Monday, January 24, 2011

Do You Want To Send Your Listeners Eight Times More Coupons?

Groupon Chief Executive Andrew Mason is in Europe today and claims that they are only able to accommodate one of eight businesses wanting to do daily deals with them.

10LocalCoupons.com’s Eric Strauss has gone live partnering with radio in 100 markets and hopes unity will be the key to success.
“With every broadcaster doing their own thing, there’s just getting to be too much noise in the market. We try to get multiple broadcasters in a market to work together so we can block any competitors.”

Groupon, goes mainly after restaurants and spas. Strauss tells Inside Radio local broadcasters tend to attract a wider array of clients — like dry cleaners, roofers and carpet cleaners. “We’re getting calls from furniture stores who say they called Groupon and they wouldn’t take them.”

1. Is your station website as clean and focused as this?
2. Does it make sense to email your entire database offering half off on furniture or roofing? Do you have a better way to help these categories?
3. Is your communication going to be as clever, well-written and focused on the permission/needs of the consumer as Groupon's?
4. Have you segmented your database based on their planned purchases and interests?
5. Have you searched for "Groupon competitors" and studied the unique selling propositions of all of them?

Don't act until you can honestly answer "yes" five times.

Just because the short-term money is there, doesn't mean it's smart for radio to TAKE it without a solid strategy that benefits listeners and doesn't further clutter our brands.

1 comment:

Jim Kerr said...

Just to clarify on this, Number 4 makes number 2 unnecessary. Targeting the right deal to the right consumer is very important and something that Groupon is just now starting to focus on. Unfortunately, radio's databases are generally in such disarray that they can't really focus on this either.

If there's are lessons here, they are:

Retailers are beating a path to the door of a partner that will give them a quantifiable ROI.

This is still a "gettable" space for radio.

It REALLY underscores that importance of your listener database.

I would distill your list of five down to one truism that will be important for the future of radio:

If you have a large listener database with robust and clean data, you have a huge asset for digital monetization.

Jim Kerr
Triton Digital