How to Create Buying Moments: Give People a Reason to Buy All Year

Mike Beckham (0:00)

Welcome to the Operators podcast. Today, we're talking about one of the most important things about running a business. How do you create interest when people aren't necessarily already looking to buy? There's things like Black Friday and holidays that generate obvious demand from customers. But the real alpha is when you can create moments out of thin air that make people compelled to pay attention to your brand and to show up and to buy. Even the biggest companies in the world are engaged in this. Look at Amazon. First, there was Prime Day. Then there was multiple Prime Days that spanned two or three days. Then there were Prime Days over different parts of the year. They've even expanded their Black Friday section to something they call the Turkey 10, which is 10 full days before Thanksgiving to way after Cyber Monday. Everybody's trying to do this. You should be doing this in your business. Unfortunately, one of our hosts, Sean Frank, who's with us today along with Matt, is going to share how Ridge has done an absolute masterful job of this.

Sean, I'll just open up the episode with a question.

What is it that you do to generate demand during summer? What's the event? Tell us a little bit about the history of it and how it's done this year.

Sean Frank (1:14)

Every year, we do an annual sweepstakes. It started in 2021, and I stole the idea from somebody else. I was not the first person to think about giving away a car on the internet.

It harkens back to the McDonald's Monopoly, like this annual event people get really excited for. But I was at a Nick Shackelford event called Geek Out in San Diego coming out of COVID. There was a guy who was on stage, and this was his whole business model. He would just buy cars, he would run offers to them, and if you bought items, you were entering into like, it was like buying lottery tickets basically. If you spent more money, more lottery tickets, and that was your chance to win this awesome car. And I'm like, okay, cool, that's a great idea. I'm gonna do that. So that summer, me and Connor bought a Gladiator. We put a cool decal on it, we drove out to the desert, and we spent probably 12 hours filming us with this Jeep. And it's like, it's probably 50 grand for the car, it's probably 20 grand for the filming, and it's probably 20 grand for legal stuff. So look, we spent $100,000 a day on ads back then, let's just take one day's worth of ads and gamble if we can drive some sort of results out of this. We had some great footage and hopefully we could show some B-roll of that first year of sweeps. I was the stunt driver, so I was jumping this thing, I was whipping it out in the desert, it was awesome. And so we went live with it, and we've never done this before. So there was a ton of learnings, this was before anybody else was really doing sweeps, there was Ronin and this other company that I learned from, there was four or five people out there trying it.

And it worked good enough that it was worth a second shot. So we've improved that every single year, this is probably our fifth or six sweeps that we've done this year. And it's elevated to the point where now we're giving away Lamborghinis and supercars, and we have Tony Hawk as a spokesperson. And now it ends up being like a multi-million dollar invested campaign, runs for 45 days, just wrapped up. And it turns what is our weakest months of the year, which is July and August, into both of them are now multi eight figure months. And, you know, this year was up 100% year over year. So we've been able to really refine this over time and turn into a real jewel of our Q3 campaigns.

Mike Beckham (3:29)

So this is becoming a really meaningful driver of your entire year's financial performance at this point.

Sean Frank (3:35)

Yeah. We're still very Q4 heavy. Like, we're just 50% of revenue happens in Q4.

But it ends up being... We try to create as many peaks as possible throughout our business, right? Like, if we didn't have sweeps, if we didn't have Father's Day, we also run an anniversary sale in March. If we didn't have those things, revenue would be like pretty low, and then there'd just be a massive shoot up in November and December, it would be 80% Q4 heavy. And you just can't run a business like that, right? Like cash flows, investing in inventory, keeping people around, paying people. You can't have be so backloaded. So out of necessity and cash flow, we actually had to create more peaks throughout the year.