Steps to Marketing Success
Marketing is about finding you target audience, providing value to that audience and giving them what they want while earning their trust so they will come back to you again and again. Oh, and while building your brand, clearly showing your target audience why you are different from the competition.
I love to share examples of businesses that are doing a great job marketing because we can learn from the success of others. In my hometown of Minneapolis, MN is a restaurant named Travail which opened just three years ago and has received incredible notoriety first for their food, but because of their point of differentiation which is to create a fine dining experience that was interactive, approachable, affordable and more fun. The owners succeeded in bringing all of these to a small and loyal community. Word of mouth is what has built this restaurant, in fact they don’t even have a website – their online strategy is utilizing social media – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram .
photo from Travail Facebook Page
How a Kick Starter Campaign Changed Everything!
This past year the owners decided they needed a larger space to serve the many people who kept coming again and again! So they decided to build a larger, new restaurant just down the street and needed funding. Rather than raising capital via the most traditional channels, they decided to start a KickStarter campaign to raise funds from their greatest supporters – their customers. On their kickstarter page they described their funding need this way, “We need your help to furnish the kitchen with all of the bells and whistles it takes for us to relentlessly push food boundaries and the dining experience. We aren’t opening the new Travail and The Rookery to repeat history, but rather to create history, and we want you to be the catalyst of our creative freedom.”
It was reported that they reached their goal of $75,000 in the first 6 hours of the campaign. But, people just kept giving – when the campaign ended October 11th, the pledges were up to a whopping $255.659. Now that’s a lot of dough that their loyal tribe committed.
Now funding business growth with a crowd funding option won’t work in many “for-profit” business models, but what I’m really sharing here are the steps these business owners took to build a business from start to explosive growth.
Why Did It Work?
I believe the success of Travail restaurant is in large part to several key marketing components:
1.) They started with a clearly defined target market
2.) They new why and how they would be different than other restaurants and they’ve stuck to this
3.) They keep giving people what they want and thus created a loyal customer that is happy to share their experience with others
4.) They’ve built trust in their product, service and the experience they promise
Take this example of the steps these business owners have taken and see where you might be able to tweak your marketing strategy and implement some creative ways to grow your business.
