Social marketing and the ugliest boots in the world.
A few weeks ago Zachary Cohen wrote a blog post about social marketing and how a small clothing store in London nearly changed a purchasing decision he'd made.
Here's what happened:
- Zac found a pair of boots on ssense.com and sent out a tweet asking his followers what they thought. Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Hub Shop, a London boutique, picked up on Zac's tweet and recommended he try a pair of boots from their store.
- Under normal circumstances you may consider this spam but in this case, as Zac points out, 'they were putting one of their products in front of a customer'.
- Now, he didn't end up buying the boots from Hub Shop, but he did end up subscribing to their mailing list and checking out their website. Which means there's a chance he will become a customer at some point.
Why this is a good marketing strategy for small business
What Hub Shop did was start a conversation with someone passionate about fashion (you'd have to be passionate to wear those boots). If your small business could find the time to legitimately start conversations with 5 people each day you'd have a powerful marketing system in no time at all. And all at no cost.
Hub Shop also gave Zac as many as 5 proactive options simply by pointing him to their website. He had the choice to:
- Subscribe to their newsletter
- Like them on Facebook
- Follow them on Twitter
- Subscribe to their RSS feed
- Buy something
Finally, they followed marketing principles 101 and followed up. I've taken a look at their Twitter stream and they've sent Zac in the region of 4 follow up tweets offering other products he might like - without sounding pushy.
Why this can be a bad marketing strategy for small business
Unfortunately there's a flipside. What if every time you put out a comment on Twitter or Facebook, you were bombarded with promotional messages? I'd imagine this would get very tiresome very quickly. As social media users we aren't giving marketers permission to sell to us, only to start conversations, and it's a very fine line between casual chit-chat & spam.
How can your small business do what Hub Shop did/tried?
- You can be more passionate about your products. We're enthusiastic about your stuff and we expect you to be too (Hub Shop could do this a lot better)
- Our time is valuable and we don't tolerate spammers. But we're also egotistical, so feel free to start a conversation.
- Don't rush us. We won't buy until we're ready and we scare easily.
- Give us options. I hate Facebook and love Twitter. My wife is the opposite. By giving us a Twitter stream and a Fan page to follow you, you're covering your bases.
- Have fun. People who buy ugly boots need to have a sense of humour, so find someone in your organisation who can make me smile while they spank my credit card.
That's all. You can get back to work now unless you have something to add on Twitter.
