Privy Weekly Blog Roundup for Marketers (5.24.2013)

We're back again to bring you a roundup of what's happening in the local/marketing/restaurant blogosphere! This week, Yelp is vocally fighting back against claims of extortion, GrubHub and Seamless are joining forces, and Mashable brings us 2 insightful articles about branding (and of course, social media).

First up, Yelp. A few weeks ago, we posted about Yelp facing some serious allegations, namely that it extorts its customers into buying (rather expensive) ad space by selectively filtering reviews, which stands to hurt or help a business, depending on the nature of the reviews. Well, it seems Yelp has had enough, and has come out on their blog to contradict the claims that have been made for some time, calling it a 'conspiracy' that they intend to debunk. Without any courts ruling against them, and a simplified explanation of the algorithms determining which reviews are filtered, their debunking post is fairly compelling.

Yelp has responded to critics who accuse the review site of extorting customers for ad revenue

While we're on the subject of Yelp, David Chevalier at SalesBlend has some interesting thoughts on how SMB's can best make use of Yelp to drive revenue. This article is particularly powerful because it takes a realistic, seemingly unbiased approach to explaining that Yelp's algorithm isn't perfect, and there are certainly examples of that imperfection in practice, but SMB's can impact the reviews that end up on their Yelp profiles. He goes on to say that the best approach is to "aggressively manage" your Yelp presence. For example, when a negative review is left on your Yelp page, take Inc.com's advice to "craft authentic, appropriate, and respectful responses."

GrubHub & Seamless are merging, but will remain separate apps, for now

GrubHub and Seamless, arguably the two biggest players in the online-food-ordering industry, have announced this week that they'll be merging, but they'll remain separate apps, for now. Businessweek has a solid roundup of what this means for them, and the other players in the space, including Yelp and OpenTable, whose functions are not directly competing with the merged order-takers, but whose businesses stand to take a hit, as they dominate the most important part of the food-service customer interaction: the purchase itself. Yelp handles reviews and recommendations, OpenTable makes reservations for in-store dining, but GrubHub and Seamless will know what you eat, how often you get food from particular establishments, and as the article says, "the best review is the purchase."

Mashable is one of my personal favorite blog networks, obsessively covering everything related to social media. As a marketer, I've found it extremely useful for distilling the events of the social web into easily-digestible nuggets of insight. First up from Mashable, 9 Social Marketing Metrics That Actually Matter. The list includes "Facebook Engagement Ratio," or the number of people talking about a brand divided by the number who like it, as well as Conversion: the number of people who actually become customers. We're especially keen on Conversion as a vital metric, because that's what Privy does best: convert fans and followers into customers, and track it. And after all, what's the point of maintaining a social presence if it's not driving revenue?

Another thing we harp on here at Privy is finding and projecting your brand's voice. Nobody wants to interact with apathetic robots or corporate marketing machinery, so finding your brand's voice is crucial to maintaining a conversation with your audience and engaging them. Mashable publisher The Daily Muse has put together a list of pointers on how to identify and establish your brand's voice. Their advice includes building archetypes of your audience, identifying how you want them to feel after their interaction (examples: special, informed, or maybe loved?) and then testing your voice on your already-captive audience of archetypes (friends and family, or regular users of your brand). This is good advice for anybody trying to build a social presence, and audience, and engagement.

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How to use the Facebook Custom Audience for Better Advertising

Facebook now has over 1 Billion active users on the social network, almost twice the population of the United States. That's powerful stuff. It's no wonder Facebook advertising has been garnering a lot of attention.

The social network recently unveiled it's facebook power editor, which is an advertising dashboard for "power advertisers". Hidden inside the dashboard is something called "custom audiences". We wanted to give a quick overview of what this is, and why it's important, as well as a brief "how-to" with some screen shots. 

In short, it's an incredible way to advertise to a very specific subset of users, and despite being hidden in the power editor dashboard. it's actually quite simple to use, so don't worry!

For anyone who does email marketing, or prospecting through email, this can be another way to get in front of your leads, or bring old customers back again.

1. Head over to your Ads Manager

This can be found on the left navigation after you login to your facebook account.

2. Enable "Power Editor"

If you haven't already enabled "power editor", you simply click on the tab and follow a few instructions. No more than 2-3 clicks.

3. Click on "Audiences"

As shown above, click on the audiences tab.

4. Click on "Create Audience" and then choose "Custom Audience"

Now we're getting to the fun stuff. Click on "create audience" and then select "custom audience to upload your file".

5. Upload a csv file containing the list of emails to target

For those who have multiple target lists, you should think about how to accurately name and describe the csv file you update. Note that if you're uploading a list of emails, you need to format the csv file to only include emails, and nothing else. If you use constant contact, or mailchimp as your email service provider, they make it quite simple to export a csv of your email database. You can also export your emails from lead in salesforce, or other similar CRMs into a csv. 

Once complete, facebook will do some thinking, and check to see how many of those emails are recognized in their system. After that, you've got your first custom audience. Congrats! Now you can create an ad in the power editor and select this custom audience as your target.

6. Use that list to "create a similar audience" and hit more targets

The amazing thing about the customer audience functionality, is that you can even grow your custom audience by selecting "create a similar audience". Facebook will use it's magical powers to identify similar target users to that in the list that you uploaded, and help you increase your reach.

Happy Advertising!

Online to offline conversions from restaurant facebook pages vs twitter pages

As a follow up to our recent post on comparing the effectiveness of restaurant websites to facebook pages in converting online audience into in-store customers, we thought we'd share a similar data set comparing the effectiveness of facebook and twitter for driving in-store traffic.

As a reminder, Privy enables marketing managers at multi-unit restaurants to convert high intent visitors from online channels into email addresses and in-store customers. Part of the fun is the ability to track how many customers you're driving as a direct result from your online efforts across facebook, twitter, foursquare, mobile and more.

Conversions from Restaurant Facebook and Twitter pages to in-store customers

Take a quick look at the pie chart above. We took a snippet of data we've collected after building over 6,000 guest relationships with over 50 different restaurant locations. Of the 6,000 conversions, lets take a look at the breakdown of those customers that converted from a restaurant's facebook page vs a restaurant's twitter page:

Of the 1,085 customers who came from facebook and twitter, 32% of conversions came from twitter pages, and 68% came from a restaurant's facebook page directly.

We were excited about this for several reasons:

• Most marketing managers we speak with don't yet believe you can win customers through twitter
• Facebook seems to be twice as effective as twitter, but 32% is nothing to ignore

The interesting thing about twitter is that 71% of users access twitter from mobile phones and tablets. So, when consumers who are "out and about" come across your campaigns in their mobile twitter feed, it can be a great channel to drive immediate results. And, as we said before, 67% of online to offline conversions are happening within 24 hours of seeing a campaign. Don't miss out on this opportunity.

Both Facebook and Twitter can be incredibly effective in marketing your local business, so be sure you understand how to engage each audience effectively.

If you're interested in understanding how to track in-store results from your marketing efforts, click here to schedule a free demo.

Privy Weekly Blog Roundup for Marketers (5.17.2013)

It's been a big week for us here at Privy, as we've unveiled our new and improved dashboard, but that doesn't mean we've neglected our blog roundup duties. This week, we've been watching as big players make moves toward owning the local merchant POS system. We've also been gearing up for the NRA Show (that's the National Restaurant Association, not the gun group) in Chicago.

First up, a bit of shameless promotion of our dashboard redesign, with lots of new features and a slick, fresh interface. We posted about it on the blog yesterday, and we're really proud of all the hard work that went into it. Take it for a spin on our live demo.

Square's newly designed iPad stand is meant to attract merchants into converting their POS system.

Next up, we've got a post from one of our favorites, Street Fight Magazine. They're covering PayPal and Square's moves upstream toward local merchant POS ubiquity, comparing the two payment giants' distinct approaches to attracting local merchants. In one corner, Square is going for sexy by including an iPad stand to facilitate their iPad-based customer interface with Square's innovative credit card processor accompanying their POS application. The simplicity of the interface is definitely a selling point, but PayPal is no slouch when it comes to attracting merchants to their system. They're offering free (that's right... free) credit card processing for merchants who trade in their current cash register for one of PayPal's partner's cloud-based POS systems. With merchants often feeling nickle-and-dimed by credit card transaction fees (which can vary by a .01% margin), it appears PayPal is appealing to the bottom line, while Square is making a play for design.

Also in the news this week is the National Restaurant Association's annual show, taking place in Chicago this weekend. QSR Magazine has published a guide to this year's show, where 60,000 professionals and 2,000 exhibitors are descending upon the windy city to connect with fellow food-service professionals and get a glimpse into what the coming year holds for the industry. I can only imagine the plethora of delicious smells that must be emanating from that convention hall...

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Announcing the New Privy Dashboard for Marketing Managers

Privangelists, gather 'round! It's a great day here at Privy as we announce the unveiling of our new dashboard, with a bevy of features, layout improvements, and new functionality. We've been working tirelessly on this update and we're thrilled to have it live. Without further ado, let's dive in and see what's new.

Key new features include:

• Better Campaign Scheduling: The new calendar view makes creating a new campaign as easy as clicking and dragging your mouse across the dates you'd like the campaign to run. Schedule/track all your promotions and drafts in one place. 
• Cleaner Promotion Page: See all promotions, past and present, on a single page.  You can edit incomplete drafts, view pending promotions and check up on past campaign statistics.

• More Customer Data: Sort through all of the customers you have acquired through Privy, in total, and on a per campaign basis. You can now see customers according to where they came from online and which location they visited so you can easily export pre-bucketed lists to your email marketing provider.
• Custom Photo Library: You can now store photos for offers directly in the dashboard for future use.

For a deeper walkthrough, continue reading.

Overview Page

When you first log in, you're taken to the Overview page. Here, you can see you active campaigns and how they're doing, as well as our new fully-interactive Calendar. The Calendar is a game-changer for Privy users, as you can now see, schedule, modify, and access campaigns, old and new.

Calendar

The Calendar has been a high demand request from users, and its beauty is matched by its simple functionality. On the Calendar, users can drag and drop campaigns, drag across dates to create a new campaign, and easily navigate all of their campaigns in one place. The color coding system allows users to see which campaigns are past, active, and future, and incomplete drafts, giving them a hub for managing and scheduling promotions.

The new Privy Calendar houses all your campaigns and allows you to click into campaigns in every state: Current, Past, Future, and Drafts.

Campaigns Page

We have also revamped our Campaigns page, as an adjunct to the Calendar, where users can see all of their campaigns in one place. The page goes beyond the Calendar by providing quick access to campaigns from last month or last year. Here, users can revisit previously-successful campaigns as inspirations for new ones, or start from scratch promoting new menu items, expansion to a new location, or just another enticing offer that will drive customers that are online into your doors.

Customers Page

Our new Customers page has been completely rebuilt from scratch, giving our users vastly more insight into who their customers are, where they're coming from, what location they frequent, and an improved capacity to segment these customers for future remarketing opportunities. On the Customers page, users see their total statistics from across their Privy campaigns, engaging users with their customer base in all new ways. For example, mousing over a customer will reveal where they came from, their email address, and often a picture pulled from profiles associated with their email address.

Our new fully-interactive Customers page, where customers can be bucketed for easy email list creation.

Color-coded interactive graphs indicate where users are finding your Privy specials and what location is producing the most from your campaigns. Clicking on a slice of the pie chart reveals customers who came from that source or visited that location, allowing users to identify how to best market to 'buckets' of customers based on how they have engaged with the user's brand. This added functionality helps users use email marketing more effectively by curating buckets of customers to whom personalized messages can be sent and more effectively reached.  What's more, with our fresh integration with Mailchimp, you can  now export customer lists directly to Mailchimp, or export them as a CSV for any other email service provider.

There are lots of other features and functionality that make for a truly smooth Privy experience, an experience you can now try using our free product demonstration! Take our new dashboard for a spin by going here.