Yes, I know you care about Social-Media. You might have aggressive plan to spend a good chunk of your marketing dollars from digital marketing aisle on it. But, here is the bummer- according to a recent report by Sucharita Mulpuru at Forrester Research. –
Less than 1 percent of the online transactions she tracked could be traced to a social media post, Sucharita wrote in her report:
“Social tactics are not meaningful sales drivers. While the hype around social networks as a
driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers. In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions for both new and repeat shoppers could be traced back to trackable social links.”
Sucharita didn’t study small businesses, which she said do disproportionately well in social commerce.
Here’s a graph showing how effective email marketing and paid searches are:
Forrester Research
So, Email marketing and Paid search still work great to get much needed eyeballs but making them stick is still a puzzle for marketers and sales folks. To make it worse, brick and mortar stores have to walk an extra mile to create social connection with visitors. No, it is not just about brand recognition, but actually connecting with prospects and keeping them engaged with stores- this is more along the lines of community development. So, why are we using the same social media strategy as used for an online retail store to achieve a different goal? If you have online sales channel, it is all good, but to keep brick-mortar store interesting, you need to twist and turn to create a social connection with prospects and provide a play area for them to play on.
So, what about having facebook page, twitter page, yelp page? Yes! They are all great and must also exist individually for every store. Imagine a Dallas shopper and loyalist getting constant deal updates from Boston stores through national retailer facebook page. I hope getting to the conclusion that this is not working is not as painful a ride as learning through experience.
What should a retailer do? Try some fundamental mindset shift and that should do the trick:
1. Have separate social channels for brick-mortar stores than brand social channels:
This comes from my previous rants on keeping mobile marketing strategy different for brick-mortar from overall retailer brand strategy. It applies equally well for social media strategy. Sure, there is no harm in educating your prospects about your brand and having them connect with brand pages to stay brand loyalists but for your store to be kicking, keeping agenda separate would make more sense. Brick-mortar store should evangelize on more meaty stuff on why someone actually buys from the store, having more community focused strategy. One tool that could help in this direction is QRCode based forms/surveys taking users to social channels specific to brick-mortar stores while shopping. It would not be a bad idea to educate current staff members to pump content to those social channels.
2. Use Email marketing list to bring social followers/endorsers:
Yes, this age old model still works great. I am sure that it is not a surprise to anyone that keeping email marketing list buffed and using it appropriately would work great in increasing visitors. One tricky thing is to keeping the emails more as a newsletter to keep users engaged with some custom newsletters / deals that are targeted to user’s taste. Besides keeping email content cranking, buffing the email list is important as well. Every possible touchpoint should provide ability for visitor to leave their email. For example – put QRCode throughout the store to capture that information. To sweeten the pot, stores could get that information through sweepstake contest, coupon distribution channels, and feedback capture. Those outgoing emails could include links to social channels and if possible compensate for any play/social share/endorsement.
3. Understand why customers visit you and use that messaging to invite more customers:
One key component to understand and include in social media strategy is the reason behind why someone should buy from your store. Anything that is not covered by brand media strategy should be emphasized and covered. The reasons could range from your social presence, your location proximity, to your super helpful staff. Every effort should be made to learn and to include that information in social media strategy. If done properly, all this localization effort will be rewarded. Local community has stronger bonding and social sharing capabilities than brands. So, knowing more about local initiatives and community perspective of the local store will help in building robust sustainable strategies for efficient social media marketing for stores.
4. Identify social clout rockstar and make them your brand ambassador:
Remember a guy who knows everyone?, yes now it is high time to tap that landscape. It is important to identify and capture influencers to add some localized marketing stent into your campaign. So, finding people with high social clout is important. Every arrangement should be made to identify and lure those people into store and understand their perspective. There are a lot of channels that could help find those high clout individuals. Foursquare, Yelp, Klout, Facebook could provide information that could help identify such people. So, giving them some gratification for their effort to visit and endorse store could have more ROI (return on investment) impact as compared to 30 sec advertisement on brand awareness on national television networks.
5. Incentivize prospects for increasing your reach:
Once a strategy is placed to connect with visitors and other prospects, many used cases should be introduced to promote sharing. Sharing is what increases your outreach. Increasing outreach within social circle has some trust build into it. So, effort should be made to encourage sharing. Providing an incentive has always worked great in this area. It shows that you respect their time and effort and would like to compensate for their trust in the brand. Campaign such as coupon for tweet or like should be introduced and once any satisfied customer is observed, opportunity should be provided to share their experience. Having a strategy in compensating people in increasing outreach could help in making any campaign viral within community.
So, social media strategy for retail brick-mortar stores is not the solo play with social media channels, but a rounded strategy to build an ecosystem around social identification, social awareness, community development and community building. Sounds fun? Let me know of any other ideas I forgot to mix or mention.
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