May 16th is… National Sea Monkey Day

Posted on May 16, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

How does a brine shrimp become known as sea monkey?  Probably by some creative marketing people who were inspired in a moment of genius.  Yes, genius.  How else would you be able to market a packet of dried shrimp eggs that you pour into a container of water and watch for up to two years? Calling them brine shrimp sounds almost as exciting as watching the grass grow or the paint dry, but a sea monkey with banana treats and sea-diamonds – now that’s something to watch!

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May 13 is… Frog Jumping Day!

Posted on May 13, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

Frog Jumping Day should be celebrated by kids and kids and heart all over the country.  We’ve heard of some annual frog jumping festivals which would be a great way to embrace today’s holiday, if it’s the real amphibians or a version of the child hood game leap frog.  Frog Jumping Day has been tied to Mark Twain’s short story Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, first published in 1865.

If your a restaurant in the Greenville area, today would be a great day for a promotion with frog legs, and it comes with a built in tag line – we’ll make sure your frog legs don’t jump off your plate today!

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May 11 is… Eat What You Want Day!

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

Every day is full of choices and today you get to choose what to eat, just like every other day.  Not too exciting of a day, really, considering you choose what to eat every day.  It could be more exciting if you threw your diet rules out of the window for today, but No Diet Day was last week!  Hold strong and choose healthy, but only if you want it.

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May 10 is… National Shrimp Day!

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

Whether you call it a shrimp, crustacean, or prawn, just remember to call us for dinner!  And we’re not picky about how you prepare them for us either, grilled, sauteed, or fried, just not with a lot of garlic and butter, because shrimp scampi day is not today.

National Shrimp Day is a perfect day for any restaurant to run a special on shrimp dishes, and here in the Greenville area a local favorite is shrimp and grits.  Stellas is one of our favorites.  But let’s think outside of the box for a moment and take advantage of some other meanings for shrimp.  Pee wee, shorty, little person, these are all name-calling alternatives for shrimp.  So make it shrimp day at your place of business.  Half off offers for everyone under 5′ tall, or pay for your item an amount commensurate with your height.

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Exceeding your Greenville marketing expectations

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

The number one thing that our local Greenville residents ask us for these days is more coupons, specifically, food coupons.  In today’s economic times, it’s no wonder that residents want to save money, and the stronger our sponsor’s offers are the better results.  A BOGO offer always does better than a save 10% offer, and sometimes the results can be a little overwhelming to our sponsors.

When the Simpsonville and Mauldin editions hit the area homes in December, the coupons came pouring in to our sponsors.  One in particular, TGIFriday’s on Woodruff Road averaged 350 coupons per week for the month of January.  I think that may be an Upstate Town Planner record.  We have a lot of testimonial letters for Friday’s across the country, and most are around the 50 – 100 per week, I guess the local Greenville residents like their Friday’s a little more than average!

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Social Media Unacceptable

Posted on April 23, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

Every once in a while something occurs on our social media platform that is unacceptable, and is probably the biggest reason why everyone should monitor their social media sites frequently.  Someone who is a fan of our facebook page decided that it was acceptable for them to post their Living Social deal on our fanpage to try and get themselves some more traffic.  Well, the problem I have with that is that this person / business is not a customer of ours and the service she is selling is the same service that we do have a sponsor for.   The point of our fan page is to engage our fans and to drive business towards our sponsors who provide our publication to residents.

So instead of immediately deleting the post we chose to post a comment underneath the Living Social link that simply pointed out an even better deal with one of our sponsors.  Was it the nicest thing to do?  No. But we did it in an attempt to make the person realize that posting the link for a Living Social deal on our fan page wasn’t the nicest feeling in the world.  And when this post first appeared we didn’t realize that is was from the business owner herself, we thought it was a fan of ours who was trying to share the deal.  Here’s a screenshot of the part of the post:

Well apparently the point was made, because when we checked our fan page later we had noticed that our own comment on our own page under her thread had been deleted.  There is only one person with the authority to delete a comment under a thread, and that’s the originator of the comment.  I guess she felt threatened that if our other fans saw the better deal she might not sell as many Living Social deals.

I tried to call to explain that in the future she was welcome to post her business offerings on my personal facebook page, but that our fanpage was reserved for our sponsors, but the person answering the phone didn’t want to put me through unless she was expecting my call.  Really?  You’re phone number is plastered all over the web and Living Social but I have to pre-arrange a phone call.  We did finally have the discussion and she said that she understands 100%, but she also un-liked our fan page.

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Award winning Town Planner covers

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

The national Town Planner conference was held last weekend and all the publishers voted for the best cover photography.  The winners are shown below, and unfortunately, the upstate SC editions didn’t place.

First place went to an Arizona edition and is a lovely picture of some winter action at the Grand Canyon.  Second place to a fall scene in Pennsylvania taken by a photographer who was published shortly after his death.  The publisher, Kathy Weaver, delivered an emotional acceptance and related that Terry Schantz had always wanted to be published but never had been.  Kathy was able to fulfill that lifelong dream for Terry.  Third place went to a Wisconsin edition and don’t tell anyone, but, it was my favorite.  (Rules state that I can’t vote for my own covers)  So come on Greenville area photographers!  Submit your photos for the 2012 editions so we can earn some national recognition! You can submit through the contact us page.

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Cashless marketing ROI

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

At the encouragement of some of my Greenville area social media friends like Stephen Harvey and Jay Handler I videotaped my presentation to my BNI group this week.  After covering the essentials of Upstate Town Planner I moved to a topic that is getting a lot of press lately, cashless advertising.  So here it is, a little less than 9 minutes of me running through some numbers for popular cashless sites.  Yes, there are a lot of assumptions and yes, you can pick it apart because I didn’t use average ticket instead of face value, but the numbers will be quite similar.    Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWHEctAJAwA
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Co-op direct mail marketing is affordable

Posted on February 27, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

I received a direct mail piece yesterday from the Hearing Healthcare Center in Greenville.  It was a #10 envelope stuffed with 3 full sheets of information.  It’s not the first time I’ve received this information trying to sell me some hearing aids.  So I took a closer look at the marketing piece this time and found some interesting things.

First, the postage was 19 cents, pretty standard for pre-sorted standard class mail.  Second, the name and address on the envelope came from somewhere, and I’m pretty sure it was from AARP, since these started showing up in my mailbox after joining.  I’m sure that list cost something but I can’t put a hard figure on it.  Next, the three 8.5 x 11 color copies inside.  One is marked “private invitation”, and invites me for all sorts of free stuff next week, the second is a call to action savings of $895 off MSRP of a pair of hearing aids, and the third is a personal letter “from one spouse to another”.  Let’s just pick a number and go with 10 cents for the cost of the copies, envelope, and mailing list.  Total cost per house: 29 cents.

If a sponsor were to advertise in Upstate Town Planner for the year the total cost per house averages 18 cents.  And it’s not even fair to compare this cost because it’s two different things, one is a one-time mailing, the other lasts for an entire year!

If you were to guess how many of the Hearing Center’s envelopes get opened, what do you think that percentage would be? And of those opened, how many times will the literature be viewed before it’s thrown away?  For comparison’s sake let’s assume each is looked at 3 times.  The cosportunity (cost/3 opportunities) on a per house basis is $0.09667

The cosportunity with Upstate Town Planner on a per house basis averages $0.00035?  That’s only 276 times more cost effective than a one time mailing.  We like to call that affordable!

 

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Macaroni Grill + Town Planner = ROI over 4x

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Mark Rodeffer

It’s always great to see a sponsor of Town Planner track their results and report back to us how well it worked.  The goal of any advertising should be to generate a return on your investment.  I’ve spent enough time recently talking about cashless advertising sites and their potential return, so we’ll just refer to those posts below and just talk about the results for Macaroni Grill today.

Macaroni Grill ran some Jr. Coupons in a California Town Planner edition and just sent in a testimonial letter citing on average they’re getting 4 coupons turned in every day.  The coupon offer is for $5 off a $25 food purchase, a strong offer than I would take advantage of myself!  So let’s do a little math:  30 days in a month means:

120 coupons redeemed per month

$600  -for the cost of the promotion ($5 x 120)

$3,000 – minimum gross sales ($25 x 120)

$165  – for the cost of advertising (1 jr. coupon)

Calculating the ROI by dividing the sales by the advertising costs gives a result of 3.92!  And let’s also consider that the average ticket for a party of two is probably higher than the $25 required purchase, which means the ROI is definitely over 4!  For every dollar Macaroni Grill spent advertising with Town Planner, they brought in $4!  Can anyone refer me into the local Macaroni Grill in Greenville?

Thanks to Joyce Carter out in California for this great testimonial, and for sharing her idea about Jr. Coupons!

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