With a new wave of social media coming, how are you able to stay on top of your social media, and how can you actively pull customers into your venue by just using your phone?
As Gary Vaynerchuk says, pull the eyes, pull the body, then the wallet.
So use your Instagram to pull those eyes and bodies – and the wallets will follow. Then use incentives that you’ve created in store with your membership and loyalty program to capture them as a customer and their data to remarket towards them.
Using Instagram – bet you’ve heard that one before, right? Perhaps try it in a different way. Having thousands of followers can be important, but in a time of such saturated media – why is your burger snap going to be above and beyond compared to others? One key reason is the recommendation from another person, everyone trusts another person saying “I approve” over a company saying “trust us”. One crucial way to create this recommendation is to go through the location based section on your Instagram search. A big white void as people use hashtags less and less. Choose your city or suburb, and look at the 10 most popular images in the area – those are your influencers. Send them all a direct message and engage with them in a personable manner to draw them in store to promote your venue.
Social media isn’t just a “fad”, it’s made a pretty obvious point that it’s going to stay, so utilise it to gather eyes, but don’t rely on it solely for the bodies or wallets.
Hypothetically, what if Instagram just shut down tomorrow. Pretty unrealistic right? But on a more reasonable scale, if they altered their terms and conditions for how businesses act on their platform that’s their prerogative, and is likely to go through changes. And you need to abide to these new rules regardless of how it works for you. You are on their playing ground, not your own. You need to turn those customers into a mailing list, which can be done in several ways, but capturing them in store will be the most effective and applicable as you have more than a name and email address
One great feature our marketing and loyalty solution Zen Global can do, is a pre-registration form. Use your social media pages to drive people into that pre-registration form, and customise your direct marketing to these new members to drive them in store once they have applied. They can go in the draw to win a voucher or experience at your venue, just fall away from discounts as much as possible as people get addicted to discounts. They don’t get addicted to free.
Use social media to your advantage, and make sure that you don’t annoy your existing loyal customers by rewarding new customers too publicly which is where the direct message function comes in handy. The people that have been visiting your venue for years on end won’t be miffed that they are the ones constantly in your venue, and the new guys on the block will become new customers.