Material Retail Dumps

Welcome to the Material Retail Dumps podcast. If you've listened to us before, thanks so much for coming back. If it's your first time listening, welcome Material Retail Dumps is a short form podcast with brief but valuable content for independent retailers. As business owners, we don't have time for a 30 minute lesson with a ton of banter, so we get straight to the meat of the topic and aim to give you actionable information that will help you optimize your retail operation and make more money every day. Welcome to Material Retail Dumps, episode 39. This is another episode in our series about getting customers into your store or back into your store. In this episode, we're gonna give you an idea for a social media tactic or contest that you can use to get customers in store and also get content that you could use for your own social strategies.

So, super simple. So let's talk about how it works. The contest can be called, you know, win your outfit or win your post or anything like that to enter the contest. Customers who bought something for your store will have to wear the outfit, take a picture or a video in the outfit, and then post the outfit on either Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or wherever you wanna have a contest. It could be across multiple social channels or just on one social channel. That's up to you. And then they'll tag you and whoever posts the best outfit or the best post gets to be the winner. You can have it be a random winner based on a, you know, tool online that you use, or you can actually pick a winner who posts the best content and then whoever wins gets that outfit for free. So they already bought the outfit, so you're gonna refund them for the outfit or send 'em a gift card for the cost of the outfit or just send them money.

Um, either way and people get really excited because gives them, uh, the ability to be a little bit creative with what they bought and, you know, showcase your items. Um, you know, most people who are going to use this, who are gonna join this contest are people who would've posted on social media anyway. So it's a little bit of a h heavy lift to join it cuz you actually have to take a picture and be creative, um, with what you're doing. A lot of other contests are just like, you know, like our posts and comment and then you get entered. But this one you actually have to post and you post it on your own social channel. You don't have to do any crazy, um, tagging or anything like that to really like ruin your page. You just gotta mention the store. People gotta know that, that it's you.

So let's just talk about it a little in a little bit more detail about how we're gonna run it. So first things first, you gotta, you gotta get people to know about the contest. This one's simple. You'll do what you do for any of your other marketing campaigns. You will, you can put up sides in your store, you can tell your customers about it at checkout. You can put it at the bottom of your receipts, you can put it on your own social medias. You can email customers, text customers, kind of any way you communicate with customers, you want to tell them about this. Um, the next thing is you wanna get customers excited about it. So how are we getting your customers excited about it? There's a couple ways. So before the contest starts, you wanna make sure that it's very clear what the prize is gonna be and like why they should join.

So if you're gonna make the prize, um, win your outfit, you know, you want it to be a full outfit, you don't wanna just, uh, give them a $30 win. So, you know, if you sell the expensive stuff, it get a little expensive, but it is what it is. Customer gets to win their outfit. If they post a photo with a dress, a hat, earrings and shoes and they win, they get the whole outfit for free. Um, and you also want to kind of promote the creativity behind it. Put some sample pictures, sample videos in any of the communication that you're doing. The next thing we'll talk about is during the contest. So assuming the contest is gonna be going on for a week or two weeks or three weeks, um, you're gonna want to post repost some of this content that gets posted so that a social media channels look good and b, you entice people to post more because they see that their friends are posting or you know, they see competition.

Maybe someone who posted will post again. Um, and it's just a really good way of like spurring that competitive instinct in people. Now once the contest's over, um, what are we gonna do? We're gonna pick a winner. So you can either pick the winner yourself and be part, be impartial. Don't pick your best friend or your employee or cousin. Pick the person who had the best posts. Um, maybe you can have a committee of, you know, your employees who actually go and vote on who had the best posts or you can just pick at random. Once you have the winner, you're gonna wanna announce it on your social channels and definitely repost that, that image. Um, and now again, the whole point of this is for two things. Number one, you want customers in your store. So how do we do that? We do that because now a lot of people are gonna be posting on your behalf. And even if you get 3, 4, 5, 6 different people only to post on your behalf, that's six more people that were posting on your behalf than before. And that's a win. You know, those six people might have a reach of, you know, 10, 20,000 people in when combined together. Uh, and the second thing, and maybe more important is now you have a lot of content with, you know, your outfits

And you could repost it on your channels and you wanna get your customers permission, but you could definitely make that as part of the rules for entry as we're gonna use the content in our own social channels. And you go ahead and post it. And user generated content is extremely important these days. People love seeing it. People are getting sick of the same old posts of, you know, a mannequin in your store or someone by a beach or same employee, whatever it is. Like they wanna see different.

And having customers

Wear your products and promote your products and putting that on your social channels even in your emails and stuff like that is super important.

Um, I think,

You know, another thing you can think about is like, how else can you just run

Contests

Like this similar to this with different prizes that kind of just spur your community to make moves and to take action and to just do things. The more activity that's going around the internet with your brand or your store, the better it is. The more people see you and chat some, the more people will come into your store. Well anyway, that's it. Looking forward to the next episode of Material Retail Dumps.