Retail Camp Keynote: How to Leverage the Social Ego to Generate More Sales

Last weekend I jumped on a jet plane and headed Westbound to palm tree-lined Los Angeles for a conference called Retail Camp. An event dedicated to highlighting the world of Digital Media Marketing for the retail community as well as what you need to know as a blogger in the changing face of digital marketing, the two day camp was laden with useful and exciting information for the digital professional.

One particular keynote that I would like to share with you was from Dylan Whitman, one of the faces of TabJuice, a company that allows brands and retailers to set up e-commerce and/or facebook commerce shops. Whitman covered how to leverage the social ego to generate more sales.

The Psychology of the Social Consumer: Get philosophical and think about why consumers engage with your brand on facebook.  By understanding the reason why a customer wants to be a customer, a brand can foster and develop the relationship and generate more sales.

How can you, as a brand, make this happen?  First, utilize the soft brag by boasting (although not too much) about who you are and what you do, aggregate this information out, and engage with your network.

Once engaging, you then need to think about the Tools of Actualization :

• A brand needs to continue to present itself exactly how its customers want to be seen. Basically, are you cool? If you are, then great. If you’re not, well then you need to figure out how to be because customers are buying your image as much as your product.  I have one word: Apple.

• A brand needs to nurture the hype.  How?

Add titles and descriptions to your products that reflects how your customers want to present themselves. You need to state more than color, size, fabric type.  Get creative because when they “like” your brand, the description shows up on their page, and the more branded it is, the better.   You need to give your customer the ability to look cool by association.

Analyze the demographics and psychographics of you customer.  Get to know who they are and what makes them tick, this will inevitably help you understand why the shop.

Innovate by constantly reinventing yourself to stay relevant because this allows your customer to reinvent themselves via your brand.

Customize your messages to different people by engaging with these people through comments, their photos (not just yours!), re-posting, etc.

Remain {mostly} genuine. Obviously,  never lie or waste their time. But keep your goal in mind and work to make them continue to want to associate themselves with your brand, not just buy your products.

Remember that everybody is important. The friends of your customers are also engaging with you by viewing your network’s “likes”, comments, photos, etc.  You are also speaking to the not-so-fashionable friends of your followers. There is opportunity there that shouldn’t be ignored.

Feel Good and Adopt early.  There is nothing wrong with smart marketing.  Stay ahead and use the momentum you’ve obtained by starting early to be a leader.

And remember, there is no single approach.  Success comes by constantly trying new angles and ideas.

About TabJuice:   TabJuice provides a free and comprehensive social e-commerce solution allowing sellers to offer a branded shopping experience directly on their Facebook page. It’s custom branding features, flat affordable monthly subscription price, open source API and superior admin panel functionality and design, make it the best social commerce product on the market today.

You can follow @TabJuice on Twitter or connect via Facebook.