To know Heather Nolte is to know Glamajama. She’s a 5″1′ firecracker (as described on her Twitter profile), fashionista mother of three and an incredibly savvy business women. In 2003 she launched a business making custom designed clothes for babies and moms called Glamajama . Today you can buy her products at more than 500 retail stores worldwide and on her website.
Over the years, she’s tried a lot of traditional marketing tactics from celebrity placement to TV infomercials with a range of success and failures. She’s been very successful with getting her brand worn by celebrity moms like Lisa Rinna and Tia Carrere and their babies . Infomercials…not so much. And, she doesn’t use radio or newspaper. In fact, she doesn’t pay for advertising anywhere. She relies primarily on the PR she gets for free from small bloggers and even major publications who write about her and her business.
Over the last couple of years, Heather began using a variety of social media tools in an effort to build Glamajama’s brand awareness, drive new business and create of loyal base of customers. Here are some of the social media tools and strategies she is using to listen, engage and interact with her target market.
Listen
Heather pays close attention to what the fashion blogs and publications are saying, especially the small and mid-sized fashion bloggers who typically have a strong relationship with their readers and are a great source for major bloggers and publishers to garner ideas. She uses Addict-o-matic, Google Alerts, Techrigy to automate the process of listening to who’s mentioned the brand and what they are saying about it. She can then decide how to respond to the individual and potentially leverage the post or comments to further promote her brand. She also uses Tweetdeck to manage her Twitter stream of 18,000+ followers. Given that Twitter is a general-use communication tool, she follows all kinds of people and businesses for different reasons. Tweetdeck allows her to categorize the people she follows into manageable columns, and search the entire Twittersphere for comments made about her brand.
Engage
To get her target market engaged with the brand, she uses email, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. When she first launched her email newsletter she focused her content soley on deals and offers, but she wasn’t seeing the response rate she wanted from these communications. After re-evaluating her messaging strategy, she realized that she never paid attention to similar emails she received so why would her consumers–busy moms like herself– behave any differently? As a result, she began to focus the content in her newsletter and blogs on information that is valuable and applicable to her consumers’ lifestyle, such as ”Glam Beauty: Super Foods for Super Skin” and “How to Use the Ferber Method for Getting Baby to Sleep“. Fortunately, she IS her target demographic so she knows very well what’s interesting and valuable to them.
When using Twitter, she does a great job of personalizing the brand. She shares not only great lifestyle content like links to blog posts or other articles of interest to her followers, but also little personal tidbits including the music she likes or the boxing match she’s going to watch. You’ll rarely ever see a tweet pushing her products because, as she will tell you, “It’s not all about the products. It’s about the brand.” People follow Glamajama on Twitter because they feel a personal connection with Heather and she provides content that’s valuable to their life, not simply because they like Glamajama products.
She has a Facebook fanpage with 320+ fans. She follows a similar content strategy on her fanpage but admits she’s not as active on Facebook. Links to her Facebook fanpage and Twitter profile are promoted appropriately on many pages of her website including her homepage.
Interact
Finally, she has several outlets where she interacts with her target market and builds a personal relationship with them. She is very approachable on Twitter where she often has direct conversations with her followers. She runs a program on her email newsletter where she highlights a “Mommy of the Month” and awards them with a $100 shopping credit towards Glamajama merchandise. She also encourages her target market to send videos of their babies laughing and highlights some of them on her website (by the way, the third one down is hilarious!).
All of this activity helps her build brand loyalty. Those who engage and interact with Glamajama feel a deeper sense of connection with the brand because they’re personally involved. Glamajama becomes something more than just a brand of babies clothing they like. Those loyal customers are spreading the word online and offline and in turn are driving more business for Glamajama.
Glamajama’s got some exciting things happening over the next few months. We look forward to following the brand and watching how Heather continues to use social media to help build her business. If you’re interested in learning more, check her out on Startup Nation where she often writes about small business marketing topics and on Twitter at @Glamajama. She’s definitely worth following and a great local brand to support!
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Great post — I would be very interested to hear in a follow up post about how Heather tracks the success of the different things she tries with social media.
It seems to me that it’s really easy for small businesses to get caught in the trap of “Everyone’s on Twitter. We need to be too.” The problem is that for many businesses — especially those with bad strategies — this can be a colossal waste of time.
Anyone can Tweet 2039580 times a day. But I suspect that far fewer get a positive ROI on the time they spend doing it.
It seems to me that social media as a strategy for small business is a three-legged stool that’s currently missing one leg. One leg is Twitter. The second is Facebook. And then the missing leg is an effective means of tracking this sort of stuff. Would love to hear your thoughts…
Avi…thanks for the comment!
I started to put together a response and realized that social media measurement deserves it’s own post. There are actually a lot of tools available to measure your social media efforts. Heather uses a couple of these tools for Glamajama.
I totally agree that Twitter can be a waste of time for those who rush in just because “everyone’s doing it.” I’ve seen a lot of small business’ who clearly gave it a shot for a month or so and just gave up. Twitter is such a general communications tool with so many possibilities that it’s important to define a few things before you can begin to get value out of it; who is your target audience, what do you wish to accomplish (listening, driving brand awareness, relationship building, support..etc.) and how will you measure it. Again, there’s a lot to cover here, so I’ll reserve it for another post. Stay tuned!
Hi Avi!
You are absolutely correct…you simply can’t determine a campaigns success without an effective measurement technique. I have a few systems in place to ensure that my social media efforts do indeed produce results. For starters, I know that if I follow X amount of people on Twitter, X% will join my newsletter, and X% will successfully complete a sales transaction. It took a while to get these baseline stats, but it has been vital for determining whether my social media efforts are paying off. My suggestion is to set up your Google Analytics to track not only traffic, but whether “goals” are being completed. Also, I highly advise adding a “popover” sign up for collecting emails from visitors that do make it your site. I noticed a 300% increase in newsletter subscribers when I added mine.
I also agree that simply being on Twitter and Facebook is not enough. You need a strong anchor for those “tools”. Your website should serve as that anchor, so be sure its ready before you get knee-deep in social media. If you have low sales conversions, no lead capture systems in place, or an unprofessional web presence you could actually end up doing more harm than good. The foundation must come first.
Best of luck and let me know if you need anything!
Heather