First time visitors are a double edged sword - marketers love them (they represent possibility) while website optimization specialists often hate them (they represent low conversion). Most of all, though, they represent a vital part of any business, and one that is almost always neglected.

Why First Time Visitors Are Bad

First time visitors historically perform worse than other segments of web visitors. On average, only 1.4% of first time visitors actually convert into sales. For all of your marketing team’s search engine optimization, social media efforts and viral marketing campaigns, less than 2 of every 100 visitors will even turn into a sale. That’s a tiny amount.

Not only do first time visitors underperform, but there’s relatively little data about them. With a repeat customer, there’s all sorts of demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips. For a new visitor, you have absolutely no purchase data, and no idea whether their intent is to buy, browse or otherwise. This is a big reason that first time visitors are typically stressed much less than repeat customers. For repeat customers you’ve already made the sale once. That first sale makes it much easier to sell the second, third, fourth and fifth time.

Why First Time Visitors Are Great

On the other hand, for most e-commerce websites, first time visitors represent over 65 percent of all users. That means roughly two in three of your users are accessing your webpage for the first time. A first time visitor has also most likely been driven to your website through some form of three-letter acronym marketing campaign like SEO, SEM, CPM, CPC or PPC (all campaigns created in an effort to improve your immensely important ROI). Which means that you may know more about them than you’d think.

New visitors represent a huge growth opportunity. Every percentage point increase in conversions for first time visitors is worth roughly two times that of a percentage point increase for repeat customers, due to the size of the segment.*
*Example: A website has 10,000 daily visitors. Of that, 65% are new visitors and 35% are repeat visitors. A 1% increase in conversions for new visitors (6,500 total) equals an increase of 65 customers. A similar increase in conversions for repeat visitors (3,500 total) only equates to an increase of 35 customers.

Every new visitor lost without a conversion is money walking out of the proverbial door. A new visitor may never come back again. So this may be your last time to convert them into a sale. First time visitors are an untapped resource ripe for the picking.

Why First Time Visitors Are Vital to Your Business

There are no shortage of reasons why it pays to have first time visitors converted into customers. You’ve succeeded in driving these users to your website. You’ve succeeded in showing them what products you have to offer. Yet if you haven’t converted them to a sale, or at least a second visit, how much of a success can your marketing have really been? Making a half-hearted attempt at new visitor conversion makes even your best marketing campaigns go to waste.

In tough economic times, it’s extremely important to maximize all potential resources. You stand to lose a great deal of money if you don’t properly optimize the experience of first time visitors. Even though first time visitors offer low conversion rates and have suboptimal amounts of customer data available, they still hold plenty of potential and contain a surplus of beautiful underutilized data.

What You Can Do to Capture First Time Visitors

I can’t go into too much depth about how to best capture first time users, because that’s a big part of what Dynamic Insights does. If you want a demo of our product, feel free to contact us. However, there are a couple of things you can do on your own.

Offer promotions. Use coupons or other promotions to entice your first time visitors. While being careful not to look spammy, you can give a user a definite reason not to leave your website without purchasing. Whether that means offering free shipping, a discount at checkout, or a free offer, turning a new visitor into a customer may be well worth the minor expense.

Track your marketing campaigns. If you’re conducting your marketing campaigns well, you should able to track which users come from which marketing campaigns. Track those users through your website. Measure trends based on where your users are coming from. Do users coming from one website tend to purchase certain types of goods? How can you maximize profits from those users?

Improve usability. It’s entirely possible that your first time users do not convert due to problems with your website’s usability. If you think this is the case, then it’s really time to start usability testing. Study your navigation, checkout and site organization among other things to improve your customer experience. If all else fails, use the mom test. If your mom (or grandfather, or [insert electronically-challenged person here]) can’t do what you want your user to do, you need to fix the process.

Use your traffic data. If your first time visitors take a look at a few pages before leaving, you have an exciting opportunity to show them what they want while you have their attention. If you’re collecting the right data, you should be able to hone in on what your user wants within a few clicks. Use that to your advantage.

Work with us. Pardon the plug, but Dynamic Insights helps to optimize websites for both first time and repeat visitors. We collect and analyze your customer data and we provide in-depth insights and offer real solutions. By segmenting your users and allowing you to refine your website in real-time, we make it our goal to make first time visitors into first time customers.

Advertisements. Whether you like them or hate them, they are one of the means by which website owners are generating revenue. While for some the revenue from advertisements are enough to be the average American’s paycheck, for others it is just a nice way to get rewarded for hard work. Either way, even before thinking about what to do with the money you will make off advertisements on your website, what you should be asking yourself is if you are even ready.

One of the biggest misconceptions about making money off your website is that it if you follow the ’steps’ that the ‘experts’ say, you will be making money in no time. The first thing that website owners need to understand is that ’steps’ are different for everyone. Everyone has a unique website and to say that the same thing will work for every single one is impossible. Secondly, unless someone has a proven track record of monetizing multiple websites in different markets, they are not an ‘expert.’

Here are 4 questions that anyone thinking about having advertisements on their website should ask themselves:

1. Are Advertisements Right For Me?

While making money is an obvious reason for adding in advertisements on your website, it is important to determine if they are right for you. For example, if you have an e-Commerce website, it is important that if you do decide to incorporate advertisements on to your site that the advertisements shown are not taking way business from your own. Too often are websites focused on maximizing ad space that they forget that the ads themselves may be competing businesses.

2. Why Would Companies Want To Advertise With Me?

Here is a big part of the equation. If I am a sports organization for example and I am looking to place ads on particular websites, I will look for sites that are 1) relevant to my company and have 2) traffic value. The best way to think about this situation is as if you are a selling your car. If you want to get the most profit, you need to make sure that not only is it presentable, but that you have all the paperwork in order.

3. Do You Have A “Target”

If you finally do decide that advertisements are the right route to go with your website, you should develop a core group to ‘target’ as far as advertisements go. This means that you should focus on getting advertisements on your site that ‘compliment’ the content you have. A great way to find advertisers that are relevant to your site is to look at sites similar to your own. See what companies advertise on those sites and keep them in mind moving forward.

4. Figuring Out Advertisement Costs

Another big question that needs to be asked is how much you could potentially make. This ties into #2, in that your site traffic will play a big part in this.

To help you understand how much you can potentially charge/make off of advertisements on your website, here is how you can figure it out:

CPM = Cost per 1,000 Impressions, Page Views: Impressions

Question: How much will you charge for every 1,000 impressions (page views)?

Sitution: If I have a 125 x 125 pixel advertisement space with 10,000 page views a month, I am thinking about charging $10.00/month.

Advertisement Cost/Page Views x 1,000 = CPM

$10.00/10,000 x 1,000 = $1.00 every 1,000 impressions

Your CPM tells you how much advertisers will be paying you per 1,000 page views. After you have this number, find websites similar to your own and work out their CPM based on their own advertisement rates. Be sure to take into account how much traffic they have. If you are charging the same amount ($1.00 per 1,000) as a site with four times your traffic, adjust your rates accordingly.

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After asking yourself these four questions you should be able to determine whether or not your website is ready for advertisements. Remember to always ask questions if you are unsure and that your website ’space’ is valuable and that you should never give it up unless it’s for a good reason.

You need to give your consumers a reason to become a fan or follow you on Twitter.  Small and medium-sized companies often make the mistake that the simple action of building a FB Fan Page will instantly allow them to have tens of thousands of fans.  Depending on your company brand and culture, a strategy that you might want to engage in is to be bold, controversial, and sexy.

American Apparel is no small brand.  They are well known and have an excellent following.  At the same time, they are a perfect example of how to push the envelope and generate buzz by using “sex” as the hook but always making sure that the campaign is true to their company culture and brand.

Their latest campaign, Best Bottom in the World, is one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve seen in a very long time.  Lets dive into the campaign to see how they’ve marketed it and how I would improve the campaign.

Buzz and traction through large online publications

American Apparel has reached out to large publications to post the news of their competition.  These large publications include:

1. Style List
2. The Frisky
3. New York Fashion

Value: The most obvious value is that you’ll reach a large, targeted audience by having your competition posted on these large, highly trafficked publications.  The residual value is that smaller fashion and entertainment blogs, such as Street Level, will pick up the news and post it on their site as well because they want to keep their community in the know.  In essence, you pay for the big boys and you also get the little boys to post about you as well.

What about Sugar Inc, Mashable, Elle, and Glamor?  Heck, I’d sponsor Fashion Toast first and foremost

I did not find the American Apparel contest featured on Fab Sugar, Mashable, Elle, or Glamor online.  But I think one of the biggest opportunities that they are missing is the personal fashion bloggers niche.

The first thing that I would do is sponsor Fashion Toast. She is a hugely trafficked fashion blog who advertises on her sidebar for American Apparel.  Furthermore, she is well connected to the other fashion bloggers online, so there is a strong way to leverage her sponsorship to influence others to participate.  I would have made the marketing of this campaign focus purely on the fashion bloggers.  By getting them, Sugar, Elle, New York Fashion, and Glamor would all follow.

Reach out to the YouTube pop culture through a web celebrity

American Apparel was recently featured on the Philip Defranco show.  I’m not certain whether this was a paid sponsorship or not, but what is important is that Philip is a hugely watched show that hits a targeted audience.

Value: People love to watch Philip talk about Pop culture.  He has a die-hard community and that will take action to do whatever he tells them to do.  By becoming featured on the show, American Apparel reaches not only reaches an audience that would vote for nice bottoms, but more importantly, submit their own image.

Facebook and Twitter

I think American Apparel dropped the ball on FB and Twitter.  Yea they wrote a note on their Facebook Fan Page and made an announcement on Twitter, but they could have made it so much more engaging!

Facebook Application:

AA should have created a Facebook Application that allows fan to upload their image directly to the FB page.  Fans can then vote through the Facebook Fan Page and tell their community who they voted for.  I think this would greatly spread across Facebook.

Twit Pic Submission:

Twitter users should be able to upload an image directly from Twit pic to the AA main site.  In this way, you’ll generate more buzz from the Twitter community and allow for an easier submission process.

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There is so much potential with this campaign!  Remember, if you’re building a social campaign, make sure to leverage the power of the personal blogging community and to build a Facebook App when relevant.

Every user that visits your site, whether through search engine, grassroots marketing or an advertisement, is a potential customer. They came to your site for a reason that was (hopefully) somehow related to your core of business. If they leave your site without even knowing what you are offering, you’ve failed. Once you know what it is you want from your user (and just as importantly, what your user wants from you), it’s a matter of carefully crafting the message. Since not all customers are the same, you probably want to offer a different message to certain visitors rather than others (that’s part of what we’re developing). No matter how you do it, though, take advantage of your users’ attention while you have it.

There are a number of tactful ways to do this. For instance, on Neil Patel’s blog, he draws attention to QuickSprout Pro, a service that he’s selling. Or take a look at the Google.com fade in that they’re testing – which emphasizes Google’s focal point even more while calling attention to its other services with an unobtrusive fade. Alternatively, look at an article on The Seattle Times. Where are they trying to drive you? In what way are they trying to convert you into a customer? Even though it’s an ad revenue-based business, they’re wasting an invaluable resource: their user’s attention, and getting nothing out of it. Are you?

When a user visits your website, there is a very limited time to convert that user into an customer (email subscriber, sale, whatever a customer means to you). Even if you can convert just 1% of those lost visitors, that’s often enough to make a significant difference. You owe it to yourself, and to your business, to do whatever you can to take advantage of your users’ attention. Before they’re gone.

While optimizing your site for keywords and search engine traffic is important, another aspect that few have taken advantage of is generating traffic through comments left on forums and blogs. By leaving comments on blogs and forums, you are not only building a relationship with the blog author or forum community, but you are essentially leaving your ‘business card’ with them.

Just how networking is essential in business, ‘networking’ with other bloggers and communities is important in generating interest and traffic to your website.

Why You Should Comment

In regards to the question of “why you should comment on blogs and forums,” the best way to answer this is to put yourself in their position. As a blogger, feedback on your blog and work is extremely important. In essence, comments can validate the hard-work that one puts into writing articles. For the most part, bloggers and forums are not created with the intention of selling a product or service, but rather to create a community. By commenting, you are joining that community and becoming an active participant.

As mentioned earlier, by commenting you are leaving your business card. When you leave a comment on a blog or forum, your profile is attached to it. Aside from including your name or handle on the comment, you are given the opportunity to leave your website and contact information as well. Imagine if networking in person was this easy?

Be Effective, Be Efficient

Although commenting on a blog or forum and getting traffic may sound easy, it is important to always be effective and efficient. Just how there are certain ‘best practices’ when it comes to writing a letter, commenting on a blogs should be effective and efficient.

The first is to always be relevant. By this, it means to choose blogs and forums that you can build a relationship with. If you decide to comment on blogs with the sole intention of driving traffic back to your blog, you are doing it for the wrong reason. A good strategy when commenting on blogs is to pick blogs or forums that write about similar topics as your own, or that you have a genuine interest in. Just how you wouldn’t take a class in school you didn’t like, don’t pick blogs you don’t enjoy.

Aside from choosing blogs and forums that are relevant, the second is to actually build the relationship. Your comment already has a link-back to your site as well as your contact information. There is no need to repeat it again in the actual comment. The more value that you can provide to the author or forum, the more likely they are to check out your site.

Optimize Your Own Site

Just as important as it is to participate in blog communities and forums, be sure to optimize your own site for others. Here are some key elements that are helpful in creating a great experience for your visitors:

1. Clearly defined “add comment” section on your articles
2. Ability to share content on social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg
3. Contact information: Be sure to always be accessible to your readers/visitors by having your “Contact Me” information clearly marked on your site

My attention was drawn by a simple commercial:

I think the beauty of Old Spice’s traditional and new media campaign is that the brand isn’t afraid to stay true to its roots, try new things, and push the envelope to capture your attention and ultimately buy their product.  Lets take a look at how Old Spice has been able to capture a large social following and entertain people while selling their product.

The Brand

Old Spice is a man’s deodorant.  Everything about the brand exaggerates the fact that only real manly men wear Old Spice. Take a look at how each social profile and outlet further pushes the brand:

Videos

I absolutely love the videos.  They’re funny, clearly use and advertise the product, and push the “man” brand.  Take a look at the Arm Wrestling one below:

Facebook

I just checked out the FB Fan Page for one of my favorite quotes of all time!  Too bad they took it off.  The description on the FB Old Spice Fan Page used to read:

“If your Grandfather never wore it, then you would never have been born”

Now it reads:

“Old Spice has 71 years of experience helping guys improve their mansmells with deodorant, antiperspirant and fragrances.”

Definitely not as fun, but they had to change it sometime.

Close up on Facebook

With over 400,000 fans, the Old Spice Facebook Fan Page is very active.  When you look at the wall, you’ll notice that each wall posting has over 400 Likes and 200 Comments.  This is excellent for a company and you pretty much can’t get anymore community participation.

I feel that a key element to notice is how far apart Old Spice’s wall postings are spread apart.  Today is January 23rd, 2010.  Since January 1st, Old Spice has only had 2 wall postings:

1. January 15, 2010: If manliness were a color, what color would it be? Probably grey or brown or something. Or dark blue.
   • 455 Likes
   • 493 Comments
2. January 7, 2010: Keyshawn Johnson is going to tell us which NFL teams have the most Swagger. Swagger the attribute, not Swagger the Old Spice product. We don’t know which NFL team uses the most Swagger product, because we’re not invited into the locker rooms anymore. Watch Keyshawn on FOX & Friends this Friday morning.
   • 207 Likes
   • 120 Comments

Old Spice is keeping its community engaged once per week and not posting daily so that its community is not bombarded with information.  At the same time, I feel that Old Spice could greatly improve engagement by consistently showcasing and promoting sweepstakes that fans can participate in.

For example: The Swaggerize You Wallet Competition

This is an excellent competition where users submit a video to participate in a competition and the winner gets money.  The Swaggerize Your Wallet page seems to have a lot of video participation; however, I don’t see any mention of the competition on Facebook (besides the two video winners) or on Twitter.  It seems that with such an involved community, Old Spice can take advantage of it and make the competition a user-votes-for-the-winner competition.

Old Spice could easily create a Facebook Application where a user can upload a video and then vote on his or her favorite participants.  The user is then able to share her favorite videos with her friends on Facebook and thus get more eyeballs on the competition.

Yes, I know that this was more of a Summer Competition, but where is the follow up competition that builds on top of the buzz created by the first one?  It’s great for Old Spice to enter the game and keep people excited, but if Old Spice doesn’t continue to push the envelope and give their fans something to participate in, its competitors (like Right Guard or Axe) can swoop in with a competition of their own.

Awesome, transparent products

Old Spice is doing an excellent job with its product pages.  As you can see from the link, Old Spice posts all Positive and Negative reviews on its site no matter what (of course if you’re belligerent, they’ll go ahead and remove you).  This kind of transparency only encourages the viewer to find out more about the product and has a higher possibilty of turning into a sale.

Useless Blog

You would think that a company as fun as Old Spice would have a vibrant blog that captivates its readers and brings them something of value.  Nothing could be further from this than the Old Spice Blog.

It’s really a wonder why they have given their blog such a prominent position in the top menu of their site.  It’s even slightly colored yellow so that people will notice it and click on it.

When you read the content, it’s boring and bland with no multi-media images or visitor participation.  My recommendation to Old Spice is that if its not going to effectively use its blog, then it should remove it from the top menu of the site.

Useless Twitter

I know that numbers don’t matter on Twitter; however, to only have 215 followers means that Old Spice is definitely not providing any value with its Twitter.

Do you know what I would be doing if I were Old Spice?  I would be monitoring the Twittersphere for anyone talking about the following topics:

1. Deodorant
2. Body Odor
3. Right Guard
4. Axe
5. Smelling good

These are just some of the keywords that Old Spice should be monitoring and responding to in order to build a conversation.  They have completely missed the mark with their Twitter.

Awesome Store

I must admit, Old Spice has a really cool online store.  They have manly products for real men, which keeps in line with the brand.  I feel that a great opportunity here is to give out these products as prizes for competitions.  Most people have no idea that Old Spice has other “fan” oriented products.  By giving out the products to fans that participate in competitions, Old Spice will further spread brand awareness and get more people to promote their products.

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Conclusion

Old Spice has a terrific brand.  People are obviously fans of the product, and Old Spice only needs to mobilize them in a specific direction to harness the power of the community.  Facebook is their best bet, and the addition of more competitions will encourage user interaction, user generated content, and the continuous domination of the male deodorant product.

Proper targeting and segmentation is one of the biggest inefficiencies in marketing and advertising. It is extremely important to increase your customer base while maintaining (or increasing) your rate of conversion. Otherwise, you quickly waste money by expending energy and time on non-profitable consumers. Due to the relative ease of mass social media marketing, many marketers mistake the ability to appeal to the largest audience possible as a necessity. Because, “why not”? The reason is there are costs (even online) of time, effort and resources that add up and could be better spent targeting customers better to increase conversions rather than building up the base that you’re pitching.

Case Study: Twitter

Twitter is the most prescient example of marketers who choose to cast a wide net rather than targeting. For the majority of marketers, the end goal is one number: how many followers do you have? Not only is that number the wrong metric, but it’s the wrong approach.

Take @BlueMoonBurgers, a local Seattle burger joint. It is unrealistic to think that Blue Moon could convert anyone out of the Washington (or at least Pacific Northwest) area into a sale or consistent customer. Spending time pitching those users would be crazy, and a waste of time. Yet if you scroll down the list of their 800+ followers, it’s clear that at least 20% (conservatively) are not from the area. A list of 650 Seattle-based followers is actually more relevant (and profitable) to Blue Moon than an 800 person list, 20% of whom are unlikely customers.

What it Costs You, and What You Can Do

Blue Moon Burgers does not actually spend its time trying to add these followers from places like London and Arizona. But there are thousands of individuals and companies that go around following everyone they can and replying to everyone possible just to increase their number of followers, regardless of whether they are a possible conversion. I’m sure you can name quite a few yourself. Sure, you never know where you’ll get your next conversion from, but doesn’t it make more sense to spend your time trying to pitch customers with a much higher likelihood for conversion?

Every hour you spend on a campaign that targets the wrong users, or dollar you spend advertising on an irrelevant website cuts into your profits. Find better customers and you will maximize your resources and improve your profits. Every time.

So how do you find those “better” customers? You know your customer better than anyone else. If you’re making t-shirts for 20-somethings, you have no reason to target baby boomers (unless you’re looking for gifts for said 20-somethings). If you’re a local art gallery, you should be targeting people locally, not halfway across the globe.

You can target your customers on any platform. With Twitter, you can use geolocation services or Twitter Search. On advertising platforms, unless you’re Coca-Cola, you shouldn’t be targeting *everyone*, you should be looking for your own potential customers. A yarn company wouldn’t advertise on TechCrunch in the same way that Major League Baseball wouldn’t advertise during a soap opera. It’s the wrong audience.

Targeted advertising is the best way to increase clickthroughs and conversions through an ad – find the right place, or right segment, first and foremost. Sometimes when an ad fails, it doesn’t mean the messaging or the product is bad, sometimes it’s just pitched to the wrong person. It really helps to do in-depth evaluations of all your marketing campaigns.

What We’re Doing

In case you didn’t already know, Viralogy is doing its own part to help companies segment and target their visitors. A little over a 2 weeks ago, we allowed users to vote on what direction we would take with the Viralogy platform. They chose Viralogy Dynamic Insights, a platform designed to increase conversions by optimizing websites dynamically for visitors using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). If you’d like to learn more about how our API can help your customers, we’d love for you to contact us.

Photo by Paul likes pics

For many, building a website means hours upon hours of drafting up designs and even more time trying to get it all together. Still, one area that few take the time to think about is the website font. While it is important to have a great logo to represent your company, having the right font and font size is just as important as it can play a big role in overall customer experience and most importantly, conversions.

For companies that are in the process of building a website, the font they choose may seem like a simple process, but in fact, it can be quite difficult depending on the presentation and ‘personality’ you want your website to present.

What Size Font?

Probably the best answer is to not have a set size font. By this, we mean that by ‘locking’ in an actual font size, you are in fact limiting yourself and also potentially causing problems for the visitor to your site.

Rather than setting your sizing to size 10, 12, 14 and so on, the smart decision would be to choose font size relative to the rest of the content on your site. By using percentages, this will provide flexibility for the user who is viewing your website.

Example:

When a user comes to your website, if you have locked in 12 PT font, what if the person viewing your site has poor eyesight and is has trouble reading it? While this may seem easy to read to you, you need to be conscious of the fact that there are many factors that go into how your content is displayed on others screens.

Because of differing DPI’s on Mac’s and PC’s as well as screen resolutions, font size dynamically changes from user to user. By using percentages, content can adapt to the visitors browser font settings which will in turn ensure that your site is readable and also to the visitors standards. Additionally, CSS allows you to change your font size based on the rest of your content.

Example:

Through the use of H1, H2, and H3 tags, font changes proportionally. This not only visually shows content importance, but it is also great for search engine crawlers who translate these into ‘weights’ for your content.

What Font Style?

The second part to the equation is what type of font style you will use on your website.

While the average Joe is used to font’s like Arial and Times New Roman, the key thing to remember is that not every computer have these fonts installed. As a result, instead of choosing just one font style or ‘typeface,’ the better choice is to select a ‘font family’ when building your site.

To ensure that your website content is displayed in the font style that you want, be sure to include at least 2-3 fonts that are similar to each other, followed by the generic font family that they belong to.

Here is an example of how this would look in the HTML:

Remember that although you may have hundreds of different fonts at your disposal, your visitors may only have a handful installed on their computer. Always have alternatives and always adapt to the situation.

If you need further reference for font families, here is a great list from Font Tester:

font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘Arial Black’, Gadget, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘Bookman Old Style’, serif;
font-family: ‘Comic Sans MS’, cursive;
font-family: Courier, monospace;
font-family: ‘Courier New’, Courier, monospace;
font-family: Garamond, serif;
font-family: Georgia, serif;
font-family: Impact, Charcoal, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘Lucida Console’, Monaco, monospace;
font-family: ‘Lucida Sans Unicode’, ‘Lucida Grande’, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘MS Sans Serif’, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘MS Serif’, ‘New York’, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘Palatino Linotype’, ‘Book Antiqua’, Palatino, serif;
font-family: Symbol, sans-serif;
font-family: Tahoma, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif;
font-family: ‘Trebuchet MS’, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
font-family: Webdings, sans-serif;
font-family: Wingdings, ‘Zapf Dingbats’, sans-serif;

]]> http://viralogy.com/blog/website-best-practices/font-and-your-website/feed/ http://viralogy.com/blog/case-study/social-media-case-study-whole-foods/ http://viralogy.com/blog/case-study/social-media-case-study-whole-foods/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 15:49:06 +0000 JunLoayza http://viralogy.com/blog/?p=1752

I love using Whole Foods as a social media case study in my presentations.  Whole Foods is a first-mover that doesn’t wait to see what its competitors are doing; instead, it looks to constantly innovate and embrace new forms of media to build a closer relationship to its consumers.  From a sleek, professional blog, to a useful iPhone app, Whole Foods has noticeably made the effort and succeeded in engaging consumers.

The most impressive feature of Whole Foods’ social media campaign is its use of Facebook.  It not only has a central FB Fan Page where campaigns are run and conversations held, but it also maintains individual FB Fan Pages for individual stores.  Lets dive into the details of what has made the Whole Foods FB Fan Page so successful…

Structure

A page that truly stands out for Whole Foods is its Facebook Central Hub.  From this page, a visitor is able to view and interact with the following:

1. Become a Fan
2. Easily locate the main FB Fan Page and view the latest postings
3. Find a local Whole Foods location and link out to the FB Fan Page (right sidebar)

When I google “Whole Foods Facebook,” you’ll notice that the Central Hub is the fourth link above the fold, giving Whole Foods the opportunity to rank well in the SERPs and get people on their main site when searching for their FB Fan Page.

Individual Stores

Maintaining 1 FB Fan Page for a large company is hard enough; imagine the organization needed to maintain over 200 FB Fan Pages!  Well, that’s exactly what Whole Foods has done and its right in line with their brand and messaging to its consumers.

Why its so tough:

Posting on a wall doesn’t seem that hard right?  Well, it’s not just about posting one item and then snoozing; the task of maintaing an active community on a FB Fan Page and moderating your fans takes a lot of work:

1. The company must either assign and train a specific employee at each store to become the Community Manager or hire an intern specifically to fill the role
2. A guide must be created so that the CM knows what content can be posted and what content must be avoided
3. Moderation rules and guidelines need to be created in case there are any belligerent fans on the wall
4. A FB post-tree is highly recommended to keep the CM organized and keep the content on the wall alive and fresh

Example of a FB post-tree:

1. Mondays: Special recipes
2. Tuesdays: Tips on how to stay healthy with your food
3. Wednesdays: Career opportunities
4. etc…

The result:

Some of the FB Fan Pages are highly active; others are not.

Regardless, the goal is NOT to hoard fans; rather, the goal is to provide a platform that allows the community to interact with their local Whole Foods.  As can be seen from the video below, the brand goal is to be “local.”  By having a FB Fan Page for every local store, they are keeping in line with their brand and fulfilling their promise.

An Open Approach

The greatest fear that the majority of large companies have when it comes to social media is letting go of control.  Sure they want the thousands of  Facebook fans, but they don’t want these so called followers and fans to leave negative messages on their wall. Furthermore, censorship of social profiles and the complete control of what your Community Manager does with the profiles inhibits creativity, deflates the authenticity of the message, and creates an operations nightmare.

Whole Foods truly understands that a censored, red-taped, top-down approach does not work in the digital age.  A great example of this is how they use their Facebook accounts.  Facebook managers understand the guidelines to which they must abide by and are fully immersed in the company culture, but are free to add their personality and creativity into each post.  Some FB Fan Pages share fun information while other keep posts strictly focused on business happenings. At all times, the FB manager is able to have fun in the process and feel they have the ability to fully engage with FB fans and provide them a personal service.

Why the amazing engagement

Whole foods interacts with consumers and provides them with relevant content.  News features like this one are posted on the Facebook Fan Page and receive more feedback and shares from the FB Fan Page than on the actual blog.  The FB Community Manager doesn’t just post the link and let it happen, the CM actually takes the time to write a descriptive paragraph describing what the post is about:

“The recent Florida freeze is affecting produce availability - in particular strawberries, tomatoes and bunching greens. Check out this blog post from our produce folks for more details.”

Furthermore, Whole Foods has not linked the blog to the Notes feed of the Facebook Fan Page.  Instead, they only post highly relevant posts that their FB community would like to read.  By taking the time to make sure only FB relevant blog posts are featured on the wall, Whole Foods does not bombard its fans with constant content and makes sure that the community loves every single post.

Whole Food is also not afraid to link out to articles and content that was not produced by Whole Foods.  In an effort to provide relevant, high quality tips to its fans, the Whole Foods Community Manager linked out to this article through the FB Fan Page: http://eating.health.com/2009/12/22/10-resolutions-to-start-today/

Involvement with real employees

Whole Foods embraces transparency, and features real life employees in its videos to support the campaigns that it is holding.  Again, this is keeping in line with the “Local” brand and allows FB Fans to see the real people that make Whole Food happen.

This is my year to… Facebook App

The current campaign that Whole Foods is running is called “This is my year to…” in which a Fan is able to choose an intention to support a worthy cause. Each cause will receive a $10,000 donation from Whole Foods, with the winning cause receiving a double donation.  Fans are able to vote everyday and share their vote with their friends.

As of this posting, the race is very close with Non-GMO Project barely in the lead:

In Summary…

The most important takeaway is to stay true to your brand, and to deliver your brand message on every social platform.  If your brand is about being “local,” then you better provide local service to all of your customers.  Be bold, take risks, but ultimately, stay true to your brand and your social media campaign will have a high chance of reaching success.

There are dozens of advanced tools you could use to help you with each of these steps (thanks to your votes, we’re developing our own, called Dynamic Insights), but the process and ideas are still the same. Everyone should be measuring the success of their social media efforts, if only for informational purposes. Ignorance is not bliss; it’s irresponsible.