In my last post, I mentioned that there is a great way to boost brand image, increase customer loyalty, and engage new visitors to your Facebook Fan Page. Many companies have done it well, online and off, but doing it online has the extra benefit of visibility – anyone who participates automatically broadcasts their involvement to their friends.
I’m talking about generosity, of course. Society rewards do-gooders, and scorns the obviously selfish. So put in a little effort to deserve all that attention your brand needs. It’s one great way to take your Facebook Fan Page or other online marketing platform to the next level, and getting past the “oh, it’s spam” reaction that filters out almost every marketing message on the Internet.
So how can you be generous? Might sound like a silly question, but throwing dollar bills into the air isn’t going to get you page views and fans. Unless you do it at the right place and time, of course. So, let’s go over some of the most successful methods, and how you can execute them quickly, easily, and with very little overhead, through your Facebook Fan Page.
Choose your method of generosity
There are several proven ways to turn generosity to your advantage; you only have to pick a method and perhaps one or more causes:
- Co-donation is where the enterprise puts money up for donation and customers participate in choosing which charities to donate to, or how much, by voting or making purchases (or both). Target’s “Bullseye Gives” campaign is an excellent example, where users use a custom application that enables them to vote once a day to determine the allocation of donation funds. Give them a hand, and make them want to keep coming back.
- Eco-generosity drives good will, branding, and sales through commitments to environmental causes. Stonyfield Farm yogurt, for example, has been donating 10% of profits to eco programs for years. But you can boost the image effect of your contributions by communicating with customers about how, where, and how much their purchases impact the environment.
- Free things always generate interest – and it doesn’t even have to be your product. For example, retail outlets with a system for recycling and reusing customer’s throwaways can shake the anti-consumption scorn that the environmentally and globally conscious generation loves to dole out.
- Personal brand outreach through personalized services, convenience, and relevant two-way interaction is always a sure winner. People feel good about your company, and your brand is boosted. Read anything about Ikea lately? You should.
- Perks. Instead of giving away tangible goods, provide socio-cultural perks such as VIP treatment, skipping checkout lines, and special parking for “qualified” customers. People love to feel special – customers will compete for these perks, boosting both your image for empathy and personal attention. Similarly, flexible policies with regards to returns, refunds, subscription rules, etc. will bring in good will that’s worth far more than the immediate expense.
- Free samples show confidence in your products by encouraging try-before-you-buy activity, and provide a positive, generous, non-intrusive way of penetrating a market.
- Random acts of kindness. This doesn’t really need a description, does it?
Get generous on Facebook for involvement and reward
You can use your Facebook Fan Page to develop your cause as the value at the center of a marketing campaign – remember, without value, you won’t have involvement.
For all of the above approaches, surfacing it through a Fan page can support a much more detailed level of involvement than other media. You can use a fancy custom application, of course, but it’s probably much cheaper and simpler to simply talk about your initiative on your Fan Page, dedicate a tab to it, and use simple applications such as polls, event calendars, progress tickers, sweepstakes sign-ups, and so on, to give your Fan Page visitors an accessible view of — or better, a hand in — your generosity campaign.
Yes, you can do all this on your Web site (maybe you already do) – but that doesn’t take advantage of cheap or free Facebook apps, and it isn’t already placed in the middle of the largest (and most trusted) social network on Earth, waiting to tap into whole communities of your target audience. Use your Fan Page to drive traffic to your homepage, but then you won’t have the benefit of a forum for visitors to say nice things about you to each other.
After all, generosity goes both ways – and social media has made it possible for “doing good” to be a solidly viable business model.
