Listen and Learn

Great companies are great listeners. Have you ever met someone who you really enjoyed talking to. Next time you talk to that person try to be present enough in the moment to recognize who is talking more. It’s you. So before you jump up on your campaign soap box and start shouting how awesome you are, try this exercise and see if it effects your campaign tactics.

yelp.com – Read your Yelp reviews. Do they love you? What do they love? Are their complaints? Even the people that seem to bash every business they come in contact with may be pointing out something worth looking into. Also, do you respond to these reviews? Maybe you should. Read your competitors reviews. What do people love/hate about them.

search.twitter.com - Go to search.twitter.com/advanced and enter the name of your business in the “All of these words” section. You may have to play around with this a bit. Does your company have a nickname? When I worked at Bicycle Sport Shop some of our customers referred to us as BSS.

There is a lot of information you can glean from this site. Are people “checking in” to your business for example? What are they saying when they do? Are you getting back to them and thanking them for stopping by and sharing their visit?

socialmention.com - This site will search multiple social sites, such as blogs, micro blogs, forums, etc. for the key words you enter. It is a little finiky so you will need to tweak a few times, but this will give you an idea of what people are saying and how they feel about you, sentiment. I would not rely solely on the sentiment scores here. Go ahead and click through to read some of the posts. Sentiment still has a way to go before it is 100% reliable. 

Listening is great way to start any campaign. Next time you have a new product or service offering  try listening to increase your chances of success.

Jason has a cousin that mows lawns for a living. He was looking for ways to market his business and since Jason is of course “Mr. Social Media” he wanted to know what he should be doing regarding a social media strategy. Jason’s first question was “How did you get your last customer?” To which the reply was “A neighbor saw the work I had done and asked for my name.” So Jason’r recommendation was to hit a new neighborhood (or street) each week and mow a different lawn. why didn’t Jason recommend Facebook or twitter? Maybe a blog about lawn care and maintenance, a content strategy? Because that was not the lowest cost, highest reward solution.

Your marketing strategy should contain tactics that get you the highest reward at the least amount effort. For Jason’s cousin that meant the time it took to mow a lawn vs. the time it took to learn technology, create content, and come up with a plan to reach the appropriate audience. So when you sit down at your desk or with your team to discuss your marketing strategy, don’t pigeon hole yourself by focusing solely on social media. As small and medium size retailers there may be lower hanging fruit available right now. Remember, it’s all about the RFM value.

Ok, so now I am looking for some participation from the “Audience”. If you are a retailer, help a brother out, what can you share about your own experience that may help other retailers regarding their marketing efforts?

More followers on Facebook or twitter, thousands of views on your viral video or visits to your site may be precursors to dollars in the bank, but your goal should be focused on showing you the money, not the potential of money. Here are the three things you should be focusing on as a retailer.

• Frequency: Increasing the frequency of transaction from your existing customers
• Reach: Getting new customers in the door
• Yield: Increasing the dollars spent per transaction from customers

Planning for Success

There is an old proverb that says “He who fails to plan, plans to fail”. Social media is the same. Creating a page, making it look good and posting pictures and news about your events may gain you a modicum of success regarding your page’s popularity, but more than likely this will not show huge gains in NET profit over the long haul.

Spend some time in your POS data. A simple segmentation can help you identify customer segments and focus your efforts on something specific. Try dropping your customers in three groups based on their Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value. Once you have determined their RFM value you can break them into 3 groups.

• Group A – high frequency, high avg. spend
• Group B – frequent, moderate/low avg. spend
• Group C – (At Risk) inactive/infrequent, low avg. spend

Now try and find out what the similarities are within them and between them. See where there may be opportunities to move the C group to the B group or the B group to the A group. How can your social media initiatives help you achieve these goals?

Don’t forget to measure your efforts against your goal. Are your actions moving Group B members to Group A members for example. What are the precursors to this shift? It is ok, and recommended, to look at likes, follows, page views, etc. Just remember that those alone will not help you assign value to your efforts.

1. Target your audience

Your POS system is your friend. Leverage your database to target customers based on the product being demonstrated or time between purchases. Don’t waste time marketing to people who won’t attend.

2. Require registration

Someone willing to take the time to register for an event are more likely to follow through. This also allows you to capture important information about your attendee.

If you are currently using SmartEtailing you can create a custom form to gather important information about your attendee or invite them to register for your newsletter. If you are using Google Analytics, track your participation across multiple channels to see which channel is performing best.

3. Encourage promotion

Let attendees share their participation through social media integration. Adding a share this button or similar widget will allow your registrant to post to their network of friends.

When they arrive at the event offer them an incentive to check in via Facebook, Foursquare, or Gowalla. This will notify their friends that they are at your event.

4. Send a reminder

Be sure and send a reminder to your registrants a few days before. Highlight key benefits of attending this event.

5. Follow Up

Be sure to follow up with your attendees. The best time to survey them is immediately after the demo. Have a laptop or ipad at the ready with your survey loaded up. Be sure to have paper back ups in case you get busy.

Finally, be sure to record photos and video at your event. Customer photos and testimonials are always great for social media content, your website site or in future advertising efforts.

Custom Page Name – If you have not already you should visit http://www.facebook.com/username/ and name your page after your business.

 Image - There are a few things that you can do on your Facebook page to enhance your visual presence. One of those is to take advantage of the real estate you have for your profile image.

Here is a great example of a shop that has done that.

One thing I might add to this image is a phone number.

Email List – Monkey Wipes has included an option for joining their email list. If you are running an email marketing campaign this is great place to capture email addresses for that campaign.

You may want to include information about what to expect from the newsletter. The content should differ slightly from the information you provide through your Facebook page to encourage participation.

Custom Pages – Here MapMyRIDE has used a custom iframe to promote their upcoming Aquaphor Le Tour Challenge.

You may use a custom page to promote an event, a sale or set this page as your landing page to encourage “likes” from new visitors.

Here Cervelo uses this page to show off their test team.

Maybe you could create an employee directory. When the visitor clicks through to your website they learn more about this staff member’s bike picks, favorite rides or preferred products.

Content – Make sure your page is Search Engine Optimized. from the content you post to the wall on a daily basis to the information you add to the “info” page or custom pages you create. SEO should be included in your Facebook best practices.

There is a ton of customization you can do to enhance your Facebook presence. Just remember that you should always be thinking  of how your tactics relates to your business objectives.

Social Media initiatives are typically determined when creating your social media plan. Your initiatives should be tied to your overarching business objectives and should ultimately reward you in dollars.

Tactics are the actions you choose to take towards achieving your chosen objectives. Sometimes those tactics include social media channels.

Measurement is what you should be doing to determine the success of your tactics as they relate the objective they were employed to accomplish.

In my experience speaking with bike shops over the past few years, tactics are employed for the sake of participation and little thought is put into a focused objective or a desired outcome. With little time and resources on hand it is very easy for a bike shop’s social media efforts to wind up in the high cost / low reward bucket.

Ultimately, you should expect that your social media efforts are doing one or all of these.

1. Getting you more customers
2. Encouraging your existing customers to spend more
3. Encouraging your existing customers to spend more often

Take a look at your existing social campaign. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to shape the public’s perception of your brand, improve your customer service efforts, foster relationships and build a community, or are you looking to generate leads?

You may find that you have more than one of these and that’s fine, but ask yourself if these efforts are accomplishing one of the three business objectives outlined above? Once you have aligned your social efforts with your business objectives it will be much easier to determine which tactics to employ.

Do you ever feel like your management team just isn’t on the same page?

Creating a mood board is one of my favorite creative assignments for helping illustrate how your team sees your business. This assignment can be used prior to a business opening, before a campaign, or as a way to ensure everyone is on the same page. Not only does it help you plan more effective creative for your marketing and advertising efforts, but it will help you and your team better manage decisions that effect the future of the business.

Mood boards are typically used by graphic designers to visually illustrate the direction of a campaign or project. As the mood board is intended to give visual direction it is very helpful for key decision makers to participate in this exercise as they are generally making independent decisions on a daily basis.

For this assignment you will need the following for you and each team member that you would like to participate.

• 1 piece of poster board
• scissors
• glue
• old papers, magazines, photos, etc.

The Assignment

Working separately (preferably at home) each person should cut out any colors, images, or phrases that they feel communicate the company’s message and glue them to the poster board. Here is an example of what a mood board may look like.

Set a time to meet when all of you can be present to share your collages. What similarities exist between you and your team? What images and concepts are portrayed?  What differences exist? Is there one person that sees the company much differently than the rest?

If there are major differences uncovered in this exercise, this would be a great opportunity to address those. Feel free to report back with what you discovered.

How much do you know about your customers? You may know how much they spend, how often they come in and who comes in and spends the most, but do you know how to get more of those people? In 2008 I had the opportunity to work on a customer segmentation profiling campaign for a direct mail piece we were planning.

Through customer segmentation profiling we were able to determine two things.

1. The types of consumers that were most likely to become customers
2. The types of consumers who will spend more money once they have become a customer

Our typical method for segmentation allowed us to target consumers based upon age and income, but it did not answer whether or not they were likely to become a customer. Nor did it give us any insights into their psycho-graphic profile.  Through customer segmentation profiling were able to answer questions about our customer’s lifestyle, media habits and consumer behavior.  Once our top consumers were identified we were able to target geographic markets with high concentrations of consumers just like them.

For example, We were able to determine which houses were occupied by families with kids within a certain income range. This allowed us to target those houses with a direct mail piece depicting the family cycling lifestyle. Had we just sent this piece to a zip code it may have ended up in the hands of a much wider demographic and therefore been less effective.

The result of the research was an increased response rate to the mailer and an increase in the average dollar spent per transaction. In addition this research allowed us to make a more educated decision regarding the placement of a new store by targeting neighborhoods with high concentrations of potential customers. That store has outperformed initial sales projections.

While research may require a little investment on the front end it will allow you to better focus your efforts, reducing costs and increasing returns.