My Secret Strategy
My #1 Secret strategy that I used to get new customers and keep bringing them back was:
Building A Tribe
Building a tribe of loyal customers should be the ultimate goal for any business owner. But, I don’t want to waste a lot of time talking about tribe, I want to show you the tools I used to build my tribe of paying customers…
The Social Media Revolution has rocked the way a lot of businesses are building their business very quickly. Because I had known Social Media is a powerful tool to build a business, I knew there was a way to use it for my coffee shop. Once I was able to get past my disconnect, I saw the bigger picture.
Seth Godin, New York Times bestselling business author, speaker, and internet pioneer, says it best:
“Marketing is about engaging your tribe”
So I setup a Twitter and Facebook account under my coffee shop’s name and went to work.
First, I put up a sign in our shop announcing that we were going to start having “Twitter Tuesdays” and “Facebook Fridays”. This is where I would “Tweet” out a coupon code to all of our Twitter followers. Then those followers would need to come in and say the secret code in order to get the discount or access to our special secret menu. This took off very fast! Our Facebook Fanpage also grew rather quickly and we not only where able to keep us in front of them all throughout the week. We now had direct access to them to let me know about any events, specials and things of that nature whenever we wanted to.
(We thought about having Myspace Mondays, but I really don’t care for Myspace)
I was so excited that we were seeing immediate results and making sales that normally wouldn’t have been there. I was able to see the return on my investment, unlike the traditional ways of advertising I had tried.
After because our Twitter Tuesdays was working so well, I thought I would try something new. I targeted the high school students for my next test.
I would wait for the time when I knew they were just getting out of school and knew they were know going to have to decide where they were going to hang out.
I would then send out a Tweet that said something like “First 5 people to come in within the next 15 minutes gets % off.”
This started to work as well, kids started to look forward to the Tweets we would send out, so they could get a snack after school.
I then decided to do something I had never seen anyone do before…