Podcasts that are perfectly curated are a labor of love.
Yet, rarely is the show without work going on behind the scenes.
Join Adrienne in this very special episode as she takes you behind the scenes and recaps a few episodes from the debut year of the FAM Marketing Show.
Tangible Takeaways:
– Just like in marketing, do things differently to capture attention;
– Even hosts of their own show, get the name wrong. In business, don’t sweat the small stuff no one else will notice.
Check out how virtual room scenes are converting higher sales in the online shopping experience.
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Mark Kinsley: It’s our brand new show, completely dedicated to helping you make mattress furniture and appliances, marketing magic.
Mark Kinsley: Let’s, let’s start with what this show is about and why it matters to furniture appliances and mattress retailers and brands.
Here’s the format. Each week we’re gonna bring you marketing strategies, tips, and. That will help you think more creatively, attract more foot traffic, drive your business forward. The FAMs readers are listeners, they’re hungry for ideas because they know that marketing is such a key ingredient in making your business successful.
So what do we do? Just like we do at the fam? We gathered around and we listened, and we created an entire show dedicated to making your marketing muscle stronger. So each week we’re gonna focus on one, maybe two topic. Shows are gonna be 15 minutes or. So you can snack on the subject matter and start applying the ideas in no time.
Adrienne Woods: What is the don’t bother me button, and how can you use it to market your in-store experiences?
Adrienne Woods: I think the don’t Bother Me button is absolutely genius.
And let me tell you, I was the one that came up with this idea and so I’m just, if it’s okay with you, I’m just gonna tell everybody what I think it is. I am the type of person when I walk into a store, I have already done my research. I don’t actually want any salesperson to come up to me and bother me.
I wanna go see the product in person, and then when I’m ready, I will come find. But nothing annoys me more than somebody coming up to me and being like, how can I help you? And I’m like, I’m here for a table that I’ve already researched that I already know what I want. Like I just wanna go find it by myself.
And they’re like, well, let me show you some other stuff. And I’m like, no, I know what I want. I don’t need to see other things. Like I have done more research than you could possibly comprehend before I walk into the store. And so I just. I wish when I walked into a store, you know how, I don’t remember which brand it is, but it has the easy button.
They’re like, oh, you just like hit the, hit the easy button Stickless. I wanna Don’t Bother Me button. I walk in the store, I hit the button, and it alerts somebody that they don’t need to come and talk to me. I will come and find you. You’re much more likely to make a sale with me if you don’t bother me.
Mark Kinsley: When a crisis smacks your company or your community in the face, how do you respond on social media? Do it wrong and you could pay a heavy price. Our Crisis Communication Guide is here to help. Julia Rosein is our co-host
Julia Rosien: it’s all about keeping the communication light open
There is no company that is too big that can, nobody’s made it a Teflon. Every company is at risk for a social media crisis. It doesn’t matter how big or how small you are, and I’ve always been a firm believer that you have to have a crisis plan in place. and people, you know, I talk about crisis plans.
We’re like, well that sounds complicated and it sounds, it really isn’t complicated. It’s really, if this happens, then that happens. If this happens, then that happens. And if you have somebody managing your social media, if, for example, it’s a national tragedy, so there’s a, you know, a shooting and, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of deaths involved if this happens.
Then this happens. You call the president, you call the owner, you call the manager. No decision is made by yourself. If it’s a customer service issue that has snowballed into, all of a sudden everybody is piling on that customer service complaint, that’s a different, if this happens, then that happens. And so you have to have all those scenarios in place so that you as a company know how to navigate those waters.
And they’re pretty rough and choppy when things
Mark Kinsley: go bad.
sometimes you have to even just pay attention, like with social listening. and ways that you can tap in to understand what’s happening in the social space, to understand like what is, what is really going on here, even if it isn’t something a very apparent and in your field of view,
Julia Rosien: what you said about social listing, that’s a a hundred percent. You need something in, in place. You know, whether it’s a simple tool like Hootsuite that allows you to schedule and listen, that’s. Incredibly important, but I think it, it comes back to knowing who’s in charge of your social media and them knowing the parameters they can operate in.
So if they have, uh, the autonomy to answer. A crisis till it gets to a certain point and then once it develops into something else, then they need to know where to go for help. And the players in the company need to know that. The leadership needs to know what’s going on there. So, you know, we shouldn’t be acting in silos when it comes to managing social media because nothing happens alone in social media cuz if it’s happening in social media.
It’s probably happening in your customer service. And those two players should be connecting with each other so they, they can work together and make sure that they’ve got the same message going out. That one’s not telling one thing and the other one’s telling something different. So open communication is by far the biggest thing.
Mark Kinsley: How to beat the big box by Marketing Luxury Appliances. Our co-host today is John O’Halloran,
John O’Halloran: business.
And with the focus on the luxury appliance sector, um, that we launched about a year and a half ago, it’s allowed me to even help them focus on what I consider, you know, the luxury appliance business to be probably, you know, one of the most important categories. For luxury or for appliance retailers because it’s, it’s, it’s very difficult for the big box stores to sell and be successful selling, and it’s, it’s a, it’s a part of the business that’s owned by probably about 80 to 90% of the sales are done through the independent retailer
Adrienne Woods: understand we come from the land of Walmart too. So why is Walmart not catering to the luxury consumer ?
John O’Halloran: Well, I, I think it’s a great question, right?
And it’s not for lack of trying in the past, right? Mm-hmm. , so, so they’ve attempted to be successful in the luxury space. Um, but the challenge is, and why the independent retailer does so well is to be successful with luxury appliances and, and think you’re, you’re talking. You know, very heavy, big appliances that need to be a lot of times customly installed.
They need to be really, you know, with the right specifications. Um, they’re very costly, so it really needs to be sold by a true sales professional. Right. And we call it like an assisted sales floor. So there’s a tremendous amount of training that our retail sales associates for independent retailers have to be successful in the luxury space.
um, you just don’t get that at the big box store, right? Um, also they delivery and installation. So a lot of, uh, independents will have their own delivery and installation teams that are highly qualified and they understand, they’re trained how to deliver a product without damaging it. But then the important thing is, and then installing it, um, a lot of independents have, you know, service that they provide, right, or have tie-ins to local service network.
So there’s a lot of different reasons and for these reasons, right? It just allows the independent to continue to thrive in a luxury space.
Mark Kinsley: one man makes sure every person has a place to sleep, regardless of their circumstances and his foundation dreams for all. Doubles. As a mattress marketing machine that won’t stop
so Keith, do take us into Dreams for all because whenever you and I have talked about marketing your retail mattress store, you have shown your community, you’ve shown other retailers, and you’ve shown the fam that you can do good in the community and really have a significant impact.
And, and, and by doing that and being consistent with it, it drives lots of business to your store.
Keith Moneymaker: So it didn’t start as a marketing machine, but the fact is, in the, at the very end of the day, no matter what your business is, if you’re doing something to genuinely give back to your community, if anybody’s going out to open a business, if you were genuinely in business, Not just to make money and there’s nothing wrong with that.
But if you were doing some, if you were expecting people to spend money with you and you aren’t doing something to support them, then what’s your purpose? So this, this model can be applied to really multiple types of businesses, but. The fact is you can talk about the good you do. I think it’s often frowned upon on social media and things like that.
Uh, um, you don’t, you shouldn’t talk about all the good you do. We, we flash our houses and our cars and all these other things. So why can’t you talk about the good you do? Heck with that? Like, so I, I talked about the good we did, we told the good story why we’re in business. And it’s, it’s tenfold every other day.
You know, customer, well, how’d you hear about us? Oh, we know what you do with you as beds. And that’s like a constant thing in the store. Continuously. Continuously. And so yeah, the business has grown over, over a year, over year with us, um, in North Carolina. And I mean, I deliver into South Carolina. I mean, we go hours out, we take beds to beach.
To the mountains because people just want to deal with us and they don’t wanna develop a new relationship with somebody. I. I’m their mattress guy on their phone apparently. And we all got a yard guy, uh, the car guy or whatever, you know, I got, they get a mattress guy here in, you know, Southeastern North Carolina.
Mark Kinsley: It’s one of the last places on the planet where you can’t skip ads. We are democratizing O T T streaming TV ads with Esquire Advertising, C E O, Eric Grimley
Eric Grindley: So O t T actually stands for over the top. Um, no idea why they came up with that as a name or, or whatever. Um, Uh, I think if you’re not in the industry, uh, you know, nobody really uses that word.
we work with retailers all over the country. Um, manufacturers all over the country. Um, to basically understand customers better and then serve them individual ads essentially on a one-to-one basis. That is our bread and butter, right? Like we know your customer better than you know your customer.
We finally took us two years to do it. , we built all these connections and, um, we’re able to onboard data directly into the platform, um, and, uh, and then serve ads on a one-to-one basis.
But the beauty of this is because of our relationship with these platforms, now we’re able to bring down all these barriers to entry. So like, if you go to a, you know, a random, you know, television station or something, they wanna sell you OTT ads or streaming television ads. , um, you know, there’s usually a, a really large monthly minimum to do it.
And you gotta create a commercial. You gotta do this big, you know, maybe it’s 10,000 if you’re lucky. I’ve seen as high as 25,000, $50,000 minimums. Um, if you wanna try and go direct onto some of these platforms, you know, you have to commit to spend a million dollars for the year. Like there’s, there’s high barriers of entry to do some of these things.
And, so the average small business, the average furniture store, the average mattress store, the average appliance store, the average retailer, Is not gonna be doing this because they simply look at it and go, well, I can’t afford to put all my eggs in that basket. And I don’t blame them for thinking that way.
Right? I wouldn’t do it either if I was them. That’s a lot of money and a big commitment for not really knowing if something’s gonna work or not, but this is the one last medium. Where the consumer can’t skip the ad, so you have eyeballs on your ad the entire time. They can’t skip it, they can’t fast forward through it
so we basically got rid of minimum commitments of monthly spend. I mean, um, you know, for general O t T, we’re bringing on people onto the platform, spending as little as like $1,500 a month right now. Um, but they’re out there advertising on tv, um, and they’re just advertising to the premium people in their market, you know, from O T T plus, which is the proprietary thing that we created that allows us to serve on a one-to-one level side of this.
Mark Kinsley: How is mentorship marketing? We have the man, the myth reality. Doug Stewart is on the show today.
Mark Kinsley: So whenever you think about mentorship as marketing and you’re zoomed out, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?
Doug Stewart: You know, uh, the first thing that comes to mind is something that, that I taught for a long time, particularly when, when I’m coaching TEDx presenters.
Which was something Del Carnegie said. Uh, so he said, if the audience is thinking about themselves, which I naturally will, and the presenter is thinking about themselves, then there’s never any hope for real connection. Right. And so, you know, one of the things that I, I think sometimes we can get backwards is we can think, you know, I need to make my audience, the people that I’m marketing to.
Like me, want to buy my thing, believe in me, instead of saying, you know, what is the real gift that I can give them and what I can, what can I learn from them and how can I best serve them? So instead of trying to attract people’s attention, giving the attention, learning, developing, changing, edit, iterate, um, and, and make it more of a, let’s say, a relationship than, uh, than, than, than begging for.
Eyes and attention.
