Social Climbing: Niche Marketers are Finding New Customers Thanks to Social Media

Social media is hot, for both consumers and businesses. Just about everybody seems to be on Facebook, twittering and blogging, or following blogs.

Is anybody generating more sales as a result of social media activity? Not really. But several merchants are finding that social communities can be a decent customer-acquisition vehicle — particularly for niche marketers.

For instance, Kathy Elkins, owner/vice president of marketing of yarn merchant WEBS, which operates Yarn.com, joined knitting and crocheting community Ravelry.com about two years ago. She was able to launch a WEBS group within the site while it was still in beta.

Ravelry.com now has more than 346,000 registered users, with several different groups based on interests, such as Yarn Sales and Needlework on the Net. So Elkins can reach out to members based on their preferences.

Ravelry — like Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites — does not give its subscribers' data to its users (unless you're paying to play). But Elkins can post in Ravelry groups, and interact with people who may not be customers or even know about Yarn.com.

“For us, it was a natural audience,” and a way to join the conversation and listen to what people in the knitting community had to say, she says. “In our group, we can put information up on new products and in-store events, and engage users to sign up to receive our catalog.”

But Elkins says the blogosphere is still the main tool for customer acquisition. The company even put its blog on a separate WordPress platform rather than using the same platform as Yarn.com. So if someone Googles “yarn,” there's a chance Yarn.com will show up in both the general search and the search for blogs.

Ravelry.com and the blog have helped generate new names, Elkins says. “If you look at our analytics, the Yarn.com blog is one of the top sites for both customer conversions and driving traffic to our site.”

Ravelry is driving about 3.5% of customer acquisition, but only 2% of revenue. The blog is driving about 2.5% of customers, but 3% of revenue. Why the discrepancy? “My average order from the blog is significantly higher than orders I receive from customers on Ravelry,” Elkins says.

As for getting those customers acquired from social media to be multibuyers, “We are very aggressive with e-mail marketing, and we mail our knitting catalog four times a year,” Elkins says.

Great expectations

Social media can be a handy acquisition tool for marketers that sell goods for special events, such as maternity or wedding apparel. Going social was crucial to the growth of maternity fashion merchant Due Maternity, which sells online and through five boutiques.

“Our shopper cycle is 12 weeks,” says Albert DiPadova, who cofounded Due Maternity with his wife, Shannon Raffetto DiPadova, in 2003. “The first trimester, there's denial; the second trimester the bump is noticeable and there's a need for a maternity wardrobe; and by the third trimester, it's all about buying for the baby.”

So the window of opportunity for prospecting for mothers-to-be is extremely tight. “And there aren't many good resources for finding lists of expecting mothers,” DiPadova says. “You have to have a real-time list.”

Due Maternity has a Facebook and Twitter presence, but it brought social networking home to capitalize on the niche. For instance, a dedicated team of four bloggers helps populate its inhouse blogs; the blog content is half keyword-driven, half content-driven, DiPadova says. Posts from its blogs automatically populate to Facebook and Twitter through a service provided by SEOwhat.com.

The Due Maternity Website also hosts message boards and gift registries — or wish lists — within its community section of the site. What's more, expectant mothers can also launch a personal page to show their families and friends their pregnancy progress.

Due Maternity is using a widget created by PopularMedia called Social Notes, DiPadova says. This lets users e-mail the product page to a friend, post the page to their Facebook or MySpace user profiles, or post it to a blog.

While traditional e-mails have delivered a 1% response rate for Due Maternity, Social Notes generates a response rate of 2%, DiPadova says.

Here come the brides

David's Bridal has been able to generate traffic and qualified leads through Facebook advertising. Working with interactive agency Brickfish, David's Bridal placed ad units on Facebook pages of users who fit the specified target, based on user profile information. David's Bridal also placed ads on MySpace.

The wedding apparel retailer held a Dress Your Wedding contest this past winter to promote its online customization tool of the same name, says Carol Steinberg, vice president of Internet for David's Bridal.

Participants used the Dress Your Wedding Tool to create a custom wedding ensemble, Steinberg says. And David's Bridal encouraged contest entrants to use social media to spread the word. The campaign, which ran from Jan. 11 through Feb. 24, generated 4,200 entries.

The contest brought in new registrations from those entering via a direct click from the contest page set up by Brickfish, as well as through word-of-mouth mentions that came in from viral networking sites such as Facebook.

“We are able to track all new registrations by source, in addition to monitoring updates to existing vs. new entries,” Steinberg says.

David's Bridal would not reveal exact numbers, but Steinberg says, “we found that new registrations from Brickfish, Facebook and MySpace increased by 120% as a result of the campaign.”

This was David's Bridal's second big social project in the past year. The company's One Love campaign, which ran for six weeks on Davidsbridal.com this past fall, had people submit their stories about finding their one love.

Steinberg says Davidsbridal.com saw a 112% increase in social networking traffic, primarily from Facebook and MySpace, during the One Love campaign.

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