OnSpot Social – A Quick Look

Video Transcript (edited)

Hey there, how you doing this? It’s Chris. I’m going to do a quick look at OnSpot Social. We’re going to call this an examination. It’s not really reviewed because for me to do a review, I’d have to dig into the software. I’d have to actually download it, play with it and all that good stuff.

I have a client in California that’s interested in this particular piece of software and she wants my opinion on what I think of it. I think I can give her the answer she’s looking for, and hopefully help you out as well, by simply taking a look at what I can see from their marketing.

So we’re going to start there. But before I vent my spleen as to what I think, let’s see what they say about themselves.

So where are we going to start with this conversation? Let’s start with the use cases. What they basically say is that this can be used in store, at events and in the field.

And I can see where that would make sense. If you are a service area professional and you go out to your customer, like a fence contractor or plumber or something like that, then in the field might make some sense for you. Because that’s where you would use it.

If you happen to go to trade shows, then you would use at events. But for this conversation, we’re going to go look at it through the lens of a salon owner. There are other in-store applications, but we’re going to stick with that one and everything that we talk about here.

Pricing

The conversation really needs to start at pricing. And the reason it starts there is because you need to ask yourself, how many devices are you going to have in play at one time?

Regardless of which plan you go with, let’s say you have one that’s in display mode, which we’ll talk about in a moment, that’s sitting at a check in checkout, then you might have one sitting over at the, what do you call it? The waiting area. And then you can have one per salon. And if we’re doing a four chair kind of scenario, that’s what six.

So you have six running at any one time. That way every stylist can collect email addresses and do whatever they want to do with this particular system. So that’s, you know, my imagination, but that’s the kind of calculus that drives the first part of this conversation. How many of these things do you need? Because until you know, how many of these you need, you really don’t know which one of these numbers makes sense for you. And since we’re to the numbers part, let’s talk about that. Okay. So this, as any service, a software as a service company, does they have two different models. You can either pay annually or you can pay monthly. And if you take a look at the difference in the pricing, you can see which one they want you to lean towards. They want you on the annual plan. And I can’t blame them.

That’s a lot of commitment and they put a lot into putting this piece of software together. So needless to say, they want folks that are around for the long haul. And if you are using this for a year, chances are, you will learn how to make it work. And that habit will get itself ingrained. However, if you’re doing the monthly, the thing to think about, I think is, does this number, does this number, does this number make sense for how you’re using it? How you, the benefits that you’re getting from it. Okay. So before I get lost in the sauce on this one, let’s basically look at what you get. Okay? If you’re going with the standard plan, essentially what you have is three things, three things that matter, really, you have the digital signage, which is basically what is going to look like when it’s running.

And we’ll get into that in a second. Cause they have a whole page for that. Then there’s the email elite collection. Now that’s my baby right there. I like emailing Lee collection because if you’re going to be reaching out to people, if you’re going to go with what we call lifecycle marketing, you want to have email addresses. You want to have a way of reaching out to people after they’re no longer in your establishment. So email is the way to go email SMS slash text message, marketing, whichever phrase you want to use, but you’ve got to use it. So having a really cool way to collect that information. It’s not going to do you a whole lot of good if you’re not actually using that information. Okay. So, um, and then of course the third part that it has is a social media follows. So if you’re going to be active on social media to develop your market, not your market, your audience, that way, if you’re going to be using email marketing to reach out and maintain contact, then there’s value there.

If you’re not, then the question is, does this make sense? Because where the value in this comes from, if you are going to do email marketing, is that it makes it very easy for you to collect that email address. It’s kind of seamless. We do screens now. That’s not a, that’s not a new thing. It used to be a new thing. When my kids were teenagers, that’s a long time ago. So now we do things on screens. And this is built for people who are comfortable with screens. So depending on the, you know, the decade that your clientele is in, they may or may not get a whole lot of use out of this, or may not feel as comfortable. However, what it does, if you remember from the video, it makes it so that when you do go to collect email addresses, you don’t have to wonder what someone’s chicken scratch.

Handwriting actually means. They type it out. It’s the way it’s supposed to be. You don’t have to wonder whether that’s a zero or an O or L or a, a small L or a large eye. You don’t have to worry about those things because it’s clearly typed out. So there’s obviously some benefit there. And the information clearly, I mean, seamlessly goes into your software. So you don’t have to bunch up little pieces of paper that you’re like, where did I put that? You don’t have to worry about all of those things. So if you’re doing email marketing, there’s some serious value going on here because this streamlines, what is probably the most difficult part of that process, which is getting the information from somebody, getting it incorrectly and seamlessly getting it into your system. Because one of the things, if you remember from the video, it said that this comes with, in addition to the actual software and all that other good stuff is the, you have this other dashboard where all this information is collected.

So as opposed to you having to figure that out, it’s already done for you. And that makes things much easier. So keep that in mind. All right. So where are we at right now? We’re talking, we’ve already covered the fact that you really need to think of how you are going to use this. And well, when I say, how are you going to use this? I gave you a scenario where you had six of those particular devices running at any one time. And of course it has to be an iPad. So you’ve got six iPads floating around the salon. Well, what if you don’t want to use six? Think about how you would actually use this going one to one, because if someone’s filling out their email address, somebody else can’t look at it. So if you happen to happen to on display, and I guess I keep saying this display, thing’s probably be a good time to take a look at that when you’re looking at the cycle of the features and they’ll go all the way to the bottom of the page and you see what says display, signage, and videos, click that.

And what you’ll see is that this is the configuration that I was talking about. So you can imagine, you know, an iPad sitting at your check and check out to greet somebody when they first come in or sitting there with a slideshow going, as they’re sitting there, looking at the magazines or thinking about whatever you could put, all kinds of things in that slideshow. If there’s a particular hairstyle that is suddenly in style or starting to be coming current or whatever, the cool phrases for people are doing that now, then you could actually have that in different versions of it, flashing up to give people ideas. You can do all kinds of things. There’s all kinds of cool, um, video marketing that you can do to stick in front of people. Current events, current events in the salon, current events in the community, all kinds of visuals, again, we’re into screens.

So that’s a good thing. However, just a caveat. If you’ve got that running at the chair, one-to-one, that’s no problem. But if they’re sharing, say one, iPad per two chairs. If one person picks one up, the other person can’t use it, doesn’t see it. You kind of lose some functionality there, showstopper, probably not, but something to think about as you’re deciding how many of these you need to put into play. All right. So one of the other things that’s really nice about this is if you’re a geek like me, which you’re not, then you could simply put up a page on your website, have it displayed and do the exact same thing. However, it’s not going to be able to be adjusted as quickly. You can’t move it on the fly. And then of course, if you’re not a geek, you can’t contact me to quickly do it.

You can do these things from the dashboard. That’s already included in this software, in this system, which makes that piece really, really easy. You see a picture online that you want to display in your salon. All you have to do is copy the image, throw it up there. Boom. There it is. Instant marketing, kind of a cool thing. So that flexibility is a really nice feature of this. And of course, if you look at this image right here, if you want to get people into your social media, you can do that. If you want to have a contest or something, pump the brakes on that one, got to go back to the features for that one. It depends on which tier you go with, but there is, there is some benefit of sticking things in people’s faces and saying, Hey, are you interested in this?

Okay. So let’s see. That’s what we’re talking about. As far as that’s concerned, let’s go back over here to pricing. And then I think the last thing that you really need to consider now that we’ve talked about how many devices you would have in play, how you would use it, whether your clientele be comfortable with it, depending on, you know, you know, whether they’re millennials, gen Xs, boomers, or whatever is which features that you necessarily want. Because one of the things that I can understand why the company did it, but man, it would have been nice. The real functionality at the standard level is really email, um, email and Lee collection, that digital signage, which is just to facilitate the email lead collection and social media, this other stuff. It’s nice, but it’s not enough to push the dial in one direction or the other once you get to plus then all of a sudden you come down to surveys and reviews.

Now that’s some goodness. The thing that I’m not happy about, the surveys and reviews, unfortunately is you can’t push it out. Meaning that how many people do you know, are going to sit there and vent their spleen or tell you what they really think about you while they’re sitting there. Some people you want to have be able to remind later now, is that a showstopper? Absolutely not. Because you can tie that functionality into the email and lead capture. So you can kind of do that that way. Um, but it would be nice if it was just a feature of this and that’d be kind of cool. It does come with a video player, social billboard, all kinds of cool stuff that kicks in here. But for me, this piece right here is the main thing. Main feature that you get when you jump from this level to this level.

And last but not least, when you jump from this level to this level, the main feature that you get is the auto email and text messages. The text message piece specifically auto email. The difference between this and this. If I understand it correctly, email you’ll capture the information auto email, they fill it out and all of a sudden you can have their software without your autoresponder automatically send out certain preprogrammed messages. It’s not a full blown autoresponder. As you get with say a Weber, constant contact, or, you know, send, send in blue or something like that. But there it does have a functionality to automatically send stuff out. So for instance, coupons or things like that, which I believe if I look here somewhere, it’s probably going to say it gaming a contest, digital coupons. There it is. So that’s the difference. So when you’re evaluating this, that’s what you have to look at of the features that are available, the different jumps at that level, but is the review piece enough of a jump for you to go from here to here is getting the coupons and the auto email and text messages feature enough to get you to jump from here to here.

That’s what your decision points are. And depending on who you are, the answer is probably going to be yes, depending on what you’re doing, depending on how developed your outreach is, you may eventually find yourself. And I don’t doubt this moving from here to here to here. Now, one of the, I’m not going to say it’s a downside. I always come off with a negative way of saying things. One of the things that would have been nice is the free trial. Now the free trial gives you the full Monte. It gives you full access to all features, which is as it should. Only thing is it only gives you the use with one device and the only downside for this. And it’s not really a fault of theirs. I wouldn’t have done it any differently, but you just need to keep this in mind is you can’t get the full feel of how you would use it.

If you’re going to have more than one device, you can’t see where the friction points are of having one device versus having a bunch of devices going. So that’s the only thing I would think about. So you’re going to have to use your imagination to see how you would actually physically use it in the, going through your day customer, to customer, to client, to client, to get a good idea of how many devices you need to have. So that using them, does it become clumsy? If that makes any sense? Hopefully it does.

Conclusion

Alright. So is this good software? Does it have great functionality? I think the answer is yes, but it has to make sense for you. You have to understand what you’re doing and you have to really have the intent of doing something with the information it collects. If you don’t, then this is just an expense.

If you really want to do your outreach, which you should, there’s some goodness here. There’s a lot of goodness here.

Okay. And that’s my opinion, just based on what I’ve seen. Hopefully it helps you. If you have any questions or comments, just drop them in the space below the video. Then we’ll go back and forth like that. Talk to you soon.

From https://chriscarter.net/local-marketing/onspot-social/

from
https://chriscarterlocalmarketing.wordpress.com/2020/06/19/onspot-social-a-quick-look/