Spreading the Word

Who says a local coffee roaster can’t serve a more national market without ponying up big marketing bucks? The owners of Barrington Coffee Roasting Company, nestled in the heart of the quaint Berkshires region of Massachusetts, knew they had a memorable product and wholeheartedly believed that others, once they sampled the exotic blends, would be equally enraptured. So Barrington Coffee embarked upon a “tell someone who will tell someone” strategy, putting their brew in the hands of everyone they knew in the hope of creating a coffee buzz that could translate into broad demand.

The strategy worked. Nine years later, what began as a local wholesale coffee roaster has percolated into a nationwide business, which has doubled its sales every year and now sells directly to the public via its Web site and through a mail-order catalog. Admittedly, Barrington Coffee still operates on a relatively small scale with five or so full-time employees primarily still catering to the local commercial market. But the Web and the mail-order business have definitely opened up growth potential. More importantly, they’ve allowed the coffee roaster to make a name for itself outside of Massachusetts without changing the charter and personality of what was originally established and without inflicting any kind of financial drain. “That part of the business couldn’t be any more grassroots,” says Tricia Widgen, marketing director for Barrington Coffee, in Great Barrington, Mass. “The two owners made sure that anyone who knew them or visited them tasted the coffee and told someone. We’d send them back out into the world telling everyone about our coffee.”

Where Is Your Business Headed? Are you overwhelmed by the thought of pulling together a concerted marketing effort? Well, here is an exercise that can help. Setting realistic, short-term marketing goals will help clarify your longer-range objectives. For openers, try answering this checklist of questions to help define the future of your business. What are your marketing goals for the next year and the next five years in these areas? Dollar sales Unit sales Profits Market share Markets to enter Markets to abandon Customer-base expansion Customers to drop Activities to begin Activities to stop Production/product improvement Reputation What are your five biggest marketing problems, in order of urgency? (Consider, for example, consumer trends, technological challenges, customer mix, competition, staffing, margins, and media.) What major threats and opportunities does your company face in the next five years, in these areas? Products and services Customer attitudes and trends Competition General business conditions What new competition do you expect within the next five years? (Consider technological developments and product/service innovations, as well as alliances, mergers, and acquisitions.) Which competitors do you expect will decline or disappear within the next year? Five years? Why? What proportion of your sales five years from now will come from new products or services? From new markets? The answers to these questions should give you a clearer idea of where to steer your business.

Grassroots marketing, while always a staple of small business, is becoming increasingly more important as tough economic times sap already strained marketing budgets. But just because money is tight, doesn’t mean companies can go dark and stop promoting their products or services. What it means is that small business needs to get more creative about how they get the word out to potential customers beyond traditional advertising and direct-mail campaigns. Some like Barrington Coffee are relying on novel programs and special events to encourage word of mouth. Others are leveraging the Internet to cast a wider net and to promote themselves beyond their traditional markets.

Using the Web—whether to broaden sales or to educate potential customers—is one of the greatest assets a small business can leverage today. “Marketing capabilities in the online world are unmatched for companies with less money to spend,” says Kathleen Goodwin, CEO of iMakeNews, a Newton, Mass., company that offers tools for creating and disseminating e-mail newsletters, among other online marketing products. “The Web essentially levels the playing field.”

IMakeNews (www.imakenews.com) offers tools available as a hosted service for a fee starting at as low as a couple of hundred dollars a month. Small businesses can tap these services to create everything from online promotional offers to e-mail newsletters, even Weblogs, which are a new interactive medium that essentially creates a continuous community where prospects and customers can comment and relay personal experiences related to a company, product, or service.

Ciclismo Classico, a tour operator specializing in active travel to Italy and the Northeast, has signed up for an iMakeNews e-mail newsletter service to replace the print edition it widely used as part of its guerrilla marketing approach. The e-mail newsletter, which now goes out on a monthly basis, has articles on Italy as well as biographies on past customers and guides. Prior to the Web-based service, Ciclismo Classico (www.ciclismoclassico.com) was only able to get its Pasta Times print newsletter out four or five times a year because it required so much effort, explains Lauren Hefferon, director and founder of the Arlington, Mass., firm. The iMakeNews service also provides analytics that let the tour company see what stories people click on and what content they’re most interested in, which is helpful for tailoring services, Hefferon says.

For Curious Quilts, a two-person designer of custom quilts and clothing, the Web provides a forum to sell wares without having to travel to pitch stores or staff local craft fairs, explains Erinn Johnson, one of the owners of the business. After testing the waters on ebay.com to see if anyone would buy their product online, Johnson and partner Liza Marcolini invested less than a couple of hundred dollars to find a Web host, register a domain name, and buy a shopping cart package to process transactions. Already, the pair is getting several thousand hits a month on their site (www.curiousquilts.com) and they’re trying to bolster traffic by including a postcard, which promotes the Web site, with every physical purchase.

Events and creative incentive programs can be equally important to a grassroots marketing strategy. Curious Quilts, for example, uses word of mouth to sell friends and neighbors—and friends of friends and neighbors—on hosting house parties to sell its products. Barrington Coffee, for its part, holds regular coffee tastings at its storefront and works with local retailers and restaurants selling its coffees on promotions and demonstrations that provide rich background on the coffee blends it imports, personalizing the experience.

Event marketing is particularly crucial to Bigelow Mountain Partners LLC, which distributes the Winterstick brand of backcountry mountain snowboards. To capture brand awareness and preference among the regional buyers of snowboards for the retail sector, Bigelow hosts a minimum of six regional demo days at various resorts. At these events, Bigelow invites influential buyers in that area to demo the boards and spend the day mixing it up with the company’s sales reps and paid professional riders. “It’s the number-one way we get buyers interested,” says Chris Lorenz, Bigelow Mountain Partners president, in Boston. For the same cost of running a single print ad in a popular snowboard publication (around $7,000), the snowboard manufacturer can sponsor five or six of these events, Lorenz says. Bigelow Mountain Partners hosts similar activities for consumers.

Creating an ambassador program is another way Bigelow Mountain Partners and Ciclismo Classico, among others, generate a following. Bigelow Mountain Partners, for example, has created a research and development program aimed at the core market segment of trendsetters in snowboarding. This segment, which traditionally can’t afford to buy a Winterstick board, is invited to apply for the program, which entitles them, if accepted, to purchase a much less expensive, preproduction board with a promise of a 25 percent discount on the real thing in exchange for providing feedback. The idea is to empower trendsetters, encouraging them to get the word out about Winterstick boards without the company having to pay out any money. Similarly, Ciclismo Classico courts former customers of its trips in key demographic areas to sponsor rides and give slide shows to prospects promoting the tour operator’s services.

What both examples illustrate is that a loyal following of hardcore customers can be the most effective mouthpiece for your product. Says Bigelow Mountain Partners Lorenz: “The idea is to seed the market by courting the influential people ... that’s what gets the word out.” BA