How Marketing Strategies Evolve – DSP 230

Graham and Ashkahn wax nostalgic in this episode tracing back the history of Float On to its origins. They were younger, bright eyed and the world felt full of possibility. How they advertised floating was a whole different beast back then, too. Part of it was how different the industry was, part of it was how different awareness in Portland was, and parts of it were just about Float On still being a young business.

The guys share their successes, lessons, and bold faced mistakes they made along the way in learning how to deal with the idea of filling tanks, as well as some of the constants that have remained throughout the years.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Ashkahn: Hey, everybody.

Graham: Hello, everyone. I’m Graham.

Ashkahn: I’m Ashkahn. Quick announcement before we start the episode. The Float Conference is coming up.

Graham: It’s awesome. It’s great. You’ll love it.

Ashkahn: That’s right. It’s August 18th and 19th.

Graham: You’re probably already coming to it.

Ashkahn: You’re probably already coming, but if you are not, then you should.

Graham: It’ll be awesome. We’ll be there.

Ashkahn: If you are and you don’t have tickets yet, this is the time to buy them.

Graham: Oh, man. Delay no longer.

Ashkahn: Yeah. There’s a big discount for early bird tickets. That discount is going to end on July 19th, so you better buy them before them.

Graham: You all get that? July 19th. Get your tickets before July 19th-

Ashkahn: You should probably just do it right now.

Graham: Or you’ll pay hundreds more money and your firstborn child.

Ashkahn: Hundreds. So much more money. You should just do it right now. Just do it. We’ll wait here.

Graham: Oh, sorry, you’re back. I didn’t see you there.

Ashkahn: Good. Well, great. Now you’re coming to the Conference. We’ll see you next month.

Graham: Yeah. Welcome to a real podcast question period. Today’s question for you it, “How have your methods of growing your business changed since the inception of your business?” I think they mean, yeah, not like the movie, too.

Ashkahn: That is how our business started, actually. Fun fact.

Graham: Oh, yeah, that’s what you remember.

Ashkahn: If we even have a business. Back when our business was just a wee little tot, huh?

Graham: Yeah. The little pitter-patter of Float On feet scattering across Portland.

Ashkahn: We started in 2010.

Graham: Yeah. Which is like 90 years ago in float years.

Ashkahn: Forever. Yeah. So much has happened since then. I almost feel just as much has changed about just the fact that our business has been around for those years as much as just like the floating world. Like how much has changed in the world of floating in general.

Graham: I count at least three things going on here.

Ashkahn: Okay. All right.

Graham: At least.

Ashkahn: Okay, good.

Graham: All right?

Ashkahn: Good. Very concrete. Let’s go through them.

Graham: Yeah. Like you said, there’s just times changing. When we opened, there were not many float centers around.

Ashkahn: Simpler times.

Graham: Yeah. It was horse and buggy, largely. Just didn’t feel the need to get away from all the bright, flashing lights as much. The float industry was way less developed, so there’s just that part of it.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: We grew as a business, which just means the things that we had to do early on aren’t now the things that make the most sense for marketing. In addition, we just learned some things. We made mistakes, and we did stupid marketing things early on. We’ve learned what does and doesn’t work for us specifically.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: I’d say those are three things that have changed categorically.

Ashkahn: Yeah. That feels pretty good. Not sure what could into something else.

Graham: Cool. Which one do you want to start with?

Ashkahn: Let’s talk about our business growing, the effects of our business growing.

Graham: When we started, we had zero people on our email mailing list.

Ashkahn: Yep. Nobody was following us on Facebook.

Graham: Yeah. No one even knew that we existed, because we didn’t actually exist yet. That was the beginning. Now we have thousands of people on our mailing list.

Ashkahn: Couple people like us on Facebook.

Graham: Yeah. One or two. My parents mainly, but they know, it’s a step. There’s also just something that happens as awareness builds around your community about your business. I always feel like, on a very dramatic scale, I think of it as the Coca-Cola kind of effect. Coca-Cola invests is so much marketing into basically just reminding people they exist, and being front of mind, and being out there, and being the soft drink that people think of as a result of having Coca-Cola in as many product placements as possible, on as many billboards, etc., etc. If you’re just getting started out as a business, taking out giant billboards and doing product placement probably won’t get you very far, because there’s no one to remind that you exist. You need to actually get people in to try it out.

But, as we’ve grown, we do kind of get to do more of that. It’s been kind of fun in the last couple years. We get to do things where more people have heard of us and we’re making marketing outreach to remind them we exist, rather than building up those initial clients and getting them out in the world.

Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s going to be hard for me to keep these three points separate, because-

Graham: It’s fine. Well, you don’t even need to stick to the three points. I wanted to lay those out as categories of things that have changed.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I feel like hand in hand with that is just the spread of knowledge about float tanks in general. How effective big, blanket advertising is, I think is not only dependent on how long you’ve around as a business and how much you’re just doing the kind of gentle reminder to people who are like, “Oh, I got to go back to that place and float again.” I’ve also totally been talking to people from other towns. We go to a lot of these sanitation conferences. We’re talking to all these people about float tanks. I’ll hear them say, “Oh, yeah, I just saw a billboard. I think one of those places are opening up in my town. Knowing about float tanks and then seeing some sort of blanket advertisement is, nowadays, like you could actually get someone to be like, “Oh, one of those is opening around here.”

Graham: Yeah, totally.

Ashkahn: It’s all you need is that gentle reminder. As opposed to before, like when we were opening, a billboard would have to tell people float tanks exist, like explain what they are. Explain why people should go. Explain that one exists now. It was such a big step.

Graham: Yeah. Then also explain that they should go to your specific facility to float.

Ashkahn: That’s just different. It’s a slightly different float world now than it was back then. The amount of education you have to do to catch people up to speed to the point where they’ll become your customer is a lot less.

Graham: For sure. Even starting out as a fresh business, you probably won’t have as high a hurdle to get over in order to get that awareness to a nice point.

Ashkahn: Specifically for us, we were really focused on this at the beginning. When we opened our business, pretty much all of our marketing efforts were just about getting people to know float tanks existed. We were going and giving guest lectures at universities. We were literally just walking around talking to all the local businesses around us.

Graham: Yeah, we really hit the ground.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Our brochure is called “The Beginner’s Guide to Floating”. Everything was focused on that simple concept like get people to learn that float tanks exist. And, it was hugely necessary. When we first started, nine out of 10 people, when they’d walk by our shop, had no idea what float tanks were.

Graham: Literally, I remember going down Hawthorne just conducting an informal survey, because I was curious, and talking to about 25, 30 people. Like two of them knew what float tanks are. One of them had seen Altered States. That was pretty much it. That was the circumstances back then. It probably differs city to city, but here in Portland now when I strike up conversations, it’s rarer that people haven’t heard of what I do than the opposite.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Especially, at least for us, we stick around our neighborhood a lot. In our neighborhood around Float On, the chances that I’ll run into someone, it’s now literally the opposite. One out of 10 people, I’ll have to actually explain what float tanks are, and still, halfway through my explanation, they realize they’ve kind of heard about it before. It’s just a hugely different level of awareness than it was when we first started. That’s changed a lot about how we approach-

Graham: “Oh, the salt water rub-a-dubs. Yeah, I’ve heard of those things.” Yeah.

Ashkahn: Yeah. It opens up possibilities for us to do things like newspaper ads and have a little bit more faith that that kind of blanket marketing will be effective for us.

Graham: Yeah. Yeah, what else? I guess other big things that have changed just related to us getting bigger, is we’re able to rely on our mailing list more now.

Ashkahn: Yeah, our existing customer base.

Graham: Yeah. As that grows over time, not only do you get more word of mouth and everything like that, but now when you need to get an announcement out there or you do want to offer a special or anything like that, all of a sudden, you don’t need to shell out as much money for new eyeballs to get that message. You already have this existing client base that has subscribed to emails from you, and that you can notify that these things are going on. That is a gigantic asset. Collecting a bunch of email addresses may sound simple and small, but I belabor the point to every single apprentice who comes through, and probably multiple times on this podcast, that a huge email mailing list is just one of your best friends for marketing. This is one of the nice things about growing over time. If you’re diligent about collecting those emails, you can get a really huge email list even by year two, year three, and stop having to rely as much on outsourced marketing.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and it shows in what we’ve done as a center. We ran Groupons and things like that in the beginning, because we didn’t have a big audience of our own to reach out to, and they did. They had many thousands of people on a mailing list that we could be blasted out to. We haven’t run one in some years now, because now if we want to try to put out a deal or something like that, we can send it to our email list. We can put it on our own social media pages and just between our own audiences that we’ve built up are reaching thousands of people.

Graham: Yeah. I guess, another way it’s changed is we’re just starting to toy with some more paid advertising kind of as a result of this. We’ve grown our base. We’ve gotten a lot of word of mouth going. Now we’re just wondering how we break into these different demographics and different circles of people who, during the course of our eight years, we haven’t naturally pulled in a lot of. For that, we’re turning to both internal demographics analysis and also doing some paid advertising outreach, mainly on Facebook. Which if you look at the industry report, Facebook is the place to spend money if you’re doing marketing. Goes word of mouth, and then Facebook, and then everything else whenever you look at the industry report. Yeah.

In the past, our policy really was just we believed so much in word of mouth and getting people in the tanks. We’d way rather spend money on whatever it took to get them in and get that word of mouth rolling, rather than specifically advertising in order to get them in. Yeah. Again, that’s just something that’s changed as we’ve matured.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I think there’s just more stability in general. I don’t mean to say you don’t have to hustle. There’s always hustle, but we don’t have to hustle quite as hard as we were when we were beginning. People come in and float and some people just float like once, maybe twice, a year. The longer you’re in business, the more of those people you will just start collecting that will be coming in for their annual float or once every six months float.

Graham: Yeah, so by year 365, we should be like-

Ashkahn: Yeah. One person a year.

Graham: Well, we still have one person guaranteed a day, I guess, by that logic. Yeah, anyway. Something like that.

Ashkahn: Something. We’ll work the math out later.

Graham: Fix it in post. Yeah, what was the third category that I said at the beginning?

Ashkahn: Mistakes we’ve made.

Graham: Yeah. Mistakes that we’ve made.

Ashkahn: No, I can’t think of any.

Graham: Yeah. It’s interesting, because the things that we’ve learned from aren’t things that would necessarily go poorly for other float centers in other areas. Some of them are just things that, I think, we’ve had more trouble with in Portland. Same thing, I guess, for the things we’ve succeeded at, too. I know places that are succeeding at different marketing than we’ve had luck with in the past. Some people on the industry surveys say that radio, they’re absolutely killing it with.

Ashkahn: Wow.

Graham: It’s the minority, but there are some centers out there seeing a great return on radio advertising. You can’t eliminate anything. Testing is always the thing to do, I guess, is the takeaway.

Ashkahn: And, just the longer we’ve been around and we’ve played with more pricing. We’ve played with different types of discounts. We’ve played with different membership structures. We’ve changed the price of our base floats. Over the years, we’re honing that stuff in a little bit more. We know now, like, “Hey, we shouldn’t run a discount like this, because we had all these problems with it before.”

Graham: Yeah. Changing discounts. Stopping running Groupons. Starting to run with paid advertising. Yeah, I’m trying to think of actual mistakes that I feel like we made early on. I think that we covered it during our pricing episode pretty well. But, just a really brief recap was we launched without any memberships, kind of with some wacky different pricing models. And, definitely launching without memberships, you might not call it a mistake, because it was an experiment to see how many full price people we could see coming in.

But, I suggest every center out there has membership options. Recurring revenue just stabilizes your business so much. That’s one of the things that, as your business matures, you can rely on that stabilized income from memberships. Like Ashkahn said, you just have to hustle a little less often. Yeah, starting with memberships, and in our case, and not starting with them was, I’d say, maybe a little bit of a marketing mistake.

Ashkahn: Yeah. I guess, just improving the quality of our floats. Just that we run a better float now than we did before. We’ve just had the years to hunt down a progressively smaller list of annoyances, you know? Like there’s little noises. It’s just hard. It’s hard at the beginning to make sure some random sound that happens in the afternoon that’s popping up, and you’re like, “what is that?” Slowly but surely, you work out those tweaks. You fix any little light leaks. We’ve had an eye on that for the entire time we’ve been open. I think that’s, at the very least, super important to always keep on your list. That’s the kind of foundation of a whole thing.

Graham: Yeah. Quality is your best marketing, just because word of mouth is your best marketing. By extension, the better experience that you can deliver and the more people want to talk about it means that’s where you should invest your money. Yeah. As that’s gotten smoother over the years, I think that’s another part of us actually starting to invest more in paid advertising is because we’ve invested so much money in making sure the quality of floats is there, and our rooms are so nicely set up, and everything like that.

Maybe just a quick touch on things that we haven’t changed and have no intention of changing before we wind down?

Ashkahn: Sure.

Graham: Okay, maybe just things we haven’t changed. No intention of changing is bad, because I always want to be ready to change everything. Maybe I spoke too soon.

Ashkahn: We’ve been doing 90 minute floats the whole time.

Graham: Yep. 90 minute floats. I was going to say we’ve been relying a lot just on the quality of experience for a long time. And, I’m giving out free floats liberally to introduce people to the tanks.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: The experience in the tank, I guess, being its best marketing. Thus investing in giving out free floats rather than paid advertising is something we’ve always done.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Still our biggest marketing campaigns from day one till now is finding some sort of subsection community in Portland and actively working some sort of program with them.

Graham: Yeah, like our art program, our music program. We’re just in the process of launching a marathon runner program right now. Yeah, these special programs hitting niche groups. Yeah. I don’t see that changing any time soon. We’ve always had a website.

Ashkahn: Yes, true. We’ve always had a mailing list. Yeah, from day one before we even opened, like while we were in construction, we just had little hand cut slips of paper in a little handmade paper box taped to our door that said, “Give us your email address, and slip it through our mail slot.”

Graham: Yeah, it’s very true. I guess investing, also, in good customer service is a big part of it, like presents for our customers and members. If anyone complains, being very liberal with discounts and free floats. Just making sure, even if they don’t have the best experience in the tanks, interacting with our business out of the tanks more than makes up for that. If they had a bad experience, they won’t have spent money. Stuff like that is still just like the customer service. Making sure every person leaves happy, even if they didn’t have a great float is, in my mind, a marketing investment.

Ashkahn: I think we’re going to stop that pretty soon. We should go more to like float Nazis sort of people know us as this-

Graham: No float for you!

Ashkahn: rude place, but our floats are so good, they come anyway.

Graham: Okay. I hadn’t heard that idea, but-

Ashkahn: Pivot. We got to be ready to pivot.

Graham: I’m open to testing. I like testing things. Yeah. Again, I just wanted to touch on some things that seem more universal for our marketing that some of them.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Again, quality control. Running good floats, keeping an eye on good floats. Listening to people when they say temperature, or light leaks, or noises. Making sure that you’re always actively trying to solve those problems.

Graham: Police siren Sunday. Get everyone out of the tank with police sirens. That was a good-

Ashkahn: Yeah. That lasted one Sunday.

Graham: All right, everybody. I think that about winds up our episode. If you want to hear more of us, you know what to do. Go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

Ashkahn: Go to FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

Graham: We’ll talk to you later.

Ashkahn: Bye.

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