marketing
Don’t Forget to WIFM
Let’s face it…we’re selfish and inpatient when it comes to marketing, especially my generation of millenials. We don’t always have time to read through every article or look at all the pretty ads unless there’s something in it for us. BTW, thank you for reading 🙂
WIFM or “What’s in it for me” is extremely important; imagine that your customer is asking it with every marketing piece you put out there. It’s even more critical for small businesses such as the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli Stadium who can easily get lost in the crowd.
But let’s back up for a second. You might have noticed in my earlier posts that I’ve changed from talking about the Brockton Rox to the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium. The Brockton Rox is the baseball team, Campenelli stadium is where they play, and the Shaw’s Center is a 15,000 square-foot convention center attached to the stadium. This is a very unique situation for the business because they not only have to focus on the WIFM for their baseball fans, but also for event planners (both personal and professional).
After our cohort did some initial research about the business, we realized that their baseball side of business, “The Rox”, is actually well on its way to success. They are starting to get the WIFM right for their Rox customers. Where they need more strategy is on the event planning-side of their business…how to get more customers to rent out their two facilities. In many ways, the business is starting out from scratch with their marketing of these facilities. We’re doing a ton of research to better understand their target market and even identifying potential buyer personas to help them build out better content that’s more tailored to their audience and of course that answers the question: What’s in it for me?
By the way, we only have four more weeks left! We’ll be wrapping up the written portion of our project within the next two weeks and starting on creating the presentation. Yikes!
Round One: Pulling it All Together
During the past two classes, everyone in the cohort gave an update on where they stand with their part of the Capstone consulting project. We’ve broken it down into three major areas: financial structure, industry environment, and marketing.
The advantage of doing a Capstone on a small business is that you get your hands in everything and you almost get too much information. One of our major struggles will be deciding which areas we should continue honing in on because unfortunately we can’t do it all, especially not in five weeks.
We’re targeting the “low-hanging fruit”, the areas that need most improvement, can be easily implemented, but that also will reap the most benefits.
Our first written analysis is due on Tuesday so it will be interesting to see the whole project faintly coming together. We’re almost there, guys!
Focus Your Niche
I came across an article in Inc.com recently that truly epitomizes the Shaw’s Center/Campanelli stadium and many other small businesses. How does a business increase sales in a declining market? It finds other niches of course! The Inc.com article talks about how businesses in the wedding industry such as bridal shops, are narrowing down their focus to strongly target groups like older brides and gay couples to name a few. They don’t spend their resources on areas they “think” they can compete in; they invest in what’s truly within their reach.
How does this apply to our Capstone?
The Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium offer a very unique value proposition for very unique clients. Our job is to figure out who these unique clients are so that they can easily find exactly what they’ve been looking for. This might be in the wedding industry or it might be in a completely different area. Our research so far has shown us that this business has a few opportunities to not only increase its market share in the wedding industry, but also penetrate an entirely new market that’s more locally-based.
I don’t want to give away too much of our project because it will all be presented in our final Capstone project in August, but let’s just say that the demographics in Brockton cannot be ignored. We’ll be looking at all angles to leverage the Shaw’s Center and Campanelli stadium location and potential customers that surround them.
Andrea Lebron 