Okay folks, so after reading the last two chapters you should now understand who your King Consumers are and the environment in which those kings are shopping. Now we’re going to turn our attention to a plan that will help you snag King Consumers, make them fall in love with your products and services, and come back time and again to buy more. Sounds almost too good to be true? It’s really not.

When I was a boy my friends and I spent mostly every Saturday at the movie matinees in Times Square. For very little money we’d watch every kung fu movie that played. My favorite one of all time was The 5 Fingers of Death. The ads screamed, “See mighty warriors attack each other with the most deadly weapons ever developed; their bare hands!” My favorite part of the movie was when the good guy reached into the chest of the bad guy so quickly and with such precision, that he had a moment to show the bad guy his own beating heart before that bad guy hit the ground. Now, honestly, what kid could possibly have asked for more on a Saturday afternoon? Clearly this five-finger thing stuck with me, and now that I’m (mostly) all grown up, I’ve used it and adapted it for business purposes.

Now, I’m not advocating that we want to rip anyone’s heart out, and we certainly want all of our consumers and customers to live long, happy, prosperous lives so they can keep shopping, but every business owner would love to steal his customers’ hearts and loyalties and make them her own. So, for the purpose of commerce, we’ll soften that whole “death” thing and instead apply an old business term used to describe shoplifting: the five-finger discount. Larceny is better than murder, right? Since humans have five of these clever little appendages, they’ve long been used as a learning tool, so we’ll stick with it.

The Five-Finger Discount, shown in Figure 4-1, describes five key strategies to attract your consumers, serve your customers, engage your customers in your products and services, optimize your business in search results, and build brand awareness. It’s a simple plan—much of which began long before social commerce became so universal—but it’s still a good business strategy and one that can easily increase sales and bind your customers to you for more commerce. You may already be doing some of these things, but you’re about to learn how to do them better and more effectively.

Figure 4-1

The Five-Finger strategies are as follows:

 

1.  Sales funnel

2.  Customer relationship management (CRM)

3.  User-generated content (UGC)

4.  Search engine optimization (SEO)

5.  Brand awareness

THE FIRST FINGER: THE SALES FUNNEL

The elements of the sales funnel haven’t changed in years. You will have to explore each level of this funnel if you’re going to achieve your goal of attracting and keeping your customers. But as you’ll soon see, the application of the sales funnel is much different than it used to be.

The levels of the sale funnel are the following:

 

•  Awareness

•  Interest

•  Consideration

•  Preference

•  Purchase

•  Up-sell

•  Cross-sell

•  Loyalty

 

The challenge itself hasn’t changed. If you want someone to buy something from you, you’ll always have to make a case, or “pitch,” for why they should need or want whatever it is you sell. How you complete this process and navigate the sales funnel is now entirely different.

For example, before the dawn of e-commerce and the arrival of social commerce, merchants had a limited number of ways to attract their consumers. Advertising had three main channels: TV, radio, and print. You could also rent a billboard or buy some movie advertising, but TV, radio, and print were the main ways of getting your product in front of your consumers. Of course, TV offered the greatest opportunity to reach the largest number of people.

Before the days of cable TV—yes, many of us are old enough to remember that far back—there were generally three main TV networks. In local areas there may have been a public broadcast station or a couple of local outlets, but TV viewing was left to whatever happened to be on the channel at any given time. If you placed an ad on a major TV network, tens of millions of people might view it. Now, most of us have cable outlets that give us close to a thousand stations. Internet TV provides thousands more, and YouTube has joined the fray by offering virtually countless numbers of other viewing options. What about commercials? Well, many of us don’t watch or listen to them at all. If you don’t use a digital video recorder to capture your favorite shows and speed through the ads, I’m willing to bet you still watch TV with that little device in your hands—a remote—that allows us to quiet the commercials or flip channels to avoid them. Skipping through ads on TV is a more proactive way to watch entertainment, but it makes it much harder for you, as a business, to attract consumers with your brand message.

Don’t even get me started on print and radio advertising. Magazine after magazine has switched to electronic-only format, and newspapers all over the country are shutting their doors. You can still place ads in both these outlets, but it’s a lot more likely that, in 2014, those ads will be delivered electronically via the Internet. And radio advertising is equally anemic. Why should any of us listen to radio ads when we can carry our whole private music collection on a tiny player that fits inside our pockets? And we haven’t even looked at all the other ways we get distracted today. We can spend our time with iPads, iPods, iPhones, smart-phones, gaming systems, YouTube, Facebook, and a dozen other new media. Our attention spans have been fragmented by the plethora of choices we have about how we will spend our free time.

The old sales funnel was broad at the top and narrow at the bottom (see Figure 4-2). That’s because the old outlets for making your pitch—for making your customers aware of your products—reached a wide audience composed of a variety of different people who didn’t have many other choices. Still, capturing that customer and turning him into a lifelong devotee of your products and services was difficult. That’s why the top of the old sales funnel was broad and the bottom was narrow. Once you reached your customer and convinced her to come in and shop with you, it was time to work on the bottom of the funnel. We all want to increase our profits by up-selling or cross-selling, but getting your customer to spend more than she intended to spend wasn’t easy in the traditional model, and this is what both up-selling and cross-selling involve. Brand loyalty was also difficult to achieve, because those large and captive TV viewing audiences were always being pitched to by others selling products not only similar to yours but also products that claimed to be new and improved.

Figure 4-2

The Funnel Has Flipped

The sales cycle we experience today differs from this classic sales funnel. The elements are exactly the same, but the entire funnel has been turned on its head, and now that it’s upside down, it’s upside down for good. You’re going to have to work a lot harder to reach a much smaller number of potential customers (see Figure 4-3). We have so many different forms of media vying for our attention now that even the three main TV networks struggle to gain the viewership they used to enjoy. The most popular TV show on the air today isn’t likely to have anywhere near the regular viewership of the number one show as it held that spot in 1972, for example. In that year, All in the Family was the top-rated show. An estimated 67 million people all sat down at the same time and watched it, according to an article written by Brandon Gutman for Forbes.com. Viewers all had to sit down at the same time because they had no other way to capture the show, and if they weren’t ready to watch when it aired, they could only hope to catch it the next summer in reruns. Today, according to Gutman, five or six broadcast networks combined don’t achieve that number of viewers. American Idol averages about 21 million viewers and Modern Family gets about 14 million. You will never be able to use TV advertising as the main way to reach your customers and achieve the same results once possible.

Figure 4-3

Change Is Good

Making your sales pitch can be challenging in today’s multi-channel world. The good news is that once you do capture the attention of your King Consumers, the up-selling and cross-selling—the wide part of the funnel today—gets much easier. Now it isn’t hard to up- or cross-sell once you’ve got the customer’s interest; you can do either on your website or in the shopping cart. Up until the final push of a button that seals the sale, we can offer our customers accessories or items similar to the ones we know have drawn their interest and recommend products that interested others who made a similar purchase. A common guy like me, a small business owner, can do this without extra staff, because technology makes it a snap to work alone.

THE SECOND FINGER: CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Customer relationship management (CRM) is especially important to online sales. In the physical world, you can build relationships with your customers by remembering their names, their favorite products, even their favorite colors. You might find yourself ordering products to sell specifically because you know a handful of your customers will want them. In e-commerce, this customer relationship management is more complicated, but it’s still an achievable goal. You’ll find getting to know your customers as people and allowing them to know you, too, will result in increased sales. Let’s look at CRM across the whole life cycle you’ll share with a customer.

Your customer’s life cycle begins the first time he buys something from you and it ends the last time he makes a purchase. Your goal through CRM is twofold: Extend the life cycle while simultaneously increasing the frequency of transactions during that life cycle. Think about it. If you estimate your average customer will shop with you for about a year before moving on to wanting something else and will purchase from you three times within that year, you have a baseline to begin improving sales. If, over the course of that single year, you can get that one customer to shop and buy from you five times instead of three, you’ve nearly doubled your profit from only one customer. Apply that formula across many customers and your sales numbers will multiply.

Social media is a great tool for forming lasting relationships with your King Consumers. Even online, people shop with and buy from other people. Most of us prefer to buy from people we know and trust. Through CRM you can show your customers the person behind your business, which is sure to make them feel more comfortable buying from you. Letting your customers view you as human and viewing them that way, too, will enable you to build synergy with them, similar to what shopkeepers in the physical world do. Once you’ve established this synergy, your customers can tell you what they’d like to see added to your inventory, and you can tell them about what is going on in your business. You can keep them informed about upcoming sales and the new inventory items you will be adding to your line. You can share company goals that you are working toward and enlist their suggestions about the best ways to reach them. You can also target specific news, information, or product marketing to your customers, because they are much more receptive to these messages when coming from someone they know, like, and trust.

The social bond you’ve created with them is going to keep them checking your site and coming back for more product. Take the time to build the relationship, and they’ll have no other reason to look for anyone else the next time they want to buy something that you sell. In this way, you’ll also uncover some precious nuggets. From solid customer relationships come your best advocates for more sales. This bond is also likely to be something they share in their own social media circles, which in turn spreads your social commerce campaign even farther along than you could have on your own. We learned in Chapter 2 that Consumer Kings don’t shop based on facts as much as they do opinion. Every customer who leaves your site with a positive opinion is a potential candidate to become an opinion leader when it comes to the products that you sell.

THE THIRD FINGER: USER GENERATED CONTENT

The first customer who leaves you feedback or writes a review or tells her social media friends about an interaction with you and your business has created a piece of user generated content (UGC). These opinions, observations, and remarks can be some of the most powerful bits of promotion available on the web. It’s important, as a retailer, that you pay attention to and embrace the remarks your customers make, because they offer you a gold mine of market research that once cost good money to attain. You need to know specifically

 

•  what they are saying;

•  in what context they are saying it;

•  to whom they are saying it; and

•  what the sentiments are behind the words.

 

It’s very important for you to be open and receptive to your customers’ comments, whether good or bad. Actually, looking at the negative comments may be your best option for learning more about operating your business and improving your service. It’s easy to take negative comments personally, but if you can get past the temptation to overreact to criticism, the negative comments can be your best friends. If someone is always telling you that everything you do is terrific, it may help boost your ego, but it won’t motivate you to strive to do more and strive to do better. So keep in mind that UGC—even when negative—is the third finger, but that doesn’t mean it’s the middle one. So don’t act like it is.

Think of your UGC as a free and ongoing focus group, only better. The standard format for a focus group is an artificial construction. People are culled and put together in a room where they know other people are watching and observing them. It’s an environment where everyone knows exactly who is seeking information about what. The fact that it’s observed means it isn’t necessarily accurate. Thanks to social commerce you can have an ongoing focus group where you get genuine user feedback from real people who are really using your products in real time. These are concrete results in a real environment, and your King Consumer may never even know you are there and paying attention.

Okay, so just as you shouldn’t assume all input will come at you in the form of words, you also shouldn’t assume that you’ll only find your products being discussed on people’s Facebook pages, in snippets on Twitter, and in formal feedback and review areas. I personally find some of the best conversations about my products happening in the old-fashioned forums that have been part of the online experience since it began, even before the Internet was named. These groups and forums could be on Facebook, but there are a lot of other places where you’ll find them, too. For example, if you sell coffee products there are dozens of chat rooms specific to coffee. The chat board at CoffeeForums.com has more than 25,150 members and fifty-seven thousand posts about nothing but coffee-related topics. Here’s a community that is very active and passionate about coffee.

I find some of the deepest and most poignant conversations occur in groups and forums. Plus, if you’re reading for observational purposes only, you don’t have to announce who you are and what you sell. You can simply use these conversations to learn about what your King Consumers are saying about you and your products. Believe me when I tell you they are talking about it, and you owe it to yourself to know what they are saying. Once you get the lay of the land, you can be more direct. Trust me. If you want to know what your customers are saying about you and your products, find where they chat, and go ahead and ask them. They’ll be happy to share their opinions with you along with the other members of their groups.

And how will you find where your King Consumers are doing all this chatting and sharing? Nobody can answer that specifically for you. You are the one most likely to uncover these places, because you’re the one most devoted to your products. The exact locations will become apparent to you only with monitoring, searching, and researching. It’s a good thing you like all three of those!

THE FOURTH FINGER: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

Search engine optimization, or SEO, isn’t new, and most people who operate an e-commerce business have been thinking about it for years. I’m going to bring you into the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century, so that you can go beyond the basic information you’ll find all over the web. If you’ve never worked at all to optimize your site for search engines, you can read all about it through Google’s SEO Starter Guide. (Search Google for it.) But I’m going to assume you’ve at least tried to bring your business up higher in search results.

I see three basic best practices for anyone wanting to optimize search results, and they start with the way you title your website.

 

1.  Be sure your target keyword phrase is part of your website’s title page. For example, if you sell pet supplies, choose a domain name such as WorldsBestPetSupplies.com, which will automatically list you higher up on the search page whenever someone is looking for pet supplies online.

2.  Include an optimized title meta tag. A meta tag is an HTML (hypertext markup language) tag that gives information about a web page. They’re different from normal HTML tags, because they don’t have any effect on how a page displays. They provide information that includes which keywords represent the page’s content, and search engines use this information when building indices. So, rather than stuffing your title with keywords, incorporate your most important keyword phrase for the page into your title. For example, World’s Best Pet Supplies Online might be a good title to use.

3.  Include an optimized description meta tag, too. As long as you’re working on meta tags, be sure to put some in your descriptions. They should contain your web page’s title and a compelling reason or a call to action that will entice people to visit your site. For example, “World’s Best Pet Supplies offers shoppers the highest quality products, fastest shipping, and greatest customer service on the Internet.” Then you can add the names of the brands you carry.

 

The number one benefit of social media, in my opinion, is how effectively it boosts SEO. Social media ranks well in Google and Bing searches, so comments and content posted on sites like Facebook and Twitter will improve your position in searches. Today, SEO is no longer only about searching, but also about finding; it allows people to find your business even when they are just browsing the online places where they hang out. So, if you add social bookmarking sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon, and others to your SEO mix, you will see expanded results and improved positioning.

If you’re feeling a little nervous about all that writing, remember text isn’t the only medium you can use to impress your customers. I’ve had fantastic results on YouTube, and as you’ll see in the second half of this book, making videos can actually be a lot of fun. Years ago I created a video on YouTube showing people how to fold a bandana. I was getting a lot of requests from my international customers asking me how to fold a bandana so they could look like Tupac Shakur. It was simple enough for me to create a video demonstrating several easy techniques for getting the look my customers wanted. I posted it in YouTube’s “How-to” area to see what would happen: That simple little video recorded with very few frills has been viewed more than 250,000 times! Actually, that number isn’t accurate, because all the people who read this book before you have gone to check it out. It cost me nothing to create. I spent a few minutes doing it, and the results have been simply fantastic. Why? Because it gets indexed every time someone searches for a video showing them how to tie a bandana.

THE FIFTH FINGER: BRAND AWARENESS

Everyone talks about building their brand across the World Wide Web. In the early years of social commerce, when people were told to begin promoting their businesses on social media sites, most of them went about their branding all wrong.

In the Old West, cowboys had to brand their cattle. We’ve all seen a cowboy poised on top of a galloping horse chasing after a horrified calf with a lasso. Our cowboy hero would get close enough to capture the little guy, and then he’d wrestle the calf to the ground, hog-tie its legs, and hold it still while another cowboy seared the rancher’s brand onto its flesh with a hot branding iron, so that everyone could easily see which rancher that soon-to-be fully grown calf belonged to.

That is what I see people doing in social commerce all the time. They want to wrestle their customers to the ground where they can’t move away and then just hammer them with the message of their brand. I don’t think this is the best way to do your branding. Remember, you only get one chance when using social commerce to turn people off by spamming them with your message. If you spam them, people won’t trust the brand you’re trying to build, but they won’t trust you, either. You’ve just made it clear to them that you came to social media to profit from them. That makes you noise and your consumers won’t want to become your customers.

Instead, I consider branding to be very simply defined. Your brand is what people think and say about you when you’re not there to observe. That’s your personal brand. It’s also the same concept with your business. It’s how people talk about your products and services when you’re not participating in the conversation. Making sure consumers say good things can be summed up with the Five C’s of Branding:

 

1. Clear messaging: As with the story of the bumblebee in Chapter 3, your branding has to have a clear message, and it has to be small. Just as the pollen is small enough not to overwhelm the bee, your message has to be small enough so your customers can go from place to place and deposit your brand.

2. Credibility: Bring out your persona. Give the consumers the feeling and emotion of your brand, and let your consumers feel attached to it. Creating credibility builds loyalty and loyalty means repeat business.

3. Connection: Create a sincere connection between your consumers and your brand. You are the connection with those consumers and through you the consumer will be connected with your brand.

4. Create loyalty: Begin finding those customers in your sales funnel who can actually be turned into brand loyalists. Once you do, those customers will create user generated content (UGC) around your brand That UGC will spread across their networks, too. Once you find them, you’re ready for the final C.

5. Convert: Now you’ve converted them into brand advocates. They’ll take your branding efforts into places where you may not have thought to go.

 

As you go about building your brand, it’s once again important to take the time to listen to and observe your King Consumers. There are very few rules in social networks, but these online communities rely upon people, and people don’t like it when you disrespect their communities. If you start your branding efforts off on the wrong foot, it can be very difficult to recover. It’s very important that you take the time you need to learn about the places that you want to promote your brand. Don’t make the mistake of assuming you can figure it out as you go along. It doesn’t work that way, and this is one area of social commerce where you can’t afford to make too many early mistakes.

USING THE FIVE-FINGER DISCOUNT GIVES YOU ONE MIGHTY FIST

Now that you understand the Five Fingers, let’s discuss a few examples of how you will combine them and put them into service to achieve your goals. Like any other set of tools, you won’t necessarily use them all every time you set out to accomplish a task. You’ll mix and match them according to whatever it is you set out to do. For example, if you want to improve your website’s ranking in search results, you’d use the Third and Fourth Fingers. Of course you’d focus on SEO, but you’d also work with UGC to boost your rankings as your King Consumers post, blog, or tweet about your products and services. To boost your brand awareness, you’d make use of the Fifth Finger, but you’d also be sure to focus on the Second Finger, customer relationship management and, once again, the Third Finger.

But no matter what your objective, make sure you clearly understand what it is you’re setting out to do. It’s not good enough to simply say, “I want to sell more stuff.” Really? What business owner doesn’t want to sell more stuff? I know I do, and so does everyone else who uses social commerce. That goal is way too broad to be effective. Before you go about sticking your Five Fingers into everyone’s faces, identify two or three very clear objectives and then select and combine two or three of those Five Fingers to work toward your objectives.

SUMO LESSON

I was working with an Australian client, Deals Direct (DealsDirect.com.au), which brought me in to talk to its social commerce marketing team. The task at hand was to answer the question, “How do we get people to be more aware of our product and selling more of our product?” I wanted to work with a single or SKU (stock-keeping unit), so I could take the principle I wanted to share and expand it to other areas of the business. I decided to use a stop-snoring spray it was selling.

My first task was to figure out how people were searching for products like the snoring spray. I used Wordtracker, a free keyword-suggestion tool, and the first phrase I tried was “stop snoring.” Wordtracker showed us how people were using these keywords; how they were searching the web with them. I got back results that included about twenty different things. I focused on three or four of the top results: I used “how to stop snoring,” “tips to stop snoring,” “products to stop snoring,” and “stop snoring surgery.”

Now the first three terms show what people are actually typing into their Google searches. If I create content that answers these questions, those people will see that content in response to their searches. I will answer exactly what they are looking for, and that will rank higher in Google. People will spend more time on my site reading those tips because they’re relevant to those searches. That equals three great blog posts that I can create about snoring. I can come up with a top stop snoring list of suggestions and at the end I can put links to both our site and to the spray.

At the end of the blog postings, I recommended to Deals Direct that we give readers the reward: Here’s how you actually stop snoring. You use our spray. This is a really creative way to use the information for marketing. I chose the phrase “stop snoring surgery,” because a lot of people were searching for it. Now, my client doesn’t offer surgery, of course, but think about it. Before deciding to go under the knife to stop your snoring, wouldn’t you at least consider trying the $9.99 solution of a bottle of snoring spray? Of course you would! So I think creating a little bit of content around that surgery will result in sales. It will let people know that, hey, before you subject yourself to the pain and expense of surgery, try this product first. Who in his right mind would skip over that?

I took my results to Direct’s marketing team for an aha! moment about how they could leverage the specific wording and questions their King Consumers were using on Google and social media. I showed them that instead of just jumping into the conversation willy-nilly, they should take the information I’d gathered and create full blog-type content. This content would be evergreen on their e-commerce website—always relevant, timely, and constantly working to sell their snoring spray.