In this episode, Steven Mario Cavallo focuses on using audio in the best way possible for promotional, entertainment or educational purposes. I will discuss how to use different audio vehicles properly so that you can use audio to sell products and services; for marketing a business; for promoting ideas/opinions; for fundraising purposes and to support a crowd funding campaign.
Audio is the most intimate way of engaging with an audience and it is able to do things that no other form of communication can. It has distinct advantages over other forms of media and can give the producer of the messages a great deal of power, when used correctly. I will go through the relative strengths and weaknesses of each form of media and tell you when to use one over the other. The principles outlined here have universal applicability: they are equally relevant to a global company like Sony as they are to a small business; and they also apply as much to the non-profit sector and to government, as they do to your own business. This episode includes an interview with Mr Ben Krueger of Cashflow Podcasting from the U.S. who is a highly respected expert in podcasting. Ben will graciously share with us some of his incredible knowledge on producing business-generating podcasts and insights from the clients he serves around the world.
The biggest advantage that audio has over video or text is that it doesn’t require EOS (eyes on screen), which means people typically consume audio while doing other things. If you think of your own habits when listening to podcasts, or audio books, or radio or music etc. you will probably find that most of the time when listening, you are either walking, jogging, cooking, cleaning, at the gym, vacuuming, or working. You don’t need to be staring at a screen or a page in order to consume it. This means that as a producer of audio, you enjoy the company of your audience for substantially longer than video producers and text publishers.
So what does this mean to you as a business? It means you have the time to go into more depth with your content. You don’t need to reduce your message to a mere sound byte (as is often the case with video) or to dramatic headlines (as is often the case with print). Of course, there are long form versions of both video and print (e.g. documentaries and books), but both of these require a significantly larger commitment on behalf of the audience, to consume. For people to properly consume video and text, they must give the message their full attention – something that is a lot harder to get. Obviously, there are cases where video is the preferred medium, such as where visual elements are required (e.g. to view artwork). And there are cases were text is best, such as where a great deal of technical or reference material must be imparted (e.g. in operations manuals). So to communicate best with your audience, you really need to engage in all three: audio, video and text; in some combination and as appropriate. But audio is a superb platform to form the basis upon which to build an audience that knows, likes and trusts you – and works exceptionally well for business audiences. Business education programmes, like this very podcast you are listening to – work beautifully distributed as serialised audio.
At The Business Firm, we produce video and audio for clients around the world, so we have seen how different ways of using video and audio works for our clients. In every case we manage and every campaign we create, the same benefits to the client keep reappearing every time, so I will share with you what we have learned on how to best use different types of audio in your business so you take advantage of the natural strengths of each. All of the audio forms I mention in this episode are produced in house by The Business Firm and we are experienced in the strategy, production and execution. So you’re getting this information straight from the horse’s mouth.
Let’s begin with radio, as it accounts for the lion’s share of spend in respect to advertising. Radio advertising is only appropriate in two circumstances. Because it is a mass media with a high reach that cannot discriminate its targets (i.e. radio waves go to absolutely everybody within the transmitter range), you should only use it if you:
- Have a broad based demand product or service (i.e. it can be bought by all people); and
- You have adequate distribution to cover the transmission area in order to recoup ROI on the number of impressions cast by the reach. Distribution can be either via branches you directly own or widespread distributors that stock your brand
Examples of products and services that fit both these criteria include: McDonalds, British Paints, Villi’s pies & pasties and Mortein fly spray. But don’t feel that you need to be a multinational brand or part of a chain for you to get ROI on radio advertising. You can still be a local business with a few branches or stockists, and radio can be tremendous for you. This is particularly so if you sell high value goods or services with good margins. Furthermore, you may even have just one sufficiently large store in the metropolitan area and your target market is in fact, the entire city. In this instance, radio can also work. An example of this is IKEA, or a recognised shopping precinct, or a large event such as a major food and wine festival…or even a mainstream political party.
Now, while radio has tremendous reach, the fact it cannot discriminate means there is no way you can target a segment beyond choosing a radio station, or a themed show or a time slot for your ad to appear. And while this can give you some level of segmentation on a few bases, (for example, you can usually get to youth a little easier through a station that plays nothing but new hip-hop music), this still is really poor segmentation in comparison with the super tight targeting other forms of audio promotion can give you – which I’ll discuss in a moment. So other than choosing a radio show that is meant for your target market (e.g. if you are a nursery that sells plants you might try and find a gardening show) this inability to target specific audiences in radio is a limitation, so in order to minimise wasted impressions, your offering must have broad appeal. You don’t go and advertise your niche product or industry specific B2B service on radio, as that would be a horrendous waste of money. You must be able to be bought by a sizeable chunk of the masses that will listen to each airing.
If your organisation is able to make good use of the reach of this fabulous media, then radio can be a great audio vehicle for your message.
Let us now turn our attention to podcasting, as this has become the most important content marketing platform for many types of businesses today. Firstly though, I would like to make a clear distinction understood here. In what I just described of radio, the promotional value was in the paid advertisement you inserted amongst the radio station’s programming. That is, your audio creation was the advertisement itself – the radio commercial. Audio advertising is punchy and often can produce quick results when done properly, but by its very nature as being a paid advertisement, it can only be an expensive, short interjection that interrupts what the listener is really wanting to hear. This means that no matter how creative or relevant, the audience always reserves some suspicion about whatever is being advertised because the advertiser has paid the station in order to force the audience to listen to it. This phenomenon applies to all forms of advertising by the way, but particularly so in the mass media. This doesn’t make it bad, by the way; it’s just the way it is.
So when discussing podcasting, the most important thing one must understand about it is that while it sounds to the audience almost the same as radio (particularly talk radio) and has ads in it, intros, outros, sound effects etc. – it differs ENORMOUSLY from normal radio in a number of crucial ways.
- People actively choose to listen to a podcast. They want to hear what is being said. They’ve actively searched for something that is of genuine interest to them, found your podcast, selected yours from the other search results, and taken the time to download it. All of this is the exact opposite of radio advertising. A radio ad interrupts the content. In podcasting, your message IS the content. This changes the entire paradigm of listener engagement that your business can enjoy from an audience. Therefore, to make the most of this crowd of active listeners across the globe that your podcast attracts, you must change your promotional mindset away from being a pushy ‘advertiser’, to being a ‘content creator’. Thus, podcasting is perhaps the greatest vehicle for content marketing – and amongst the most valuable marketing tools a business has to establish their credentials as an industry leader, an expert…as an authority – not merely an advertiser. Mind you, it is also possible to run advertisements for your business on somebody else’s podcasts. In fact, there are many businesses that have grown enormously by doing no other promotion than making audio ads (that are no different to radio ads) and running them on podcasts whose audience matches their target market. And this is possible because of the next crucial differentiator between radio and podcasting:
- Podcasts are usually very specific and cater directly to a narrow niche, which is impossible to isolate using broadcast radio. Such a tight audience profile allows your business to zero in on a highly segmented group. Whatever your business sells, there is likely a podcast that speaks just to an audience that represents your buyers, which you can advertise on. Or, you can establish your own podcast and speak to them as often as you like, for as long as you like. Just as long as the production quality is high and your content is valuable to that audience, you have the opportunity to build an enormous audience internationally that know, like and trust you; which then forms a listener base that can become customers of your products, or attendees at your events, or vocal brand champions, or students to your courses, or members of your club, or voters for your political party, or donors to your charity etc. etc.
- Listeners can subscribe to your show. This makes all the difference because it means that the listener doesn’t need to commit any mental energy to remember to listen to the show – it automatically shows up on their mobile or computer to listen to at their own leisure. And until it’s listened to, it will sit there permanently, waiting for when they’re ready to listen in their own time. This way, no episode is forgotten or missed out.
- Podcasts can be shared by your listeners, thereby building your audience exponentially. Furthermore, if you encourage sharing, this can grow your reach very quickly, all around the world. There is no real way of doing this in radio, but in iTunes or Stitcher or TuneIn; this functionality is baked right into the app.
- Podcasts can be time shifted, radio can only be consumed at the moment of transmission. The fact that podcasts can be ‘stored’ as content inventory in iTunes means that you can overcome the instantly perishable nature of radio. The same way that Netflix stores movies for you to watch on demand, so too your audio programme sits on an internet server awaiting to be downloaded and played to the listener at their request. This allows you to build a library of content that people can browse and listen to at any time; unlike a radio itinerary or show guide that only tells you when a show is scheduled to air – for which you need to be ready and waiting to listen to at the time of transmission in order to hear it.
- An on demand library of podcasts means that it becomes a lot easier for your business to serialise the content. That is, because the audience is able to view your entire content catalogue at once and choose episodes in correct and complete succession, you can create content that builds upon itself; taking your audience through a progression of ideas, promotions, sales pitches, education, philosophies etc. that allows you to cultivate their connection with your brand and for their attitudes to mature in the direction that you take them. And because they can access your entire library, they can’t miss any episodes. This is impossible with broadcast radio.
- The other enormous difference between podcasting and radio is that while radio can have a massive transmission area, particularly if the station is part of a network, it is always limited to the geographical reach of the signal over a terrestrial area. Whereas in podcasting there is no limit in space or time; which means you can grow an international audience very easily and without time zone issues. Most particularly, for podcasts that are in English, you will instantly grow audiences in Australia, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, South Africa, Canada, the US, New Zealand, India and Northern Ireland without any extra effort or translation. Of course, many people in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa also understand English, hence, you have the ability to capture the largest listener base possible. And if you can add such Chinese, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, French, German and Japanese translations of the same content and you will pretty much cover much of the world’s population. All of this reach can be accomplished from podcasting at no extra cost (other than the foreign voice talent) and through the same global channel of iTunes (and other channels such as Stitcher Radio, Google Play etc.). This gives your business enormous power.
Audiobooks are another very popular form of audio production. It probably gives your business the highest authority value of any type of audio product because it establishes you as an author and a credible expert, having been published in a highly refined, traditional vehicle for audio distribution. Also, audiobooks are sold for reasonable money and are therefore treated as a valued purchase; in the same way a person buys a printed book. They have a permanency and prestige to them that podcasts and radio cannot match. Because the buyer perceives it a reference publication, they invest a great deal of belief in the content within an audiobook.
One of the best things about audiobooks is that most businesses can simply repurpose their existing text content for audio. Often, works such as a books, or manuals, or even plays; can be simply read directly into a recording with minimal adaptation. So for almost all businesses that already have various text assets, be they books or blogs or FAQ etc. they have ready-made scripts to turn into audiobooks, which can be sold or given away freely. Depending on the nature of the content, audiobooks allow a business to convey a great deal of emotion and drama to the audience, by way of using voice actors to portray urgency, or comfort, or persuasion, or fear, or intrigue or any other motivating nuance to the listener. Neither radio nor podcasting portray such theatre. In audiobooks I have personally produced for clients, we were able to bring a well-written but dull script to life using accents, sound effects, dramatic pauses and other creative treatments that work only in an audiobook. What this means for your business is the ability to deliver your message with a great deal of impact that no other audio vehicle can achieve.
CDs are obviously best known as the premium format for music publishing. But of course, they also have up until recently, been the preferred method for distributing audiobooks and recordings of lectures/workbooks and even audio newsletters. And while the sheer convenience and low cost of distributing content via electronic channels such as iTunes has largely supplanted CDs, there are still strong reasons why your business may elect to distribute audio via compact disc as opposed to (or in addition to) internet files. The main reason (other than the superior audio quality afforded by CDs) is that the CD is actually a physical product that you must hold in your hands and whose existence you can see with your own eyes and that you must store in a physical location on a real shelf. This contrasts to the intangible nature of mp3 or AAC files that are of course, invisible, bear no mass and have no physical form. And it is this vague, abstract existence of electronic files that can lessen their weight in the mind of your audience because they are often downloaded and stored in an electronic folder with the intention of being consumed at a later date – but, of course, this often never happens and your message is consequently never heard by a large proportion of your targeted audience. Whereas a physical CD presses on the mind of the receiver just because it is materially there and therefore, is perceived as something of tangible value; which increases the likelihood that it will be consumed. This phenomenon is more pronounced with people of Generation X and even Baby Boomers; who grew up at a time when music CDs were horrendously expensive and so consign a high reference value to a compact disc. So if your organisation’s target market includes a sizeable proportion of people aged forty and older, then distribution of your audio content via CD (perhaps in addition to the internet distributed audio) may work extremely well for you and can even bestow VIP status to its recipients. Organisations that fall within this category would include life insurance companies, elite membership organisations, music clubs and content that you wish your targets to listen to once then ceremonially pass on to others before returning to you. In projects The Business Firm has been involved with where audio content has been distributed on CD, we have found the cost per unit of creating the actual compact disc has been quite low, but the distribution costs can be quite high, unless the CDs can be shipped at quantity to central locations and consequently distributed from there on an individual basis – such as in the case where we produced a motivational CD and a training programme CD that were each shipped to a large multi-level-marketing company and an industry body respectfully; both of which then posted to their own members. At the end of the day, CDs are the only audio vehicle that your business can use to give off an element of prestige associated with packaging, with personal delivery, with printed materials and with real cover artwork. Quite often, when consulting to clients I have used this tangibility and the physical delivery to our client’s advantage by including physical vouchers to stimulate in-store purchase, or product samples to create a consumption experience; and even in one case, a binder that shipped with the first CD that encouraged the purchaser to fulfil the entire collection.
Now, let’s move on to another option. Online bookstores such as iBooks and Amazon are of course, platforms from which people purchase eBooks to read (as well as actual audiobooks, as just described). These eBooks are usually read on an iPad or iPhone or a Kindle; and they are very, very popular. Now, depending on the device your eBook is viewed on, and this is definitely the case with all Apple devices; your text-based eBook can actually be consumed as an audio product by the user, via text-to-speech functionality such as Siri. Of course, Siri (or whichever AI your device uses) is not going to discriminate any text when reading, which means it is going to read out the copyright notice, the footnotes, the publisher addresses and phone numbers etc. (unless you specifically exclude these from the text selected for reading). So it won’t be as polished nor sound as natural as a proper audiobook read by real voice actors, but it will give the audience a pretty good audio version of text assets you already have. While the text-to-speech function is meant largely for accessibility purposes and for convenience reasons; as businesses we are able to take advantage of this for promotional, communication or educational reasons. Potentially, you could simply copy big chunks of text content you already have, paste it into a new document and have an audio piece of decent length that was super quick to create, for immediate distribution in a tiny, tiny file size. And if you do it so that the only text that appears in the piece is just what needs to be read to the audience, you can have something useful that costs little to no time to prepare – almost instantly. Naturally, you will need to train your audience to actually listen to it, rather than read it; which will entail making sure they know how to evoke Siri or Cortana to read it to them, but it can work well for your business and is a great way to use existing text assets without the commitment of creating a proper audiobook.
Another good method of using audio is to make a short audio clip, which can be a recording of new content or a snippet from a larger piece; and simply distribute it as an mp3 file (under 9Mb) that can be emailed easily. You will also want to encourage your audience to forward the clip to their own network, if your content is promotional in nature. The big advantage of this is that it can be done quickly and there is no learning curve for the listener to be able to consume it – all they need to do is open the mp3 attachment and it will automatically play. And because the recipient receives it as a proper email attachment, they can easily forward it to whomever they like, with all their address book and email addresses ready at their disposal.
Internet radio is a streaming technology that allows any organisation, be it a business, charity, school, group or an individual – to act as an online radio station. This is sometimes referred to as webcasting. Essentially, it is exactly like radio, only broadcast over the web using internet protocol to send signal over wire; rather than using terrestrial transmission towers to send signal wirelessly. The important thing to realise about streaming is that just like radio, the content is delivered in real time only – it is not available on demand like podcasting. This means that if your business wants to use this medium 24 hours a day, you will need a lot of content. Of course, this is a challenge, but at The Business Firm, I have helped our clients get around this challenge by either spreading live content creators around the world in different time zones to share the work; or to create a schedule of pre-recorded content that loops or shuffles; or simply to reduce ‘on-air’ time to just one of three or two of three shifts in a 24 hour period. The beauty of internet radio is the immediacy of live announcing that you also get with radio, but with the enormous benefit of unbounded geographic reach – something that radio doesn’t have. And compared to the cost of running a terrestrial radio station and the associated license fees imposed by governments, internet radio and streaming audio is unbelievably cost effective and can work for your organisation in building connection with your audience on a ‘live’ basis, where you can talk to people all around the world in real time in a two way discussion; something that is not possible with podcasting.
This leads to another audio technology that is different to all we have already covered, but that also has the incredible power of live, real-time interaction. And while people use it all the time, they probably never see it as the outstanding audio vehicle it is: and that option is, telephony. Now, I am not talking about picking up your mobile or landline and calling an individual; because although that is tremendously powerful, it actually falls within the sales realm, in telemarketing and call centre management, rather than audio. Rather, what I am bringing to the table is the idea of holding a live chat event using something like Skype, which will allow you to engage a group of people at once in an interactive audio session. Now, this is different to a webinar. What I am suggesting is not a one-to-many, town hall type scenario where only you can speak and the audience can only listen and maybe engage using text-based questions; no, this is about having a true multi-party conference call where you have real discussions with a small group, all of which have the ability to speak. Of course, you will need to take control of the discussion and moderate the session, but providing the number of participants is manageable, you can achieve a level of connection that all but equals a personal phone call. Obviously, you need to choose the right thing to use this for, but we have found that this is extremely powerful for our clients by facilitating negotiations or supporting outcomes through the high-level connection it provides with their audience. One caution here is that you must recognise that if you want to ‘sell’ at mass or if your message is complex to explain, you really should use a webinar that includes audio and video to help impart the information to a large number at once. This type of audio telephony is best used for building connection and community or for technical discussion within a small group.
YouTube is of course, an enormous platform that has a large amount of eyeballs at any one time. Therefore, you can capture a slice of those billions of eyeballs, driving traffic to consume your audio content. You can see quite a number of podcasters that post episodes to their YouTube channel. So while your business may find that you can get an unusually big number of hits to those audio files, because there is no video component, very few of those viewers actually listen beyond the first little bit of the audio. They are after all, eyeballs looking for video. So short of creating videos (which is an entirely different kettle of fish and much, much more work), we advise our clients to instead simply augment their audio files with some stills to help maintain engagement with their YouTube audience and get more of their audio message heard. This is of course, an extra step, but we have found it is usually worth the effort to keep listeners for longer. One other thing to bear in mind with YouTube is that unlike podcasts or Spotify, listeners are usually unlikely to allow a YouTube video (even if it only has audio) to continually play in the background while they are doing other tasks, like they would with a radio. This is because it is a video feed that requires a great deal more bandwidth to run than audio only. This reluctance is of course, compounded on a mobile as people try to preserve their data allowance.
Apps that play audio can be a very clean and direct way of delivering your content to audiences, because they connect the listener directly with your content, sidestepping all the competing noise from other stations, podcasts, channels etc. that share the same major distribution platforms with your content. For example, on iTunes or Spotify or Apple Music or Google Music there is no way of eliminating all the others. But, with your own app, you can achieve this so your message can enjoy perfect cut through. The flipside to sidestepping all that competing noise is that you also miss out on all that traffic! In a world saturated with audio offerings, discoverability is really, really hard to get and so unless you already have a large audience by way of a membership database (i.e. perhaps you are a university, or a local council, or an insurer, or a large employer or a global brand like Mazda) you will probably want to use the big platforms as well as your own app. Mind you, having your own app is not very expensive and some podcast file hosting services such as Libsyn can create a customised app for your existing podcast for very little cost, which then gives your audio content an opportunity to also be found in the App Store by people who may not normally look for podcasts or other audio-only content.
Of course, there are many other social media options such as FaceBook, LinkedIn and Twitter in which you can find ways to use audio in ways that support your business. Just bear in mind that like YouTube, audio embedded in video feeds can encounter that same bandwidth and data allowance problems when being consumed by listeners.
Finally, I will end this discussion with one of the most useful audio vehicles of all…on-hold audio. Most organisations experience significant phone traffic that usually comprises either existing customers/members; or very warm people far into the sales funnel who may have already visited your website and watched your product videos and are calling to speak to a sales person – or perhaps they are customers that are waiting for technical assistance or even ringing to complain. So on-hold audio is not going to be for lead-generation, but it is going to be useful for cross-selling, for introducing new products or services, for reminding call waiters to visit technical information online to help reduce call volume, or for calming down angry customers before they speak to your complaints staff. In every instance where The Business Firm has created on-hold audio for our clients, we have first analysed call traffic to segment the type of calls and then created specific content that suits each type of audience. We insert forks into the PBX system accordingly and this results in significant benefits for our clients. Using on-hold audio well should in my opinion, be an integral part of your overall audio strategy.
So we’ve covered most of the different ways of using audio in your organisation. You will need to assess which of these best supports your objectives and complements your overall marketing strategy.
Now, it is time for us to stand up and have a stretch, and follow me into the lift of Success Tower, where waiting for us, up in the Presidential Lounge and no doubt being pampered by James, is none other than the highly regarded Ben Krueger – one of the world’s most sought after podcasting experts who will help us understand in great detail, how podcasting can help us with our organisational goals. Come with me now…
In this episode, we hear from Mr Ben Krueger from Cashflow Podcasting. Ben provides podcast services for busy thought leaders, helping businesses grow their audience, authority and customer base with done-for-you podcasting services. He helps people either start a podcast from scratch or can edit existing podcasts to improve them before publication. He has a great deal of information on his website about many aspects of podcasting production, from equipment to scripting to editing to software to promotion and much more. I highly encourage you to visit Ben’s website: www.cashflowpodcasting.com and see some of the incredible resources he has there and consider using him to help you with developing a new podcast or to improve your existing one.
Today’s question comes from Elif from Turkey who is the owner of a business that operates short cruises in Istanbul. She has three modern boats and a very old wooden one and wants to know how she can increase the number of passengers she gets, particularly in autumn and winter, when there are fewer tourists. Her summers are very busy, often resulting in having to turn away people, but she struggles outside of the peak season, having to put one of her modern boats and her wooden boat out of service during the quietest months. She appreciates any help I can offer.
Well Elif, this is a typical situation faced by all owners of businesses that experience seasonal demand. A lot of hotels, restaurants, sports and leisure businesses and gyms deal with the same challenge. But all of these have a further restriction because they are very limited in the value they can provide; that is, a hotel can only offer hospitality, not sport. A gym can only offer exercise equipment & training, not food. A restaurant can only offer food, not accommodation etc. However, your boats are able to do all of this, plus offer the utility of transport, plus the benefit of incredible views and more. Let’s discuss the first issue of low tourism demand during autumn and winter as this concerns me most.
Look, even if you make big dollars during the peak season, I hate the idea that more than a third of your investment is sitting idle for a significant part of the year – it needs to be earning returns somehow. Even if passenger demand is low, it is still after all, a space that can be rented out. The sort of things that would earn the best rental returns would be highly experiential offerings that can make best use of the marine ambience. Given you already have chairs, tables, bar, kitchen and so forth on the vessel; you essentially have a ready-made floating facility that can host certain events. Now, rather than getting into event management directly, I would consider finding third parties that would like to hold events in your floating space. You can achieve this by finding an actual event planning company that will then go out and find clients that want to rent the space; or by approaching potential bookers directly – or a combination of both might be necessary to fill up total capacity. Of course, the space can be rented as a stationary floating barge, or as cruising vessel that is captained by charter. So while you might have hotels that are competing with you on renting out their space, very few of them will have the views or wow factor of your boats and none of them will be able to move. If you imagine a 24 hour day, you might view each hour or block of hours as being of interest to different users. For example, a sunrise yoga or tai chi group, followed by a business breakfast event, followed by Mums having coffee after dropping kids off at school, followed by a mid morning community group meeting or story time for preschool children, followed by a lunch event or even open to the public lunch trade where external operators cater to the lunch guests as their own part-time business. Lunch trade can then be followed by a period for corporate workshops, followed by a personal trainer doing gym classes, followed by after-work drinks and networking, following by a dining experience as part of a joint venture with a museum where they take groups on a historical journey of Constantinople while you cruise the water and give people views of the ancient Roman and the Ottoman buildings or on weekends sublet to a wedding planner to bring in wedding parties.
Again, these are all business development ideas for you Elif, but the idea would be to get external parties to organise and hold these activities, not for you to do them directly. Once you have put the effort into building a cohort of event organisers, and assuming each event is viable for the organiser, you might get years of ongoing space rental for relatively little effort and in the process, introduce new people to your boat and your normal services. So that will help generate return on your stationary boats in the off-season. But in addition of course, there is no reason why you should not put effort into building tourist revenue on your working boats even during the autumn and winter periods. Now, rather than use discounting and eroding margins, try instead to use that money to partner with hotels where a cruise is included in the hotel’s room package, or with coach operators to include a cruise as part of their bus tours, or with schools to hold camps on the boats. Just make sure that any money you spend generates returns to you directly, rather than to your industry as a whole. So any partnerships with other providers must give you exclusivity, so they cannot divert their customers to other vessel operators.
Subsequently Elif, you will find that lots of different types of business in Istanbul that live on tourism face the same seasonal demand problems, in which case you could create a total holiday experience that comprises a hotel, a cluster of restaurants, a theme park, a coach line, a number of historical landmark operators, a tour guide, so on and so forth, plus yourself; and form a structure whereby collectively, you can sell complete packages to people, in which each plays their part. Once formed, this can become a safer way of investing in acquisition from foreign markets that are within close proximity to Istanbul, such as Greece, Italy & Bulgaria, where flights are not necessary and your coach liner partner can easily provide all the transport into and out of Turkey. It is then worthwhile getting tourists carrying Euros directly from their home markets.
Finally, in respect to the peak season, if you are indeed having to turn down passengers this is indicating that you are beyond your capacity – which is a good thing – which means that you should increase your prices a bit to make the most if that excess quantity demanded. You should also be trying to capture as much discretionary spending while those passengers are on board your vessel, by offering things that go beyond the typical food and drink items. You could try and sell personal electronics such as headphones, portable battery power packs, DVDs, cameras and associated accessories such as leather iPad and iPhone cases, stylish bags and some souvenir items relating to Istanbul. Notice these are all relatively high value, non-perishable goods. All of this will not only add to your revenue, but will improve margins as these type of items provide more profit than lemonade or snacks do.
So I hope this has been helpful to you Elif, as a starting point to think of new ways of improving sales in your business. For really good information on how to develop your creativity so you can generate more profit-building ideas, have a listen to episode 106 of The Business Firm podcast where I interview the great Michael Gelb, who is a world authority on creativity and wrote the book How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci. In that interview, he reveals that 7 principles anybody can use to think like the greatest genius the world has ever seen…the great Leonardo. I also go through many techniques for building creativity in business, which you will find useful in your organisation. So that’s episode 105 of the podcast, via iTunes or Stitcher Radio.
I would like to take a moment now to thank one of my listeners, Cia00, for their 5 star review of The Business Firm podcast in iTunes. Cia00 wrote:
“This is a must-have podcast for the up and coming entrepreneur, as well as the billionaire. Everyone can learn something new and The Business Firm does just that. It provides you with the ideas, knowledge, systems and marketing to take your business to the next level, as well as your personal life. It is the complete package”.
I sincerely appreciate the rating you gave Cia00 and the fabulous feedback. Of course, there is no way of responding to you directly through iTunes, but I can acknowledge you on air.
So dear listeners, if you find the content published in this podcast valuable, it would be super to get a review from you as it provides myself and the team a great deal of encouragement and shows appreciation for the time and personal effort we put in to bringing you high quality content each week. In fact, I personally get so motivated by this encouraging feedback that I have actually put on our website a small token of my appreciation for people that leave a review in iTunes – have a look at the podcast page on the website thebusinessfirm.com.au to see what that is.
Listen to Episode 106 to hear all of Steven’s advice to this question. You can listen to this and all other episodes:
This is the favourite part of the show for host Steven Cavallo because he gets to directly help real people with an actual problem they are having in the areas of business development, marketing, sales or fundraising. Steven features one of the recorded questions sent in by listeners, and plays back that recording on air, along with his commentary. To submit a question, please record your question as an mp3 (maximum file size 10Mb) that is no longer than 60 seconds and email it to: answer@thebusinessfirm.com.au
While we can address your issue and provide some valuable insight for questions featured; of course, we can only go into brief detail in the minutes available in the podcast, so we encourage listeners who want more formal advice (regardless of whether their question is featured) to outline their specific problem/opportunity and email it directly to consulting@thebusinessfirm.com.au and you will get a reply within 24 hours.
Today’s question comes from Elif from Turkey who is the owner of a business that operates short cruises in Istanbul. She has three modern boats and a very old wooden one and wants to know how she can increase the number of passengers she gets, particularly in autumn and winter, when there are fewer tourists. Her summers are very busy, often resulting in having to turn away people, but she struggles outside of the peak season, having to put one of her modern boats and her wooden boat out of service during the quietest months. She appreciates any help I can offer.
Well Elif, this is a typical situation faced by all owners of businesses that experience seasonal demand. A lot of hotels, restaurants, sports and leisure businesses and gyms deal with the same challenge. But all of these have a further restriction because they are very limited in the value they can provide; that is, a hotel can only offer hospitality, not sport. A gym can only offer exercise equipment & training, not food. A restaurant can only offer food, not accommodation etc. However, your boats are able to do all of this, plus offer the utility of transport, plus the benefit of incredible views and more. Let’s discuss the first issue of low tourism demand during autumn and winter as this concerns me most.
Look, even if you make big dollars during the peak season, I hate the idea that more than a third of your investment is sitting idle for a significant part of the year – it needs to be earning returns somehow. Even if passenger demand is low, it is still after all, a space that can be rented out. The sort of things that would earn the best rental returns would be highly experiential offerings that can make best use of the marine ambience. Given you already have chairs, tables, bar, kitchen and so forth on the vessel; you essentially have a ready-made floating facility that can host certain events. Now, rather than getting into event management directly, I would consider finding third parties that would like to hold events in your floating space. You can achieve this by finding an actual event planning company that will then go out and find clients that want to rent the space; or by approaching potential bookers directly – or a combination of both might be necessary to fill up total capacity. Of course, the space can be rented as a stationary floating barge, or as cruising vessel that is captained by charter. So while you might have hotels that are competing with you on renting out their space, very few of them will have the views or wow factor of your boats and none of them will be able to move. If you imagine a 24 hour day, you might view each hour or block of hours as being of interest to different users. For example, a sunrise yoga or tai chi group, followed by a business breakfast event, followed by Mums having coffee after dropping kids off at school, followed by a mid morning community group meeting or story time for preschool children, followed by a lunch event or even open to the public lunch trade where external operators cater to the lunch guests as their own part-time business. Lunch trade can then be followed by a period for corporate workshops, followed by a personal trainer doing gym classes, followed by after-work drinks and networking, following by a dining experience as part of a joint venture with a museum where they take groups on a historical journey of Constantinople while you cruise the water and give people views of the ancient Roman and the Ottoman buildings or on weekends sublet to a wedding planner to bring in wedding parties.
Again, these are all business development ideas for you Elif, but the idea would be to get external parties to organise and hold these activities, not for you to do them directly. Once you have put the effort into building a cohort of event organisers, and assuming each event is viable for the organiser, you might get years of ongoing space rental for relatively little effort and in the process, introduce new people to your boat and your normal services. So that will help generate return on your stationary boats in the off-season. But in addition of course, there is no reason why you should not put effort into building tourist revenue on your working boats even during the autumn and winter periods. Now, rather than use discounting and eroding margins, try instead to use that money to partner with hotels where a cruise is included in the hotel’s room package, or with coach operators to include a cruise as part of their bus tours, or with schools to hold camps on the boats. Just make sure that any money you spend generates returns to you directly, rather than to your industry as a whole. So any partnerships with other providers must give you exclusivity, so they cannot divert their customers to other vessel operators.
Subsequently Elif, you will find that lots of different types of business in Istanbul that live on tourism face the same seasonal demand problems, in which case you could create a total holiday experience that comprises a hotel, a cluster of restaurants, a theme park, a coach line, a number of historical landmark operators, a tour guide, so on and so forth, plus yourself; and form a structure whereby collectively, you can sell complete packages to people, in which each plays their part. Once formed, this can become a safer way of investing in acquisition from foreign markets that are within close proximity to Istanbul, such as Greece, Italy & Bulgaria, where flights are not necessary and your coach liner partner can easily provide all the transport into and out of Turkey. It is then worthwhile getting tourists carrying Euros directly from their home markets.
Finally, in respect to the peak season, if you are indeed having to turn down passengers this is indicating that you are beyond your capacity – which is a good thing – which means that you should increase your prices a bit to make the most if that excess quantity demanded. You should also be trying to capture as much discretionary spending while those passengers are on board your vessel, by offering things that go beyond the typical food and drink items. You could try and sell personal electronics such as headphones, portable battery power packs, DVDs, cameras and associated accessories such as leather iPad and iPhone cases, stylish bags and some souvenir items relating to Istanbul. Notice these are all relatively high value, non-perishable goods. All of this will not only add to your revenue, but will improve margins as these type of items provide more profit than lemonade or snacks do.
So I hope this has been helpful to you Elif, as a starting point to think of new ways of improving sales in your business. For really good information on how to develop your creativity so you can generate more profit-building ideas, have a listen to episode 106 of The Business Firm podcast where I interview the great Michael Gelb, who is a world authority on creativity and wrote the book How To Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci. In that interview, he reveals that 7 principles anybody can use to think like the greatest genius the world has ever seen…the great Leonardo. I also go through many techniques for building creativity in business, which you will find useful in your organisation. So that’s episode 105 of the podcast, via iTunes or Stitcher Radio.
I would like to take a moment now to thank one of my listeners, Cia00, for their 5 star review of The Business Firm podcast in iTunes. Cia00 wrote:
“This is a must-have podcast for the up and coming entrepreneur, as well as the billionaire. Everyone can learn something new and The Business Firm does just that. It provides you with the ideas, knowledge, systems and marketing to take your business to the next level, as well as your personal life. It is the complete package”.
I sincerely appreciate the rating you gave Cia00 and the fabulous feedback. Of course, there is no way of responding to you directly through iTunes, but I can acknowledge you on air.
So dear listeners, if you find the content published in this podcast valuable, it would be super to get a review from you as it provides myself and the team a great deal of encouragement and shows appreciation for the time and personal effort we put in to bringing you high quality content each week. In fact, I personally get so motivated by this encouraging feedback that I have actually put on our website a small token of my appreciation for people that leave a review in iTunes – have a look at the podcast page on the website thebusinessfirm.com.au to see what that is.
Listen to Episode 106 to hear all of Steven’s advice to this question. You can listen to this and all other episodes:
This is the favourite part of the show for host Steven Cavallo because he gets to directly help real people with an actual problem they are having in the areas of business development, marketing, sales or fundraising. Steven features one of the recorded questions sent in by listeners, and plays back that recording on air, along with his commentary. To submit a question, please record your question as an mp3 (maximum file size 10Mb) that is no longer than 60 seconds and email it to: answer@thebusinessfirm.com.au
While we can address your issue and provide some valuable insight for questions featured; of course, we can only go into brief detail in the minutes available in the podcast, so we encourage listeners who want more formal advice (regardless of whether their question is featured) to outline their specific problem/opportunity and email it directly to consulting@thebusinessfirm.com.au and you will get a reply within 24 hours.
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Mr Steven Mario Cavallo
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Australia
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