You don’t know, I don’t know, and more importantly, THEY probably don’t know why they have a twitter account.
Now, its not to say that they shouldn’t use twitter, I can certainly come up with some fantastically delicious ideas to use such a digital channel (and will below), but most likely, the owners of our imaginary Bakery Shop probably have no idea how to even USE their twitter account, or even why they have one.
Lets give them a GREAT reason to tweet their sweets (wow, did I just say that?).
We all know that customer acquisition can be costly and that customer retention is a much easier and much cheaper avenue for consistent revenue generation. For the use-case of the Bakery Shop, the latter is where their twitter strategy will lie.
Lets start by making this simple and identify our hypothetical market problem… Loyal customers only patronize the bakery twice a month. If I can increase their visits by 1 incremental visit every other month, I can realize a 25% increase in revenue from returning customers.
Lets start with the basis of any good emarketing campaign, DATA ACQUISITION. In this scenario, our data acquisition is simplified because we are employing twitter to do our grunt work. So what does that leave? It leaves the VALUE PROPOSITION, what reason do the loyal patrons have to join the Bakery Shops twitter feed?
This is about identifying their purchase motivators… Is it freshness, variety, value, impulse, etc… Once we identify a scope of purchase motivators, we can tailor our tweets to play on those impulses.
We can play on these motivators in a series of compelling messages, “Follow us on twitter and we’ll let you know when the donuts are fresh from the oven”, or “Order your holiday pies by tomorrow and receive $1 off”, or simply, “Our croissants are fresh, warm, and great with a coffee, stop on in today”, etc…
This is, of course, a simplified approach meant to illustrate the alignment of a social media channel with a defined market problem. Finding the proper use for a social media channel inside of your marketing strategy goes beyond just setting up a twitter account and posting a sign in your window or on your website.
Small business (and a lot of large ones as well) have adopted a “Me Too” mentality when it comes to using social media without creating a strategy on how these new channels can be used to drive business.
Now I’m off to the bakery for a chocolate glazed!
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Matthew Kapusta is an experienced Digital Strategist and online marketer, he creates multi-channel digital strategies and tactical execution plans that produce measurable results and maintain a favorable ROI across multiple channels.
