Use Social Media To Drive In-Store Sales

Podcast:

Transcription:

Good morning Internet fans, Ryan Perry here, Simple Biz Support. Today is Wednesday, June 8th, therefore it is Social Media Wednesday, and as usual I have Sarah Giometti with Provaro Marketing. Good morning, Sarah.

Good morning, Ryan. How are you?

RP: I’m doing good, thank you. Both wearing blue again. Maybe I’m just going to make this my every day Wednesday, or my every Wednesday shirt. That way there’s more consistency, ’cause marketing’s all about consistency, right?

SG: Right. Right. And maybe, if we always represent in our Dodger blue, they’ll keep winning.

RP: There you go. We can only hope.

RP: Today we are going to talk about using social media to drive sales to… We’ve got kind of two angles on this. One is if you actually have a brick and mortar store, how can we drive more sales there? But what if you actually sell a product that is in a store, but you don’t really have any brand awareness out there? How can you use social media to drive that, so when people actually see your product in the store they’re like, “Oh, I want to buy that.”

SG: Right. I’ve had a couple of prospects lately that I’ve talked to that have had exactly that problem. It’s not their brick and mortar store, but they didn’t have enough brand recognition that they got into a couple of stores of which would have been really great for them, but nobody knew who they were, they knew nothing about their product, so their product didn’t move off the shelves, and the store’s not going to keep it. So then it’s also, if you’re opening a fairly new brick and mortar, how do you drive people from social media to come into your store? Well, you can use a lot of similar techniques for both of these scenarios. We’ll start with the one that doesn’t have their own brick and mortar. If you’re trying to get into stores, they’re going to, hopefully they’re going to check you out and see if you have social proof, if you’ve got a following online, to see if people actually know who you are beyond, what if your product’s good or not, because again, if nobody knows who you are, the stuff’s not going to move, especially with something that’s not just an inexpensive like, “Well, I’ll give it a shot. I don’t care.” ‘Cause there always is a little bit of brand loyalty that you’ve gotta battle against with shoppers.

RP: Well, and the other thing is, you gotta deal with the buyer. You’ve have to convince the buyer to give up the space in order to put your product in there. And so, if you can come in and go, “Look, I’ve got this community of people who are eager to buy locally versus just buying off my website,” that’s more incentive of, “Okay, let’s put your product on the shelves.”

SG: Right, especially if it’s a local brick and mortar that you’re trying to get into, because once you get in there, yeah, you walk in, you say, “I’ve got this community. They buy from me. They’d love to be able to buy it from a local store.” Once you can convince the buyer to put you on their shelves, you can utilize your social media community to drive them into that particular store. You can, one, promote, “Hey, we’re now in this store.” You can run a special in conjunction with that store to drive people into it. But you’ve also, before you walked in that store, you’ve taught this community about your story, your background, your philosophy, why you do what you do, why your product’s great. Maybe you offered a free sample so people have tried it, if it’s a consumable product, maybe you’ve offered them a free sample so that they could try your product and then you drive them into a store to buy it because they love it. So there’s a lot of ways that, even if it’s your brick and mortar, or somebody else’s brick and mortar, to leverage a community online to drive them into that.

RP: Okay. So I guess the big question then becomes… Well, and I don’t know if we want to get into this per se today, is how do we build that community online, ’cause that’s a whole other story. So we have to assume you’ve already built a community through social media, good content, you should have a good product out there that people are actually interested in. So, now that we have this community, and we want to drive traffic to the store, what are some exact promotions that somebody could actually write down and go, “Okay, I’m going to try this. I’m going to try this.”

SG: Well, yeah, obviously it starts with building that community. And they’ve gotta want your product, but you can do a promotion. Obviously if it’s not your brick and mortar, you need to have their buy-in. You can run a promotion with a coupon, a buy one, get one free, things to get people to walk in the door, or you can… Then the coupon can be in-store only, especially if you’ve got an e-commerce store. You don’t want them to be able to use it online. Then they won’t go into that store. Because part of what you want to do to stay… If a brick and mortar store allows you on their shelves, you want to then prove to them that you’ve leveraged your community to grow sales. And a way to do that is trackable ways, so like a buy one, get one free, or a coupon that’s good for a certain day, running promotions that will put people in the doors, and that way the brick and mortar store can see that it’s actually working, and you’re leveraging your community to… Because if someone walks into a store to buy one thing… I’ve rarely walked out of a store with the one thing I’ve walked in for, and I’m pretty sure most people are the same way. ‘Cause you go, “Oh, yeah.” Especially with consumable products. “Oh yeah, I forgot this. I forgot that.” Even though I walked in for one thing.

SG: I see a comment here, QR code is a great way to do it too. I have a mixed opinion about them.’Cause a lot of people just don’t scan them, or don’t know how to scan them. But it is something that you can utilize, and it’s trackable too. And that’s the key is a way to… Once you drive the traffic into the store, is proving that it was your traffic that you drove to that store.

RP: Right, definitely, and if you’re talking about a local company, if you’re a local company and you’re trying to get in a local business also trying to do some cross-promotion because obviously if you can bring more business to their store, there should be an interest there. And I’m always interested with, when working with clients is, “Who else is in your industry where there’s an overlap where we can actually cross-promote, and through that cross-promotion you’re going to promote our product, we’ll promote your product.” You talk about one of the clients being coffee so what activity can you do around that’s relevant to people that drink coffee that will bring them in? You go back to the… Boy even before social media the old Coke and Pepsi wars. What was that? The 80s or something, where they had the commercials and they had the blind taste test? Coke and Pepsi… “Oh my God I thought it was Pepsi. I can’t believe I picked the wrong one.” That was some early social media proof type of marketing campaigns that could very well work these days and would be great for social media.

SG: Right. You can do it… Have people do it themselves, or doing a taste test, you can promote social media, have an event. People show up to do… We’ll use the coffee one. “Taste our espresso up against another big name espresso that most people just go to out of convenience and see which one tastes better.” So you can still use the social media to drive people to in-person events and in the case of this coffee company by building that following, allowing people to taste it, they’ll hopefully see the difference… If they’re coffee connoisseurs, they’ll see the difference, they’ll enjoy it and then you can tell them where they are, where they can buy it locally ’cause obviously they can buy it online but you want to drive them to the local stores because that’s where the volume is.

RP: Yeah definitely just looking at…

SG: You’re reading the comments…

RP: Yeah, ultrasound, Angie, looks like Angie is saying you can make up a day that supports your store products, like a Coffee Day.

SG: Right, like… I mean there’s… Or you can take advantage, I’m sure there’s a National Day, Coffee Day, because there’s a National Day of everything nowadays, if you just