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Be Careful What You Wish For
Need a Cake Bakery wished for more customers. They were selling an average of 1,200 dozen cupcakes each month and, in order to boost that number higher, they created a promotion on Groupon - a website that promotes deep discounts to a wide audience. Within a few hours, Need A Cake had orders for more than 8,500 dozen cupcakes. Sounds great, right? Wrong. They weren’t prepared to handle that kind of volume and wiped out one whole year’s profits hiring contractors to help fill the orders. “Without a doubt it was my worst ever business decision,” said Need A Cake’s owner, Rachel Brown.
Using Groupon or other daily deal websites might be the perfect strategy for your business – but marketing blindly without a solid plan can also break it. That plan does more than just lay out the different media and methods you’ll use, it also takes into account the amount of work your business can handle. Chick-Fil-A opened a restaurant in Cape Girardeau a few months ago and attracted so much traffic that cars were lined up out into the street. Those of you who ate there may have been pleasantly surprised that Chick-Fil-A’s staff were prepared for the rush. Wait times were equal to or less than other, more established restaurants because they had additional staff already on hand to take orders, prepare, and deliver the food.
Marketing must be intentional if it is to be effective. Plan now for what you will invest in 2012, seriously consider both how to best reach your target audience and how to handle the orders when they come. A properly crafted plan that is executed correctly should make you more money than it costs; making decisions on the fly might cost you or your business more than you can spend. Just ask Rachel.
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