How a LivingSocial promotion helped LivFit get in shape with new customers.

If you’ve been too busy running your company, meeting the needs of your customers, or just having too much fun on Facebook, you may have missed that marketing, as it used to be known, has changed.

Gone are the days of highly-crafted, and excruciatingly scrutinized messages pushed at the highest frequency and lowest CPM to a proprietary universe of suspects and prospects. Victims of the marketing transformation that has taken place include expensive postal direct-mail campaigns, yellow page ads, and even local newspaper ads.

Marketing online is no longer an exception.

Consumers are now finding value and connecting with brands through search, sharing with friends in social networks and subscribing to the content they’ve opted-in to receive. Business leaders must, therefore, address the changes in marketing to sustain or grow their business in ways that align with today’s shift in customer preferences.

Recently, we had the opportunity to help one of our small business customers take advantage of some of the new methods of attracting prospects with the business objective of converting them to satisfied long-term customers. Our strategy and a few tactics that delivered success are outlined here.

Are you ready to LivFit?

Oliveyah Fitness | LivFit, a growing Bay area provider of personal fitness training services, offers a variety of training programs designed to meet the needs and busy lifestyles of Marin County residents. LivFit designs tailored fitness programs that include training with small groups in a “boot-camp” format at outdoor locations throughout Marin or working out in a state-of-the-art fitness facility. Their fitness programs help people of all ages and all fitness levels get in shape to achieve their personal fitness goals.

Time to experiment or fade away.

In order to reach out to new prospects and grow their customer base, LivFit wanted to experiment with some of the new online services available to small businesses. Through word-of-mouth and their social network, LivFit selected the LivingSocial platform (instead of the better known Groupon) and contacted them via email to learn about their service.

What’s LivingSocial?

LivingSocial is an online service that introduces local businesses to qualified new customers and provides tools to help convert them to loyal customers.

They do this by helping LivingSocial subscribers discover valuable local offers, in their neighborhood, every day. Currently operating in thousands of local markets, LivingSocial fosters a community of sharing by providing member incentives to share local special offers through social media and email.

How we set LivFit up for success.

Below is a summary of how we helped LivFit get in shape with a LivingSocial, online promotion campaign:

• Worked with LivFit to develop a promotional campaign strategy, limited-time special offer, participant qualifications, offer requirements and deployment date
• Arranged + finalized all of the details on LivingSocial platform
• Developed Offer Redemption Form + Landing Page capturing unique promotion code from every conversion
• Enabled real-time tracking and alerts via text + email
• Created a unique post + in-site ads detailing offer to site visitors
• Sent email to 50K of geo-targeted subscribers on the promotion start date
• Shared + broadcast the LivingSocial offer through social media channels
• Featured limited-time offer in NEWS section + home page

Results delivered.

Looking ahead to a future of online fitness.

At this early stage of post-offer deployment, the Living Social promotion looks to be a success and it will become a basis for future offers and how to make them even more effective.

Bottom line, with the socially integrated web site, blog, and content management system that we developed and produced for LivFit (along with their branding and positioning), this promotion has enabled LivFit to acquire 103 new very highly qualified prospects that will be able to experience LivFit Boot Camp Training first-hand.

This significantly increases the opportunity to convert these LivingSocial promotional customers into long-term, loyal customers who can share their experience and satisfaction with their communities in person or online. And without the website/blog that we created for them that was optimized for search and integrated with social media, this promotion with LivingSocial would never have been possible. 

Have you experimented with Groupon or other services?

Have you found success? Or was the effort not worth the investment? Please share your experience and how you fared. Looking forward to hearing from you!