Yes, this is a pitch. But it's not salesly, it's actionabl-y(?). I'd just like to define what we believe here, who we make products for and why we do it. I demo a lot of new software as part of my job. How can it help us? Is this the one with this one metric I've been asking for on my Christmas list? I find that a lot of platforms have no ideals, no real vision. The vision is success. They want to win their market's hearts and praise, blossoming into the only option a decision maker could possibly rationalize. And the products work, they work even better than the previous ones. But they work for yesterday's problems. We work for tomorrows.
Local business has always been a little behind. Not all local businesses, of course, but logic supports it. We don't have people dedicated to finding the newest technology, we don't have the budgets to afford them, we don't have the kind of team that could easily implement them into the operations. If it's not simple, if it's not measurable, and if it's not relatively affordable, it's not for us.
Some local business programs of a different nature have been offering free trial versions of big, all you can eat giant marketing companies. I've used these companies. They work great for big business, where the gadgets are needed, the new features are actually news to someone. But for local business? Who's going to learn to use this? And why do we need all of that? A platform like that could have forums full of customer q&a, the only recourse you could ever need. Heck, they might not even need a guy like me. But they'd have one, because they're the biggest and the biggest have all the features (most of the time).
We don't have forums full of q&a. In fact, if we do, we've failed. You shouldn't need to learn to use our platform, it should all be intuitive. Not only that, but before signing up you should be able to see the value in our features. How they can drive your business objectives, how they can help you sleep at night.
This is how we design Social Local - with a twist of course. See, we believe local businesses are part of local communities. We believe that cross promoting with other local businesses is a way to share awareness, to share customers. We believe that the daily deal model is silly on the backend. Of course, as a buyer, we love them. We love huge discounts. But the sales process is wacky, there is some level of pressure involved, and there is an incentive for a salesman to push more deals than are healthy for the businesses' balance sheet.
With Social Local you have the power to manage beautiful promotions and the simplicity of a movie check-in counter. We stick to what's important - new customers. We're careful how we go about doing it - incentivizing you all to share other, local deals in our system.
They call it gamification. It's just a points system. Earn points for signing up local businesses, spend them when your promotion is shared with new customers. It's a way for us to attract new members, no doubt about it, but more importantly for the overall system, the system we believe in, it's a way for you to build your community. More members mean more deals mean more shared awareness.
When you're not sharing, you're creating. Beautiful deals, the kind of deals that you thought could only come from a daily deal site. Nope. All fully customizable, and easily shareable through Social Boost (1 page with buttons to edit and share across any network.)
This is what how we've arrived at our current platform, and it's where we'll be headed in the future. We're here for local businesses. For the ones who don't need all the extra features, and the ones who are understand how important they are to their communities.
Here's to local business.
- The Social Local Team
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