Last updated on April 13th, 2016 at 11:13 am
You may have read about the man who used Uber, nearly got killed and still was charged $178.93. That man, Dennis Yu, chief technology officer at BlitzMetrics, presented at the recent Growth Marketing Conference in San Francisco’s Hotel Kabuki on how he targeted Uber on Facebook to get a refund and how his initiative can serve as an example for B2B marketers to precisely focus on specific Facebook users for a dollar a day.
In the process of taking an Uber ride to Facebook headquarters, Yu had to pay surge pricing, but the Uber driver missed his Caltrain connection to the social network’s Menlo Park station. So he had to take the car all the way on a dangerous freeway ride, according to Yu. Long story short, Yu was dissatisfied with his customer experience and asked Uber for a refund. After six tries and only receiving a $5 credit, Yu created a blog post and took to Facebook to promote it.
For only a few dollars a day, Yu said he was able to create a paid ad campaign on Facebook and micro-target employees at Uber with this post. Assuming his post was probably nationwide if not worldwide, Uber quickly contacted him and offered a full refund within a day or so.
According to Yu, he has been able to achieve similar results on Facebook 2000 times. The secret to targeting ads on Facebook is the ability to choose the specific geographic and demographic characteristics of only the users you wish to reach and not others who could not care less about your post.
Market with a megaphone, target workplaces
Yu didn’t advocate that you should complain as a first course of action on Facebook. However, after contacting customer service and not getting the desired result, consumers should consider using Facebook to target influential contacts, he said.
In a similar vein, B2B marketers can use Facebook to zero in on decision makers at customer workplaces.
For example, B2B marketers could target Facebook itself for a dollar a day. The secret to doing that would be to concentrate on Facebook users that have Menlo Park, Calif., as their designated location, which is the headquarters of the social network. In this way, B2B marketers could potentially even reach Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, according to Yu.
Get influential endorsements
Another growth hack Yu recommended for B2B marketers is to target influencers on Facebook for their endorsements of your product or service. However, obtaining the endorsement is not enough. In addition to getting the positive thumbs-up, B2B marketers need to get permission to use the recommendation for redistribution and social proof.
In his presentation, Yu cited an example of one person contacting Jason Miller, the well-known content marketing leader at LinkedIn (which B2BNN has featured previously) for advice on where to begin with social media marketing. Miller called out Yu as the “smartest social media marketer” he knew of when it came to targeting customers on social.
Within a couple hours, Yu responded to the Miller post with a simple, seemingly lighthearted request to be able quote him and included a winking smiley. Miller replied positively. After that, Yu took what he called a “lightweight endorsement” and recycled it on the BlitzMetrics website and LinkedIn. In addition, he amplified it to customers on Facebook and Twitter.
“(B2B marketers need) to take things that work in one channel and put them in another channel,” Yu said.
Pay to promote someone else’s content
As Jill Rowley, another speaker at the Growth Marketing Conference, said, social is all about OPC—other people’s content. Similarly, Yu presented that B2B marketers should pay to promote someone else’s content.
As an example, he shared a tweet that Larry Kim, founder of pay-per-click ad software company WordStream sent. According to Kim’s Twitter account, on Nov. 13 he tweeted, “dennis yu is genius level 999 and has great stuff too if you haven’t heard him.”
It would follow that Yu paid to put this tweet onto Twitter as a promoted tweet to reach an audience beyond his and BlitzMetrics’ immediate social circle on the micro blogging site.
#GrowthHacking #Facebook: Personal Branding Hacks https://t.co/Z7uinPHihb #StartUp #Innovation via @dennisyu #StartUpMarketingConference2015
— Hoi Sze Lam (@hoiszelam) November 27, 2015
Minions of ‘client love,’ nurture like email, convert cross-channel
Another tip for growth marketing that Yu proposed looked at using virtual assistant services such as Fancy Hands to show your clients “love.” According to Yu, B2B marketers are too busy to carry out tactical marketing tasks on social, so he recommended they use these virtual minion services to “snoop on LinkedIn” for information to help salespersons avoid the dreaded “cold call.”
The good thing about social, noted Yu, is that B2B marketers do not need customers’ emails to market to them. For example, looking at social profiles can give marketers information about customer intent and allow them to send particular messages to the prospects.
In this way, at least initially, customers can be nurtured via social much like email marketing. And then the social leads can be followed up with by email marketing.
Finally, using retargeting via social, email and other channels will lead to a conversion multiplier effect that none of these could achieve alone.
For more coverage of the Growth Marketing Conference, click here, here and here
Photo via static.guim.co.uk
