Continuing with our How Did They Do It? series, where we interview and spotlight companies who are successfully marketing their brands online, this post focuses on the successes of Kennedy’s All-American Barber Club, which has been featured in a wide variety of nationally known publications.
We were delighted to interview Chris Hurn, chairman / CEO / cofounder of Kennedy’s All-American Barber Club, a franchise concept dedicated to providing a pleasurable grooming experience for gentlemen, offering grooming products, shoeshines, complimentary beverages, and more.
As a franchising and marketing expert, Chris is often tapped by the news media for his input on a variety of entrepreneur- and business-related topics. He’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Entrepreneur magazine, Inc. magazine, Forbes magazine, and The L.A. Times among many other national and regional publications. He’s also been asked to appear on FOX Business News four times in the past eight months to comment on small business growth, legislation, the bailout, and other related issues.
Below is our interview with Chris:
1. You’ve receive a lot of exposure on both print and online media. How do the results of your online marketing efforts differ from the results you’ve seen with print marketing?
Both print and online marketing have their drawbacks, so I like to use a combination. Print marketing (especially direct mail) tends to have a much higher impact. Part of it is that someone is receiving something he can actually touch and handle, and has to physically put in the trash can to get rid of. Plus, lots of businesses have pulled back their cost-intensive direct mail efforts due to the economy, so there’s less clutter to cut through. The drawbacks are that it’s costly to do direct mail and print advertising, and it’s hard to make the messages timely when we’re dealing with postal delivery and publication print and distribution schedules.
With online marketing, it’s possible to be very timely and targeted with marketing messages. Social media tools have made it even easier for us to get in front of interested customers right when they’re thinking about our products and services. And it’s much less costly to do online marketing. Of course, a major drawback is that there is immense clutter to cut through. It’s very easy to simply delete an email or gloss over a tweet due to the information overload we all battle every day.
Because of these things, and the fact that we’re doing more online marketing these days, I’d say that the results of our online efforts have been a little better than our print efforts lately. But I still profess that it’s necessary to diversify your marketing messages between print and online in order to be successful in the long run.
2. Kennedy’s has an award-winning blog. What marketing strategies do you believe had the greatest impact on increasing your blog awareness and popularity?
One of the things that has driven the popularity of our blog is that we keep it timely and we write about entertaining topics. Again, this is one of the great things about online marketing—we can address an event, trend, etc. as it’s happening and capture people’s attention. Once we’ve hooked them because we’re talking about last night’s episode of 24 or his favorite sport, we’ve gained his trust and respect, and we can then tie in our marketing message (as long as it’s not too much of a stretch).
Another reason we’ve had success is that we continually write to our target audience. We know exactly whom we want to read our blog, so we write to that person. Again, once he feels we’re “on his side,” we have credibility with him, and we’ve created a “fan” whom we’ll have an easier time selling to down the road.
3. You feature a variety of videos on your website and also have a YouTube channel. What results have you seen from using videos? Have you ever run a video marketing campaign? If so, what were the results?
We’ve not run a specific video campaign, but we use videos to inject more personality into our marketing and our business. We have a series of videos where we introduce the Kennedy’s founders and explain why we even created the business in the first place. People ultimately buy from people, not companies. These videos allow our core audience to get to know us, see our faces, and hear our voices. It’s much harder to accomplish this with just print and words.
Another way we apply videos is to showcase satisfied customers. We make a point to have our best customers give us a few sentences to let us (and others) know how we’re doing. We also give signature straight-razor shaves at our tradeshows, and we have clips of people having that done, too. Having someone else say how wonderful we are is far more impactful than when we say it.
4. What online marketing strategy has brought in the greatest results for your business? What are those results?
I’d say that our involvement on Facebook has been very valuable and has had the greatest results for us. I like that we do a lot of different things on the site. We can post pictures and video; we can send geo-targeted messages; we can post status updates to let customers and prospective customers know what we’re doing and where we’ll be; we can place ads to capture people’s interest while they’re browsing; and we can do all this in a timely manner.
5. How has marketing online affected the way customers and prospects perceive and engage with your brand?
I think they don’t see us as JUST a barbershop, and that’s what I strive for. We want to be about more than just cutting hair and shaving faces. We want to be a “third place” for guys—similar to what Starbucks has achieved, and what the local pub used to represent in times gone by. We want to help guys enjoy the lifestyle they want and deserve, and the fact that they connect with us online in multiple ways makes us a little more involved in their lives.
6. How are you using Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to drive traffic and increase online sales?
Whenever we appear in a news article, we make sure we let all our connections know via these social media tools. Likewise, we can also tell them about specials we’re currently having or contests they can be part of. Essentially, we try to keep the conversation going and to keep them up-to-date on what we’re doing. Top-of-mind awareness is what we want to achieve and maintain.
About Chris Hurn and Kennedy’s All-American Barber Club:
Kennedy’s is a franchise concept designed to treat gentlemen to an enjoyable grooming experience, and provide them with the grooming products they need to look and feel their best. Complete with complimentary drinks, shoeshines, and hard-to-find straight-razor shaves, Kennedy’s is reminiscent of your father’s barbershop.
Chris is currently growing the Kennedy’s brand nationwide by opening new franchised locations and selling Kennedy’s private-label grooming products in stores and online. He’s accomplishing this with a limited budget (just like everyone else in these “interesting” economic times) with an increased online presence. Kennedy’s has an award-winning blog, a website designed to capture potential customer / franchisee information, and ever-increasing content on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Click here to visit the Kennedy’s All-American Barber Club website.
