Social Small Biz Case Study: Little Sunflowers

For the next in our series of case studieslooking at how small businesses are using social media, we caught up with Bev Toogood, Co-Founder at Little Sunflowers

In no more than 50 words explain what your business is.

We are a childrenswear and gift business.  We began with a small shop in Wendover, Buckinghamshire in 2004 and when the online business got bigger than the shop we relocated to East Sussex, where we now have a bricks and mortar shop together with an online shop, an Ebay shop and an Amazon shop.

How do you use social media as a business?

We have a Blog, a Facebook Business Page and a Twitter profile.  I also have a  LinkedIn personal and company profile.  Between these sites we promote new products, run competitions and advertise special promotions.  We also ask our customers for their views on new products or ideas for improving our service, and we chat to our customers, suppliers and competitors about all sorts of things.   We incentivise people to keep in contact with us through social media by rewarding them through our loyalty programme.  As well as talking about our own business, we post articles likely to be of interest to parents of young children in an attempt to keep it interesting and relevant, whether you’re our customer or not.

What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?

We know that we receive most of our business through word of mouth referrals, and social media is a perfect opportunity to extend that network.  We try to bring as many of our customers into our network as possible so that the communication is two-way, not just us sending them newsletters not knowing whether we’re telling them what they want to know.  We try to align all these tools so far as possible, and we cross-promote our Facebook page on Twitter, our Twitter profile in our emails, our blog on Facebook and LinkedIn, and so on.   We aim to communicate ‘little and often’.

Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?

We measure in various ways such as tracking how people land on our website and where our new customers come from.  We like Google Analytics and bit.ly.  We also have a ‘finger in the air’ way of measuring whether we’re getting it right on Facebook:  if no-one is communicating (either with us or each other) then we’ve got the communication wrong, since we’re aiming for a 2-way conversation rather than a one way ‘push’.   We have a referral programme, and find that many people who become customers discover us because their friends found us on Twitter or Facebook.  Thanks to social media there are many people out there who now know about Little Sunflowers that we wouldn’t have reached before.

How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?

Social media is just another tool in your box for communicating with people.  The most significant difference we find between social media and other marketing methods is speed – traditional methods of marketing simply can’t touch it unless you have an awful lot of money to spend.  We can now reach our customers and get a reaction incredibly quickly and the only cost is our time.  For example we recently ran a customer satisfaction survey and got a huge response – we’re sure that by promoting the survey on our Facebook page and Twitter as well as in an email we got a much larger (and faster) response than we otherwise would have had.  Social media encourages customers to respond much faster than they ever do to a newsletter – though they expect you to communicate quickly back!

Unbelievably after years of thinking that building our mailing list was everything, now it’s definitely not the be all and end all.   Newsletters are still very important for our many customers who like them, but there are new customers coming through who seem overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive and would prefer we communicate with them in a different way – and sometimes Facebook/Twitter is the only way we’ll be heard above the huge amount of ‘noise’ from their inbox.  We’ve always felt uncomfortable overtly selling to customers in the traditional sense and social media gives us an opportunity to promote our business without feeling (hopefully) as though we’re banging on about Little Sunflowers all the time.

Another really interesting benefit which we couldn’t have predicted is that we now have a clear line of communication with some of our competitors.  Children’s Fashion is a lovely industry and people are very friendly but nevertheless, in the ‘old days’ if you rang a competitor out of the blue you might get an odd response.  Social media gives you a way to communicate openly and more if you want it.  In our case we’ve met up with suppliers and competitors out of hours because of the relationship we’ve built on Twitter and, hopefully, that’s helped all of us.

Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?

Yes we have been increasing our use in 2010 already, especially on Facebook which is becoming a real extension to our site rather than just something we ‘do’ alongside everything else.  For example customers can now review our service on our Facebook page, and we have more plans in the pipeline.  We’ve also started using Twitter as another method of updating customers regarding their order which people seem to like.   We know YouTube is another great vehicle and we know there’s something there for us too, we just need to work out what it is and make the time!

What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?

1. Don’t just sell – it’s boring for you and it’s boring for your customers.  Unbelievably there is more to life than what you sell (surely not?) and people don’t just want to read about your company all the time.  Create a sense of community with your followers, some of whom may never be customers.  And that’s fine – who knows who they’re telling about you?
2. Be grateful.  Thank your customers for bothering to fan you, post pictures of their children on your Facebook page, review your service, respond to your articles, chat to you on Twitter.  In this busy world it’s lovely that they spend time with you when they could be chatting to their friends or colleagues instead.
3. If you’re just starting out, don’t worry if social media seems to be taking up huge amounts of your time – it did for us when we were setting up and there were times when we wondered if it was worth it.  The amount of time you spend will settle down as you discover what works for you, social media  will become part of your normal business life and you’ll end up wondering how you did without it!

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