The Apprentice Game, And How Marketing Automation Could Help You

This year’s The Apprentice has finished with Marnie Swindells taking the crown of Lord Sugar’s £250k investment as their new business partner. At Xposure we run a little game each year, trying to guess who will be fired each week and who we think will be the overall winner. It makes watching the show all that more fun, engaging, and is enough to get you past the few early weeks when it’s full of loud-mouths with un-proven bravado!

For the last few years, we’ve extended our office game out to the public, which began as a live-training exercise for us to use the various marketing automation tools we had invested in. In this peek behind the curtain, we’ll reveal how the game is run in the back end, how we connect all the various processes, automation and personalisations – and how if we can build this for something as trivial as this game, imagine how this personalised approach could transform your online relationship with your customers.

Tools and software

Here’s what we use to run the game, the same software and services we use to run client campaigns…

• SharpSpring / Constant Contact CRM
• Social Media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter
• Google Sheets
• Google Looker (previously Data Studio)
• Zapier

Invitations to play

The game starts simply enough. After building the landing page on our website, complete with a smart SharpSpring form to collect the player’s guesses, we sent out invitation emails to past players, clients and leads in our SharpSpring CRM system. SharpSpring Automation is capable of learning your contact’s preferences, so within the invite was an “opt-out” link for anyone who doesn’t watch The Apprentice and doesn’t want to hear about it further.

Including opt-out or subscription preferences is important to prevent people from unsubscribing from all future emails which would include useful and important advice in newsletters. Having your subscribers tell you what they do and don’t want to hear about from you is critical in keeping them engaged with your communications.

We also shared the game through our various social media connections and included anything we could get out hands on about the new candidates, and news about the show’s return to attract the right people who would be interested in playing the game.

This is a very broad and basic example, but this all comes down to knowing what to put in front of people to attract them to your site. Sharing out specific content aimed at people interested in one particular thing, then directing those people to a specific landing page is the best way to turn social media visitors into identifyable leads on your wesbite.

The Players make their choices

After bringing interested players to the landing page, we explain how the game work: at the beginning of the series they choose an overall winner and who they think will be fired the first week. This is tricky as there’s only what scant information the BBC have shared to promote the return of the programme!

The website smart form sends this information to SharpSpring, where their email address is stored securely. This is the first clever bit – SharpSpring knows who they have chosen, and sends them an automated confirmation email with the name and photo of their chosen winner and loser. This is 1 template email, but the system changes the content to match their choices.

This email has what is called ‘dynamic content’ which changes depending on what the system knows about the recipient. A real-world example might be sending a previous customer an email about hats you have on sale instead of shoes because they’ve previously looked at hats on your website.

Connecting disparate services

We use a piece of middle-ware called Zapier, which helps us connect up various different systems to share data that wouldn’t be otherwise possible. This saves us time, as we don’t have to manually update different systems with people’s choices. With this tool, the player’s name and choice of candidates are sent (or ‘zapped’) to google sheets – google’s free cloud-based alternative to Excel. This is so we can score the player’s choices as the programme airs.

At the end of each episode, the scores are totalled up with simple formulas in the spreadsheets. The scoring works as follows:

• If the chosen “fired” candidate is in the losing team, the player scores 1 point.
• If they are brought into the boardroom the player scores a further 3 points.
• Then if the candidate is fired (bingo!) they get an additional 5 points.
• Meaning if you are on the nose, you score the maximum 9 points.

If at the end of the series, the player has chosen the winner (way back at the beginning of the series before episode 2) they win a whopping 25 bonus points – potentially changing the game at the last second!

Once the Google spreadsheet has been updated with each player’s score that week – including what they scored this week, what their total score is for the series, and their place overall in the running (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc), Zapier automatically sends this information back to the SharpSpring CRM.

Keeping all these different scores each week for each player, necessitates having a spreadsheet with all this data in. And because it’s in a cloud-based spreadsheet, we can connect it to Google Looker Studio (previously called Data Studio) to publicly share out the leaderboard.

Looker Studio is a brilliant tool that can take information from a host of different sources and display it in an easy-to-understand, graphical manner.

The leaderboard is a very simple version of this, just displaying the nicknames of the players, ordered by total score.

The Day After The Apprentice Airs

Friday morning is a busy time after The Apprentice has aired. We reset the game, updating the candidates on the webpage with who has been fired or quit from the game, we update the smart form to match, and reset and test the ‘zaps’ that will send next week’s selections to the Google sheet and back to SharpSpring.

We also prepare a new email to go out to all the players, with a short write-up of the goings on of the previous night’s episode, who was fired, with the dynamic email content showing who they chose, how they scored this week, and how they are doing so far. There’s also a button to see the full leaderboard as well as a reminder to get their new choices in for the following week.

Keeping the game going

In each email, we remind the players to make sure to follow us on our social media accounts – where we share any news, rumours and preview clips released by the BBC ahead of the next episode. If you’ve seen us sharing bits and pieces from The Apprentice before, this is why. It also allows us to piggyback on a nationwide hashtag to grow our reach beyond our usual audience

Are you doing this with your email communication? Remind people to follow you on social media to grow your audience – and offer a good reason to do so, in this case it was clues about the upcoming episode to help win the game, but a more solid reason could be getting news about your products and services earlier, or even certain discounts and promotions.

As another reminder – all the previous week’s players are added to an automatic email that goes out Thursday morning to remind them to come back to the website and enter their choice.

The same process could be used to bring people back to your website to either purchase something or get in touch with your sales team.

Unleash the power of marketing automation

All of this wouldn’t have been possible without our knowledge of, and access to our preferred Marketing Automation Tools to streamline repetitive tasks and manage the different data touch points.

The Apprentice Game might be a frivolous use of this technology, but imagine how bringing together information from different touchpoints — including website visits and downloads, social media activity, and direct marketing, could offer your prospects and customers a personalised experience, as well as greater efficiency for your sales team.

Personalised workflows lead to easier sales

Manually monitoring visitor/customer behaviour is not feasible due to the amount of data, but you can leverage marketing automation software to access customer data and utilise it for creating better and targeted information.

For example, a prospect may be looking at a wide range of products. This indicates they are in the early stages of their purchasing process (near the top of the funnel, we would say), just researching and more likely to be scared off if approached by sales now. However, if they download a PDF relating to a particular product, this suggests they are interested in acquiring more information and could be open to engaging with someone helpful from the sales team. See our article on lead magnets.

Workflows like this can help qualify prospects, telling you what helpful content to send them (or even better, do it automatically), resulting in warmer leads that are easier to nurture into customers.

Marketing automation doesn’t stop there though – you can continue to engage past customers with personalised workflows that lead to loyal, repeat customers who are happy to refer friends and family. See our article on leveraging referral funnels.