Case Study: How a Local Spa Doubled its Facebook Fans with Sweepstakes
May 6th, 2011 • Posted by Spa Kat • Permalink
Facebook is transforming the marketing landscape for small businesses. Consider that over 40% of Americans (133M) use Facebook for an average of 23 minutes a day. To use it as a business tool, you need a lot more than a page; you need fans (or "likes") and lots of them. Each person you add to your Facebook business page is a person you can talk to, project your brand to and interact with basically for free. Furthermore, each of those connections has an average of 130 "friends" on Facebook.
So, after setting up your page, a frequent question from a small business is "how can I get more people on my Facebook page?" Here is the story of how one local spa added 2,000 fans in just 8 days.
Cloud 9 Spa and Salon is an independent day spa and salon in Gainesville, Florida. They have a really good local brand and enjoy a nice reputation in the community, all of which helps any kind of promotion. But when it came time to do a sweepstakes, they really understood how to do it right. Aside from their strong brand name, the factors that helped them double their list included: a strong social media following, integrating the sweepstakes into a big event around Mother's Day, promoting it in the spa's advertising and the overall strength of their prize.
First, Cloud 9 Spa and Salon has been paying attention to social media and Internet promotions for years. Their Facebook page is very active, filled with posts that are much more than "come in right now for a blah, blah for blah price." It's truly a place where clients ask questions, post articles of interest and where the spa can promote specials and events. That's why each post is special and valuable, they are not lost in a jumble of call-outs for "last minute appointment availability" and "deals." The real take away? If you want people to follow your spa or salon's Facebook posts, or open your email for that matter, you must provide valuable content that matters to them (not just you).
Cloud 9 Spa and Salon understood, at a gut level, that the purpose of a sweepstakes is to motivate current friends to invite their own friends to join the Cloud 9 Facebook page. They accomplished that by creating a very strong offer, “Win a $250 Cloud 9 Gift Certificate for Mom. Here is what it looked like:
That got the attention of their existing Facebook fan base.
After "building" this great sweepstakes offer you would think Cloud 9 sat back and waited for the "likes" to come? No. They shouted about it from the rooftops! The Cloud 9 team talked up the sweepstakes on their website, emailed and used in-spa promotion. For extra measure, they encouraged participants to post pictures of themselves and their moms on the Cloud 9 Facebook page.
The sweepstakes ran for 8 days and the response was overwhelming.
When it was all over, they posted the name of the winner and kept the Mother's Day excitement going with another promotion.
In the end, Cloud 9 Spa and Salon had 1,346 people register for the sweepstakes. Those registered then invited 4,857 of their friends to become fans of the Cloud 9 Facebook page. Over the course of the promotion, Cloud 9 Facebook fans went from 1900 to 3977.
We had a sweepstakes last month and it did bring so many new people to our Facebook page and we went from 325 fans to 420! That's almost a 100 fans and we didn't do half the things that this salon did. Next contest going to incorporate into all our marketing. But, I love love SpaBoom — my best secret in my market!
Wow! This is a great story about Cloud 9 and their website, traditional marketing, and social media marketing are so integrated… a good example for all of us. Thanks Cloud 9 and SpaBoom for sharing. I like to think I am really on top of media things, but definitely learned some good things from Cloud 9! I had some moderate success with the sweepstakes, but their story is really inspiring me to try again and use this very effective approach! Thanks Again!