Viral Ad Network

Following on from “Making Friends”, this post gives some advice on changing those friends to customers…

So you have a following of people who have engaged with your brand and are happy to listen to what you are saying and enter conversation. The next step is to try and develop these relationships to sales. How to nudge your brands digital following (e.g. Facebook fans, Twitter followers) from friends to customers is currently the million dollar question in social media.

The best approach depends a lot on the sort of brand you are, and the purchase frequency of your customers. For example, for luxury brands, such as car firms, even committed customers may very rarely be in a position to actually buy your product. In this case, you can either try and increase the frequency of purchase or make sure you are front of mind when people are looking to buy.

- How can you increase purchase frequency?

Much like sending out an email newsletter, adding prompts to your Facebook page is one way of increasing purchase frequency. For example, Crooked Tongues (an online trainer store) will announce each new product that comes in, tempting their fans to increase their purchase frequency (trust me, my empty wallet proves this works!). They also do this on Twitter, mixing industry news with their own shop launches.

- How do you stay front of mind

A good way to stay front of mind is to keep creating interesting content for your fans. Try to not make all of your communication sales based – mix it up with entertainment like viral videos, alongside opinion and discussion on your industry. This will enable you to connect more with your followers as it shows more of a passion for your industry and not just for your sales.

There are also other ways of bridging the gap between Friendship and purchase, for example Easyjet now let you buy flights straight from their Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/#!/easyJet), cutting down the number of steps between Facebook (a space for friendship) and point of sale.

A good rule is, make it as easy as you can for your friends to become your customers – keep them entertained so they remain your friends, then make it easy to purchase your product/service and easy to justify that purchase.

Using social media as a channel for your marketing is almost a given for most brands now; video advertising on Youtube, customer service via Twitter, branded Facebook pages, etc.

I’d like to show how social media can complement Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing strategy. I’ll break it into the same four stages of:

1. Making friends
2. Changing your friends to customers
3. Maintaining customers
4. Changing customers to brand ambassadors

image by TracerBullet999 on Flickr

Part 1 – Making Friends

At the Viral Ad Network, we often find ourselves helping brands try to make friends. Making friends can be quite literal and measurable (i.e. adding to a brand’s Twitter / Facebook following) or can be a more abstract objective to develop a willingness in someone to engage with a brand’s content and conversation.

Much like in real (offline) life you need a reason to engage with people you don’t know. But first you need to decide who you are trying to reach?

You should research and determine what groups and niches are valuable to your brand. Where do you want to interact with them? Do they have any awareness or preconceptions that you need to consider? You can monitor the buzz around your brand using online tools.

Next, you must consider what is it that you want from this group?

You are (at this stage) just trying to make friends with your target audience, however you must think about your long term relationship. How do you intend to change these new friends to customers? What sort of voice is your brand going to use with these friends? There’s no use in approaching people on a comical, lighthearted level, only to ditch that as soon as you have their attention and ‘friendship’.

So, what does your marketing offer them?

You need to have a reason for people to listen or participate in your social marketing campaign. Your brilliantly shot and well edited infomercial may sum up your brand perfectly but if people don’t want to seek out this info, it will not be of interest to them. For them to engage with you there needs to be some benefit to them for listening. This can be in many forms:

- You can entertain them (for example, creating a viral video) ;
- You can solve a problem they have (for example the excellent myskystatus.com); or,
- You can offer them something of value (like Groupon).

You should also consider how will you quantify success of your campaign? Are you after a number of views on YouTube, Twitter followers, Facebook likes or another metric?