Snag Your NHL Team's Schedule

Well, it took a while. But, the NHL season is now in full swing!

As always, with Squareberry, you can SNAG categories of events from other accounts and pull them into your account.

Are you a sports bar or restaurant? Does your small business support a certain team? Snag you local or favorite NHL team's schedule to show off on your social calendar. Just go to http://squareberry.com/nhl and click the "Snag" button in the top right corner and follow the steps.

Once your NHL team's schedule is pulled onto your Planner, you can choose to publish that category as reminders to social media, display it on your web calendars and widgets, show it off on your Facebook calendar or use it as a guide for planning your special events and coupon promotions.

Looking at Calendars as Part of Your Social Media Marketing

When someone says social media, we normally think of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Those are the current big players in the space and the social sites most commonly used by marketers. But when talking about "social media marketing" it is important to consider looking at other, more traditional media as part of your social media portfolio. Calendars for instance have been around a long time. But, when you look at what they do: schedule events/promotions, communicate to people and draw in groups for a common purpose, they can easily be viewed as a social marketing tool.

What's More 'Social' Than an Event?

Let's not forget the idea of "social" is person to person and person to group interaction. The idea of "marketing" is to generate more traffic and revenue for your business. Social Marketing combines these two things, leveraging peer-to-peer sharing to generate word-of-mouth, drive traffic to your location and increase your business.

For many restaurants, fitness locations and local retail businesses, events and coupon promotions are the best way drive more people into their location. Many events are designed to be social. Trivia Night is full of interaction, live music nights are a great time for people to meet and interact and coupon promotions help bring in groups of friends. All of these happenings are ideal for social media sharing and peer-to-peer promotion.

Your Calendar - Published Across Social Channels

With Squareberry, your scheduled events and promotions are published everywhere. Add an event to your calendar and it is published on your website calendar, Facebook Page calendar, mobile calendar pages and on event widgets. Automated reminders are sent out about your event to social media channels, email and SMS subscribers.

With Squareberry, your calendar is truly part of you social media marketing portfolio. Publishing your events and promotions helps you more closely merge social media and real world events to draw in larger crowds, more groups and better business.

Make Your Mobile Presence a Helpful Tool for Your Customers

There are so many companies, mobile websites, mobile apps, online tools and resources out there. When you are competing in a cluttered market, you need your presence to stand out as much as possible. Your mobile presence should be a useful resource and tool for your followers and customers.

Provide Helpful and Informative Mobile Content

The easiest way to make your mobile presence a resource is by feeding in useful and relative information. Squareberry offers a "News" page type in the mobile management area that allows you to stream in a Twitter user's tweets or RSS feed. Using this, you can instantly make your mobile website/app a source of valuable news and information.

Instead of one large RSS feed or a single News page, you can break things up into more detailed pages to offer a more comprehensive experience. Start by adding a Sub Menu to your mobile content. You can call it "News", "Resources" or whatever else works for you. Then, add News pages to this sub-menu, each with a different source. For example, if you are a financial consulting company, you can have news pages for Stock Market, Retirement, Investment, Financial News, etc. You can grab a different RSS feed for each of these topics and create a more extensive news sections of your mobile presence.

Quick Mobile Tools

It is easy to add elements to make your mobile website a useful tool. A financial firm can add or link to mobile financial calculators, provide tools for quick quotes etc. A restaurant can have a simple form for placing an order for pick-up.

The more useful your mobile presence is to your customers and followers, the more likely they are to keep coming back and utilizing your mobile presence. This keeps your organization at top of mind. When your organization becomes a useful resource and tool, you are associated with and instantly thought of when the topic, type or need or geographic area is on the mind of the customer.

Restaurant Promotions That Bring Groups

If you run a restaurant, you want as many people coming in the door and buying food and drinks as possible. You also know that running promotions and throwing special events can help drive more traffic. For most local restaurants, coupon promotions are an essential aspect of marketing. There are weekly flyers, local papers, mail-outs and more that feature local businesses. Your competition is usually present in these areas, so if you fail to be, you are missing out.

Coupon promotions can be great. But is there something you can do to make sure they draw in groups?

Optimize Promotions for Groups

Instead of offering a 25% off coupon for lunch, try a 50% Off One Lunch Entree When You Buy Another or Buy Two Lunch Entrees Get One Free. These small changes mean two people are buying entrees (and hopefully more) for lunch instead of just one person.

When it comes to after work drinks, you can offer discounts on pitchers or "Table Discounts" to encourage larger groups to stop in. Whenever you run promotions or include coupons in your marketing plan, always consider these options and how they can encourage larger groups of people to come in.

Group Events Too

This strategy does not need to be restricted to coupon promotions. You can hold special events that draw in groups. A great example is a "Trivia Night" which has teams going against each other to answer trivia questions. Your marketing for this event should point out the number of people per team, such as "Bring Your Team of 4 to Compete". This event is easily drawing in groups of at least 4 people.

Get the Word Out

Of course, with any promotion or event, you have to get the word out. Schedule various messages to go out on social media accounts leading up to the event/promo. Add the happening to your Facebook Page calendar and website calendar. Promote your upcoming events in your restaurant itself.

How to Not Get Repetitive

Feel like you are getting repetitive with your social media? This is something that can happen to many small businesses who run similar weekly promotions and keep regular schedules. The problem is, this can lead to your followers tuning you out. The more repetitive you are, the more your social media followers will grow accustomed to your repetition and be willing to unfollow you or simply look past your posts on Facebook and Twitter.

Handling Repeating Patterns

Squareberry offers the ability to set your events, messages and promotions to repeat in a variety of ways. Instead of repeating something in a standard weekly way, you can try various repeating patterns to mix-up your schedule. You can run promotions bi-weekly or on the "2nd Thursday of Every Month" etc.

If you still want to run a standard weekly promotion, you can mix up the messages when talking about it on social media. For example, if you have a promotion that happens every Wednesday, you can schedule 3 different social messages that repeat every 3 weeks. So week 1 message 1 would post, week 2 message 2 etc. This allows you to have a different message every week instead of repeating the same exact message each week. Even something as simple as this can make your social feed appear much more diverse and less repetitive.

Play Off Special Occasions or Dates

Another idea for mixing up your promotions and messaging is to play off special occasions and days of the month. You can have a "First of the Month Promotion" or run promotions that go along with National Holidays and special occasions (Valentine's, President's Day etc.) These type of schedules appear much more current and lively than a simple weekly promotion that never changes. Mixing up your schedule and avoiding repetition can breathe life into your social media communications and promotions.

Should You Post About Topics Unrelated to Your Business?

Current Events and Topics

Often times, there are current events, professional sports games, political movements and other things happening in you community that are important to your customers and followers. Should you get involved in the conversation about these topics? Obviously there are are some simple examples. Sports Bars should definitely post scores, reactions and announcements about your local teams. Sports Bars' customers want this information and may even consider their favorite sports bar a source of information on this subject.

But what about a small retail store or a non-profit? When is a good time to take part in the conversations and when should should they just stick with posting about what they have going on? If you run a local non-profit group, your followers will most likely not be looking at you as a source for updates on every single game during the baseball regular season. But if the local team wins the World Series, that probably warrants an excited or congratulatory social media post.

The magnitude of the topic or event should be considered. Does this impact my organization and its followers? In the example just given, regular season baseball games don't the non-profit or community, but winning the World Series is something the whole city and community celebrate. As part of the community, you should not be left out of the celebration.

Your Social Media Experts Should Not Project Themselves

An important factor to always keep in mind is the voice of your social media accounts. Like all aspects of your communication and marketing there should be a consistent voice that is concurrent with your brand. Is your organization, young, fun and casual? Then the way you chat on social media should probably reflect this.

It often seems that one or two people are put in charge of creating the content and messages that will be posted on social media accounts. These people always need to remember they are posting as the organization and not as themselves. The wording, phrasing and expressions used should reflect the brand of the organization, not the personality of that individual.

They should also consider this when it comes to current events. The questions should be "Is my organization and my followers interested in this subject?", "Is this topic beneficial and does it positively reflect my organization?" The top or current event may be very important to the individual in charge of your social media, but it may not reflect the brand of your organization.

Marketing During the Holiday Season

Well, the holiday season is upon us. This week, in the U.S. we will celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas is fast approaching. This is a huge time of year for retail, restaurants and other businesses as people take time off, buy gifts, spend time with family and take advantage of special offers and sales.

Holiday Marketing

Because more stores, restaurants and businesses offering specials and sales during this time of year, there is more noise to compete with. Consumers are bombarded with ads from every angle. If you want to be heard this time of year, you may consider increasing the amount of messages you publish to social media, run more events on "off" nights (such as the middle of the week) and make your promotions can't miss opportunities.

This time of the year is one of the most competitive. If you don't want to be missed, you have to make sure your offers/events are heard and you have to make them worth coming to. Remember that most every other business is also running a sale. Let people know why yours is better.

Cyber Monday

Don't forget about Cyber Monday. If you have an e-commerce website or even if you allow people to purchase gift cards or simple items online, make sure to take advantage of Cyber Monday. Every year, millions of people participate in an online shopping surge the Monday after Thanksgiving. Make sure your business or restaurant does not miss out.

Play Off the Current Events and Holidays

Back in July (in honor of the Olympics), we presented a Tuesday Tip with suggestions for playing off of current events and pop culture with your events and promotions. These type of themes promotions can be used even by small businesses and give your marketing a sense of relativeness and freshness.

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