And on top of that… It sells stuff!!!

I’m excited to share with you this simple technique that can grow your brand message, promote a product, AND get people into your store or onto your site – ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

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In this example below, you will see how this technique works with a physical location to bring in more foot traffic to a store .  At the end of the post, I’ll make a brief mention on how you can replicate this with a virtual/or online store.

* Quick Note:  Cape Surf was an actual social client of mine, so this is both a “case study” and “how to” type post…

THE RAFFLE TECHNIQUE

How I did it:

The surfboard in the image below COST the surf shop somewhere around $80.  As you can see in the Facebook post below, I told our audience “This Board Can Be Yours for ONLY $10“  -  I didn’t use the word “ONLY” but I should have…

10 dollars for a surf board that would retail around 250 dollars is a REALLY high perceived value and a big motivator for the consumer to join the raffle game.

It works great for Sales too because as the retail store, we only had to sell about 8 raffle tickets to break even.  Anything above that magic number was profit!

Here are some points I made sure to hit that made this work:

• Posted on FB during high traffic times.  – For us this was around noon on a Saturday
• Engage with the audience to hype it up – Notice I said in the comments “…the more tickets that are yours, the more chance you have in winning…”
• I sold the ticket INSIDE the shop so they HAD to come in and see the rest of the merchandise!

The outcome: I remember a pregnant lady won the board for her husbands birthday.  She only bought one ticket, so you can imagine how stoked she was to have a $250.00 surf board to give as a gift for ONLY $10.00.

Take it Even Further

Go Viral With It:

If I was to do this again – especially for an online store/offer – instead of selling physical “raffle tickets” I would make the participant make a donation and SHARE a status on facebook about the contest.  Also, make sure that the status post has the @TAG to make sure you get notified of it.  Then you can simply choose a notification at random to win.

That strategy would help add more people to your fan base AND the raffle game at the same time.

Make $$$ With Info Products:

To break even with the surf board we had to sell about 8 tickets, but what if you were selling an info product that costs next to NOTHING to distribute?

If you had an info product that was priced around $97.00, how excited would your audience be to see that they could win it for only a $3.oo virtual raffle ticket!?!

You can even WOW your customers some more by saying that $1.00 for every raffle ticket was going to benefit a charity.  This way they can feel even better about purchasing a ticket that could win them your product at a GREAT price!

To Take Away

It’s all about perceived value with this technique.  Obviously if you are a retail store then you have to cover your costs.  If that is the case, you just have to know how many tickets it would take to break even and if you are confident in hitting that number.

Entice the audience to purchase more tickets by saying “the more you get the better your chances,” and even donate some of that money to charity to help your customers feel better about purchasing them.

Hope you enjoyed this post, if so… please use those share-buttons on the left side. It’s how the good stuff spreads

Stay in Touch!

Are you a Facebook Fan yet, or would you rather tweet us to say what’s up?

The last time I checked, the more clients a business had, the more money they made. And money (correct me if I’m wrong) is a good thing. We all need it in order to keep doing our jobs… and we all need it in order to survive.

So, if you understand that more money can come as the result of having more clients in your business, the question then becomes, “How do you attract more clients?”

Based on my experiences, the best way to do this is through the creation of social proof.

Social proof is something one creates in order to prove to others that what he or she says or does is worth paying attention to. In short, it’s a way of building yourself up so that you can sway the actions of a large group of people.

The principle behind social proof is that since most people make the assumption that the people surrounding them possess more knowledge about a particular situation than they do, they will deem the behavior of others as more appropriate or better informed… and therefore, follow in the footsteps of those around them.

Social proof gets people talking about brands. Social proof convinces people to buy a particular product. And social proof sways clients to buy from one business and not another.

The more social proof your business has, the greater your chances of attracting new clients.

In order to attract more clients and make more money, however, you need to create an ever-increasing amount of social proof around your business.

Need more money? Get more clients.

Need more clients? Create social proof.

If you can create enough social proof, you’ll have clients begging to buy from your business. With enough social proof you’ll have clients clamoring to your business.

Social proof is powerful.

If you understand this, you’re on the right track! But the question then becomes, “How do you create social proof within your community?”

One way to do it is through the use of SOCIAL MEDIA.

What you may not realize about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter is that not only are these tools an excellent way of communicating with the citizens in your community… but sites such as these are also one of the best (and fastest) ways of building social proof.

To build social proof with social media, you need to do three things.

1) Increase your follower counts. The more people you have following you on Twitter, subscribing to your RSS feeds, or becoming a fan of yours on Facebook, the more important your business will seem.

2) Get your business’s message to spread online. The more your business’s content is Re-Tweeted, emailed back and forth, voted on, Digged, or StumbledUpon, the more “popular” your organization becomes.

3) Have people talking about your business in the real world. When the story you spread about your business is so great that it has people talking about your institution outside of the World Wide Web, then you know you’ve succeeded in generating positive social proof.

The formula looks like this:

• Need more money? Get more clients.
• Need more clients? Create social proof.
• Need social proof? Harness the power of social media.

Social proof is created by continually proving that your business is an amazing place; that you’re constantly pushing the boundaries; and that your business is doing something special – something others will want to be a part of.

If you are not yet using social media in your business as a tool for communication, marketing, promotion, and social proof creation, now is the time to begin!

Social proof doesn’t just pop up over night. It takes time to build and grow. The longer you wait to get started, the longer it’s going to take before your community starts talking about you and your incredible institution.

What are you waiting for? There couldn’t be a better time to harness the power of social proof through the use of social media!

Start creating your Socia Proof before your competition does!