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Apr

How This Travel Agency Got 12,000 Fans In 30 Days (Case Study)

Any marketer understands that in order to sell things to people, you need to have people to sell things to.

They had a brilliant Facebook page with plenty of user interaction, and a fan base of around about 4000 fans. They were growing steadily.

However, the challenge with Facebook is, the conversations you can have with people are a little limited:

It is difficult to track your conversion rates
There are strict rules about what you can and cannot publish as marketing material
You cannot email, phone, or SMS market to your fan base
You are limited to interacting on your Facebook wall, and sometimes via the messaging features.

An ideal strategy for this particular company was to encourage their fan base into a platform where they could not only test and measure their marketing interactions, and track the real metrics of their performance, but they could have more personal and meaningful interactions with them.

The challenge: MORE FANS! (Or if you think about this from a marketing perspective, more leads)

The solution: Run a contest gathering the data of existing Facebook fans, and encourage new fans!

The results: Just over 12,000 new fans in 30 days. See the screen shot taken from the Binkd platform.

Why It Worked

There are some factors that play into why this contest ran as well as it did for this particular brand.

Firstly, the incentive was a trip for two to Rio. A very powerful, and compelling prize. So powerful in fact, it actually inspired some entrants to attempt to cheat and game the system. Something that the promoter and Binkd had to carefully monitor throughout the contest. Binkd successfully removed all “gamed” entries – leaving only valuable fan data, and put in place more security precautions to prevent it from happening again.

Secondly, was how the contest was structured – the contest was a photo contests, where entrants uploaded a photo, then got their friends to vote on their photo. We “Fangated” the contest at two points; in order to enter, you had to like the promoter’s Facebook page. In order to vote, you had to like the page.

The promoter was clear in teaching people how to share their entries, and as you can see in the screen shot below, they encouraged sharing both on Twitter and Facebook.

How This Could Be Powerful For Your Brand

While you might not achieve 12,000 fans (you might!! and awesome if you do!) the REAL power in this particular strategy is the marketing data you can collect on your fan base and the value of each follower gained.

You need to work out what your fans are worth to you – careful testing and measuring of your sales sources is invaluable here. There are plenty of analytics programs that allow you to test and measure where your sales leads are coming from. It’s unlikely you’ll see a direct “Facebook sent this fan to purchase” result, but tracking back through your funnel will give you a good idea of how many of your Facebook fans are visiting your monetized site.

As an example, if each follower is on average worth 50 cents per month to you, and you were successful enough to attract 12,000 new fans into your lead funnel, this example would equate to over $6,000 per month extra in revenue. An interesting study by Syncapse found that the average Facebook Fan is worth approximately $3.60. The value of your fanbase will vary greatly, for example depending on how you interact with them, how well converting your monetized site is, and what your product is.

You also have the ability to not only collect the entry details (Name, email, phone number) but you can actually collect your fan base’s Facebook likes and interests. This information is incredibly powerful for a business to utilise in their marketing.

There Are Riches In Niches!

As you collect data on your customers, you’ll begin to notice niches within your database – giving you the ability to personalise your marketing campaings and interactions much more deeply – treating them as people rather than subscribers. As we move further and further into the field of mobile marketing, where we are broadcasting directly to the individual, it’s incredibly important to speak to that person, simply as a person. And the only way you can get to know your customers is to collect great data!

The more data you collect on your prospective customers, the more you can track in terms of your conversion rates. Ultimately, you create a marketing strategy that performs better, helps you engage directly with your customer base, and positions you as a company that cares.

How To Get Started Running Your Own Campaign

The contest was run as a Photo Contest on the Binkd Promotion Platform.

Binkd has put together a bunch of resources to help you get started running your own social media, including our get-started guide here.

Photo credit: DeclanTM

Jan

Creating A Customer Reward Program That Actually Inspires Customer Loyalty.

Categories: Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, Systems

Tags: customer reward programs

Comments: 1

According to research, customers have between 10-15 loyalty cards or programs that they’re participating in. This signifies that they are happy to participate in discount and incentive programs but not happy to commit to brand loyalty.

So how can brands encourage and incentivize and promote customer loyalty?

The answer lies in a careful mix of three elements:

Buyer Experience
Compelling Incentives
Promotion of the loyalty program

Buyer Experience

Much more than customer service, buyer experience is the story of your store, from the second your customer enters the store until well after they have left happy.

Creating an amazing buyer experience begins with creating a vision for your company. A brand story, but so much more. Your company vision must encompass the big dreams of the brand, the passions, the dreams, and what it aspires to come.

If your brand doesn’t have a vision, you’ve got problems right there.

All of your team need to be enrolled and inspired by the vision – setting the company rules of the game around vision will mean that all of a sudden, your business is like a football field, and you are the coach, encouraging your team to kick goals in the right direction. Everyone knows their role, everyone knows the objective, and everyone is inspired when they walk out on the field to play.

A vision is not enough, to create amazing customer experiences, you need to define what that looks like, then deliver it.

Begin with the basics:

Impeccable, polite, friendly service.
Immaculate cleanliness – not just in the food industry
And an amazing product range, that does what it says it’s meant to.

Then build in the wow factors. These will vary from company to company – but you might be the café with powerpoints as well as free WiFi for laptop usage, or the real estate agent who has a range of services to assist a vendor to get their house up to immaculate sales standard.

The little above and beyond things that set you apart from the crowd are what inspire loyalty. But they’re meaningless and useless if you don’t get the basics right first.

Carefully document and systemize the minimum standard of service, and ensure that everyone in your team is trained and enthusiastic to deliver them.

The second step in creating a customer loyalty program is having compelling incentives.

10% off just doesn’t cut it anymore. Everyone is doing it. No one is interested in a free cup of coffee after they have purchased 10 cups.

Compelling incentives have to give your customers a feeling of exclusivity. A few ideas might be:

VIP Products only available to loyalty club subscribers
Closed door sales
Store vouchers and joint venture partner vouchers
Exclusive, significant, member discounts

One café I saw get this almost right was San Churros – they had the standard buy 10 coffees, get one free loyalty program – but on completion of the program they upgraded you into the “order of the churro” where you received a special looking plastic membership card, and then received 10% off every order you placed with them from then on.

This was fantastic, but unfortunately they missed out on the next magic ingredient of customer loyalty:

Promoting the incentives program.

The basic steps in promoting a customer loyalty program are simple – have your team ask people if they’ve signed up for the program. Every customer should be prompted every time. Don’t rely on customers to remember their loyalty card – they won’t until you condition them to do so!

Taking it to the next level is where the magic begins, this is where we incorporate social media into the mix, the use of applications, and check ins, and social proof.

If you digitize your program, you have the ability to:

Have your loyal customers check in at your location when they make a purchase
Share their experiences and check ins on Social Media
Get rewarded for performing certain tasks – such as interacting on your Social Media Platforms, bringing friends with them to your store, purchasing certain products, participating in certain promotions….
Connect and converse with all of these customers via SMS marketing, or Email Marketing, or Phone Marketing – because you’ll have all of those details at your finger tips
Track buyer behavior and segment buyer groups within your customers – allowing you to take your incentives program to a whole new level, based on exactly what your customers are interested in.

The best news is, setting up a digitized customer loyalty program is both simple and achievable. Binkd has software that can turn your customer loyalty program into a program that actually inspires customer loyalty – and builds your sales and marketing.

Binkd can handle everything from the software, through to providing you with an app to completely digitise your reward program, or a nifty looking card for your customers to scan each time they attend your outlet.

The secret is in the systems and the follow up – once you’ve got your basic customer experience in place. Create the experience, deliver the service, systemise the program, then take it to the next level to add value to both you, and your customer.

Photo credit: Nick J Webb

Feb

5 Creative Ways To Use QR Codes

Categories: Customer Service, Marketing, Sales, Software

Tags: Mobile Marketing, QR Codes

Comments: No

QR or Quick Response codes are like advanced bar codes. They allow your customers to scan your code with their mobile phone, and get prompted to take action.

Here are 7 awesome ways you can implement QR codes into your marketing strategy:

1 : On Your Business Cards – use your QR code as space saver. We all have so many ways to get in contact with one another these days, a QR code can give your customers your Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Website, etc pages, without taking up valuable business card real estate. Plus, a customer who has taken action to find you, is a much warmer customer.

2: On Product Packaging: This is a particularly awesome strategy for wine manufacturers, or coffee manufacturers… picture this: You’ve just tasted the most delicious wine, you scan the QR code on the bottle (or better yet, the restaurant menu!) it takes you to the webpage of the wine, with order codes, specials, and opt ins – or specials for ordering right there and then!

3: Window Displays: QR codes could SMS your customers a discount code, or very time limited offer to get them off the street and into your retail store NOW!

4: Direct Mail Pieces: QR codes can make phone calls, send SMS’s, direct traffic to landing pages, print campaigns that are easy as pie for a reader to take response! Imagine flyers or letters that directly engage your prospect to take action, eliminating steps, taking them directly to your buy page.

5: Promotional Products: QR your coffee mugs, t-shirts, coasters, compendiums – all your free giveaway stuff!! Because QR codes have a bit of flexibility in that they can be read with a 30% error rate, you can QR Clothing that can be read while it’s being read. Imagine sending out a free coffee mug to all of your inactive customers, with a funky QR design taking them to an offer page, reactivating their custom.

Leverage the power of quick response and get your customers engaging with you!

Photo Credit: Chris Breikss

Jan

What Are QR Codes And How Do They Effect Your Business

Categories: Marketing

Tags: Mobile Marketing, QR Codes

Comments: No

There’s a lot of buzz about the use of QR codes in marketing, but to the uninitiated, what are QR codes, and why are they so exciting?

QR Codes aren’t a new technology, in fact bar codes (essentially what a QR Code is) have been around for the past few decades. QR Codes were developed in 1994, as a means to track transport.

QR codes are simply a bar code that can be read by the new generation of smart phones. With people relying more heavily than ever on their smart phones to organise their day to day life, and interact with their friends and associates, QR codes allow marketers to leverage this trend. QR codes allow marketers to incite a direct response from their target audience; for example:

Send an SMS to opt in
Visit a URL
Send a message
Send a phone number

QR Codes look like a little square black and white picture, when scanned with a QR Code Reader app, those little black and white squiggles translate into information. For example, this code is the hyperlink to the Binkd (Give it a try!!) Binkd QR Code

So what do QR Codes mean for marketers?

Already businesses are using giant QR Codes on billboards to invoke interactivity with their customers. It’s interactive marketing – potential clients scan the code, and are prompted to take action, i.e. visit a web address, receive a push SMS, subscribe to an email list.

Got extra information you want to include in a hard copy newsletter – easy, include a QR code. Want people to interact with your website via your business card? Easy, insert a QR code directing them there (Better yet, segment your business cards with different codes for different networking ventures - QR codes allow you to track where your site visitors are coming from)

You can use QR codes in your email signatures, on your blog posts, on your print advertising – the possibilities are endless.

Want to have a play and start generating your own QR Codes? Check out http://qr.binkd.com/

Photo credit: gwire

Oct

How Turning Off Your Computer Can Help Your Marketing

Categories: Marketing

Comments: 1

As business has become more and more automated, it has also become less personal. Technology has made us extraordinarily lazy, relying on the lightning speed of technology to handle the interactions we have with our clients.

Social media hasn’t even forced our hand in this area. For a medium that is meant to encourage social activity, we are spending more and more time behind computers and less time engaging with real people.

Key players are realising that as the Internet becomes vast and competition more rampant it is now more than ever before that relationships are the key to sustainable business.

Delivering relationship marketing in the online world involves us taking a step back technologically. It involves us recognising the people on our list as people – not as digital subscribers. How many of us know our list on a personal level? How many of us follow up and follow through with personalised customer service…?

Human beings are social creatures. We thrive on interaction. The current trend of isolation by the Internet will be short lived. As we ‘re physiologically designed to coexist in groups. The current trends and popularity of offline interactivity such as Foursquare and Facebook Places is indicative of how we’re so dependent on connection.

As technology advacnces at the rate of knots we can look back to traditional sales and marketing practises to provide the cornerstone of our digital interactions.

Touch base with your list offline, show them you’re a real person:

Phone Calls
Letters
Direct mail.

And online by:

Personal emails and,
Personal Social Media interactions.

The power is in the follow up and the interaction. A personal touch will differentiate you from the lazier players in your marketplace. The added bonus is, you’ll feel better for it too

Photo by: Milica Sekulic

Oct

5 Networking Strategies To Rocket You To Success

Categories: Marketing

Tags: brand equity, networking, personal branding

Comments: No

If your networking is not working chances are there’s a very good reason why. If you’ve been following my articles here on Binkd (and I hope you have *cough cough*) you would have guessed by now that there’s a few things I’m very passionate about (to the point of ranting sometimes)

With all of the technology available to us as marketers and business owners, it’s really easy to get lazy and forget that the only way to successfully build a business is to focus on people.

So let me share with you my five (yes 5) powerful strategies to use your networking events to build your business and your personal brand.

1. Give Value First – everyone at a networking event goes there with the intention of self promotion and selling. Not surprisingly this approach simply doesn’t work. A strategy I like to employ is to help people to find contacts for their businesses. I don’t ask for anything in return, but I position myself as a resource, and 9 times out of 10, they know someone who can help me.

2. Position Yourself As An Expert – if your event has a speaker, be sure that that speaker is you. Provide a valuable workshop, and regardless of whether you’re allowed to sell from stage or not, you’ll be positioning yourself as an expert in your field. Brilliant for personal branding and building brand equity ( as distinct from building your brand through wasted advertising) You’ll have broken the ice with the whole room, allowing you to make more valuable connections, who now have insight into your expertise.

3. Nail Your Infomercial You can work your UVP into infomercial. Your 30 second infomercial or introduction at the networking event is more often than not the only first impression you get to make. Be confident, be humorous (if appropriate) but most of all give value and be memorable!

4. Be Memorable my gimmick a few years a go was introducing myself by singing ”Happy Thursday”… it became a bit of an ongoing joke, where people would then call me on a Thursday simply to say Happy Thursday to me. Lame? Yes, rapport building? Definitely!

5. Be Confident people love a leader. Be confident in yourself, in your presentation and as you connect others. Shake hands firmly, dress well, own yourself and be yourself. You’ll naturally attract people to you, and repel those who aren’t going to work with you. Building a personal brand is all about being yourself, and owning that image.

BONUS STRATEGY: And Yes, you can sell. Don’t be suckered in by the advice that you can’t sell at a networking event…. People LOVE to buy, and if you have a product that will genuinely address a problem they currently have – by all means sell it to them! I’m of the opinion that if you aim to build a long-term business relationship with the people you’re selling to, a networking function can be an awesome way to start that relationship. Particularly if you’ve been the presenter.

Photo by: AndyRob

Sep

Why Brand Equity Is So Misunderstood & How To Get It Right

Categories: Marketing

Comments: No

What Is Brand Equity?

Who the heck are you? And why should I care?

If you can’t answer those two questions, then your brand needs a makeover.

Put very simply, brand equity is the value of your personal or company brand! It’s defined by the quality and quantity of people who know you.

It’s how trustworthy you are, it’s how excited people are to be associated with you, and it’s how influential you are. It’s also about how engaged you are with your following, and how interactive they are with you. Brand equity is extremely important in your business because it gives you leverage – and we’ll chat about that in detail in a bit.

What Is NOT Brand Equity

Don’t buy into to the marketing agency pitch that an ad campaign is successful because it built you “brand equity” – this translates to “We spent a whole heap of your cash but haven’t given you anything worth a dime for your business”

You can build your brand equity without investing thousands into ad campaigns that don’t make you sales – infact, ad campaigns that aren’t making you sales are just wasting your money!

Why Is Brand Equity So Damned Important To Your Business

Well, for starters, brand equity as a measure for how influential you are, also pertains to how persuasive you are – which directly results in how salesworthy you and your product are. Without brand equity, sales become a challenge. A big challenge!! Ask any sales person there’s nothing less fun than calling a cold list…

Your brand equity also gives you leverage as you launch other products and sub-brands. People who know and trust you already will be more inclined to invest in your product simply based on your reputation.

If you were offered a Tony Robbins coaching session, or a coaching session with John Doe – both were the same price, offered the exact same features, which would you be more likely to choose? Tony Robbins I assume !!

The thing about marketing is…

It’s all about people and relationships. Frankly, that’s about as complicated as marketing gets. If you have a loyal following of people who trust what you have to say, and like you as a person, when you offer these people amazing value, they’ll buy with very little persuasion.

So what is your brand, how do people see you and how are you improving it?

Photo by: europeanpeoplesparty

Sep

How To Kill Your Email Campaign In 7 Easy Steps

Categories: Marketing

Comments: No

Obviously this post is rather tongue in cheek – I could call them the 7 Deadly Email Sins… I would have thought that most of these points would be common sense, yet at least once a day, an email doing exactly what these points advise you don’t arrives in my inbox!

Step 1 - Buy a massive list. Don’t bother growing your list organically, bypass all that fuss and just buy one. After all there has to be someone on the list who doesn’t mind being spammed.

Step 2 -Ignore all unsubscribe features, and continue to email your list on a three times a day basis. If they do unsubscribe, be really quick to add them back onto the list – just in case they accidentally went through the opt out process.

Step 3 - In the emails, make spelling mistakes, have broken links and very large pictures. Everyone loves to wait – anticipation increases the fun of emails arriving. Spell check is a time waster.

Step 4 -Don’t bother using an email marketing program, they’re for wusses – just send your email using outlook. You don’t even need to use the BCC field, people like to feel like they`re not alone, they’ll love seeing all the other people on your list’s details…

Step 5 – Go to a networking event, raid the business card box and hurry home and add all the addresses to your list. Don’t bother meeting or talking to the good folks, that’s a waste of time. Certainly don’t bother calling them for permission to add them to the list – don’t add any value at all!

Step 6 – When you do send an email, be sure it’s all about you, lots of selling, lots of flashing graphics selling don’t worry about adding value or interesting content, that’s a waste of selling space.

Step 7 – Once you’ve grown your list to something saleable, be sure to rent it out to other people to send their valueless rubbish to. After all, you might as well monetize your list!

Photo by: rovlls

Sep

Social Media Is Killing Your Business

Categories: Social Media

Comments: 6

Ask any micro business owner what their marketing strategy is, and I can guarantee 9 times out of 10 the answer will be: “We have a Facebook page, and we’re using Google ads”

What this actually means, in most cases is that said micro business owner is spending countless hours talking about themselves on Facebook and wondering why all the traffic they’re paying for from the Google ads isn’t translating to sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of both Facebook and Google advertising, depending on the business and what a business is trying to achieve, but the social media strategy I see employed by so many business owners is doing their business more harm than good.

Here are a few Facebook habits that will buy your business front row tickets to it’s own funeral:

Talking entirely about you all the time.
Visiting other people’s pages and shamelessly self-promoting yourself on their wall
Tagging other businesses in your posts in the name of shameless self promotion
Selling constantly via your posts
Providing mindless, useless, business waffle in your posts.

You see the thing about social media is, it’s meant to be SOCIAL! Which means to use it effectively you really need to be engaging in conversations with your followers. Any social media strategy worth its salt will include an engagement strategy. A plan about the valuable, strategic posts you can publish via social media that actually give value to your fans.

The other massive downside to social media is it makes us lazy. Let’s face it. It’s very easy and quite entertaining to pass off a day of business sitting on Facebook or Twitter “networking” and building connections with people. In fact, I’m sure most of us can guiltily justify this act as a productive day of business.

Here’s the reality check: If you’re not making sales, if your activities aren’t bringing you a return on investment, you’re not in business!!

So how do you get a return on investment in your social media activities?

1. Remember that Marketing is about people and people don’t like being “sold” constantly. In fact, people don’t like being “sold” at all. Build relationships, build rapport. Give Value!

2. Once you’ve established that rapport, solve a problem. If your product is genuinely going to help your fans, then by all means offer them your amazing value by way of a sale! You CAN sell from Social Media, but think of it more of a seduction, where you gently build a relationship, with a long term outcome in mind – not a one night stand.

3. Use Social Media as your Lead Gen – encourage your fans into your opt in product, where you can then encourage them into the next product in your sales funnel.

4. Remember it’s not about you - network with your social network, build relationships, and participate in conversation in other people’s posts. This is the powerful stuff – it’s about personal branding. The more your voice is heard in the conversation (adding value, or entertainment, or what your people are after!) the more you’re positioning yourself as an expert in your field.

5. Social Media Comes After Cash-flow- If you’re spending all of your time ‘working’ your social media strategy for no return on investment- alarm bells should be ringing. While social media is an important part of business, it should be making you money, or at the least not detracting from the activities that are. So, focus on building your strategy to make you cash.

Sep

3 BIG Reasons Your Website Sucks And How To Fix It

Categories: Sales

Comments: No

You’ve invested hundreds, if not thousands into getting online and creating a webstore. It’s launched, and now you’re sitting back waiting for the promised results to start rolling in…

Why isn’t it working?

Most websites I see these days are pretty, but not functional for sales. Selling online presents a unique set of challenges for the vendor – firstly, there`s tangibility – people can`t touch and feel your product. Then there`s trust and rapport – something you can`t establish directly simply through a page. Then there`s the challenge of how easy it is to simply click away from your site to price browse.

Having your online store set up as a pretty marketing piece is not going to provide you with a meaningful income from the store itself. Sure there are other methods you can put in place to generate sales from it, but as a standalone tool, it’s unlikely your store will perform.

Most online stores I see these days are wasting money.

Without a back-end sales process (i.e. telesales) Your website is like a leaky bucket. The leads come in, and fall out the bottom.

The good news is, there are lots of little things you can do to fix your sales funnel on your site (Note I said sales funnel). Every experience your customer has with your website should be a gentle yet compelling nudge towards the Pay Now Button.

1 - Not Investing in things like optimum site design product photographs, shopping cart setup, and simple things like how your customers communicate with you make a BIG difference to your bottom line. These days, you truly get what you pay for, and it’s worth investing in a professional to do it for you once properly, rather than waiting to discover the cheap option really didn’t perform.

2 - The biggest mistake most business owners make, is selecting a web developer who has no background in sales. You see, by no fault of their own, web developers are wonderfully, talented, creative types. They are not sales people. They’re generally not even marketing people. If you want to know more about what your web developer NEEDS to know, check this out.

And yet, they are the people we trust to set up our online sales funnel. It’s kind of like letting your gardener do your plumbing. He might have a general idea of what’s meant to go where, but it’s a job you really ought to entrust to an expert!! (I’m going to tastefully leave out the excrement jokes)

3 - Wasted Space… Possibly the biggest reason that website don’t convert, is the ‘above’ the fold space on the homepage is used for pretty design. Pretty design looks good, but doesn’t sell anything for you. If you have selling space, it should be used to tip your customers into your sales funnel.

Here are a few tips you can action straight away:

Compelling Copy this is where you should invest in your business. You truly get what you pay for with copy writers. If you can’t afford to invest in a copy writer, invest your time into learning how to do it and do it well.

Good Product Images – from all angles of your product. Again, invest in your business, have some great images taken. A good photographer will pay you a million times over for over-coming the tactile issue.

It may seem like a small thing, but you truly should have a picture of yourself on your site. It shows your customers that there IS a real person behind the website, which establishes trust, and helps to establish rapport.

Online sales aren`t rocket science, but you`ve got to give your customer a compelling reason to buy from you! Trust, tangibility, and a gentle push to your shopping cart will get you a long way.

Photo by: Andres Rueda

Blog

Creating A Customer Reward Program That Actually Inspires Customer Loyalty.

Buyer Experience

The second step in creating a customer loyalty program is having compelling incentives.

Promoting the incentives program.

5 Creative Ways To Use QR Codes

What Are QR Codes And How Do They Effect Your Business

How Turning Off Your Computer Can Help Your Marketing

5 Networking Strategies To Rocket You To Success

Why Brand Equity Is So Misunderstood & How To Get It Right

What Is Brand Equity?

What Is NOT Brand Equity

Why Is Brand Equity So Damned Important To Your Business

The thing about marketing is…

How To Kill Your Email Campaign In 7 Easy Steps

3 BIG Reasons Your Website Sucks And How To Fix It

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