How Your Brand Can Get Social with Daily Deals

Kaila Strong | May 5, 2011 | 0 Comments

Online coupons have been around for quite some time, but within the past two years have grown exponentially in popularity and expanded beyond $.50 off your favorite cereal at the grocery store.

Receiving a daily deal on beauty products, food, services, or experiences are only a few clicks away now thanks to sites like Groupon or Living Social and now Facebook too. Traditional print coupons are so 2007.

Recently entering the daily deals industry, Facebook Deals were developed to “get groups of friends to discover your business” focusing less on the deal and more on the social component of bringing friends together to experience shared activities.

Still in its infancy, Facebook Deals looks to slightly transform the industry by adding the social component Groupon and Living Social attempt but fail to master.

Some are touting Facebook’s move as the end of Groupon and Living Social, but in reality the sites differ and can hold their own in the multi-million dollar industry. Take for instance their marketing styles, user demographics and prices just to name a few.

As a brand it’s important to examine exactly if your business can take advantage of daily deals and look to the future of the ‘social daily deals’ industry with the Facebooks, Groupons and Living Socials of the interwebs.

Create a Social Experience

It’s quite logical that Facebook would enter the industry in a way that incorporates their core mission: to “help connect and share with the people in your life.”

Creating an experience that appeals to your audience is just one part of creating a successful deal. If you don’t know your audience how will you be able to effectively create an experience worth experiencing?

Until Facebook or Groupon/Living Social allows consumers to put together their own deal experiences, you’ll have to do your research to ensure you’re giving them what they want. You can’t please everyone, but at the very least do your research and give it the old college try.

Research

Poll customers both online and offline to get a feel for their interests

See what competitors or industry leaders are doing in this space

Ask your staff for ideas, even family and friends can help

Check out Q&A sites, About.com, or other online portals that might hold deal information your audience is already checking out

Try combining multiple service offerings into one package deal

Remember holidays and event “seasons” that may mesh well with your deal

Understand the Costs

There are certainly costs associated with daily deal promotions. Most sites make their money by taking a percentage of the proceeds from bulk deals pre-paid for on their platforms. But there are also other costs to examine; try asking yourself these questions:

Do I have sufficient profit margins to actually offer a discount?

How many deals will I need to sell in order to make this deal worthwhile to my bottom line?

Realistically, how many customers am I hoping will come back to buy my services again?

Have I looked at tools to help manage the mob of possible customers?

Is my business equipped to handle a possible max influx of business, or will it cost revenue to hire and train new staff or get resources?

Have I attempted to figure out the ROI of my daily deal?

Facebook’s Deal business guide, Groupon’s detailed case studies, and Living Social’s “Merchant Bill of Rights” each provides businesses with information specific to the deal platform and offers some tips you can use when determining if a daily deal is right for your business, how to structure it, and more.

Are ‘Daily Deals’ Sites and Facebook Deals Here to Stay?

The short answer, yes. Time and time again we’ve seen that online users are looking to connect with brands that can shell out a good deal.

ExactTarget‘s survey comes to mind which found that 40% of users on Facebook “Like” a brand because they want to receive discounts and promotional information. Exclusive offers to new customers can create brand loyalists and advocates that can be worth their weight in gold — sometimes.

The devil’s advocate in me will point out that not every customer who is looking for a cheap deal is going to be your ideal customer. They may just as soon accept a deal at a competitor and play the lets-make-a-deal game regularly, never coming back to your establishment.

Important to remember, however, are the intrinsic properties of daily deals, which can transcend a one-time purchase.

With Facebook Deals you’ll have direct access to prospective fans and their friends to help build community and relationships right on the platform they frequent often. With Groupon and Living Social, you’ll have access to their large lists of users.

Each have their own marketing values when taken into account with the items addressed above.

Do you think the expansion of daily deals into the social realm will be successful?

Best Buy to jump on mobile train

Consumer electronics retail giant Best Buy is looking to aggressively expand its mobile store presence.

With the established goal to boost its online presence, reduce the scale of larger stores, and launch more “mobile” retail locations, Best Buy is gunning to regain some of its lost market share from major – and ubiquitous – competitors like Amazon and Wal-Mart.

At present, Best Buy has just north of 1,000 big-box stores across the US. In five years, the company – according to Reuters – would like to have between 600 to 800 Best Buy Mobile stand-alone stores in the United States.

The company expects that cutting U.S. “big box” square footage by 10 percent over the next 3 to 5 years will generate annual savings of $70 million to $80 million.

“I do believe that a lot of their bigger box stores have to be downsized. If there was a disappointment, I was kind of hoping they would be even a little bit more aggressive than what they outlined,” says RBC Capital Markets analyst Scot Ciccarelli.

This week, Best Buy Chief Executive Brian Dunn told investors that his company is aiming to double its current $2 billion online business within 3 to 5 years.

“The online channel is our greatest growth opportunity,” Dunn said.

Another reason for potentially significant optimism is that online taxation reforms may soon eliminate the remarkable edge that online retailers – like Amazon – continue to exert over Best Buy. If online transactions will be mandated to include sales tax, Best Buy will be able to better compete with its primary rivals in the consumer electronics space.

“We believe it’s just a matter of time before this field is leveled,” Dunn suggested.

From Gaspedal.com Unofficial Voices

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#828: The “Support the Unofficial Voices” Issue

If only the marketing and PR folks are allowed to reach out and help customers, you’re missing a big opportunity. Check out how a few smart companies are empowering the “unofficial” talkers and ambassadors on their payroll:

1> For personalized service
2> To promote customers
3> With thought leadership
4> Check it out: Find the perfect gadget

1> For personalized service

One of the great advantages social media offers is the ability to scale personalized service. Never before has it been so easy to reach so many individual customers. David Angiulo, for example, works at Nordstrom in Burlington, MA. He connects with local customers on Twitter to share photos of clothes he likes and to let them know if he thinks any of their new arrivals match someone’s specific tastes. It works because David is passionate about clothes, his customers appreciate all the ongoing support, and Nordstrom lets David do what he does best: help customers.

The lesson: You wouldn’t think of taking away phones from your sales and support staff, so why take away social media tools?

Learn more: Web Ink Now

2> To promote customers

Domino’s franchise owner Ramon De Leon has one mission: To be the pizza guy to know in Chicago. That’s a lofty goal in a town known for pizza — but thanks to his hard work and some smart use of social media, he’s well on his way. His secret: He spends 90% of his time putting his customers at the center of attention. He posts videos for individual customers. He retweets what they’re saying. He even prints their feedback on pizza boxes. And as you can guess, these customers quickly turn into fans — the type of fans who order from Ramon instead of any one of the zillion other pizza joints in town.

The lesson: Advertising doesn’t make you the pizza guy. That title is earned through millions of small, genuine conversations with your potential talkers.

Learn more: GasPedal

3> With thought leadership

If you have smart people on your payroll who want to share their business knowledge with customers and prospects, why not let them? At Cisco, they encourage social media participation. They do it with a simple list of plain-English guidelines designed to train employees on safe, ethical social media engagement. And all this encouragement has paid off: Cisco has seen significantly better results from product launches, and all of this social media outreach has raised the company’s profile online.

The lesson: Your biggest fans and potential talkers may already be under your roof — you just need to train and encourage them on proper social media engagement.

Learn more: Scribd

4> Check it out: Find the perfect gadget

Need help to narrow your next gadget purchase? Measy looks promising. Just enter some basic filters, answer a few simple questions, and Measy will give you a list of which items will work best for you.

Check it out: Measy