Tailor your tools to your marketing, not your marketing to your tools

Tailor your tools to your marketing, not your marketing to your tools

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One of the biggest frustrations that I have when working with new businesses is that they think their marketing starts and ends with their social media. If they get likes, business is good, if they don't, business is bad, and that’s the length of their marketing. Your brand needs to be much bigger than the tools that you use. Yes social media is an amazing tool to have, but it can’t be your only. You need to find the best tools that work for your business, your city, your demographic, and make it make sense for you.

The problem that we have as location based entertainment businesses is that our customer base is limited to those willing to drive to your location. You’re not Coca-Cola or Nike who have a global presence and an insanely large marketing budget and team, they sell world wide so they use every tool that is out there. 

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You need to find the best tools that work for your business and make sense in your city, and this can vary significantly.

My first location based entertainment business was an arcade in a city with generally an older population. Now if you asked any marketer their thoughts on radio advertising past 2010 they would’ve laughed in your face and said you’re wasting your time and money. For the longest time I dismissed it even as an option and wouldn’t bring that tool into my marketing mix. Until one day my local radio station was doing one of those “please support us before we die” sales and I decided to give it a shot, being the curious marketer I figured now was a great time to try it. 

The main focus was on our spring break extended hours, now we were far from a tourist town, especially in a small city in Canada in March, so I didn’t think we would see a ton of success with this initiative. But to my surprise I opened up our online bookings and they started selling. That whole week we were nearly fully booked from open to close even with the extended hours. 

I was very confused going into this on why this worked, until we started seeing who was showing up for all these bookings. Now as I mentioned earlier my city has an older population, what do the kids in Canada whose parents don’t take them to Disney World over spring break do? They go to their grandparents. Who listens to the radio anymore? Grandparents. Who made me thousands of dollars off of radio ads because they were desperate for something to get the kids out of their house? Grandparents. 

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Now why did I go on this long tangent about radio ads and grandparents? Because that was an example of 1) My brand being bigger than my social media, know what grandparents don’t use? Social media. Example 2), finding what tools work in your city and make sense. I was in a relatively small city so my radio ad reach was fairly small which made my ad space inexpensive. Now if you were looking at radio advertising in a major city like Toronto or New York the ad rate is significantly larger than what it was for me, so it may cost more to advertise for that week than you’d be able to make.

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At the end of the day remember that your brand is bigger than just your tools, I’ll go back to my Nike example. How much success do you think Nike would’ve had if they only ever did their marketing on Facebook? Well for the first 40 years before Facebook existed they probably wouldn’t have had much. Nike’s first advertising was solely in magazines and posters, find me a successful business in 2024 that only advertises in magazines and posters now? There’s not. Think of your brand, what you want it to be, who you want it to target, and what are all the tools you can use to target them, I can guarantee there’s more than just Facebook pages on that list.

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