What if your product wasn’t good? What if your customers tell you that your product isn’t any good? What do you do? The natural reaction is likely to get defensive and tout the aspects of the product that you think are strong and shy a way from conversations that are negative about your product. This means that social media marketing for your business is likely out of the question. However, what if you had the opposite reaction and tackled the negative head on. Domino’s Pizza did.
Over the holidays in the US Domino’s Pizza launched more than just a campaign. It made a dramatic change in its business, and one that all B2B companies can learn from. Domino’s was tired of hearing customer feedback and research that told them that people didn’t like the taste of their pizza. In response to this Domino’s completely changed all the the ingredients of their pizza in an effort to improve it for their customers. Think about this point as it applies to your B2B business.
Does your company care enough about its customers to rebuild a bad product from scratch? Secondly, if you did rebuild it what type of response would this change generate from customers?
Domino’s also knew it was not enough just to change their pizza. They knew that for this new recipe to succeed they needed to tell people about the change and encourage them to try this new pizza. To do this they leveraged traditional advertising as well as a social microsite: PizzaTurnAround.com. This microsite holds many lessons for B2B social media professionals.
B2B Social Media Lessons From Domino’s
Lesson 1:Be Honest With Your Customers – People hate being lied to. The only thing worse than being lied to is being disregarded. At the heart of Domino’s new effort is a simple acknowledgment that for a while they ignored customers and sold bland or bad tasting pizza. It seems like a simple sentiment, but it has powerful effects. Try doing it yourself. What would happen if you told a customer the reason a new release of a software product was being delayed was due to the fact that a couple developers were out because they recently had a new addition to their family? Isn’t that response likely to generate a better response from the customer that some line about how all of the amazing new features are taking longer to test?
Lesson 2: Use Third Party Social Media Endorsements To Boost Credibility
B2B companies want people to say only great things about their products. This is an unrealistic expectation. No matter how hard an organization may try, it can’t make everyone happy. There are always going to be people who don’t support your product or your organization. Conversely there are people who will always support you. The people that are really important are the ones in the middle. Think about the last time you bought something from Amazon. Was it the 5 star customer rating that sold you? It was likely the 3.5 star rating that offered deep insights into the pros and cons of the product.
How do you move the people in the middle to your side? They need to be convinced by other people who were in the middle and now have begun to support your product. Domino’s knew this. They included a live Twitter search stream on PizzaTurnAround.com (see image above) as a way to help convince people that are on the fence about trying the new pizza. Are all of the Tweets positive? No, but they are all credible.
Lesson 3: Mix Selling and Lead Generation Directly With Social Media
Sales and social media go together. Don’t listen to people who tell you they don’t. In this Domino’s example we can see that they have put an advertisement for their new pizza with a call to action on the top right of the microsite. Their goal is to get people to try their new product. For this to happen, they have to make it easy for people to do it. Do you have direct sales or lead generation tied to your social media activities? If not, why? To be effective, social media and sales needs to work together.
Being Remarkable is About Doing What Others Won’t
While there are many B2B social media lessons that can be learned from this Domino’s campaign, the most important is likely the simplest. To be remarkable, to be a company people talk about, to command respect, your organization has to be willing to do things for its customers that no one else in your industry would.
Link to this article at Social Media b2b .
Sabrina Espinal
Sabrina&Company
We manage your social networks!
