Local Marketing Automation

Many moons ago I wrote of an epic Balihoo vs. Wild journey into the depths of the Hells Canyon Wilderness. At the end of that article, I promised our loyal blog roll that I would keep them abreast of Balihoo’s next expedition into the wilderness. At the time, there were quiet murmurs of a First Annual Winter Yurt Trip. I sadly report that such a journey never took place and is still a coming of age tale. Several of our large outdoor apparel/gear sponsors backed out at the last minute due to ‘unexpected market conditions’ leaving us without sufficient financial backing to commence our research-driven exploratory journey. I personally think those sponsors could have weathered the economic storm had they taken advantage of Balihoo’s Local Marketing Automation platform but that’s neither here nor there and is best conveyed in one of my previous blogs titled, Outdoor Adventures in Co-op Advertising.

So while the Yurt Trip never took place, I am pleased to announce that we did manage to recently dawn our sub zero degree down jackets, resembling the fearless infantry of the 10^th Mountain Division circa 1943, and hit the slopes at our favorite alpine skiing venue. To those of you who don’t reside in the Treasure Valley, Bogus Basin may not mean much to you. But for those of us who call this area home, well… we look at Bogus Basin as 'The Matterhorn of the Boise Alps'. A group of eleven Balihoo winter-sport extraordinaires impressed bystanders (Caribou, Wolves, Grizzly Bears and even a Yeti) with a dazzling display of 360 Helicopters, Daffys and Backscratchers. Après Backscratcher, was greeted with delicious nutrient enriched hot toddys at BaseCamp to cure our aching muscles, halt frostbite and reduce the side-effects of our early-stage Pulmonary Edema (a medical condition most commonly developed at high altitudes).

All-in-all, it was another stunning display of the can-do and will-do mindset of Balihoo’s team and an even further testament to what makes this place so unique. Its the people folks. We’ve got great people.

Please stay tuned for the next Balihoo vs. Wild journey coming this Spring. Planning for a record-breaking cross-country bicycle trek are already in the works.
 

On the heels of our recent successful on-time launch of the next version of our Local Marketing Automation platform, I though I would go back and revisit what we have accomplished over the past few months and some of what lead up to this initiative.

From a macro perspective, it might actually be considered almost textbook SaaS (Software as a Service)development: Build and prototype quickly, get customers early, get feedback, drive to early revenue, continue iterating the product features and re-architect the technology in a just-in-time fashion.  Then, of course add in your typical startup constraints - budget limitations, resource constraints, just to spice things up!

Let me first take you back to the dog days of summer in August 08 when we launch what might now be called the beta release of our Local Marketing Automation platform (although we resisted the convention of actually calling it a beta) with our first set of customers.  The application showed immediate value, and our user base grew quickly.  However, by December of 2008, it became obvious that from an operational and scale perspective we had a few issues that might get worse given our current trajectory.  Additionally, aggregated customer support call data indicated a number of recurring themes, in addition to feedback from the field with potential clients showing some leading indicators of potential cracks that might become problematic when our growth track continued.  All of these diverse data points were indicating a need for a larger revolutionary overhaul over the current evolutionary development model.

January 2009: In addition to our standard ongoing iterative development process, we began brainstorming ideas for how the application could be redesigned to make a revolutionary leap forward.  We did this with a user-centric approach, starting at the user interface and worked backwards into more of the technical aspects of the design.  Even though our product falls under the B2B application space, our focus was to designing it for a B2C user from a design and usability perspective.  We wanted to make the application intuitive and usable, without the need for extensive training.  We first looked at other sites that were popular on the web that had related functions and worked well in the consumer world.  We then took these design concepts, mixed them with our domain expertise and applied them to our product.  This first produced a few hand drawn mocks, followed with some more functional screen flows put together in PowerPoint.

Next, we shopped these around to our all teams internally - sales, marketing with a deep focused on the groups that interacted with the app and our customers directly (inside sales, account mgmt, support).  They were our best window to our customers without the time or luxury for extensive market research.  Along with this, we presented the conceptual flows to our current client base.  From here, we moved forward by presenting the concepts to a select set of actual end-user customers identified by our account management team.  Looking back at my files there were at least a dozen major revisions through these prototyping exercises with many many more minor tweaks.

Now that we had a good idea of where we were going, the next step was to engage our creative team, who then gave the life to our wire-frames as they would appear in the real application.  This also served as an exercise in breaking down our interface into named visual components to support a common language when talking with our technical team.  This turned out to be a critical factor in ensuring we could develop the solution at breakneck speed.

So, to give some perspective - we did all of the above over a 2.5 month timeframe through Mid-March as a side project, while we still continuing to do iterative development to enhance the existing product (being extremely careful not to develop things that would likely be thrown away with the upcoming redesign).

In March we started working with our technical team on design to see what the new concepts would mean to the underlying architecture (data and business logic).  It indicated large changes - but for the better.  We would be able to throw out a lot of things and build new structures that would support our customers more effectively.  (In the end 80+% of our data structure and code base would be rebuilt).

In April we started the first of two formal development sprints with stabilization periods between each that would span a total of approximately 12 weeks.  In that periods of time, the product and development teams (with the support of the rest of the company) carried out a Herculean effort of rapid design and development - making constant adjustments as new issues arose.

About 4 weeks into the effort we locked down our release date to June 15.  This was critical to support ongoing sales efforts and work with clients to support their internal planning.  Due to the large number of dependencies and the scope of the change, about 6 weeks in, we had to start managing the overall effort with more of a ‘traditional software project management’ technique to incorporate all of the other pieces required for a release of this magnitude (customer transition & training efforts, outbound communication, cross company testing etc.)  However, at the core we continued to follow agile development principals, and the agile mind-set.

The cut-over was planned on a weekend, to give us the most time to react to any issues with the deployment.  We used almost all of the hours in that weekend to upgrade, convert customer data and validate to ensure a successful go-live on Monday morning.  On Monday June 15 the latest release of our Local Marketing Automation platform went live! … breath.

In retrospect, here is what I would consider to be our 5 key success factors for this redesign:

• Relentless focus on the customer, and letting form drive function
• Domain knowledge backed up with real world experience from the beta allowing us to design/build rapidly and make fast decisions
• Fanatical focus on prioritization to time-box the effort
• A passionate product and engineering team with a ‘lets getr done’ attitude
• An all hands on deck mentality across the company to support the product release where and when needed

Within days of launch, feedback has started rolling in from the our support team and through our customer transition/training webinars being held.  Here is a quote our support team received on day 2:

“I just wanted to say thank you for what you’ve done with the tool.  I had a list of things that I wanted to see changed, and this new version has covered almost all of them.  I really appreciate the changes you’ve made.  It is a lot more user friendly.”

Of course you can never sit on your laurels for very long as constant improvement is a must to stay competitive, but at the end of the day this is really what product development is all about. A satisfied, excited customer.

• According the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing generated a ROI of $43.62 for every dollar spent on it in 2009. 
• Epsilon reports that email drove an average of $.14 in revenue per delivered message.
• In general, email is considered the top-performing tactic from a ROI perspective in a marketers toolkit

I can’t even begin to tell you how often I hear that comment when meeting with dentists in regards to direct to consumer advertising to help fuel practice growth. They say this as though their marketplace is a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific and cold-hard facts don't apply.  While I do agree that no two markets are alike, I respectfully disagree that their market is so different that their practice cannot benefit from local advertising. Here's why:

48% of the US population, over 25 years of age, is missing one or more teeth. That’s a bold fact. 16% of the US population is missing 4+ teeth! Wow. Now we are on to something. These facts came from one of our clients, Nobel Biocare, who conducted one of the largest consumer dental surveys ever. So what does all this mean?

What this tells us is that, relative to the population in the market, there are a lot of people missing teeth. So then the next thing I typically hear is, “Well, they don’t have money and can’t afford to have their teeth fixed.” WRONG. The largest percentage of people missing 4+ teeth happen to fall in the higher socio-economic category(annual income of $100k-$149k/year).

So let’s get back to basics here. Why aren’t these people doing anything about their missing teeth? In most cases (43% of those people missing with incomes above $75k/year to be exact), are “not concerned” about their missing teeth. Ok, why not? Because the majority of these people are unaware of the health ramifications of not replacing their missing teeth. And how could they be? In most markets, nobody has educated theme about the long-term health benefits of dental implants outside of their office walls which is simply, insufficient. For example, a typical dental office in New York City has a network of approximately 4,000 patients. That’s less than 1/10^th of 1 percent of the people that reside in New York City. Therein lays the unrealized opportunity via local advertising.

There are a lot of people who need the services, could benefit from the services and can afford the services but simply don’t know about the services. Enter Balihoo, the low-barrier to entry local marketing automation solution for those loyal Nobel Biocare customers who realize that at the end of the day, their market isn’t THAT different.
 

If you watched the second week of the Olympics, there is a good chance that you might have seen some coverage on Men’s Freestyle Aerials Skier, Jeret “Speedy” Peterson. Speedy, who happens to be a Boise native, managed to take home the silver medal after stomping a trick he calls The Hurricane. The Hurricane is a jump that consists of three flips and five twists all while soaring 55+ feet in the air over a period of about 2.9 seconds. It’s simply unreal. Jeret named the jump The Hurricane because he said halfway through; you have no clue where you are.

Rather than attempt the jump myself, I’ll gladly take his word for it. Jeret happens to be a buddy of mine so I took particular interest in his success and actually planned meetings around when he was competing to make sure I was near a TV. The meeting I had prior to his event was with that of a dental practice that had been dabbling in local advertising but saw minimal success because they simply, didn’t know where they were. Because they got lost in the mix, they gave up which is common in the world of local marketing and often times the demise of most direct-to-consumer local advertising campaigns.

Fortunately for national brands and franchises, Balihoo is changing this with its local marketing automation platform. It allows the parent company to offer their customers, distributors and/or affiliates the ability to implement strategic local advertising campaigns with the assistance of enterprise class advertising professionals, and all at a fraction of the cost. Rather than attempting to throw The Hurricane (which is actually a fair description of advertising world in general) on their own and risk the bone-breaking brutal landing, companies now have the ability to utilize Balihoo’s local marketing software to take on The Hurricane and nail the landing with the precision to bring home the medal.

For those loyal Balihoo Blog followers who were too busy reading our blogs and missed Jeret “Speedy” Peterson landing The Hurricane, I have attached a link to watch him compete. Enjoy! Click to View

• finding easy and cost effective ways to create localized content for these mediums
• getting support from experts to know how to deploy these strategies based on their target customer base
• simplifying the process of executing these strategies under a self service model. 
• tracking the results of these campaigns in concert with other marketing investments and how they collectively translate into sales, new customers etc 

Who doesn’t remember the “hot spot” during high school and college? You know, that central location that you always seemed to end up at– whether to study, meet for a group project, recover from the night before or just grab a bite before an exam. In high school, our central spot, ‘The Greer’ was a staple in my oh-so-important teenage social life. Even today, when I talk to fellow alumni (even if they are 20 years my senior), ‘The Greer’ comes up. Legendary. If ‘The Greer’ were a national franchise, I can guarantee I would stop by (likely weekly), order an Oreo frappe and look for Post-Grad hockey players.

In college, the central spot was Subway, located smack dab in the middle of campus. Today, I can’t step foot in a Subway and not think of U of O. I wasn't too surprised when I that franchises often battle for college campus locations. As this article points out, more than 100 of Pita Pit's 180 locations are located on or near college campuses, while Subway has over 200. 
 
Alongside of Pita Pit and Panda Express, Subway establishes early brand connections with students during their college years – students graduate, go get jobs and take their brand preferences with them. While I had certainly frequented Subway before entering the wonderful world of college, I hadn't really "bonded" with the brand. I didn't feel any form of attachment to the franchise - I would never have walked an extra 6 blocks to purchase a Subway sub (opposed to another popular sub-peddling joint). Now, I do so without thinking.  

Today, local franchisee’s are increasingly looking for new ways to connect with their local customers. Two media forms that could be incredibly beneficial to college-located, QSR (quick service restaurants) locations – local internet marketing and mobile advertising. While cell phones are now largely widespread across all demographics – for the college student, his/her reliance on their phone is unparalleled. What’s more, teenagers and young adults are more likely to be technologically in-tune with their mobile devices than the average customer. Whether utilized for coupons (delivered by the mobile owners location), campus-based promotions, daily special announcements, etc. mobile advertising could be HUGE for many campus-based businesses.

Increasingly, local marketing automation tools are allowing franchise marketing teams to seamlessly provide franchisees with the advertising materials they need to immediately connect with their local customers. If I had received coupons and information on daily specials while on campus I would likely have visited Subway even more - and who knows, if Panda Express had sent me a coupon I might have buzzed by Subway in a beeline for some Chinese food (and would today, be walking an additional 7 blocks to get a different college comfort food).

Boise, ID (Feb. 2, 2010) — Balihoo, the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to national franchise brands, announced today that it will launch two major initiatives at IFA’s 50^th Annual Convention on February 5, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas. 

The first initiative is the integration of social media marketing vehicles into Balihoo’s Local Marketing Automation platform. This advancement, the first of its kind in the industry, allows the local franchise marketer to seamlessly and easily integrate social media vehicles such as Twitter and Facebook into their day-to-day marketing efforts. 

“This is a breakthrough that changes the face of local marketing by putting the power of social media marketing in the hands of the local marketer,” said Pete Gombert, Balihoo’s CEO. “We’re giving the local franchise marketer access to customize national-quality creative and the ability to quickly drive these communications to their customers across all media channels, now including Twitter, Facebook, and SMS text.” 

Balihoo will be providing the first live demonstrations of this social media integration at the IFA Convention beginning February 5^th, 2010, in San Antonio, Texas. Attendees can schedule a private appointment to see the functionality or visit Balihoo at booth #627. 

Additionally, Balihoo will share its first ever Local Franchise Marketing Playbook at the event, a 24-page hardcopy guide designed to help franchisors and franchisees navigate the complicated local marketing landscape with tips, tactics and insights to build a powerful local marketing strategy. 

Available only in limited quantities, attendees of the IFA Conference can reserve their copy here: Local Franchise Marketing Playbook reservation. Alternately, an electronic version of the Playbook can be downloaded here: Local Franchise Marketing Playbook (digital).  

“Our clients represent over twenty five thousand local marketers which give us a unique and data-driven perspective on what works in local marketing,” said Shane Vaughan, Balihoo’s VP of Marketing. “The Local Franchise Marketing Playbook represents the distillation of this knowledge, with clear, actionable guidance for both franchisors and their franchisees.” 

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About Balihoo
Balihoo (www.balihoo.com) is the premier provider of Local Marketing Automation technology and services to national brands with local marketing needs. Balihoo brings enterprise-class marketing to the local level and gives national brands full visibility into all local marketing activities and results.

Bing Dictionary defines the word Paradigm as:

1. A typical example of something

2. An example that serves as a pattern or model for something, especially one that forms the basis of a methodology or theory

If there is one thing that gets me all jacked up, it’s when I witness a shifting paradigm. It really gets me excited. I’m currently flying from JFK to SFO on Virgin America airlines flight #027. To those of you readers who have flown on one of Sir Richard Branson’s airlines, I think you know where I’m going with this.

To the rest of the world that places Southwest Airlines on a pedestal, it’s simply because you haven’t flown Virgin America yet. I defy you to fly Red(their clever marketing reference) and then tell me you would rather fly the same route on a flight with attendants dressed in purple polos and khakis. To you Virgin America virgins, picture relaxing in a comfortable Las Vegas ultra lounge while flying 400 miles per hour at 35,000 feet without the use of recreational hallucinogenic drugs. Comfortable black leather seats, ambient mood lighting, and smooth electronic jazz music are a few of the things they have done to bring back the comfort in flying.

I write of this amazing spectacle all while enjoying my third Ginger Ale that I ordered from a screen in the seat back in front of me, listening to a playlist that I built from the 1000+ song music library available to all passengers and occasionally gazing at the dumbfounding spectacle of ambient lights above. This compilation of words, commonly referred to as a blog, is being posted while at 35,000 feet courtesy of the onboard wireless internet available to all passengers. And because, my laptop battery would never last the 2,586 mile journey from JFK to SFO, my computer is plugged into the power outlet underneath my seat.

I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t be the case on a US Airways flight. This is a beautiful shift in the old-school airline paradigm and it reminds me exactly of what Balihoo is doing for local marketing automation. Balihoo is revolutionizing the way that businesses market at a local level by offering a state of the art co-op marketing solution, robust ad builder capabilities and local media buying. This is a complete departure from the way that companies facilitated local marketing in the past

Oh how I love shifting paradigms. Time for another Ginger Ale.

Marketing is part science and part art.  Neither can succeed without the other and it is incumbent upon anyone who relies on marketing to remember that.

We recently launched a campaign for a healthcare client that had just the right amount of art and science.  This was a terribly exciting campaign for us because we were responsible for all aspects of the initiative – from creative concepting, through production, media planning, media buying, trafficking of creative, results tracking and post buy analysis.  Typically we are handed creative, or have specific media guidelines that we must work under and it can be restricting to the team.  In this case we owned it all and the execution was damn near perfect if I don’t say so myself. 

Was the creative perfect from an Art perspective? No, but it was damn good and was done at the right price.  And through leveraging our technology is now fully customizable and available for execution in all 210 DMA’s around the country.

Was the media buy scientifically analyzed eight ways from Sunday to ensure the exact right reach and frequency for the given target and market? No, but it was carefully analyzed using syndicated and proprietary research and planned with reach and frequency targets that made good sense for the creative and overall campaign strategy. 

Now here is the kicker – the campaigns costs were roughly 1/3^rd of what they would have been with a traditional agency and the results have far exceeded this customers expectations.  Here is the other kicker, this is a small business – not some behemoth that cut their budget from $3 million to $1 million.  We took the costs from $75k to $25k and far outperformed expectations.   Leveraging our Local Marketing Automation technology and media buying expertise of Balihoo (science) with the creative concepting and production capabilities (art) of our creative department we nailed what is the future of local marketing – technology enabled integrated campaigns.  Damn that is nice!

A couple of months ago, I witnessed a great example of strategic local marketing in an industry where such is still considered uncharted territory. Let me set the stage here:

The Boise Airport is NOT a major metropolitan airport. With the exception of a small handful of destinations, most air travel requires a stop in Salt Lake, Seattle, Denver, Chicago or Minneapolis. There roughly 5 major airlines that fly in and out of Boise and they are all battling for their slice of local market share in a relatively depressed Boise/Treasure Valley economy.

Traditionally, airlines have spent countless dollars on large national brand awareness advertising campaigns. However, with the large decline in traveler volume and ever-increasing operating costs, innovative airlines appear to be ditching the old way of advertising and deploying a more strategic and cost-effective approach to advertising. Enter local advertising and return to story…

I was attending the Boise State vs. University of Idaho football game. Because of the rivalry nature of this game, the local Air Force base provided the sold-out crowd with a classic sporting event crowd pleaser: the fly-by. Just when everyone was coming down from the excitement associated with three military helicopters floating across the stadium, a second fly-by took place. But this time it wasn’t a military aircraft. Nope. It was a Horizon Air commercial turbo-prop airplane. What made it even better was that the plane was adorned with a brand new Boise State University paint scheme. Boise State fans erupted in cheers.

Regardless of who your favorite team is, the principal of the matter is noteworthy. It was the first time I had seen the advertising paradigm shift beginning to take place in the airline industry. They followed up the publicity stunt with a highly targeted local advertising campaign across a variety of local advertising mediums intended to generate a direct response for their Boise Mystery City promotion. While I didn’t rush out to buy an airline ticket, it did prompt me to visit horizonair.com when the time came to book my next business travel trip.

Seeing local marketing take place across a variety of industries known for their national brand awareness campaigns excites me. I can already see it now: Balihoo’s Local Marketing Automation tool will feature a new capability under the ‘Out of Home’ medium. Airline clients would log into the application, plug in images and our application would render a real-time preview of the localized airplane. And because the application is vendor-agnostic, the design could be routed to the client’s vendor of choice: Bombardier, Airbus or Boeing.