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Your Business Is Irrelevant And IT Wants To Help
I have spoken with several people about this topic recently, and mostly people are concerned about their ability to track customer information and create a profile. Many brands do not have a loyalty system or any way of tracking their consumers’ behavior. In today’s world, loyalty programs are mostly commonplace. I encourage companies to seriously evaluate such programs as an option moving forward. The information that can be gathered is enormous when compared to the cost of implementing such an approach.
But if you will not have access to loyalty data any time soon, I recommend the following approach to at least get a sample of data about your consumers. This option may wet your appetite for a more robust loyalty system in the future.
If you have a gift-card program, go to Twitter and Facebook and identify some of your largest “brand fans.” Find people who go out of their way to talk about your brand in a positive light. Maybe you will find some folks who started a Group about your brand on Facebook, or maybe you will find someone who has given you multiple positive reviews on Twitter. Tell these people how excited you are about how they have been supporting the brand and that you want to send them a gift card as a thank you. Send them a $50 gift card and then as a surprise, include ten $10 gift cards for their friends. Each card must be activated (registered) online.
Next, track the spend of your “promoters” and their friends. Try to identify those friends on Facebook and see if you can start to document the promoters’ social graph. Try to identify the consumers who have the biggest impact on your business. Figure out how to best engage with the promoters and then ask them how you should go about engaging with other customers to gain more information about them.
If you have a database that helps you better understand your customers’ wants and needs and if you have a database that tells you about your business’ wants and needs, the “magic” is bringing the two together via marketing. When you start to track the marketing messages that are associated with certain communication vehicles and then tie that information in with the consumer and business information, the impact can be huge. When this happens, you can start answering questions like:
- What is the customer count impact when I send a 15 percent off coupon to my “light” users over Twitter?
- What is the impact on the average check when I execute a Free Standing Insert in an area where my location has been open less than a year?
- How many Facebook fans are we adding as a result of a 5 second tag at the end of our television spots? Are these fans proving to be more profitable than non-fans?
- Is it more profitable for me to turn a “light” user into a “medium” user or to get “heavy” users to spend 10 percent more each visit?
I know some of you are reading this column and saying, “Todd, that is just not feasible. Our brand has millions of customers and millions of transactions a year. A system like you are describing is just not scalable!”
I must respectfully disagree. I firmly believe the response “That’s not scalable!” is the battle cry of the lazy. Tell me it would be too expensive; tell me it would be to complex. But don’t tell me it is not scalable. Plenty of companies do things of much larger scale than this every day. It can be done; you just have to put forth the effort.
What do you think? Love it or hate it, I’d love to gain some additional perspectives. Leave a comment, or E-mail me at Todd.Michaud@FranchiseIT.org.
-Marc
March 25th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
One way to increase the chance that a buyer thinks of your brand in that brief in-market moment is to build a connection in the buyer’s mind between your brand and the buyer’s friends. In other words — any chance you get, point out to a customer which of their friends shop your brand, and when that customer is ready to buy, they’ll think of you first. You’re already trying to associate your brand with other things that motivate the buyer; beauty, health, a good time, efficiency… “Your friends buy this brand” may be the most powerful association you can create of all.
March 26th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
I am a big fan of social media and have spent a lot of time walking storefronts and brands in an effort to bring them, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century.
Just kidding.
Many initiatives you describe seem relatively straightforward, but as always, the devil is in the details.
For example, how do you define “light” users on Twitter? Do you eliminate people that are “obviously” spammy? Do you include people that have just started? And which Twitter account are you talking about – the corporate account, or the accounts for individual locations? The answers to these questions are significant, echoing hygiene and maintenance issues that have bedeviled smaller organizations for years.
The challenge isn’t tweeting a deal – the challenge is how to use the technology so it works in a sustainable fashion. Many of us senior managers started working when email was still new. Instead of fulfilling the promise of “less effort than normal correspondence”, instead it has become a drudgery that occupies hours of time on an ongoing basis.
Do we want to repeat this same type of workload for every social media platform we adopt? For many organizations, the answer is clearly ‘no’. The benefits are clearly there – but it is up to corporate intrapreneurs to do a better job of demonstrating how this unfolds.
(BTW, so you know I’m not just a dour curmudgeon, I’ve been helping Altimeter strategist Jeremiah Owyang manage a list of corporate social media strategists.)