Maybe you recall grabbing your free pastry from Starbuck’s on Free Pastry Tuesday. If you missed it, let me assure you that the pastries were great (and FREE) and above all the marketing plan was awesome!

Starbucks’ last campaign worked so well that they are at it again. Before I tell what’s going on now, let’s have a quick Free Pastry Tuesday Marketing refresher:

Starbucks created an internet frenzy leading up to Tuesday July 21st, 2009 (Yup that was the date of Free Pastry Tuesday). They used social media sites (primarily Facebook & Twitter) to alert and communicate with their  fans. They used these sites to drive  their  fans to their website so they could print out a coupon – to be presented in exchange for your pastry.

Do you think you could use this concept in your business?

Here’s how they did it:

1. They set up a fan page on Facebook. (they now have  4,251,445 fans). They used this page to keep “fans posted” about the event.
2. The set up a Facebook event, encouraging all their fans to invite their friends in addition to attending themselves.
3. The used Twitter to keep their fans up to date on the event. This also allowed their followers to tweet about their experience and excitement!

Looking at #3 above, the followers did their part. On the morning of July 21st references to Starbucks accounted for 1% of Twitter’s total traffic!

What is cool about how Starbucks’ does it – is that any brick and mortar business can do it too!

So what are the up to this time?

Starbucks is introducing Via – their patented instant coffee. Not only are they introducing it, they are inviting everyone in for a free sample!

Again they created a Facebook event and are using their fan page and Twitter to promote.

Do you think that some of the people who visit the store might buy something while their there?

Do you think that maybe some of the “buyers” wouldn’t have gone into Starbucks were it not for the promotion?

Do you think that maybe Starbucks will even get some new customers using this promotion?

Methinks the  answer is yes to all of the above.

Now let’s put our thinking caps on and think of some (not just one, but several) ways that you can get customers to your business, introduce new people to you and what you do and create a whole lot of good will – by leveraging the perfect storm (or trifecta) of your website, Facebook and Twitter.

What Starbucks shows us is the how. Do you need to do it so big? Only if you have 4000+ stores and the overhead to go with it… Would 20 new clients/customers per month make a difference? (Or 10? Or 5?).

Using Facebook’s event feature, create an event, Tweet about it and drive people to your website so they can take advantage of your offer!

If you have found this post helpful or insightful please leave a comment or post to Twitter using the button above.

Thanks!

Lennie

Tags: Facebook, Free Pastry Tuesday, instant coffee, marketing, marketing campaign, Starbucks, Starbucks Via, Twitter, Via

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 1:33 pm and is filed under Marketing & Promotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.