Social Media and Inbound Marketing with your coffee
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Wed, Mar 31, 2010
Social Media and Inbound Marketing can work for you and your business. But many people are still struggle with the idea of how it can work for their business. It is true that the majority of businesses work offline through face to face interaction. And I think that is what people struggle with. They can't see how by increasing their presence and profile online this turns into business offline. So how can we have social media and inbound marketing with your morning coffee.
While there is no confusion that social media and inbound marketing is about engaging but how can we show that this does actually generate an increase in revenue. I came across such a study in the Harvard Business Review where they preformed a Facebook experiment. They wanted to study how much business is generated or customers influenced when they launch a facebook fan page to attract fans and engage them with messages and offers. A true social media and inbound marketing experiment.
For their social media and inbound marketing test they took a traditional offline bakery come coffee shop. They first started by asking their current customer base to complete a survey about their shopping habits from this have them the baseline to work from. With that completed they launched a facebook fan page and asked their existing clients to become fans. Over the few next weeks and months they updated their facebook page with pictures of goodies, current promotions, reviews and information on their staff. Then at the end of three months they recompleted the survey to see the impacting of social media and inbound marketing.
Did their new venture into social media and inbound marketing deliver any real business benefits. As it turned out those who became Facebook fans did not spend more on their visits but increased the numbers of store visits since becoming fans on facebook. They found that their fans went into the store 20% more than the non fans, generated the highest share of dine out dollars and most likely to recommend the store to their friends. So it appears that social media and inbound marketing can have a positive effect.
So what is the take away from this social media and inbound marketing experiment? For me is that worst case your fans will recommend your business to their friends or family and who could not do without that marketing. Recently I was speaking to a restaurant owner who explained that for them a regular customer is someone that comes 4 or 5 times a year. If we go by the results above that would increase the number coming to his restaurant to 5 to 6 times a year and once again who would turn away that traffic. So it appears regardless if your business in online or offline there are benefits for you to start engaging in social media and inbound marketing.
To help you along, SiliconCloud are running a free webinar next week on "Social Media for Newbies" where we will go through how and why to use social media for your business. Click here to register for your place. "Social Media for Newbies"