Back to: The Insiders Guide To Marketing Promotions That SELL, SELL, and SELL

Determine Strategic Focus, Your Hero

What is going to be your strategic focus?

One goal we listed earlier is to increase average ticket by 5%. What would help us do that?

For our burger restaurant, we’ll focus on two things.

  1. We have a limited time holiday burger we can feature.
  2. Also, the onion rings are amazing. Everyone who tries them says they are the best they ever had. And, they’re more expensive than the french fries. Maybe we can get customers to upgrade.

What is the hero? The featured product, program or service?

What is the primary message going to be? For our example, our special burger is probably the message.

And the “hero” isn’t just a product or service. It could also be a new customer e-newsletter, community program, an employee program, etc.

There is a chance that you have more than one item to feature. But, you need to decide which is the most important.

At Starbucks each department has their own leadership, each department has their own sales goals… So…

  • the music team’s new CD was just as important as
  • the new pastry, and
  • the new coffee blend, and
  • the new coffee maker, and
  • the new latte flavor.

But which one is most important in helping reach your goals?

Part of the job of building a promotion is to have the discipline to prioritize and focus.

Too many messages at once is like too many people speaking at once – it all becomes garbled noise.

For the burger place, I think we’re going to focus on the limited-time premium burger (which is higher priced than our typical burgers). And… I’ve got an idea for the onion rings I mentioned earlier!