Week 8: Another One Bites The Dust

Why did the ghost’s marketing campaign fail? You could see right through it.

A good ol’ classic pun for you guys this week.

Anyway, the college decisions saga continues. As of the day you’re reading this post, I am most probably in Nashville touring colleges. Fun stuff!

More importantly: the plan for what I’m going to build is coming together. Most of the data that I’ve looked through paints a very clear picture of what works for small businesses and what they need, and I think my solution’s an innovative way to help them with all of that.

So what is it?

Now, most of the businesses I talked to said that most of their success can be attributed to WOM marketing (in other words, their current customers told other people about their business and they gained new customers that way). When they started their businesses, they were doing a lot of advertising, but that all died down as the WOM outreach got big enough that it was fueling their growth on its own. (1 customer -> 2 customers -> 4 customers -> 8 customers -> etc. You see?)

Where most unsuccessful businesses die is before this stage – they just can’t get enough customers to justify the cost of staying in business. What I need to do is help them get to the point where they can drive their own growth.

How can that be done? There’s almost certainly many customers out in the market that would be happy to buy from or patronize these establishments, if only they knew about them. If we can get the word out that this business exists, people who find out and who need the product/service it provides would know that it is a feasible option for their needs.

Sure, in theory.

It’s true that that is what all businesses are trying to do – get their names out there. There’s no reason to expect that I can do a better job at that than them, because, by its very nature, there’s no way to predict the success of a certain marketing strategy. It may go viral, or you may only reach your followers. You simply have to use the marketing principles you know, try what you think will work and hope for the best.

It really does seem hopeless for smaller accounts, though, just like with smaller organizations, since it’s so hard to gain traction. There needs to be some way for these businesses to directly interact with people in the local community outside of their current customers and have an opportunity to communicate the value of what they’re providing to them. (And not just Nextdoor, either – something easier to sort through and focused on local commerce rather than individual concerns).

You still have not told us exactly what you’re planning to do.

Think ‘Nextdoor for Small Businesses.’

I want to prototype an online platform where small businesses get the opportunity to post about who they are and what they’re doing. Through it, they’ll be able to reach a group of individuals who have joined the platform solely for the purpose of finding out about local organizations they can buy from and support.

Businesses will be interested in joining the platform since it does not take much effort to make a post however frequently they’d like (the post structure is very similar to Instagram, although it limits to maximum one post per week). When these businesses make their posts, the platform will encourage them to attach some type of discount (15% off any purchases in the next week, for instance). As a result, individuals in the area will also be enticed by the platform because they have an opportunity to find a good deal on something they’re looking for there.

Let me give you an example of how something like this might work. Say we have a user who’s interested in going to a boba shop to buy some bubble tea. Wanting a discount, they might hop on the platform, select the filters for ‘local boba shops’ or ‘local coffee/snack shops’ and see recent posts that have been made by boba businesses. If they like it, they’ll probably come back, and the business that made the post will have received a new loyal customer.

For a platform like this one, it’s important that we have a significant user base, otherwise the marketing these businesses are doing will be entirely pointless since there are not a lot of people seeing their posts. Beyond the discounts encouraging individuals to join the platform, there are also a couple of other strategies that will be used. For one, partnerships can be built with small businesses where they promote the platform as a site where they ‘post discounts and good deals once a week.’ Their customers, wanting those deals, will join the site, where they’ll also see offers from other businesses that they might be interested in taking up. There’ll be an individual link associated with each post, so users can easily share them with friends/on other platforms.

I want to encourage not only business participation, but also active user participation, so I’ll also add a feature that allows users to express their approval/disapproval. This will either come in the form of emojis that users can react to posts with (perhaps ones related to the content of the message, like donut emojis for a donut shop) or an ‘I Tried This Deal!’ popup that users can click a thumbs up on if they enjoyed what the small business had to offer.

There are other, somewhat similar platforms like Nextdoor and Groupon, but none really come close to what this aims to do. Nextdoor is focused on, like I said, individual connection within neighborhoods and local areas, and Groupon is more a site where customers can find coupons for all businesses.

What an ambitious plan.

Well, this is a twelve-week project, so not a lot of time to develop a whole new social media platform or anything like that. As a result, my plan for the last few weeks of this project is to roughly prototype the platform using Adalo, so we can get an idea for what it might look like and what features it’ll have. I also do want to reach out to the businesses that I interviewed to request their feedback on my idea. If they think it’d be beneficial to their businesses, I’ll go ahead and try to develop it! (That comes much later, though.)

~Maya