2024 is all about integration.
And fully marrying the concepts of social media marketing and digital marketing should be automated to work as efficiently as possible.
User-generated content needs to work within your paid ads strategies, your personal brand needs to work with your business brand, and promotions or giveaways need to incorporate follow-up in order to really give you an ROI.
Knowing that a simple giveaway wasn’t enough to drive sales or build the number of people in our funnel, we started testing an automated direct messaging campaign with Burger Crush.
Using a program called ManyChat, we set up a few flow charts.
(it’s not as complicated as it looks):
Here’s how this ManyChat flow worked
- We pick a trigger to begin the flow; in this case, it was commenting on a post
- The trigger will send a custom message into their DM’s that we have written
- The message includes a question, including response prompts written by us; when selecting a response, they’ll be guided to the response
- For those who said they did want the 2:1 code, they were prompted to fill in some basic information like name and email (best to do this early)
- Once the information is gathered, they are then forwarded their promo code and a gif (keeping your contacts entertained is key)
- If they stopped at any time throughout the process, we built in a follow-up prompt to remind/engage them
- The names and emails were automatically imported (as the customer entered their details) onto a Google Sheet ready for collection.
The results were truly wild for a local burger shop.
- New Followers – 900
- Reach – 58,744 (431% increase)
- Impressions – 227,919 (290% increase)
- Accounts Engaged – 6,562 (2111% increase)
- Post Interactions – 10,302 (1836% increase)
- Reel Interactions – 1,639 (108% increase)
- Story Interactions – 435 (4250% increase)
Promo Codes Given & Emails Gathered
- Total – 4,552 – increasing their email subscribers by 470%
- From Facebook – 966
- From Instagram – 3,586
19.5% of these contacts were gathered through ads using $386 to gain 892 subscribers. At the same time, the remaining 80.5% (3,660 subscribers) were gathered through organic means posts/reels and influencer collaborations.
Why is this strategy effective?
Low Barrier to entry.
Instead of having to take all of these steps before being able to enter, the labour and energy are on the brand (but it’s automated). The user must simply comment one word to get a private prompt in the DM’s.
Getting in the DM’s
When you communicate in the DMs, you’re not competing in the main feed with all the distractions. It’s more personal.
Builds credibility with the social giants
Social media is geared towards keeping people on its platform. If your content takes them off its platform (yes, they do track this) by whatever means, the social giants will disapprove. This allows you to build relationships on its platforms, in turn helping to build the visibility of your page and posts.
They had a solid offer.
A 2:1 deal is worth the effort of filling in your information and going back and forth a bit.
What we would do differently
We would have integrated ManyChat with your email marketing platform (we recommend Klavyio), and once their information is received, they receive the promo code via email sequence. This will build credibility with the email giants of the world (yes, we’re talking about Google, Outlook, Yahoo, AOL…). As your contacts must open the promo code email, they’re helping your future emails stay out of the spam and promotional folders and straight into people’s inboxes. It would also prevent any fake or unused emails (which, in this case study, we found less than 1%).
What’s next?
We recommend running a simple campaign on ManyChat—maybe an offer, a coupon, or a download. Get familiar with the platform and then plan out a more substantial promo. Consider integrating paid content, lots of social content, and influencer campaigns with your automated DM strategy.