Paid and organic social media marketing strategies improve customer retention by:
- Retaining mindshare (by ensuring your venue holds cut-through in the competitive surrounding landscape)
- Demonstrating the unique culture of your venue (by making sure your venue is considered ‘the place to be’)
- Promoting deals, offers and/or incentives to visit your venue
- Offering a degree of exclusivity to customers
- Demonstrating social proof
Strategy: Retain mindshare
Use organic social media marketing strategies (community management and digital customer service strategies) and paid social media marketing strategies to ensure your venue’s name remains prominent in your target audience’s social feeds. This strategy keeps your venue in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Tactics include posting status updates/tweets, sponsored Facebook posts, Facebook Pay-Per-Click campaigns and Facebook ad retargeting (using Perfect Audience).
Ensure your messages and advertising creative accurately represents your venue’s culture and are accompanied by a call to action (to visit your venue). Use (a) creative and value-adding messages and (b) accurate location targeting strategies to cut through the competitive landscape.
Strategy: Demonstrate your unique venue culture
Your venue’s ‘magnetic’ culture is the force of attraction that draws customers in through your doors. Your most loyal customers are attracted to your core offering (this could be wine, cocktails, beer, sports or dance music etc.) and the unique manner in which you deliver this core offering.
Your core offering + your style of delivery = your unique venue culture
This culture is (a) what sets you apart from the competition and (b) attracts new and existing customers. Use organic community management strategies to demonstrate the culture of your venue. This is done by:
- Sharing and discussing images of your key products and/or brands.
- Sharing and discussing images and information about premium products specific to your offering.
- Sharing images of consumers (famous consumers if possible!) embodying the culture of your venue. An example of this is sharing a picture of a celebrity drinking a brand of Champagne you stock.
- Engaging followers in conversations around the core culture of your venue – ie. discussing wine, beer or a famous DJ.
The power of association:
Use the power of association to align your venue’s culture with respected brands and products in your industry. If new and existing customers see pictures of (a) the cultural devices they wish to be associated with (eg. Expensive Champagne, cocktails, jugs of beer, glow sticks) and (b) other people enjoying these items, they’ll be enticed to visit your venue to paint themselves in the same picture.
Promoting the culture of your venue will galvanise it as ‘the place to be’ for your chosen niche.
Strategy: Offer a degree of exclusivity
Customers will return to any venue where they’re perceived as being superior or hold a degree of exclusivity. Use social media to deliver exclusivity – create a ‘members only’ area or membership card for patrons who frequently check-in, share your venue’s content or frequently mention you in hashtags and comments.
Strategy: Demonstrate social proof
Use the social web to demonstrate social proof in the form of (a) customers enjoying themselves at your venue and (b) positive comments your customers make about your venue. By nature, consumers will be drawn to a popular venue. Use paid and organic social media marketing strategies to demonstrate how popular your venue is. Leverage positive reviews and comments from review sites like Urbanspoon and Yelp.
Strategy: Promote deals, offers and/or incentives to visit your venue
Use paid and organic social media marketing strategies to promote traditional deals, offers and incentives to visit your venue and/or purchase certain products. This retention strategy follows the same dynamics as offline incentives: two-for-ones, refer-a-friend, happy hours etc.
General tactics for increasing retention:
- Conduct ‘high-engagement’ organic social media marketing strategies such as content curation, value-provision and the discussion of common passions in your community. This will increase awareness of your brand to your existing followers and will expose your brand to your followers’ personal networks. Other organic strategies include:
- Share written descriptions of the food, drink and entertainment you offer
- Share images and videos of your latest products or services
- Provide links to website pages demonstrating your products and services
- Post clear written statements declaring how your venue is different than all the others
- Post images of social proof – customers enjoying themselves at your venue
- Ensure you make your ‘social conversion path’ (explained in Step 3) and unique offering and cultural elements as visible as possible in posts.
- Promote your Community Value Proposition (and links or URLs to your profile pages) in as many places as possible, including:
- On your website
- In email marketing
- In email signatures
- On business cards
- On product packaging
- On designated hardcopy marketing collateral
- In other traditional marketing campaigns
Platform tactics for increasing retention:
- Use Facebook Pay Per Click advertising to increase brand visibility and communicate your incentive/call to action. Always use a call to action. Provide links to either (a) your profile page (to grow your community and nurture your followers), (b) your events page or (c) directly to your functions page on your website (this is a traditional ‘direct response’ scenario).
- Use Facebook Pay Per Click to promote an event, deal, promotion or special product.
- Advertise to ‘Friends of Followers’ using Facebook’s advanced advertising targeting capabilities. This will allow you to reach new eyeballs (instead of spending money advertising to existing followers/customers).
- Visit other Facebook pages with a similar customer base/target market to your own. Provide value to these pages in the form of comments and constructive conversation without promoting your products.
- Comment and share the posts of industry stakeholders. For example, share a Champagne house’s post if you are a Champagne bar. Share a beer brand’s post if you’re a pub.
- Share links to items your customers will find useful. If you’re a beer bar, share a link to a page a beer drinker will appreciate.
- Ask your customers to tag themselves in your photos. Offer an incentive or prize to those who tag themselves and their friends the most. This will improve your organic visibility amongst the networks of your existing followers.
- Create intelligent status updates using one of the 12 inspiring status update categories in the Daily Social Media Management Manual.
- Post images and videos of the core elements of your offering and culture. Use Instagram’s powerful filters to make your media stand out. Examples are:
- Beer bottle labels, cocktails, spirit bottles
- Signature dishes
- Staff preparing drinks or meals
- Group shots of customers
- Crowd shots
- Bartender profiles
- Use humour and light-hearted banter in comments.
- Share inspirational quotes relevant to your target market. Use an app like PicLab to produce your own quote images. Search for quote images on Pinterest.
- Monitor for mentions of your venue. Follow users who do so. Try and engage these followers in conversation.
- Add the following information to the ‘About’ section on your profile:
- A detailed bio containing your location, offering and insights into your culture (note: this will have to be short, clever and punchy)
- A link to your functions or events page
- Post as frequently as you can on Twitter. Provide as much value as you can.
- Share links to items your customers will find useful. If you’re a beer bar, share a link to a page a beer drinker will appreciate.
- Monitor the Twittersphere for mentions of your venue. Follow users who do so. Try and engage these followers in conversation.
- Retweet the Tweets of industry stakeholders. For example, ReTweet (‘RT’) a Champagne house’s Tweet if you are a Champagne bar. ReTweet a beer brand’s Tweet if you’re a pub.
- Use #hashtags relevant to your offering or culture.
Learn more:
Increased customer retention is obtained by executing the abovementioned strategies via paid social media advertising campaigns (Step 9 of this Action Plan), and organic community engagement strategies (Step 8 of this Action Plan).
See the Daily Social Media Management Manual for organic social media marketing tactics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Pinterest.