NWAR Sudden Values: Technology Bumps Up WOM
Biz2Biz NWA June 2010
Janie Pritchett-Clark
As business owners, we all love word-of-mouth advertising – the “this place is great, buy it here” slogan of our existing customers and clients. For small businesses, WOM is one of the most effective ways to grow your client base. So how do you jump-start the conversation?
Steve Brachtenbach of NWAR Sudden Values has a solution. He calls it “Uniting the Connections Between Us.” Instead of pitting businesses against each other in a war of bigger ads/more marketing/survival of the fittest, his business model strives to aggregate the power of many.
“At Sudden Values, no business stands alone in their marketing efforts,” says Brachtenbach. “We create an online community of local merchants linked directly to the subscriber base. Every time a business signs up with Sudden Values, all of the existing clients say ‘yahoo!’, because they know everybody’s star and ranking just rose a little higher.”
NWAR Sudden Values is a Web, e-mail and coupon-based marketing platform that aggregates the visibility and influence of local companies. The goal is to grow individual businesses and, in the process, a better local economy.
As Brachtenbach explains it, every business has a message it wants to communicate to existing and potential clients. His e-mail platform helps businesses proliferate these messages using coupons (which he calls “values”), events, contests and added information.
“We are the pipeline – the connection – to disseminate the flow,” he says.
E-mail marketing has been all the rage for some time, but that, too, is changing. Today consumers choose how, where, when and, most importantly, if they will receive your message.
“So we ask for permission,” Brachtenbach says. “We deliver the message in multiple ways that empower the consumer to choose. We find that when you give them the opportunity to choose, they will more likely engage with it and pass it on.”
Brachtenbach is no newcomer to marketing. He spent years selling traditional print and phone book advertising. He saw the writing on the wall – or on the Facebook wall, as it were – and knew traditional media was deteriorating.
“I knew that the world had turned when Twitter became the number-one source for news links in the world. The Internet is leveling the playing field and empowering the small-business owner to finally market cost effectively.”
In fact, he points out, analysts claim that by 2015, for the first time in history, local marketing will outspend national marketing. This will occur not because small business will spend so much more, but because national firms will spend less.
As a small-business owner serving other small-business owners, Brachtenbach is discovering much about himself and others.
“Running a small business is hard,” he says. “Really hard. Most small businesses have a passion for what they do, they work hard, but their vision drives them. I find inspiration in that.”
Growing from a one-person operation to a two-person team is his immediate business goal. In the long term, Brachtenbach hopes to “save the world from bad media.”
After all, he says, at the end of the day, most WOM-worthy business success can be traced back to a stellar reputation coupled with a dash of uniqueness, along with a business owner’s personality and desire to serve customers. Case in point: Wal-Mart and Sam Walton.
Consider Rick Boosey of World Garden, Rolf Wilkin of Eureka Pizza, or Kenny Tomlin of Rockfish Interactive. They are proof that small, local businesses can gain the same reputation for success, Brachtenbach says.
Where are your customers? On the Internet!
· 67 percent of the U.S. population is on the Internet regularly.
· Reaching a consumer on the Internet is 5 percent the cost of print.
· The average person spends 32.7 hours a week online.
· 81 percent of your customers have e-mail and view ads 21 percent of the time.
