The Art of The Deal on Facebook – Grow Revenue at Your Spa

 

If you do sales in anyway, you know the value of a referral. Facebook set-up a system for your Spa to obtain referrals, Deals. A deal rewards your clients when they “check-in” on Facebook at your Spa. A yellow coupon appears on your location, creating an immediate benefit to you and potentially a very valuable long term benefit. How?

If someone is checking-in on Facebook at the restaurant a block away your location will pull up on the list, with a yellow coupon attached showing there is a Deal. Think of this as an “enhanced” listing drawing attention to your Spa to Facebook’s mobile users. Is this a population we want to engage with? Heck Yeah! With over 450 million mobile users and a population that is twice as active on Facebook, we want an incentive that encourages Facebook mobile users to “check-in” at your Spa.

Any other reasons? Yes! When people “check-in” on Facebook that activity is promoted to their friends. This is the referral. When your clients “check-in” at your Spa they are rewarded by Facebook  with a series of Likes and Comments. Why? Primarily because this is really positive activity, people are inspired to know their friend is going to get a massage or facial and this is easy for them to Like. Each time somebody Likes or Comments on that “check-in” your Spa’s Page is exposed to a larger and larger audience (think friends of friends see that activity).

When your clients “check-in” and claim a Deal – the activity becomes promoted by Facebook. Edgerank is the term we use to explain how activity winds up in your newsfeed on Facebook. Some activity is being promoted by Facebook at all times, generally this includes Status updates and pictures. As Facebook releases new features they alter their algorithm for the newsfeed to promote certain activity. For 2012 and 2013 Facebook is going to continue to promote Deals in the newsfeed. Why? Because Facebook wants your Spa to have a large and engaged community on Facebook. Every time your clients engage with your Spa on Facebook, advertising money is being generated. In addition, the Deal will eventually evolve to have paid promotion capabilities –  whether those are emails to people who are near your geo-location or more features and capabilities to your Deal.

How can you create a great Deal that inspires your clients to “check-in?” Start by doing an estimate of what you are willing to pay to obtain a new client, do a similar calculation for retaining a loyal client and a calculation as to what you are willing to pay to cross sell a service to a current client. This will give you a good idea as to how aggressive you can be in creating your Deal. What kind of Deal will be good enough to make people want to “check-in” and claim it. It may be 20% off of the purchase of a retail item, can you be more aggressive? Why not give them 50% off the purchase of any retail item? That is a coupon worth claiming!!!

Your debate is are you willing to give up the profit in that retail item to get your client promoting your Spa on their Facebook Page to their friends. What can you do with a service as a Deal? Are you able to offer 50% off of the hot stone massage if you are getting a facial of vice-versa? What is the real cost to you for exposing your client to an additional service at your Spa? You have to be creative about the incentives in your Deals. The more you give, the more business your Spa will attract. 

The best case scenario is they tell people about the Deal and you get their friends coming in and “checking-in” because your Deal is so amazing. How do we jump start that? You and your staff should start checking-in on Facebook when you get to work. You can do this easily from an iPhone or any of the other smart phones or even an iPad or iPod. Your team has to tell the clients about the Deal, let them in on the secret. Almost all of your clients are on Facebook and have friends that live near your Spa or would visit your Spa. This is the nature of our social structure, our friends tend to share a few basics traits in common.

How do you create a Deal on Facebook? As an Admin of your Spa’s Facebook Page you navigate to the Page and click on “Manage Page” in the top right. A menu will appear on the left, as long as your Page is a Place, you will have the option to create Deals on the bottom left of the list of options. If your Page is not a Place on Facebook either your address is wrong or you need to change your type of business to a local business. Now you are ready to create your first Deal.

 When you create the Deal you set the parameters within 3 basic types of Deals. The most common is a simple “check-in” Deal, your client “checks-in” at your Spa on Facebook and a coupon appears on their phone that they show you.  You can change this to require your client to “check-in” multiple times before they can claim the Deal (think the loyalty card at your favorite coffee shop). You can also make this social and change the check-in requirement to be based on the number of friends “checking-in” together. Unless your Spa is consistently getting groups of friends coming in, this is probably not ideal for you.

Last but not least you can do a “charity check-in” Deal. This is a great way to partner up with your favorite charity and when your clients check-in you reward the charity. This is particularly effective if you would normally contribute to the charity anyway or if the charity has a large user base they will encourage to “check-in” at your Spa and help the charity. For this to be work you have to get the charity to work with you and inform their base about how you are helping the charity and encourage their constituency to “check-in” when they visit your Spa.

“Check-In” Deals are Facebook’s response to Groupon. The Deal is flexible, will help you build your Spa’s community on Facebook and empower you to grow revenue at your Spa. The Deal is most beneficial to your Spa when it is claimed! This means you have to make a Deal worth claiming and you have to promote the Deal. Start by promoting the Deal on your Facebook page and newsletter, remember the key to your success is getting the front desk and staff engaged in promoting the Deal to your clients. Are you ready to start growing your Spa’s Facebook presence?