“Sometimes what you want is right in front of you. All you have to do is open your eyes and see it.” – Meg Cabot

During the nicer weather, have you noticed dozens or hundreds of people outside your business, all looking down at their smartphones, smiling, and enjoying something? They aren’t your customers, they are clogging up the sidewalk, and you are tempted to go outside and yell at them all to “Go away and earn a paycheckisaur and start a careerachu!” It’s that darn Pokemon Go thing. Oh wait, there’s a little mark above the “e” so it’s officially that “Pokémon Go” thing. Whoever thought of this dumb game doesn’t understand how the world works! …or do they?

Let’s say that again. Some business owners complain about the crowds hanging around their businesses! Crowds! Potential customers! Additional revenue! #AreYouKiddingMe

As Niantic’s Pokémon GO hit record downloads upon release in the Apple Store and Google Play, the people who don’t understand the game are left scratching their heads and hurling sarcastic insults at the game players. Businesses who are near some of the game PokeStops or Gyms, sometimes gripe and complain about the sudden crowds of players that are hanging around outside their stores, or even inside their stores.

Poke-Who?

Who are these Pokemon players? They are mostly teens but there are also a ton of collegiate students, parents playing with their children, and adults of all ages. For most businesses, that’s a wide variety of their potential target customers.

Without this game, where would these players be? Many would be at home, probably playing some other video game. Instead, they are out of the house, walking all over your city and interacting with each other and the community.

Many parents are finding a renewed bond with their child as they play the game together while exploring areas of their city they’ve never seen before. In fact, the game travels all around the world so it’s an activity that keeps on providing discovery to the players. The biggest drawback is potential accidents while walking around with their heads down, or worse, riding a bike or driving a car while trying to glance at the game. With that aside, you are witnessing a miracle. Nothing else in the last decade has caused more people to leave the confines of their home to go explore their community!

Take the Poke Chill Pill

First of all, you need to take a chill pill, educate yourself, and realize that you are seeing something amazing and revolutionary. What these close-minded businesses owners are really saying is that they don’t understand the game and they don’t know how to take advantage of these crowds. Let’s explain some basics first.

Financial Statistics

Pokemon GO is big. It’s more than big, it’s huge. No other smartphone app game has been downloaded as frequently. The game is free to play, but because of optional in-app purchases, Apple estimates the game’s revenue between $1 million to $2.3 million A DAY. It’s estimated that out of every $1 earned at the Apple App Store, 30% would go to Apple (it’s standard cut from app sales), 30% to Niantic, 30% to Pokemon, and 10% to Nintendo. The game has double the engagement of Snapchat and is approaching Twitter in its percentage of daily active users.

Niantic raked in almost a BILLION dollars in the first year of Poke game operation! Even today, it’s on more cell phones than almost any other downloaded app. It launched in the summer of 2016 and was a world-wide phenomenon. Like all great games, it started on a slow decline and lost about 1/3 of its players over the first winter season. However, it is still one of the strongest players in the market…and it’s setup to possibly bring you extra business!

Niantic has updated the game with a few enhancements but has mostly worked on bugs, but they are expected to use some of their new wealth to come out with some huge enhancements that draw more players.

Game Concept

The game concept is brilliant and it has done something that no other game has been able to do on such a mass level: It is getting players off their rear ends and out into the community as they journey around looking for Pokemon. It’s a geocaching game that players spend hours on end walking, driving, skateboarding, and biking to various locations.

The game runs off an augmented reality HUD (Heads-up Display) of the real world around them. It shows streets and building structures, but intertwines it with Pokemon stuff here and there. Throughout the map, there are fixed PokeStops and Gyms. If your business is lucky enough to be near one of these, you’ll notice crowds of players hanging out, sometimes around the clock.

A PokeStop is a place where players can get free items that they use in game play. A Gym is a battle arena where they fight Pokemon to gain control of the Gym.

Every player ends up joining one of three teams: Mystic, Valor, or Instinct. Whichever team wins the battles, controls the Gym. You’ll find that Gyms change owners frequently so teams of players constantly battle at the Gyms to regain control of the Gym.

As players roam their cities, they will occasionally find Pokemon, little creatures that they can capture and use in battles. There are many common Pokemon but players really want to find and capture rare Pokemon, that have the novelty of being rare, but also have the potential of being more powerful.

So What?

So what? Why should you care? If your business happens to be in the path of these explorers or if you have been blessed by the gods to have a business that is the destination of these explorers, you may be standing at the end of a rainbow and don’t realize the pot of gold is right in front of you!

Do you realize how much expensive advertising it would take to get these people to come near your business? Yet here they are. Many have the ability to purchase too!

Your Game Plan

Now that you’ve got the basics, you need to find out if your business is near a PokeStop or a Gym. You can load the game onto your phone and check it out yourself. If you’d like to find an official map of all PokeStops and Gym locations, you are not alone. There currently is no map for Pokémon GO. However, there is a pretty cool workaround. Niantic developed a game called “Ingress” which has an online map of portals. These portals map almost perfectly to PokeStops and Gyms!

So how do you get Pokémon GO players to interact with your business? Below we explore several creative ideas, but these are far from an exhaustive list. You are only limited by your creativity.

The first thing you need to understand is that these players like the following: Being around PokeStops and Gyms, finding rare Pokemon, having a relaxing place to sit and play near other players, having a place to recharge their smartphones, food/snacks, drinks, air conditioning or heating depending on the weather. If you can provide some of these amenities, you’re on your way to being considered a fun business to hang out at. Let’s go through these in more detail.

Is your business near a PokeStop or Gym? If so, you’re in luck. Really, you are lucky. Players will come to you.

If you are not near such a location, all is not lost yet. Niantic’s CEO, John Hanke, says they offer “sponsored locations” which provide a new revenue stream for the game. These sponsored locations allow businesses to get Pokemon players to patronize their brick-and-mortar facilities. They also allow brands to be incorporated into the game. These location businesses pay a “cost per visit” charge, similar to a cost-per-click concept of Google and Facebook.

Finding Rare Pokemon. Pokemon are scarce to start with. You can walk for miles before you find one. When one does appear, it just randomly pops up nearby and you have to go catch it. Players want to catch all kinds of different Pokemon to fill out their PokeDeck. Collecting them is part of the fun. The more Pokemon you catch, the better chance you have of capturing a rare one. There is a very cool feature of Pokemon GO that significantly increases the number of Pokemon that appear in a certain location. It’s an in-app purchase called a Lure. When you drop a Lure inside your business, players will start showing up in droves. Prices can change but at one point, $100 bought 14,500 Pokecoins. An eight-pack of Lures cost 680 PokeCoins. That’s 84 hours of Lure time which is $1.19 per hour. If you drop the Lures during business hours, or slow periods, you’re making wonderful things happen.

Hopefully your mind is racing with new ideas. By the way, you might want to consider going back and re-reading the top of this section. Having a comfortable place to play and being invited into your business to recharge phones and relax, can make you a real magnet. Now that you’ve got the players at your business, can you figure out how to sell them stuff?

If you’re not a retail outlet, do you have a service you can impress them with when they need it later? How about starting a contest and rewarding someone for promoting your business in some way. For example, take a photo by your sign and post it with a hashtag of #YourBusinessName

Like mentioned above, your success is only limited by your creativity. Put those business marketing skills to work and earn some Pikacash from those players!

Products to Consider

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X8 Power Station Cell Phone Charging $495

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Umirro 10-Outlet Power Strip with 4 USB Charging Ports $24.99

Wall Mounted Cell Phone Charging Station w-8 Universal Charging Tips $375

If you have questions or suggested topics you’d like to see in this column, please contact me at Author@HireSelf.com
Copyright © 2016-2017, R. Scott Alvord

R. Scott Alvord, MBA-MCA, BSCS. is an award-winning, multi-business owner, and CEO of Advanced Development Concepts, LLC. He can be reached at www.HireSelf.com or (916) 782-4272

The post Embrace the Pokemon Go Craze! It’s Great for Business! first appeared on Fire Your Job, Hire Yourself.

When you’re a MAJOR, world-wide company, someone needs to take responsibility for double checking the result of your strategic planning meeting! Ronald McDonald, The Hamburglar, Grimace, and Mayor McCheese should have hired an English teacher to do a final review. Can you find the error?

“McDonald’s brand mission is to be our customers’ favorite place and way to eat and drink. Our worldwide operations are aligned around a global strategy called the Plan to Win, which center on an exceptional customer experience – People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion. We are committed to continuously improving our operations and enhancing our customers’ experience.”

You can still find this mission statement on their corporate website (unless they’ve finally fixed it since this post was written).

So what lesson can we learn from this? I’m almost afraid to say it because I’m not the best example of clean writing in all situations. In fact, I’m guessing there are even some mistakes in this post because I’m in a hurry to write it so I can get back to a project for a client. I think the bottom line is to double-check your work, right? Like I said, I’m preaching to the choir if not to my own mirror.

The chapters for my book are pretty clean once they leave the editing cycles, but I’ve shared unedited sections of the book before and later realized they had typos. When it comes to blog posts like this, or Facebook updates, my writing is much more “human” and buggy than it should be. I know basic grammar, even some advanced grammar, but I like to write less formally and I have the nasty habit of not double checking my work. I like to blame some of this on the combination of my smartphone and my eyesight. My eyesight is a problem because I can’t see what I write very well on my phone, so I often find myself squinting and skimming. I blame my smartphone because it’s the platform I use the most for informal posts, comments, and texts. I love my Windows smartphone. It is better at spelling suggestions than Apple’s iPhone. The problem is me. I tend to get lazy and resort to drawing out the words on the keyboard, which is very fast, but causes frequent phone guessing because of my fat finger. As I’m flying along, I often don’t go back and re-read what I wrote because it’s a pain to scroll and to see it anyway. This can result in some unintentional words in my sentences. Sometimes, these words can completely change the meaning of the sentence.

For example, I am in the process of selling a car. I was texting a buyer on Friday, a few hours before he was to come over with cash to buy it at an agreed-upon price. California law requires that I get a smog check within 90 days of selling it and I had not. I didn’t know this rule until I read it that morning on the DMV website. The car was up to date with smog certification but selling the vehicle requires that I perform one for the buyer. Oh dang. The guy was coming to buy it and I didn’t have time to get the smog check without postponing his visit. Instead of texting him, “It has current registration and smog but it hasn’t had a smog in the last 90 days,” my finger swipe caused the phone to spell the second word wrong. The text went out as, “It had current registration and smog but it hasn’t had a smog in the last 90 days.” That caused a big misunderstanding by the buyer and his next reply was, “I’m just gonna cancel.” He thought I was trying to sell him a car that wasn’t registered or smogged! The other big mistake my phone likes to make is switching “your” and “you’re” which makes me look uneducated even though I completely understand the difference and can spot it a mile away…when I can visually see it. In fact, when I first posted about this mistake in Facebook, a friend came back and pointed out that I (my phone) typed your when it should have typed you’re. Phone or not, I obviously didn’t re-read it before pressing Post.

So why don’t I re-read what I type? Laziness? In a hurry? I certainly have room for growth in this area. While I will continue to work on my shortcomings, I certainly think it’s okay to point out that McDonald’s blew it. They are way too big of a worldwide company to get away with such a mistake. Did it really happen in the board room? That would be embarrassing, horrible, and obviously something they’ll never admit. Did it happen when the secretary copied it into the minutes? Didn’t the executive who signed off on it re-read it? Did the website guy get it wrong when he updated the website? How about the person who approves the updates before they are applied?–most big companies have a review cycle.

How long will it take for them to realize the mistake? Let’s find out. This article was written on Feb 22, 2015, but I see writers posting that same mission statement AT LEAST as far back as 2012 (most didn’t catch the mistake but I see that a few did). That means McDonald’s doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, or doesn’t go by the same grammatical rules that the rest of us were taught in school. What frustrates me the most is that McDonald’s doesn’t seem to review their mission statement regularly, which is a best practice for leading corporations. Many of the best companies that I know do this annually during strategic planning sessions.

The post Even McDonald’s Needs an Editor first appeared on Fire Your Job, Hire Yourself.

Question:

“How can I build up Twitter followers that are from my target audience instead of just random people? And how can I do this for free?”

Answer:

Assuming you clearly know the characteristics of your target audience, a smart and FREE way to build followers from that audience is to think about the leaders and businesses for which that target audience is connected. These might be your competitors or the leaders and businesses in your niche that you look up to yourself. Go find those leaders and businesses on Twitter and read a history of their tweets to confirm that they would attract your target audience.

Then the fun begins. First, post a few quality tweets on the subject matter for which you specialize. Make sure those tweets are not retweets of some else’s material. You want these golden information nuggets to be at the top of your recent tweets when a potential follower comes and checks you out.

Next, go to the Twitter home page of one of those major leaders or businesses and click on the Followers option to see a list of their followers. If you selected the right leader or business, it’s fairly safe to assume that most of their followers are the type of people that you’d like following you…right? Right!

To avoid wasting time on potentially junk accounts, scroll through their list of followers and quickly look for the following characteristics:

1. They have a profile picture.
2. They have a name that makes sense when compared to their @ handle (e.g., if the name is “John Jones” and their handle is @W3RFg3Q, skip to the next name).
3. They have a profile description that sounds like your target audience.

For each person/business that seems legitimate and appears to be in your target audience, click on Follow to follow that account.

Go to the next account and lather. rinse. repeat. Be careful not to follow too many people in a short amount of time, or your account might get locked by Twitter until you respond to an email from them to verify your account. How do I know that?…ummm…well…trust me.

So up to this point, it sounds like you’re following your target audience instead of getting them to follow you. How do you turn this around?

You’ll be happy to discover that many of them will follow you back, especially if your profile fits their interest and your tweets look like the stuff they’re interested in following. We find that about 25% of them will follow you back! What a cool way to connect with your exact target audience.

Bonus: Try to connect with influential people or companies who frequently like, retweet, or positively comment on the tweets of gurus or popular companies your target audience follows. These might be free advertisers of your material if you can get them to follow you as well.

If you are looking for more help to identify and reach your target customer, or if you just need a qualified consultant, contact Advanced Development Concepts, LLC.

The post Twitter Tip: How to Get Your Target Market to Follow You on Twitter for Free first appeared on Fire Your Job, Hire Yourself.

Hotels do it. Airlines do it. Cruise lines do it.

For example, if a cruise ship can break even on food, housekeeping, and wear-and-tear, by renting an interior cabin for $100, and they know that the additional liquor sales, excursions, and casino earnings will, on average, bring in $200 per cabin, they are happy to give bargain basement prices at the last minute to various travel agencies and discount travel sites. The catch? The shopper might not be able to go on a desired cruise if they risk waiting until the last minute, and the shopper only gets the left-overs.

This is the concept that can allow you get advertising for less than half the price. This applies to newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, and more.

Here’s the situation: Folks who sell advertising space for a living, make money off the commissions. They have to sell to get paid, and the publisher needs those sales to pay for the cost of publishing. The ad agent can’t always find enough buyers to fill the necessary slots. They can often make room, with a smile, if they have too many. But they get a little desperate when they are running thin because the publisher requires certain minimum levels to fund the production.

This is where your opportunity lies. You can offer to help fill these voids at a significant discount in the event the sales agent needs someone quick. If you know what the absolute minimum price that the publisher requires of the agent, you can make an offer around that level to fill the holes when the sales agent needs to meet their quota. The downside is that you won’t necessarily get to pick where it’s positioned, when it airs, or even if it gets selected to run at all (of course you won’t pay if it doesn’t run). Another downside is that you aren’t helping the sales agent make much money, but meeting quotas can help them keep their job.

Here are the steps to get this special pricing:

1. First figure out where your target audience will be. What do they read, watch, and listen to? Those are the places you’d like your ad to exist.
2. Contact the marketing sales agent for these media sources. Find out all the specifics about the ad options including the size/length, format, deadlines for submission, and who to send the submission to. Ask a lot of questions about the location/timing options, and how much control you get in selecting where the ad is positioned. Ask which positioning locations tend to do better and which do worse (e.g., the top right corner of the right page of a magazine is seen more often than any other location when the magazine is opened). Make notes, this is all important for later.
3. Obtain the regular prices for each of their options (first page, back cover, various sizes, special issues, etc.) and the best pricing they can give you and if they ever run specials. It’s important that you clearly understand how their pricing model works and why sometimes they offer specials.
4. If you are able to find out anything about how their commission works and if they have quotas, you will be in an excellent position for later. Some sales folks don’t mind sharing this while others realize it puts them in less control and won’t answer it. This information can sometimes be gathered by reviewing the details of their job postings on their website or by simply calling or emailing the manager of the advertising department and asking these questions. They are sometimes amazingly quick to share the details because they might assume you are thinking about applying for the position, but you might find them guarded. Be prepared to answer the question, “Why do you ask?” Saying that you’re a potential advertiser will likely get you no where but lying and saying you’re wanting to apply for the job is unethical. Possibly answering, “I’m curious how it works” or “I’m doing some research,” would be a reasonable next response but determine ahead of time at what point you are going to admit, “I’m considering advertising with you and I want to understand how your sales reps get paid.“
5. Try to find out how often they are scrambling to find advertisers, or how often a prime ad location isn’t filled. This information will be golden to you.
6. After researching multiple companies this way, you can then study your notes and figure out where you’d like to advertise, based on what your target audience would consume, and which of these targeted media sources might be the most desperate to give you a great deal.
7. For each media source, figure out your budget and what you’re willing to pay for a horribly placed ad and for the prime location. Again, write everything down so you’ll be well-prepared for the upcoming phone call or email.
8. Then contact your targeted advertising sales rep and you’ll pitch your offer to help them fill in missing advertisements when necessary, for a significant discount.  FOR EXAMPLE, let’s say that you’ve determined that the publisher needs at least $150 per 1/4 page ad and splits the amount over this minimum as commission for the sales rep. You’re willing to pay up to $200 for a $500 1/4 page ad placement. You’ll create your own ad so the sales rep doesn’t have to hassle with paying for graphic work (which makes you an easier and less costly client to work with). After the warm-up conversation, your pitch might sound something like this: “I am not able to budget my advertising for the $500, 1/4 page ad that you quoted me. But I am willing to be placed on a back burner until you need to fill a 1/4 page hole and can’t find a full-priced advertiser, or if someone backs out at the last minute. I’ll do my own artwork and have an ad ready to go for that size and format, and I can afford $175/issue for this purpose.” Offering less than the $200 you decided you can afford gives you a little negotiating room if they counter offer.

Guess what? If you did your homework well enough, you might not have to wait too long for the sales rep to use you to start filling holes. You’re not as profitable as the other advertisers but you do fill a need. You are offering a win-win situation that can help the sales rep when necessary.

The post Advertising Secret: How to Get Advertising for Half the Price first appeared on Fire Your Job, Hire Yourself.