Something interesting happened last week. As I was going through my emails in the morning, I received an email marketing message from Ssense.com. Ssense is a high-fashion e-commerce website based out of Toronto. I came across their site recently when I clicked on a banner ad on a fashion blog. The email marketing alerted me to a members only sale that the firm was conducting. As I am wont to do, I tweeted out the links to this pair of boots that I wanted to buy.
Almost immediately, several of my followers chimed in with commentary.
It was a pretty slick ass boot as you can see from above so after hearing a chorus of approval I went ahead and daddy bought himself a new pair of shoes.
But then something interesting happened. A tweet from an unfamiliar source appeared in my stream. An account called Hub Shop tweeted at me, showing me a totally different shoe. It turns out that Hub Shop is a high end apparel company in the UK. They had, one way or another, seen my tweet about boots and replied, offering one of their own products up as an alternative to the purchase I would eventually make.
Tomorrow’s Marketing: Equal Parts Cool and Creepy
What Hub Shop did could very easily be a glimpse at the future of marketing. What did they do? They used the tools of social media to try to solicit a new customer. But it wasn’t spam. It was in fact very relevant, and the shoe that showed me, this shoe, was actually incredibly similar to the shoe I had tweeted about. For a minute, I actually considered buying them, and the whole time I didn’t even realize what had happened.
I had been marketed too AS CLOSE TO THE POINT OF SALE AS POSSIBLE. This is so incredibly brilliant. I was literally on the verge of spending money on a certain kind of boot. I shared this fact with one of my primary social networks. Somehow, Hub Shop became aware of this and felt they could garner a new client by offering up one of their own products. It was relevant, it was a similar price point (a bit higher actually) and it was effective. They weren’t offering me a new iPad or a discount if I joined their Facebook page. They were doing nothing more than putting one of their products in front of a consumer who was about to buy.
It took me a few hours to realize all this but when I did I think I got a vision of the next step in social marketing. Since social networks are now a place populated by both consumers and sellers, it was only a matter of time until marketers figured out how to authentically engage with customers and potential ones. Obviously this kind of thing doesn’t scale. A company couldn’t go around sending tweets with links to every Twitter user tweeting about boots. And if they did it would be obnoxious and would backfire.
But beyond putting a product in front of me, they got me to check out their website, take a look around, sign up for their email marketing and, of course, write this post.
That sounds like a pretty good version of social marketing to me.
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This was excellent.
thanks buddy
imagine a hotel that was searching for people who were booking hotels online and sharing them, they could potentially put their own business in front of their customers, offer discounted rates, point them to relevant content, personalized offers…
z
what kind of manpower would it take to do that kind of marketing? did someone at the UK site just happen to see your tweets? or are they trolling for all tweets about those boots? or that shoe mfu?
Jane
I think is an essential question. And I don’t think it scales beyond a certain point. I don’t think a retail shop, brick or ecommerce, would need to target 5000 people a day, but maybe just five or ten, and let the results flow from there, track the ROI, integrate the CRM with the social aspect of the business. How many Twitter followers have become customers? Average purchase? How much work did that take the achieve? etc.
Zac
I have had similar experiences on Twitter however a few have been more annoying than helpful. As long as the company uses this targeting correctly and reach out to people who are actually looking to purchase, then it’s fine and could be extremely helpful. But, if they’re just sending me a tweet about something that is remotely related to something I mentioned, it’s very off putting.
I have had similar experiences on Twitter however a few have been more annoying than helpful. As long as the company uses this targeting correctly and reach out to people who are actually looking to purchase, then it’s fine and could be extremely helpful. But, if they’re just sending me a tweet about something that is remotely related to something I mentioned, it’s very off putting.
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