Social Media, Mobile, and Local Marketing Tips to build a Thriving Massage Therapy Business.
Posted on 09. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Social Media
Photo credit: Emily Chang
I’m a graduate from Massage Therapy back in the day (2003). I graduated from the Utah College of Massage Therapy aka UCMT. Those were fun days, I loved going to massage school, due to health concerns I eventually was not able to follow up on Massage therapy, so instead I became a social media consultant (which I also love).
I still miss practicing massage on people, and doing energy work like Cranial Sacral, Shiatsu, Acupressure, etc…
As a marketer I often think up ways that “If I was a __fill in the blank____” I’d do this to get more customers or clients.. It’s something that’s fun for me, if a little geeky.
So for this blog post “If I was a ‘practicing’ massage therapist” I would do the following to market my business:
1. Social Shopping Services. Social Shopping services are literally popping up all over the place. By “Social Shopping” I mean sites like LivingSocial and Groupon. The premise is this – a bunch of people each agree to buy the same deal from a company. Because a whole bunch of people are buying the company gets some nice exposure from possible people who might not have been customers otherwise.
Example: Groupon or Living Social runs a campaign for your business. Your customers get a 50% off a massage. Say you charge $60 normally for massages, that means that your customers get a $30 dollar massage. Groupon or LivingSocial would then get a percent of that I believe it runs from 30%-50%.
The benefit is that they have a large user base and can get tons of new customers to try out your services. You’ll generally get a fraction of what you normally do – but to get new people trying out your services its often worth it.
2. Local Directories. There are tons of great local directories out there. I would make sure to list all your services and modalities in each and every single local directory that you can find. Some good ones are: Google Places, Localeze, CitySearch, Yelp, MerchantCircle, ShopCity, Local.com, Yellow Pages, Yahoo local,
Be sure to use lots of graphics, some sites will let you add coupons. Make sure that every little space and form field is filled out with very detailed information about your business.
Also be sure to ask your customers how they found you, and ask them to go back to that site and leave you a review if they have a chance.
Another great Local Marketing tactic is using new Local / Social services to market your business. Make sure your business is listed at Foursquare and Gowalla and suggest to your clients that if they check-in on foursquare they can receive some nice benefits. You could give $5 off for all foursquare users who checkin, and $15 off for the Mayor of your business.
3. Adwords and PPC ads. Pay-Per-Click is a great boon for business. For those non-techy, pay-per-click ads are the ads on google on the side that say ‘sponsored’. Users can bid on keywords and their ad will get shown in the order of their bid. So say you bid $1.00 per click for a keyword and someone else bid $1.10 per click. That means for each click to your website you will pay $1.00. It also means that the $1.10 advertiser will be above you on the page.
Don’t worry about it getting costly because you can set your price, you can pay as little as $.01 per click on some keywords. You can also set a daily budget of $5-10 or more to make sure that you’re not spending hundreds of dollars a month with monetary benefits coming back to your business.
Running adwords campaigns can be costly if competing for high profile keywords. The key to being successful with local adwords campaigns is to target smaller less-searched after keyword phrases. For example instead of ‘Massage Therapy’, I might try Orange County Massage Therapist, or Massage Therapist Chicago, IL; or New York Massage, or New York Shiatsu, ..insert the rest of your modalities. You can do hundreds of keywords and see which ones work the best for you.
The key to PPC is trial and error. Keep trying new keywords and new ad copy to see what works best for you. One additional trick is that you can also choose to only show up on results from people in your area, and you can set the hours of day that you want your ads to run. So you might just want them to run during your normal business hours, to get the maximum benefit and so people can call you right away to setup and appointment.
You can also use other services that may be cheaper and more cost effective that are essentially adword like campaigns but for mobile applications and websites. These are great because the person is already out travelling the neighborhood and new technologies are making it easier and easier to reach people who are with-in a couple city blocks of your business. A couple of good services to look into for this space is Admob, and iAD.
4. Social Media Marketing. Having a good social media marketing strategy is crucial to online success. Your strategy should feature a highly professional Facebook page, an active twitter account with a custom background for your profile, an Active blog that features blog posts about local health related topics.
When blogging its a good idea to mix general health related articles that feature keywords related to massage therapy with articles and blog posts about local businesses, local news, etc. Why? Because you’re a local business which means you need people to see your blog when they google local events and news topics. It’s a small trick that could help you get noticed more. Also make sure to cross-post all your blog posts to your social networks, and vice versa if possible. There are many great plugins available for wordpress that can help you accomplish this.
5. Reach out to Local Influencers. Join and find all the local business networking groups and run a special where each group can run a contest to give away a free massage. You could also do this for local bloggers. You could also give local bloggers a free massage in exchange for a good review of your service – they’re getting something free and would be more than willing to write about your Massage Therapy practice in exchange.
6. Mobile Marketing. SMS text marketing is a great way to connect with your customers, though it could be pricey, if you’re the owner of a massage clinic though it might work great. Basically this is where your customers opt-in to receive promotional messages via their cellphone’s text message capabilities. You could offer a chance to win a free massage every month to get them to stay members of your list.
Mobile coupons are another great mobile marketing tactic to reaching customers on mobile phones.
It’s also important that your website or blog has a mobile version for people who are on mobile phones. This is becoming more and more important as more and more people are using smartphones to navigate the web.
One final word of advice is to setup a google alert for your name, or business name. This way you’ll get emails sent when people review your business, or share it on facebook or twitter, or talk about you in a positive or negative way. This way you can respond to them in kind and thank them, or address their concern and see if you can do something to keep them as a customer.
It used to be that to get noticed you simply paid over $500 per year to get your business listed in the Yellow Pages, and hope people would choose your business over the other guy. Now, a listing in the Yellow Pages doesn’t mean diddly, being tops on google on the other hand will get you tons of foot traffic. To be a leader in your field for your local area you absolutely have to embrace all these new technologies and work hard to get your name out there more often, and on more sites than your competitors. That’s all it really boils down to.
The more content you put out there the more people will visit your blog, and subsequently your brick and mortar business.
Drive-in Theater Marketing Case Study. How to make Drive-ins more profitable.
Posted on 02. Jul, 2010 by Patrick Curl in Inbound Marketing, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Websites, Social Media, Video Marketing
Image by Denise Mattox
How to bring Drive-ins back from the cusp of Extinction.
I absolutely love going to Drive-in theaters. First off I love movies, secondly I love the nastalgic feeling a Drive-in theater brings, thirdly I love the price – you can’t beat two movies for the price of one. It’s really a great deal.
As excited as I am about Drive-in theaters, not everybody is. In the heyday of Drive-ins there were over 4,000 screens across the country, now there’s only 10% of that – only 400 drive-ins. It’s a sad thought but someday the Drive-in movie may be as extinct as the do-do bird. I’m going to share some of my insights on why this is happening, and how to fight it.
Most drive-ins are family owned, which is great – I’m all about small businesses but sometimes there is older folks running the theater, people who aren’t necessarily upto speed with modern technologies. I’ve yet to see a drive-in theater who’s website is powered by WordPress, and that blogs frequently about the latest upcoming movies.
I’m just waiting to see a Drive-in theater that has a stellar social media marketing campaign. So far, their web sites are as nostalgic as their movie going experience. Each Drive-in theater web site I’ve looked at reminds me of a cheap GeoCities site back in the early days of the world wide web.
I’m going to explain what I would do as a Drive-in Theater owner to make my business rock solid, and more profitable. I’m going to break this post into 3 parts: Social, Mobile, and Local Marketing, Concessions Profits Maximization, Additional revenue streams.
1. Social, Mobile, and Local Marketing. Getting customers to your Drive-in should always be your first priority, unless you’re constantly sold out, then you can skip this step. When it comes to social media you need to be proactive and find out what people are saying about you online, address their concerns, and give a good customer experience all around.
Example: The drive-in around here I did a search on, I’m on not going to name the Drive-in I don’t want to alienate or embarrass the owners – but on Yahoo reviews a long time ago there was a very derogatory remark left about the drive-in. Some other reviewers stood up for the Drive-in but for the most part no official spokesperson for the Drive-in stepped forward and tried to remedy the situation. I’m sure instead they lost one customer for life, and maybe others who saw that remark.
A few weeks ago I went to this same Drive-in and due to technical difficulties we ended up missing about 30 minutes of the main movie we had come to see. They didn’t say apologize or anything. I didn’t ask for my money back, but ever since that day I’ve noticed less and less people at the Drive-in. A lot of the people I see there are regulars, and now they’re not coming back.
One remedy would’ve been to give everyone a free $5 concession stand item. Sure they might’ve lost a little bit of money, but it would’ve gone a long ways towards saving face, and saving future customers.
Social Media Marketing: Ten years ago it was important for every business to have a web site, now it’s the web profile(s) on social networks. It’s very important to create a a social presence for your Drive-in theater. People can then tweet that they are going to your Drive-in and you can tweet back at them, or you can send messages and specials to your facebook ‘likers’. The bottom line is leads – in this case people who might be enticed to visit your drive-in. The beauty of social media is also that you can get people to help you spread the word and sharing your profiles to their friends.
People really want to connect with you, and your brand. They want to know who owns the Drive-in, the history behind it, it adds to the ‘nostalgic’ feeling. Give them what they want.
Another tip to reaching out to via social media is to contact local influencers, bloggers, and social media marketers – give them free tickets to give away on their blog, in exchange for blogging about your Drive-in. You could do the same with radio DJs too.
Mobile Marketing: SMS shortcode marketing is a great way to interact with your customers. Run a contest each night at a specific time that the first three people to send a text message to your special # will receive a free concession. To know when to text they gotta be a subscriber of your sms newsletter. — This way you can send weekly updates telling them what new movies are coming out, maybe even give them special coupons.
I would also recommend having a mobile version of your website. It’s a fact that 40% of all web site traffic now comes from mobile devices, and if you’re site isn’t optimized people looking for your Drive-in may not be able to see the web page.
Local Marketing: I could see Foursquare becoming very popular for a Drive-in, and Gowalla too. Why not offer the Mayor of the drive-in a free Large Popcorn? The mayor is someone who visits the Drive-in more than anyone else. They are your loyalest customers, and they certainly deserve to be rewarded. The special thing about Foursquare and Gowalla is that whenever someone checks-in – it tells all their friends where they’re at. Sometimes those friends will then go and meet up with that person where they are, this means more potential customers. It also could mean their friend saw they went to the drive-in last night, and they decided to plan on going the next day by themselves.
It’s also a good idea to have an optimized profile in all the local directories like Citysearch, Yelp, Merchantcircle, ShopCity, etc.
2. Concessions Maximization. Concessions is where Drive-ins make the bulk of their money. Yet, many people often smuggle food into the drive-in taking a big bite out of their proceeds. To combat this a lot of Drive-ins have begun charging $5 per car for a ‘food’ ticket. This allows outside food into the Drive-in. This is one way of going about things, but from a consumer it seems a little hard-pressured.
I think there’s a better way. First off you should make sure that your food is the best it can be, because I remember going to Drive-ins as a child and the food was about as good as school cafeteria fare, and that wasn’t that great. Now that you have better food, you should find a way to get more people into the concession house. To do this you should have a free giveaway every night. Nothing big, something small. I’d recommend switching it up nightly. For instance you could do 1/4th of a pretzel one night, half a slice of pizza another night.
These small ‘trial’ sized freebies will get people hungry, and will be a great way to introduce people to your products. If they’ve never tried your food before they are less likely to want to. I know sometimes I’d rather much buy pizza before I come just because I konw what I’m getting at a pizzeria. I don’t know the quality of food at the concessions. Of course a good social media / local directory campaign can help by encouraging people to write reviews about your concessions.
Another way I’d maximize concession purchases is to have a customer loyalty program. Initially a punch card that every 12 spends of $5 gets you a free Concession item of your choice upto $8 value. So they end up spending $60 and getting $8 back. These cards could also have another line for movie rewards. Say for every 12 trips to the drive-in they get one free movie entry – one stamp per vehicle per entry. So in other words one stamp per car trip, not per person on the movie tickets.
Lastly, I would create some better video. The nostalgic 50′s cartoons are great – but they’re lacking in taste appeal. For some reason food looks better today than it did back then or something, but when I watch a Papa John’s pizza commercial I’m hungry immediately afterwards, when I watch a concession stand commercial at the drive-in sometimes I’m actually LESS hungry.
It might cost some money but get some user opinions of the food on tape, testimonials sell. An amateur video showing new people eating the concessions and taking taste tests would sell the food much better.As a bonus you can upload the video to youtube and share it on facebook, twitter, and your blog.
Also be sure to pass out full-color menus with coupons to EVERY car that comes through the gate. Pictures sell, and coupons sell.
3. Additional streams of revenue: There’s a lot more you could do with the Drive-in space.I’m just going to run off some ideas here:
- You could host a battle of the bands every weekend before the movies. This would give people more time to work up an appetite. People could vote on their favorite bands via twitter, sms, or online. At the end of the summer you could have a ‘finals’ competition and give away some prize to the winner. The last competition could be an all day thing that you could sell tickets to, and open the concession stand all day.
- Add a mini-golf course along the sidelines. Charge a low cost to play. Again open a bit early so people coming to watch the movies can also play some mini-golf.
- Add a cornhole game and charge a fee to play, again also open early so people can play.
- Have On-Screen advertising. You could make an extra $500-1000 a night just off advertising.
- Post billboards along the sides high enough to block out extra ambient light that might dim the screen, and also selling advertising on the billboards.
- Sell drive-in movie memorabilia, t-shirts, souvenires, etc in the concession stand and online.
- Many drive-ins already host flea markets, but if yours doesn’t that’s a great idea as well.
- Have special theme nights. Like an all night Nightmare movie festival – featuring all horror movies – 5 of them back to back. The older movies are cheaper to get usually, and you could charge more for the tickets since its a special occassion.
- Sell dvd’s on your website, or have adsense, or other affiliate ad monetization.
- If you have a large size land and extra space you could setup a Paintball area. Paintball is very popular and can bring in some decent amount of money.
Really you just need to be creative. Think of ways that you could make even a little bit more money. Maybe add a small uptick on all your products. Most people won’t notice an extra $0.25 but add it to every item and you could make a decent amount more money than you’re already making. Just be sure to let your customers know its going to happen before you up it. They will understand, they’d rather you up the price, than go out of business. I would pay more to go to the local Drive-in if it meant keeping the Drive-in. I’m not ready to see them become extinct.
Of course if you need help implementing any of these strategies, MarketingOC would love to help you get the ball rolling. Just give us a call!
Got any other Drive-in Marketing Ideas that you’d like to share? Do you own a Drive-in and have some secret tips you’d like to share with other Drive-in owners? Leave them in the comments please, and thank you!
Nissan Shows Apple iAds Make Advertising Engaging and Cool
Posted on 01. Jul, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Mobile Advertising
We have been holding our breath as all the hype of iAds and Ipad ads and every other kind of new mobile advertising format’s dust settles. Â However, after seeing the Nissan Leaf iAd – I have to say, I am blown away.
Untitled from Justin Montgomery on Vimeo.
The potential to enable people to actually engage with a mobile ad, beyond just a click is an incredible opportunity for users to immerse themselves with the brand – all from within an application. This accomplishes 3 key goals:
1. The application publisher gets ad revenue
2. The advertiser gets targeted exposure
3. The mobile user gets to experience ads (if they so choose) without having to leave t application they were using.
Very powerful stuff – really – it’s not hype.
Online Retailers Plan Mobile Advertising Push But What About Your Local Business
Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Blog, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing
If you are a local retailer the constant drum beat of online retailers can be maddening. Often times the online retailers are cutting into your business by offering lower prices (warehouse space is cheaper then retail space), no sales tax on purchases, bigger selection (again the warehouse thing) and well, sometimes convenience (the whole shopping in your underwear deal) – but thankful your retail business has many benefits that an online retailer can’t ever match. The very basic fact being is that you are local.
Online retailers are preparing to launch another salvo in the battle for consumer dollars according to a new report published by Forrester and cited on Mobile Marketing Watch. According to this report,
Nearly three-quarters (74%) of online retailers either already have or are developing a mobile strategy, and one in five boasts having a fully-implemented mobile strategy in place already.  Interestingly, the report forecasts $170,000 per online retailer is expected to be spent on mobile sites this year with larger retailers spending much more.  â€Mobile investment is modest now, but we see that it will pick up in the future, especially among the biggest brands that have already invested significant amounts in their mobile operations,†said Sucharita Mulpuru, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, and lead author of the report.
So, as online retailers make their push into capturing customers via their mobile phones, where does that leave local retailers? Not to worry – mobile is where the playing field is tilted in favor of the local retailer. That’s right, the opportunity to reach prospects and customers on their mobile phones while they are on the go, is an opportunity for local retailers to reach their audience, and drive traffic to your business.
And don’t let the $170,000 online retailer spend intimidate you – local mobile marketing is very cost effective and affordable for small, local businesses. The only thing you need to do, is take action now. Let’s face it, there’s only so much screen real estate on mobile phones – your business needs to be front and center when your prospects and customer perform a mobile search looking for your business, products or services that you offer.
Contact us to talk to one of our Go Mobile. Get Social. Reach Local. Marketing Specialists.
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