How Businesses Need to Leverage Facebook’s One Billion Users
Recent discussions with customers and prospects have consistently involved utilizing social media to decrease marketing costs and increase ROI (return on investment) on marketing campaigns.
Can you relate to some of these comments?
“We’ve built a Facebook fan page, and have increased Facebook likes, but it is not generating business.”
“Facebook sponsored ads and Facebook banner ads have increased Facebook reach but there is no real opportunity to consistently convert to paying customers. “
“We keep posting great content on our Fan page and it has increased Facebook fans, but how can we really exploit the power of social media to not just engage with our audience, but to influence and inspire action.”
The majority of the businesses we spoke with have shared that most of their online and offline marketing is focused on lead generation and that more than 88% of sales are conducted offline. So if we take a closer look, much of their Facebook efforts are purely focused on gaining users, analyzing user preferences to create engaging content that eventually increases lead generation. The critical point, where we see businesses fail, is creating that compelling element to influence users to take their action offline.
So the question that begs is…Why focus on driving customers offline?
Benefits of O2O
We understand people and we know technology, especially when it comes to mobile. Where most businesses may think of the mobile device as an extension of digital channel promotions, we know the real power is the ability to connect people from the online world and to influence offline behavior.
Creating an opportunity offline allows your company to expedite closing of a transaction (i.e. immediate answers to customers questions, highlight timed offers, etc.). The additional benefit of offline transactions is the opportunity to influence customer spending beyond what was originally planned.
Per thesocialskinny.com’s aggregated social media stats article for 2012, “64% of consumers will research online before buying offline” and “55% of consumers prefer offline commerce”. What we found as the real benefit to businesses to increase offline (in-person) sales is that “45% of people bought more when in the store”.*
This can apply to businesses offering both projects and/or services. For example, if you connect, via online recommendations, with a person in wealth management they will help to put your money in a place through standard investment portfolio offerings. Through conversations, they find out that you are also interested in being part of a business venture but you don’t want to start it up yourself. The wealth manager can then sell you on becoming an investor of a local business with the potential of greater returns.
Should your marketing focus on bringing your online customers offline? Well, only you can answer that question. But we know the common focus for many marketing campaigns is to generate opportunities that expedite a decision while making it completely convenient for the consumer. And today, the ability to provide customer convenience along with speed to market has been proven when utilizing both social media and mobile technologies.
“91% of all mobile internet use is “social” related.”*
With PassKit’s Facebook Connect Solution, you can 1) utilize Social Media channels, like Facebook to drive customers online to offline actions and 2) through delivery of passes via PassKit, the speed of delivery of marketing to your customer is achieved.
(Click infographic to enlarge) (Click to download PDF)
Driving O2O via Facebook Connect
While many businesses will use a social media channel like Facebook as a customer relationship management tool, we focus on using Apple Passbook passes to create more effective opportunities to motivate consistent offline behavior. Therefore, when we created the Passkit Facebook Connect solution we had two goals in mind:
- To allow businesses to efficiently acquire new customers from Facebook’s One billion users without having to create a Fan Page, acquire likes, etc.
- To create opportunities to drive customers to transact offline.
How do we achieve goal number 1?
Instead of using Facebook as the tool to manage customers, we use Passkit plus Facebook information to quickly create personalized Passbook membership passes. This then becomes a loyalty program, which has been a proven method of motivating customers to offline behavior.
But, the issues of most loyalty programs these days are broad promotions and lack of in-depth customer insights to create marketing campaigns that make sense. Take a look at many of the loyalty programs in place today. The essence of these programs is to increase advocacy of its customers by rewarding behavior with something of value (reward points, special offers and promotions). What happens with many of these programs is a short-lived relationship for these reasons:
- Physical cards – out of sight out of mind
- Referrals – no motivation to refer, or may forget
- Emails – may not read or take immediate action
- Discount Focused – customers only take action when it is value savings
- Relationship Management Tool (website, customer service): not convenient to see what benefits apply to customer
From our experience, we find the easiest way to create stronger and longer-term relationships with a customer is to inspire a customer journey that is completely seamless and convenient to the customer. Put simply, it has to be extremely easy to transact with your business.
With PassKit, our technology is not only focused on complete convenience to our customers, but it also extends to their customers through the delivery of a pass using PassKit. So to overcome many current loyalty program inefficiencies, creating a very convenient to access electronic loyalty card was the solution.
At this point, we have only defined the tool of choice. So how do you leverage Facebook?
With Passkit’s Facebook Connect Solution, a user gets an invite to join your loyalty program. How this message is delivered can happen using multiple distribution methods, but essentially the user is taken to your branded mobile landing page. The user accepts via Facebook Connect, which then automatically posts to the user’s wall:
“I just joined XXX Loyalty Program, I get $30 when I refer three friends. ”
The purpose of this post is that it provides a really simple and convenient way to automate and increase user acquisition through “Member Get Member” promotions. How do we know this works?
When we look at any social community online or offline, the true value is the inherent nature of “trust” that is built within each user and their network of friends. It is this trust that has proven time and time again to be what inspires viral activity that breaches a reach of users beyond your current customer base.
“90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know.”*
So when a user sees a family or friend join the loyalty program, there is this sense of instant credibility and if they join they will enjoy the same benefits. This method has been proven everyday on Facebook. How many times have you liked a page or post because you saw another friend has done the same?
With this single action of the user accepting via Facebook Connect, you have now access to Facebook’s One billion users! Well, of course that depends on viral ability of your member get member promotions. But, as you can see, we didn’t even mention anything about building a Fan Page or promoting via paid advertisements.
Is that all there is to it? If you remember we also mentioned the second goal of creating opportunities via Passkit and driving customers offline, which is where the true value to any business’ bottom line.
C2C The Real Value to Bottom Line Results
At PassKit, our mission is to speed up concept to cash (C2C). What this means is that the faster you can move from an idea or trend (concept) and convert this into buying (cash), your business will thrive, leaving your competitors behind.
Think about the last marketing campaign your company launched. You do your analysis, create a concept, execute, promote and track. How long did this usually take, even for a simple campaign? How effective was the campaign to incite customer action? What most businesses want to achieve is to take this whole process and to do it as fast as possible.
Going back to our Facebook Connect Solution, the only thing that was achieved was to automate and inspire user acquisition through member get member promotions. Once a user has your loyalty pass, the idea is that you no longer have to live within the constraints of Facebook to market to your customer. You’ve got a direct line to creating an intimate relationship with that user’s one friend that has no social profile, their mobile phone. Essentially, with this loyalty pass, your brand now lives on their phone.
At this point what do you know about every new loyalty member? Remember when we mentioned that one click via Facebook Connect to accept your loyalty program invitation? Did you know that by that one click, the user has agreed to share their public Facebook information? With this information, you now have the ability to understand your new member via their online-defined preferences and create marketing campaigns that are more targeted and relevant to each user.
For example, a coffee shop that wants to drive traffic during slow hours of 2-4pm can create a campaign to target working singles to take a quick afternoon break from work and mingle over a free coffee.
Sounds simple? Well here is where you can really put your creative marketing hats on to really drive more effective re-targeting campaigns.
After some time, you can analyze your loyalty member’s redemption behavior to gain increased insight. For example, tying the loyalty customer to your point of sales system to create historical buying habits. You can also tie the user into your CRM system to track online behavior through email or social media marketing.
The point is that when you tie together user preferences, online behavior and offline actionable insights a business can take the information today and execute a more relevant re-targeted campaign that is delivered within minutes using PassKit. There is no need to go through a complex marketing process to deliver a simple custom message.
“We see that you live near our coffee shop and you love our pastries, come by today and try our new blueberry scones.”
The acquisition of each user’s actionable insights is what allows a business to quickly create a very effective, custom marketing campaign that can be rapidly delivered to the consumer for immediate action. The value for the customer is complete convenience to connect with the business and experience a very personalized, high level of service.
Getting Back to Basics
Overall, the business objectives of PassKit’s Facebook Connect Solution is to decrease marketing costs, increase brand visibility beyond Facebook and drive customers to take action online and offline. Your direct line to the user is now through your branded pass that now lives on their mobile phone.
Here is a note of caution, once a user allows you access to their mobile phone, treat that relationship with the utmost respect. Maintain communications to create real value to the user.
So the initiative for smart businesses today is to access the instant credibility with a user’s trusted Facebook network AND their phone. Once trust and advocacy of your company is gained, it is really in the control of the business to drive smart, creative, targeted and relevant marketing campaigns.
It’s time to get back to basics. Use technology to get to know your customers, more than they realize, and find better ways to build stronger relationships that matter to your customer.
Click image below to test-drive our Facebook Connect Solution. (Access via mobile device)
Click above image to test-drive our Facebook Connect Solution. (Access via mobile device)
{Question} Do you agree that electronic loyalty passes can increase consumer offline behavior? Tell us what you think. Leave a reply.
*Sources: allfacebook.com, mashable.com, mediabistro.com, thesocialskinny.com, socialtimes.com, upstreamcommerce.com
