Hope everyone had a great week! People frequently ask me for insight into how a company can succeed using social media to drive ecommerce. For this week’s blog I have chosen to focus on Shopify contest winners, Jake Kassan and Kramer LaPlante of MVMT watches, the masters of using social media to increase sales. Their story is inspirational and informative and I hope you not only take pleasure in it, but also apply it to your own businesses. In order to make this blog as action-oriented as possible, I asked the guys to share their three keys for success on social media. Enjoy! – DJ
We started MVMT in college. We were just two friends with a fresh idea, and a shared passion. We loved high-quality timepieces, but noticed that all of the watches that we were into were priced way out of our budget. We made it our mission to solve this problem, and create great looking watches at reasonable prices. We used and built out our social media networks to help drive ecommerce and before we knew it, we were Indiegogo’s second highest crowdfunded fashion startup of all time! It sounds unbelievable but there was no magic involved. All we did was make a plan and stick to it, and if you do the same, we have no doubt you’ll be successful. Here are three key things we did to make people #JoinTheMVMT.
- Authentic Engagement
You have to speak to your customer in his or her language. It’s all about knowing your audience, and crafting copy that will resonate with them. For example, if you’re trying to communicate with young 20somethings, you know you are going to need to reference culturally relevant touchstones, like hip music, or popular TV shows. Of course you need to do this in a way that feels natural, and not contrived. In addition to your audience, it’s important to be conscious of the medium that you are using to reach them. The way one communicates on Facebook (link-heavy) is different than the way they would if they were on Twitter (short/punchy) or Instagram (picture-focused). In addition to carefully crafted copy, we were able to forge an even deeper connection with our audience through individually replying to questions and comments on social media. By doing so from our individual accounts, rather than the company profiles, we established our identities as individuals, making our relationship with our consumer even stronger.
- Contests/Giveaways
Believe it or not, there is no secret recipe for a successful contest. It’s all about execution. You need to craft something with a clear call-to-action that will provide value to both your customer and your company, create a schedule and stick to it. For example, we have a running contest in which we give away a watch for every 1000 Facebook likes we get. In order to enter, people must like, share the post, and comment on it with the watch that they would like. This is a very simple and effective contest for us. The steps for entry are clear, the prize is desirable, and the mechanism, sharing and liking, provides us with satellite promoters, who spread the word about our products through personal recommendations. This is extremely valuable.
- Start a Conversation.
One important thing you want to do when building your brand on social media is cultivate interaction between the company and your consumers, but if you can get your consumers to talk to each other about your product, you’ve started a more meaningful conversation. We created the #JoinTheMVMT hashtag for this exact reason. We asked our consumers to post pictures of their MVMT watches, with the hashtag, for a chance to be featured on our feed. This approach proved to be extremely effective for us as not only did it get a conversation started, but also it inspired User Generated Content (UGC). UGC is terrific for a company as it is not only free, but also provides the power of personal recommendations, which are known to drive sales.
What do you guys think of these tactics? Have you used them before? If so, how did they work out? What are some of the things that have worked for you in the past? If you haven’t used any of these types of strategies before, try them out and let us know how it goes! We look forward to reading your stories in the comments!
Also, if you like what you see in the pictures above, head over to our website mvmtwatches.com and use the code shark for a 10% discount off of MVMT Watches!
