Long before the digital age conventional way of advertising a product into
the market is through newspapers, radio, magazines, word of mouth or
television. A local-social strategy by Walmart to make more accessible to their
communities is by launching store level Facebook page.
Social media is
enabling Walmart to go back to the future by providing an authentic customer
service. They outreached the local communities by sharing targeted local promotions, and discussing town
news or events.
The recent advent of social media has created a platform for companies to
market their products. However, there
are various social media presently in the market. Wal-Mart chooses face book as
a media to market its products because face book has 165 million users and it
is considered to be the best platform for advertising.
Walmart has committed for a social local strategy to attract online
customers. It has launched thousands of face book pages. Facebook timeline
provides the online opportunity to interact with customers and to the nearest
Walmart stores. The users can enter a
zip code in the Facebook page and this would direct to the nearest Walmart
stores. This strategy would help lower
the advertising expenditures and more engagement with customers. Walmart gets about 150 million shoppers
monthly whereas Facebook has 160 million users.
Walmart found a
great potential to reach such a large volume of Facebook users and thus
launched a Facebook page. They realized that having a local Facebook page is
better strategy for marketing. Now,
they have about 9.4 million fans on Walmart local Face book
pages. It lets users to find deals, coupons promotions online, and black
Friday-discounted merchandise in the local stores.
Designated store
employees who have received special training on social media are responsible
for maintaining the face book pages, respond to customer’s questions and issues
in timely fashion, and evaluate their social media marketing based on social
media metrics. The analytics is done by several different ways:
•
Likes/dislikes, Shares and
Comments about particular
products in a page
•
How far the content is reaching the community?
•
Responding
to the positive and negative conversations accordingly
•
Measuring popular impressions.
As
technology continues to shape the retail experience, the “My Local Walmart”
Facebook application now allows shoppers to use social media to track exactly
what’s in their Walmart stores and when including:
·
New Products: From
the latest LED-TV to organic dog food, customers can now get updates on
products available in their local Walmart.
·
Rollbacks: Fans
will be notified of additional savings on already everyday low prices for items
ranging from popular hair care products to favorite cereals.
·
In-Store Events: Information
will be shared for family-friendly events and product demonstrations. For
example, in the next few weeks, customers planning their holiday shopping for
one of the busiest shopping days of the season – the day-after-Thanksgiving –
will be able to print their store map via the “My Local Walmart” application.
Apart from Facebook,
Walmart uses integrated marketing communications tools to ensure that all users
in different social media such as twitter, youtube, and google plus can also be
reached.
Walmart continues to
put people at the center of their marketing, in this case by bringing
relationships to life locally. This could be one of the reasons that Facebook Walmart
Page is generating more popularity than the corporate pages.
Given a choice, do you
prefer Walmart Facebook page or the corporate page?
Link to the article: http://adage.com/article/digital/walmart-local-facebook-store-level-messaging/230327/