How I stopped my Viral Marketing Campaign from Imploding

I’ve been a little busy working on a new startup concept and getting those details together, and it’s tied me up from posting a few follow up posts that I thought would interest you maniacs. I recently wrote about how my small business marketing campaign on Facebook went viral, and wow have things changed since I made that post.

Since I never really planned on having a “viral” marketing campaign I failed to factor in a lot of important things, things that could have saved my customers a lot of stress and aggravation. Things that I could have done to ensure that our backend was ready for the success of a viral marketing campaign.

Viral Marketing Campaign Failures

I wanted to share a few of the things I failed to plan and what I needed to do to make sure that we continued to maximize the success of our viral marketing campaign on Facebook. Those of you that subscribe to my blog might remember that I decided to give this social media campaign a little kick with radio advertising, something I obviously want to get a ROI from. Having new customers immediately confused or frustrated with you before they even experience your service is a recipe for disaster, that disaster was unfolding right before my eyes.

Tagging Made Difficult

One of the largest premises behind this particular campaign was to take advantage of Facebook tagging by having our Facebook friends post a specific image to their Facebook wall and tag us in the comment area. Assuming that my customers would simply just know how to tag was a terrible assumption on my part, as most don’t know how to tag a Facebook Page.

Facebook Privacy Hates FB Pages

Even if a potential customer knows exactly how to tag a Facebook Page, if their privacy settings aren’t set for everyone to see the tag won’t show up on your Facebook Page wall. Assuming everyone’s privacy settings will work with this type of promotion is a terrible move.

Failure to Plan for the Flood

Sure, I’m not going to lie. I knew this marketing campaign would do well for my small business because we’ve done it before and the results were excellent. However, one major thing changed since the last time we ran this promo… the birth of Social Media.

Managing new customers and this promo in the past was easy because it didn’t require managing customers using the internet or social media. It became very difficult to track and efficiently add new customers to our salon software database out of the Extreme Tan and Smoothies home office, something I definitely took for granted when putting this campaign together in my mind.

Next time I’ll put more thought into how things will be managed on the backend to make sure things run smooth.

Follow Up Nightmare

I never considered that there would be questions, lots of them and often, especially with the addition of all of the poor plannings listed above. Customers wanted to know how they would know when they were added, how to tag, why it didn’t work, was it really free and a massive slew of other questions. Questions that all require an answer, our commitment is that everyone receives a response, everyone. Regardless of the question.

This alone requires another associate handling social media questions for an additional 3 days a week at 6hrs per day, another position that can’t be filled out of season.

How I Fixed My Social Media Marketing Mistake

This marketing campaign kicked off late on a Friday evening, by early Monday morning I knew we were in for a wild ride as the team scrambled to make sure we got customers entered quickly. By the close of business on Monday there was a false sense of security, like “OK, we made it through and got everyone from the weekend added”. By Tuesday afternoon it was evident that there would be a new full time position needed at the office, someone to simply enter first and last name in to the salon software system.

Being in our slow season we won’t be hiring any new full time office positions, instead we needed to come up with fixes.

Avoided Micro-Managing

Mike thought it would be a good idea if we had a simple tool that would make it possible for our customers to see if their Free Tanning til Labor Day package had been added to our system. The “Magic Man” Jim put it on wax and a simple tool was developed to make it possible for our customers to see if they could begin tanning, and a dashboard to make managing customer additions simple for the associates that are now taking on extra tasks. The tool is simply called “Promo Checker“.

Now Jessica, our social media mastermind and Mike utilizes the new tools to manage customer additions almost effortlessly.

Adjusted Quickly

Even with the new promo checker tool, how to adjust privacy settings video, “How to tag a Facebook Page in a Status Update“, and “How to tag a Faebook Page in a Photo” posts things were still shaky. There were plenty of questions and even more confusion.

We needed a better way and we needed it fast, even with taking the steps below we would need to make more adjustments.

On Thursday we came to the decision that we would need to have a custom Facebook app made to handle this entire process, making it “2 clicks” simple for our customers and making it easy for us to manage on the backend. As some of you may know, I’ve dabbled in custom Facebook apps before and currently have a Facebook game in development as well.

I should have a finished Facebook app to show you later tonight or tomorrow.

Asked for Help

After going through a few of the things listed here I knew we would need some help getting the right tools in place to make this work right. Thanks to tools like Skype I was able to call on a few friends and a developer that I’m currently working with, all of which stepped in and helped in some way. Networking matters.

Educated

I mentioned above that we wrote “how-to” articles on both the Extreme Tan and Smoothies business blog as well as here on my blog. I also mentioned the video and the custom “free” page that we set up to help customers find all of the information we put together. Our social media manager Jessica put together a quick infographic on correct tags and tagging examples. We are constantly educating our customers using Facebook, Twitter and our Live Help support system.

Listened

I monitored the Extreme Tan and Smoothies Facebook Page closely to see how the campaign was going and to jump on any questions that anyone might have had. I listened to my fellow associates, their concerns and ideas.

Learned

Last but not least and breaking the cute little alphabetical list I had going on above is learning. This entire experience reminded me of the importance of pre-planning properly, I’m a planning and project management freak, the fact I didn’t think this through is silly. I learned how powerful Facebook Pages can be. I learned new things about Facebook and resolving problems that I never would have learned without this experience.

Parting Shots

I can’t tell you how much I enjoy the learning experience that this little campaign has given me in such a short period of time. It’s just awesome to learn (kinda) the ins and outs things in a hurry.

P.s. If you would like more information about the tools I used to build my viral marketing campaign using social media, check out “24 Tools I Used to Build a Viral Marketing Campaign on Facebook“.

Tagged as: Facebook, Facebook Pages, Social media, Viral, Viral Campaign, Viral Marketing

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