This document discusses strategies for driving 25-30 customers to a bar or restaurant in a month for $500-$700. It suggests focusing initial efforts on acquiring teenage customers by targeting events they celebrate and offering deals. It then proposes expanding to other types of events and allowing direct booking online. It also recommends changing the domain name to something more social and viral, improving the website design, and defining a compelling story for the business. The goal is to not just meet the monthly customer target but build a repeat customer base and recurring business.
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Marketing Strategy for
1. Challenge #1: What is the easiest way to send 25-30 customers to a bar or a restaurant?
Important: Do NOT suggest TV, radio, newspaper advertising, etc. Those are obsolete methods and are
more of a long term strategy. Besides, we are charging only $500-$700/month to drive foot traffic on
one day, so it would be difficult to engage in some type of advertising. But if you have any better ideas,
describe them.
The business is simple and very straight forward, yet difficult to achieve. 25-30 customers on just 1 day
for the whole month in return for $500 sounds very lucrative, but it's tough to achieve. If you were
hired, what would you do to achieve the goal of satisfying this requirement of 25-30 people?
According to the case study described, above is what I see as the current strategy for business. This
strategy would definitely work but not cost effective as the costs of advertising are increasing and
shrinking the profit margins. The below is the proposed strategy for optimizing customer base and
increasing margins for the business.
2. In the proposed strategy for the business, It is viable to acquire more customers and create a good
customer base. Relaying on the Social Person may give good results, but cannot be banked upon in long
run. This model, can start to focus on the customers from location to location and acquire their base and
target them individually and in groups.
Starting a effective website and good mobile apps and advertising through can maximizing the reach and
loyalty for the customer to return and use the services offered.
Business Math ( Acquisition through Website)
Revenue for 30 Customers $700
Revenue Per Customer($700/30) $23
Assuming the Average Life time value of each customer is 5 Bar/Restaurant Visits
3. Revenue Per Customer is (5*$23) $115
Assuming that the cost for acquiring single customer is $3.5
Revenue Per Customer $111.5
Hence, To send 30 Customers to one Bar/Restaurant, assuming the customer turnout ratio is 0.5% the
number of customers to target is 10,000
Business Math ( Acquisition through Mobile App)
Revenue for 30 Customers $700
Revenue Per Customer($700/30) $23
Assuming the Average Life time value of each customer is 5 Bar/Restaurant Visits
Revenue Per Customer is (5*$23) $115
Assuming that the cost for acquiring single customer is $1.5
Revenue Per Customer $113.5
Hence, To send 30 Customers to one Bar/Restaurant using Mobile app, assuming the customer turnout
ratio is 5% the number of customers to target is 600 Only ( As the effectiveness of Mobile app is more
when compared to the Website)
4. Acquisition and Brand Strategy for Next 1 Year
Acquisition Strategy:
Digital Advertising is ROI driven advertising and the best part of this advertising is it can be measurable
as to how many customers have signed up and from which campaign and their respective location.
Google Adwords – Advertising through Zipcode is possible on Google Adwords. This helps in acquiring
customers.
Facebook – Facebook paid advertising has recently launched the local ads where customers can
advertise through zipcodes.
Classifieds – To reach customers by Location, classified websites help in generating more targeted
traffic.
Location Based Adverting agencies : Location based advertising is becoming more popular in the US.
There are many agencies which started Location based ads to acquire customers based on theme.
Advertising on Food.com, FoodNetwork, Yahoo Food and Etc.
Mobile Acquisitions: Mobile application are cost effective and very reliable as the cost per app
download is cheaper when compared to the web and also once the app is downloaded, It creates good
visibility on the mobile front every time customer see’s his mobile or tablet.
Social Acquisition : Some of the social tools like Social Twist can help in creating good social acquisitions
from friends of the existing customers and this can be made effective by introducing a referral program
Affiliate Marketing : Once the business starts running online, introducing Affiliate Marketing can help in
expanding the reach.
Brand Strategy :
Brand Name : Please see Challenge #3 for more on Rebranding Strategy
Press Releases : Press releases help in creating word of mouth marketing.
Facebook Fan Page - customer can be well engaged as part of retention activity through maintaining a
Facebook Fan page. This page will help in acquiring fans for Socialevening.com facebook page and
engaging them with the deals of the restaurants in Nearby location.
Twitter – One of the effective and most powerful digital advertising is using Hashtags on Twitter.
Hashtags help in creating a good brand visibility for the website in Social Space.
Pinterest/Instagram : Picture Advertising is getting more popular and interfaces like Pinterest and
Instagram can help in create Viral marketing for the company.
5. Challenge #2: To put things in perspective, we have executed the following strategies:
Hired models and extremely social people in expectation that they would be able to bring 25-30 of their
friends. Assumption here was that a highly social person or beautiful model would have access to a large
number of people and would have very little trouble bringing 25-30 people. We used 1 model/social
person for 1 client. The fee for this model/social person was $80-$100 for them to be present at the
bar/restaurant and bring/invite their friends.
1. The issue with hiring models and these extremely social people is their credibility. They turned out to
be flaky with last minute cancellations. 2 Those who went forward were unable to deliver. It's also a very
laborious task of placing calls to dozens of these socialites and scheduling the events. These increase our
operating costs. In hindsight, giving the person the responsibility of inviting 25-30 friends on a random
weeknight seems tough.
Any solution that achieves the goal of bringing 25-30 people on just one night is fine. Considering Social
Evening as a separate project, we always are willing to keep the business model flexible so that it can be
changed on a whim.
6. For the first 8 months, the business model would be to concentrate on the niche market. Dry days for
restaurants as mentioned in the case can avoided by changing the target audience. Usually during the
dry days, employed people do not visit fine dining, or a Bar or Restaurant as they are pretty tied-up with
work and travel from work to home would be consuming most of the time. Hence, the target audience
have be made more specific. According to a survey,
(http://taagency.squarespace.com/storage/temp/RRx%20Fine%20Dining%20Summary%20Report-
1.pdf), teens are the most frequent visitors of fine dining during workdays.
(http://digital.library.okstate.edu/etd/umi-okstate-2118.pdf).
To target these teens more effectively, usually Rumspringa is celebrated more often between teens. So
making use of this event, initially for the first 8 months, the strategy is to acquire more and more
number of teen customers and target them to create a different market for the company. The process of
acquisition would be through website as well as through mobile or tablet apps. Apart from just targeting
these websites, these teens would be only looking for bar and restaurants which are cost effective as
they will be many of these friends who are invited to the party. Hence, by given them a deal/coupon
associated with a model would be a good strategy to start off. In needed in certain cases, there can be a
model be present there for that day, which can attract more teenagers.
Once these customers are acquired, they can be retargeted again as we will be collecting some
information of these customers who are availing this services and also give them a opportunity for
inviting their friends so that, once their friends utilize this services, they can get paid through the referral
program.
7. Once the customer base has been created in 8 months, the business can now expand to offer other
services like Birthdays, Anniversary, Breakup Parties, Naming Ceremony, Baby Shower, Business Dinner,
Bachelor’s parties and etc.
By creating a platform where customers can directly choose the location and book the restaurant which
the number of people who will be attending the party and a referral program associated to it.
8. Challenge #3: Assuming you start from scratch, what comes to your mind in driving just 25-30 people to
a bar/restaurant? It's not a huge ask to satisfy the client. But this business will survive and thrive on
repeat business as the business keeps re-subscribing month after month.
Driving customers worth 25 – 30 to walk in to a restaurant would be achievable task. However there are
certain challenges to this task
1) Domain Name Change
After doing a small research I have come across some of the domain names which are social words and
can help the business go viral on internet very easily.
Tokenno1.com (Token # 1) – Available Domain
Liqvds.com - Misspell of Liquids – Available Domain
Xotato.com – Misspell Potato – Available Domain
2) Website Design :
The website needs to me more User friendly in terms of the colors and the search features. The
Navigation of the website can also be better than it is currently.
3) Defining a Story:
Defining a good story for the business can help in creating a brand visibility for the business. Story telling
activity help the business in being more social and creates virility for the business. This can be achieved
by defining a good story line with the help of the customer segments and value proposition. Story telling
is more about creating a powerful context for customer to use the services and build loyalty for the
business