A Flash Sale, the Catalyst for Small Business Increases.

Amazingly, there is not one Wikipedia entry on this term yet, although there are several entries that do mention it.  For those who aren’t comfortable with the term, it means a huge sale for a very short time on a particular item.  Sites like Woot.com, DailySteals.com, and etc. work on the idea of a flash sale.  Groupon works as a flash sale, by having its members rush in and buy, buy, buy!  Can your business accomplish this without services like these? And does it make sense to try?

First of all, let’s break down the term.  Flash, in this case, has to do with speed and impact.  A “flash mob” forms immediately, has high energy, and is gone forever.  They drive up viral video, and work as guerrilla marketing in many different ways.  The same is true of a flash sale.  They happen quickly, and the outcome is huge. 

A recent example of a flash sale is Lady Gaga’s new album going on sale on Amazon for $0.99.  It was only available at that price for one day.  Amazon had several trending tweets that day.  There was a ton of hype around this sale, on all different social media channels. The rush to take advantage of this sale brought down Amazon’s servers, and it brought an unprecedented amount of people onto Amazon’s site.  The site, which is the fifth largest site in the United States, ground to a halt by the level of traffic this sale generated.

What does this mean to you, the small to medium business?  Can you somehow capture this same level of increase in a day, and make it a positive experience for your customers and your bottom line?  You bet!

First, you need to think of an item or service that you typically sell in volume.  Something that everyone could use, that is exclusive to you, and that your competition would never dream of giving away at a loss.  You want it to be expensive enough that you can show a huge discount, but not so expensive that reducing the price cheapens the product after the sale ends.  It also cannot be the only product you sell.  You need something that goes hand in hand with lots of other products you sell, with the hope of selling these when your customers arrive.  We’ll call this, for the remainder of the blog, “Product X”.

Now, you need to deliver the knowledge about this sale out to the masses.  All of your social media channels need to pump this message out, as well as possibly some direct mail, print advertising, etc, depending on your current marketing strategies.  You need people to write down on their calendars that this is the day to go buy Product X.

I don’t recommend this type of sale to everyone is that you need a dipstick to test the waters.  If you have no social media already in place, and have no email marketing, I don’t necessarily recommend it.  You need to be able to see some feedback before the day of the event.  You need to be prepared.  Without this knowledge, you won’t be able to prepare your stock levels.

The day of the sale, SELL.  Sell everything you can.  Sell Product X, and everything else that you can sell that day.  They come in for Product X, and you want them to leave with Y and Z, and return tomorrow for A, B, and C.  You have three goals for this day:

1. Sell like crazy.
2. Make everyone happy.
3. Expand your customer base.

You have to make sure that everyone who partakes in this deal sees how great your business is.  You need word of mouth to flow.  You need your level of customer satisfaction at its highest on this day.  Warn your employees, that although they are going to leave tired, they’d better have their game faces on. 

Now, who needs Groupon?  If you’re still thinking, “Can this work for my business?” click on the Feedback tab on the left, and we’ll work with you to start your business revolution.

Strengthening Your Social Media, Part 3

This is the final part of this series. Enjoy the final two steps to strengthening your social media!

Step 5- Redefine ROI.

You can choose to look at Social Media’s ROI in traditional ways, and you will decide that social media is a waste of time, relatively soon. That’s because you are not listing a singular ad, to see how much traffic is driven by that one ad. Let’s pretend you are throwing a large party this weekend, with over 100 guests. You invite 110 people, and 100 show. They stay for a couple of hours, and leave. Immediately after they leave, can you tell how successful the party was? You may try to judge by how much food or beverage consumption happened. You may try to gauge by how dirty the place is. But really, the only way to find out is to wait. See how many people you know are talking about the party a week from now. Was your party the party that all people use to define other gatherings? That’s how social media works. You do not have an immediate response. A successful social media campaign has customers that show up, mentioning ads you did months ago, and you are left wondering, “Where did these people come from?”

That’s not to say you cannot accurately measure the effectiveness of your campaign. It just means you need to change your analytics. One highly effective method is to judge how much traffic is happening at any time on your social sites that you did nothing to encourage. If people are visiting your social media sites, and you didn’t do anything to encourage them to visit at that moment, via some promotion, they are probably also buying from your store. There are ways of measuring ROI, but they are more long term, since they depend on social timing, not business timing.

One of the quickest ways of monitoring your ROI comes from Step 6.

Step 6- Have Watchful Eyes - Monitor Everywhere

“No news is good news” is not true. “Any press is good press” is a little more accurate. But only if you are working on monitoring every single thing anyone is saying about you. Imagine you are an automotive dealer. And a customer, waiting in your service area, tweets, “Could Imaginary Dealership waste any more of my time!!!” If you aren’t monitoring for this, you are sunk. This message is going out across cyberspace, to possibly thousands of potential customers. Now, imagine you are the same dealership, and you see that message, and immediately tweet back, “Let me fix it, right now. Come to the service desk.” And you fix the issue. And then you tweet, “All set?” to which the customer replies, “yes, thank you Imaginary Dealership!” Now there is a conversation out there, in cyberspace, going out to potentially thousands of customers, that you will do anything you can to help your people immediately. Capitalize on complaints publicly. Showing you are human and make mistakes doesn’t hurt your credibility. Fixing errors immediately, and going above and beyond to make things right builds customer satisfaction just as quickly as does doing it right the first time.

Let’s go out of the world of the internet for a minute. Have you ever been in a restaurant, where something came back not right? And you complained, and the manager came over immediately, fixed the problem, and gave you something for free, like dessert? Did you go back to the restaurant in the future? I know that this has happened to me, and I always went back at least once. Now, if every time I go, there’s something that gets done poorly, then the manager can give me free dessert for life, and I’m not going back. However, when the first error happened, and it was quickly addressed, corrected and I was compensated for their mistake, it cemented a positive experience in my mind.

How do you effectively monitor the entire world? You really can’t. But you can try. I’ve looked on a lot of facebook pages, and seen the comment sections blocked, or monitored. When I’ve asked the business owner why this is, I’ve been told that they do not want negative things written about them on their own site. My response is always, “So, you’d prefer negative things written about you on sites you don’t know about?” Stuffing your fingers in your ears, and singing, “La la la la la, I can’t hear your complaints!” probably wouldn’t help your business if you did it in front of a customer when he or she has an issue. The same is true when you shut down avenues where customers can communicate. Your goal for facebook should be that if someone wants to complain about you, they come right to your site to do it. That way you can address the issue, and fix the customer’s problem right away.

The same is not quite true for Twitter. If you aren’t constantly searching Twitter, looking for your name, you don’t know if someone is complaining. It is a different climate on Twitter. Whereas people go to facebook to have conversations, people typically are on Twitter just to express. So they aren’t going to aim their complaints at you personally, which means you have to go find those complaints. Then follow the complainers, and see if you can start a conversation. Many times, you will use their profile on Twitter to find ways to communicate with them through other channels where a dialogue is easier to complete.

You have people that watch your location to make sure that there are not disgruntled customers roaming the store, complaining loudly to other potential buyers. You need to have people watching the internet to make sure there aren’t people doing the same thing. If you can capture a negative experience, and turn a customer around publicly, and sell that customer, there is proof positive of ROI. As one car dealership I worked with stated, “It was real easy to see the ROI when we had a displeased service customer, Tweeting, ‘I’m never working with (dealership) again! I hate this car, and I hate this place!’ and by monitoring social media, we stopped trying to fix the car, and sold her a new one. That’s powerful. Now we have a happy customer, we sold a car, and we have her positive press on Twitter instead of negatives.”

Strengthening Your Social Media, Part 2

Continuing from where we left off from yesterday, here are steps three and four of our discussion.

Step 3- Creating and Maintaining Connections.

You have set realistic goals. You know what you want to say, and who you want to say it to. How come you have no listeners?

First thing to work on is capturing your own. No one wants to follow someone who is following 500 people, but has no followers. That’s like following a groupie, instead of following the band. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your social media presence be. However, the quickest way to build is to go after your warm market. Get your strong relationships to follow. Start with your employees. Get your families involved. Some of the strongest marketing campaigns have started grassroot before they exploded into the mainstream. If you have strong relationships with your customers, get them involved.

Once you have the ball rolling, you can start with some incentives. FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, and Twitter should all be at the ready for an incentive based marketing campaign. You want people taking an active role in stopping by your location, whether physically (FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places) or just by saying you company name (Twitter). These are considered “Cold Market” and line up with your traditional marketing approach. Fun, short incentives are the most effective. “Show your tweet at the register” campaigns encourage interaction, following, and make the customer feel special.

Previously, people would do email campaigns, where they would send coupons, and state, “print this coupon for XXX savings.” What does this do for your business? It means you have a way of communicating with that one customer. However, if instead, you are telling your customer, “Tweet ‘@mycompany saved me 10%’ for 10% savings” not only is the customer happy, buying, and saving money, but they are telling their social group that you are saving them money. Which would you prefer? One customer’s email, or 50 customers coming into your store immediately to buy your product?

Step 4- Multiply Your Face.

One word – Branding. You have a webpage, and a channel on each and every social media outlet you can think of, but can the average Joe tell who you are? Does this look like your signature on the bottom of an email?

John Smith

www.mycompany.com

www.facebook.com/mycompanyfacebook

www.twitter.com/mycompany1

www.youtube/mycompanypageonyoutube

If you aren’t uniform, you are harder to find. Don’t be hard to find. Sometimes, it is hard to stay uniform. If you are a small business, and have a common name, “Mike’s Auto Body” it is going to be hard to own this common a name on every domain. Therefore, be creative out of the box. When you create your website, go for “www.mikesautobodyMA.com” and then brand yourself as the only Mike’s auto in MA worth visiting. If you have to have a second name, make sure it’s just a second name, and not a third, forth, etc.

There are people out there that say, “Put a face to your company. Don’t have a corporate logo on your accounts. People want to talk to people, not to companies.” Let’s take a look at successful companies. The avatar for CNN is the CNN logo. Google, Twitter, E! online, Coca-Cola, etc. All of the companies that people follow have their logo. People will follow companies, if they are companies that are worth following, and have successfully branded themselves. The only way to successfully brand yourself is to have uniformity. You can have lots of faces for your company. Since Step #2 was having your employees take an active role on your social media sites, you will have plenty of faces.

Check back tomorrow for Part 3, our final part of this series.

Strengthening Your Social Media, Part 1

If there were six simple steps to strengthening your social media, would you follow and share them with others? Our answer is: Yes, we would!

Step 1- Define your goals.

When you have decided to take a new direction in your business, no matter what aspect of business it has been, you must have a plan. If you are a retail outlet, your goal may be increasing sales by a particular percentage. The same is true for social media. One of the ways that companies fail is they set unrealistic goals, or no goals at all. It requires more than simply stating, “I want to be on Facebook.” That is not a goal. Neither is, “I want 200 followers on my Twitter account by next Thursday,” although that is closer.

Your goal should be to have your customers and potential customers following and interacting with you in whichever medium of the social networks out there you are focused on. For example, if you are in the automotive business, what good is 200 followers if they are all other dealerships? You need to have potential customers as followers. Arbitrary numbers are typically not good goals. We will get into this more on Step 5.

Step 2- Find your content

Let’s face it, fans are great. There will always be a great number of people that will sign up for any social media that Coca Cola puts out there, because they practically bleed their soda. Movie stars do not need to create hype around themselves to have people follow them on Twitter; the fact is that people want to feel connected to anything that they have to say. I actually heard someone say, “Like Ashton (Kutcher) was saying yesterday, …” The person saying this felt completely connected to the actor, and when it came up in a conversation, to an innocent bystander, it sounded so natural that I’m sure people were wondering, “Does this guy really know Ashton Kutcher?” Unfortunately, most of us are not going to have that level of interest in either us or what we do. So figuring out your content niche is extremely important.

The first thing to remember is that it must be interesting to anyone. If you are an electrician, and your posts read like “and he said, 20 amps, are you crazy? Lol” you are really only talking to other electricians. Your content isn’t going to drive business. Your content must be legible to anyone, not just experts within your field. Clarity counts.

You also want to remember, unless you are a rock star, no one else sees you as one. This means that your information on a daily basis is probably not going to capture everyone’s attention. Not everyone is universally appealing. The easiest way around this problem is to have as many different people involved with your social media as possible. Obviously, your interactions with clients, customers, and anyone else on your social media are what build momentum. If only one person has the ability to start these interactions, you are limited. Try to encourage your employees to share on your social media presence, as well.

While we’re on the subject of your employees, and this point may sting a little…. How many of them are on social networks, and are not on yours? Some employees feel that if they “like” “Follow” etc. your social media channels, the boss is going to follow them, and watch them like a hawk. Unfortunately, that is the culture at many companies. One of the things you need to do is educate your employees. Social media is a tool to grow business. Growing business means that each and every employee has the potential to earn more money. Growing business typically adds to job security. If your employees are afraid to sign up for your social media presences, you may want to take a hard look in the mirror. It is hard to lead people outside of your company, if you cannot change the climate within.

So to summarize, you want content that addresses everyone. You are trying to build a social connection with as many people as possible, and the only way to become universally popular is if you can relate to everyone in one way or another. You want as many of your own advocates, your employees, involved, and bringing in their friends. Selling in a warm market is far easier than the cold market.

Check back tomorrow for part 2, Steps three and four.