Our goal as marketers is to provide as many opportunities as possible for our business to make that sale, and we do that by engaging new clients, our current clients, people that are looking for our product or service.
Once I figured that out, I understood that I could market any product, any service there was.
And that’s why my company can launch products in so many different categories, from burger joints to senior homes.
What do they have in common? There are customers actively looking for a solution. Might as well be you that sells that solution.
I wanted to start this post with this small rant since I’ll be writing about how we’re launching new products and the challenges we face as we grow from a team of 8 that mainly operates in a small little country (but very beautiful) called Portugal to a world class company.
I’ll talk not only about marketing but also about business. Most of the stuff is not perfect, perfection is something we strive for but most of the times it is unattainable due to the speed we’re moving.
The first product launch I want to write about is a very fresh business called Box Burger. Gourmet style Burgers served in Street Boxes.
We figured that a lot of cities in Portugal are missing a great burger at a fair price. We designed this concept where it’s very cheap to build, it’s movable if the location is not good, and the product is easy to cook making it easy to train the staff.
So to launch our first location we did a BOGO offer (Buy one, Get one free).
We wanted people to try our burgers, see how good they are and try to make them burgerholics.
We designed a flyer with that offer and spread it around the city, on companies, factories, supermarkets.
And a Facebook ad campaign to generate leads. And this is where it gets interesting.
The Facebook campaign we built, didn’t lead to a landing page, we pointed people to Facebook Messenger.
Here is our ad:
Once the conversation started, our Messenger bot kicked in and continued the conversation, pushing the user down the funnel. And these were the steps of the funnel:
Step 1: Facebook Messenger Ad presenting the offer, within the copy of the ad we also requested the user to tag 3 friends who would enjoy the offer, creating a mini viral loop.
Step 2: The user would click the ad or tag their friends, in both cases, the bot would be activated.
Step 3: The bot would ask the user for their cell phone number so we could send a text message with the coupon.
Step 4: The user would get a text message with the offer and the coupon code (which was their phone number), the location of the box, and an expiry date (7 days after they received the coupon). 15 minutes after submitting the phone number, we would ask the user to share the post on Facebook with their friends, thus creating a new small viral loop.
Step 5: After a few days, if they didn’t go to the box, we would remind them about their coupon on messenger, and 2 days before the expiry date, we would send them a new text message with a reminder.
Step 6: Once the user shows up at the box, he would show the staff their text message, the staff was trained to input the customer number on a special area of the messenger bot and the bot would validate the coupon and check if it was redeemed or not.
Step 7: After about an hour of having the coupon validated, the customer would receive a message on Facebook requesting him to rate their experience from 1 to 5 stars. If the user rated 4 or 5 stars we would thank him and request them to write a Facebook review, which is public and gives us notoriety.
If the user rated 1–3 stars, we would ask him how we could’ve given him a better experience.
We generated around 458 coupons and out of those, 98 people actually went to the box and enjoyed a tasty burger. So we had a conversion rate of 21%.
We also opened a direct line of communication with 614 people on Facebook messenger, and 458 people via text messages.
So the next step is to develop a Box Club and POS (point of sale) integration so we can track how many times a customer has come to our Box Burger and estimate the lifetime value of our customers so we can more accurately understand what we can spend to acquire new customers.
So the beauty of this is that we can track each step of the funnel. And figure where are the bottlenecks of our funnel.