As an ice cream shop, we live or die by hyper-local support — meaning those who can walk to us from either home or work or the hotels on the river. This means that most all of our advertising efforts must be local. There may be such a thing as a destination restaurant, but that concept does not really translate to frozen treats, mostly because if someone lives 30 miles away there are just too many quick, good opportunities closer to them. That doesn’t mean we don’t get such folks. We have one couple, for example, who drives an hour and a half because we are the only game in town for truly amazing licorice ice cream (my favorite, too!).
Anyway, three years ago we rebranded Piper’s. We dropped food service completely and concentrated on expanding frozen treat sales. We hired a local marketing firm to help us get the word out, and man was that worth every penny we spent on them. They treated us right financially because we had done their owners a good turn when they were first starting out, so it could have been worse. But, honestly, it would have been worth it at twice the price. They blanketed the local media with press releases that resulted in on-site interviews and more mentions than I could count. Some of those are still lurking around the internet because as we all know the internet never forgets.
These days our biggest ad buy is with a Northern Kentucky independent online news source, of which we have two. It’s as simple as a display ad on their site that clicks through to our website. During the height of season it is not uncommon to find that this one ad brings more website traffic than even Google or Facebook. I’m normally leery of “traditional” advertising but, in this case, it gives us a great return on our investment.
This year we are considering a bigger push into local social media. I’m talking to local players in the game to see what they can do for us, emphasizing that I want our efforts to be concentrated within a 10-15 mile radius of Piper’s.
One thing I learned from our experience with a marketing firm. Local media outlets love stories about local businesses. These days, all it takes is for me to come up with a cool new concept or a different take on our business and the interview request just appears in my inbox. Nothing beats traditional word-of-mouth advertising in my line of work, and nothing ever will. But when I want to tap previously untapped markets, my local media contacts never let me down and usually go above and beyond to meet my needs.
