industry paul sherratt Social Media in the
Paul Sherratt of Solutions for Sport continues his series on business development for the sports trade
Why social media? Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to sell a pallet of tennis balls. a) You could offer them in the checkout as an impulse purchase, but the internet is full of tennis balls and how can you get attention for yours?
b) You could run some Google ads. But with costs per click as high as £1.40, its tough to justify the spend on such a low price/margin product.
c) You could try getting your website to the top of Google for the phrase ‘tennis balls’ but it'll take a long time and, unless you're really committed, you might not get there.
So what about using social media? Why not contact a popular blogger and offer him/her a dozen tennis balls as a prize for a reader competition? Get people to guess how many tennis balls are in, for example, a car! Take the key elements of social media
– liking, sharing and following – and piggy back the blogger’s authority and visibility to get attention for the seller. As entrants begin to like and share the competition post, the word is spread and momentum builds. Friends of friends start to get involved, retweets appear on Twitter and the audience grows. I recently read of a similar approach with a competition to win some glass jars (with a retail price of £12.50!) and within one week the competition had attracted a whopping 3,000 entries and the client grew their Twitter following by 20% generating hundreds of Tweets and Retweets along the way! To generate such a buzz for such a low cost is virtually impossible in any other marketing channel, hence the appeal of social media to any business should not be underestimated.
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How big is the opportunity? We have all read how big the audiences are for the various social media platforms, with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram followers in the hundreds of millions. However, perhaps the most exciting opportunity is not the total number of users, but more the number of users in each and every little niche area. I have written many times before
regarding the importance of exploiting your business niche and finding your point of difference from the competition. The strength of using social media is that it can further enhance this approach and be used to your advantage. Perhaps the biggest mistake we see within the social media world is the ‘scatter gun approach’. Whilst content is indeed king, to simply blindly post content with no wider strategy is a simple and common mistake. By all means have some fun with social media, however if you follow a simple process for your business you will find that the results will have a very measurable impact on the bottom line…
1. Set your campaign goals The first step of any social media campaign is to plan your goal. What do you want to achieve? It is key to have a clear map of your objectives and a clear timescale. Make sure your goals are measurable, for example: • Gaining insight into your community/customer. You can run all the customer surveys you want, but some of the most interesting and progressive market research can be found within the social communities where your customers interact, share information and make recommendations. Tapping into the streams of dialog is a great start to engagement and social participation with your brand.
• Building brand visibility and authority. Conversations are happening online about your brand, with or without you. You might as well participate and do so in a way that pays close attention to the interests and needs of your customers – providing them with information and interactions that further support your brand.
• Influencing and promoting products/services. Providing information to educate customers about your products in the formats and media types they prefer can go a long way towards building the kind of buzz that results in new business. By promotion, I mean advertising on social media sites.
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