Soon after starting up, Scottish beer business Brewdog was struggling to sell
its product until its co-founders hit on the idea of using the internet to
market their distinctive beers.
“It was a hard sell locally at first,” said co-founder James Watt. “People had
grown up with lager, and a lot of the pubs in Scotland are tied. So we
decided to see if we could interest overseas beer enthusiasts online. We
could see an opportunity in places like Sweden and America where specialist
beers are popular,” he said.
Watt found the most popular bloggers in each country and sent free samples to
them. Having built a following, they convinced local importers to sell their
beer and international orders took off. Today exports account for 80% of
sales.
Blogs and other inexpensive online social-media tools are the most powerful
means of growing a business for those who learn how to wield them, said
Watt. “If you are competing against big companies, you have to use every
means at your disposal to get your message out there and tell people why
you’re different.”
Brewdog uses video to talk to customers. It recently gave them the chance to
create a new beer by posting clips of its staff arguing about the virtues of
different types of beer and letting them vote on how the final product would
taste.
“We called it Beer Rocks and it was the first ever democratically designed
beer. It generated a lot of interest and all it cost us was a couple of
hours’ filming and the price of a video camera,” said Watt.
Jeremy Spiller of the online consultancy White Hat Media agreed that
social-networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter (a micro blogging tool),
blogging and participating in forums and chatrooms were ideal ways for small
firms to attract online visitors and win business inexpensively.
Using them effectively, however, required a different approach to traditional
sales and marketing methods, said Spiller. “Marketing online is
conversational in nature and it’s often slower-paced than traditional
marketing campaigns. Find the influential websites where products like yours
are being talked about and join the conversation.”
Finding out who’s talking about your product has been made much easier with
the advent of simple and free tools, such as Google Alerts, which will tell
you where a particular word or phrase is referred to online. A more recent
service, Google Insights for Search, offers instant statistics on which
people are searching.
Finding the right places to start a conversation is just the beginning, said
Spiller. “When you do start a conversation, be genuine. Don’t pose as a
happy customer and don’t overtly sell your product. Aim to be helpful,
reliable, trustworthy and slightly different from everyone else.
“Don’t expect immediate results either. It’s not necessarily about quick wins,
like a big marketing campaign where you see an immediate 50% uplift in
sales. It’s more about growing positive awareness of your products or
services online.”
Tom Marchant of the travel business Black Tomato warned, however, there was a
danger you could waste time and money blogging and communicating with
potential customers if your online activity had not been thought through.
“It’s a good idea to keep it quite simple initially and not be creative for
the sake of it. We always try to keep in mind that the point of our website
and our activities is to prompt people to e-mail us or to pick up the phone.
Everything needs to be about that.”
Chasing as many online links as you can or driving traffic to your website
indiscriminately would not work either, said Marchant. “Quality links with
sites such as the BBC or relevant online channels are the ones that matter.
Relevance is important, search engines are always refining the way they
define that.
“There are so many websites out there, so you have to increase the stickiness
of your own to make people stay there - in our case by writing our own
travel blogs, inviting customer comments and questions, and allowing them to
share their photos on the site and share their travel experiences.
“You need to look beyond your own website as well. We launched a
travel-photography competition, the Amazing Face Race on Facebook, which was
a big hit and drove traffic. We’re also encouraging people to post videos on
YouTube. They’re all things that build critical mass and bring people to
your website. We’re now looking at using Twitter to enable customers to
share information.”
Jamie Parkins, founder of Vzaar. com, which hosts and streams video for other
websites, said video in particular was becoming a more important way to
attract customers. “Video is a great way to build trust. Video is becoming
much more important to search-engine results as well. It’s the
fastest-growing medium on the internet now, but you don’t have to direct a
whole movie - 30 seconds is often enough. People tend to click elsewhere
after a minute.”
Whatever social-media tools you use it is important to remember your customers
at all times, said Parkins. “You reap what you sow, so share information,
and be useful.”
