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Some companies just get it right when it comes to online marketing. Oola Tea is one of those companies that is not only tantalizing their customer's taste buds, but also their online experience. When it comes to marketing online, you want to make sure that you reach your target market, resonate with them and connect with them. Oola Tea does a great job of this. Let's examine some of the areas in which they are excelling.
Oola Tea's Marketing Strategy
- Great referral program
- Connecting with their audience
- Facebook strategy
- Great online ecommerce store
- Getting the word out with influencers
Great Referral Program
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Source: Oola Tea[/caption]
Oola Tea encourages their current customers to share their tea with their friends with a great referral program. With this program, you can easily understand what you'll receive just by reading the headline. Give $10 off to your friend and you'll receive $10 off your next purchase.
Oola also uses a great image of two people enjoying tea to promote their referral program. It combines tea and friends, so it is the perfect image to promote their tea referral program.
The buttons to sign up are large and easy to read. Customers know exactly where to go to sign up for the referral partner program. It is also very clear what they'll receive when they become a referral partner.
Connecting With Their Audience
In this digital world, we are becoming less and less connected with other human beings. People desire and crave a human connection, so when businesses can offer a connection with their target market, they will create loyal customers. One way to connect with your audience is to engage and talk with your community on Facebook. This can build a strong relationship of trust and loyalty. Facebook communities can also be used as a customer support hub. One of the most exciting results of this is that you will start to create repeat customers as they engage more with you and feel connected to your brand.
Oola Tea's founders are doing a great job at connecting with their audience. They make a real connection with their Facebook audience through doing weekly live videos. During their videos, they'll address an important topic or answer questions that the community has submitted to them. This keeps their audience and community interested in returning to their page to discover what they have to say and share it with their friends. By covering topics that are relevant to most people, they have broadened their audience and cast a wide net.
Their Instagram page is also full of relatable quotes and photos focusing on how to live an OolaLife. Through these posts, customers can relate to Oola, not just through the photos, but through meaningful actions that the Oola team themselves promote.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm_W0iCh6nq/?taken-by=oolalife
Click here to discover why customers talk and learn how to use that to your advantage.
Facebook Strategy
Facebook is a great place to reach your target market. Facebook averages 757 million daily active users. It is highly likely that many of these people need and want your product. If you want to use Facebook to a maximum advantage, you must post contents for your target audience with consistency. The businesses who use facebook best educate, entertain and empower their audiences.
Facebook is the main social media outlet that Oola Tea uses to connect with their audience and promote their business. They use it with more regularity and consistency than any other social media outlet. Oola Tea uses Facebook to create live videos and interact with their audience. They also post regular updates on their facebook page, this ensures that they stay in the newsfeeds of their customers, which means they stay top of mind. Not to mention, these inspirational posts get shared quite a bit. Their most recent posts had over 500 shares. This means that they are showing up in the newsfeed of 500 other people. That is a lot of eyes on their image.
Oola Tea doesn't try to sell their customers tea with every single post. They have a daily inspirational photo as well, which will likely get shared with their followers who agree with the sentiment. In the corner of the photo, there is the LIVEOOLA logo. This helps to increase brand awareness. People love to see images and videos. These are easy to engage with and most likely to be shared with friends and family. Oola mixes it up and alternates between images, videos and text when it comes to posting on their Facebook page.
Click here to discover why people share.
Oola Tea is also making use of Facebook's events feature. Oola is holding events for book signings and other gatherings. They are notifying their followers of these events through Facebook. Everytime someone is interested or indicates that they plan on attending these events, it shows up in their newsfeed and many of their friends may see it and discover the event.
If your company is just starting out, you may not have a book and a book tour planned, but you can still make use of Facebook's events feature. You can create events for your local community, especially if you don't have the funds for a world-wide book tour.
Here are some great event ideas that business can advertise on a Facebook event page:
- Networking luncheon
- Host a Happy Hour
- Create a community Fun Run or 5k
- Customer Appreciation BBQ
- Have a Holiday party - Halloween, Christmas, Valentine's
- A tea party
As you are planning out your Facebook strategy, you may want to incorporate some of the successful things that Oola Tea is doing. As you create your status updates, you may want to consider the following statistics to make more effective ones:
- The use of emoticons increases comments by 33% and makes posts be shared 33% more often and get liked 57% more often than posts without emoticons (source: AMEX OPEN Forum infographic.)
- Posts with questions get more comments (source: HubSpot).
- Posts with pictures and videos are more likely to get shared.
- Posts with questions give you an opportunity to provide answers in a Facebook Live video.
Great Online Ecommerce Shop
The Oola Tea ecommerce shop is a great example of what an ecommerce shop should be. It has a very simple and elegant layout. You can see exactly what they are selling based on the featured image. The recognizable logo is placed up in the upper left-hand corner. They have also clearly defined their target market - organic tea for the essential oil lovers.
Oola uses their website to feature their charitable contribution to ending world hunger. They have partnered up with Rice Bowls in order to provide starving children with a meal. Each purchase of one bag of tea will provide a meal to a hungry child. This partnership will appeal to many people who want to end world hunger. Some individuals may even choose the Oola brand over other teas because of their partnership with Rice Bowls.
Oola Tea keeps it fresh and interesting with a flavor of the month. This gives them a reason to update their target market about what is available in their shop and get their customers to revisit their website.
Oola Tea makes great use of the "Subscribe and Save" feature. It promises subscribers that they'll be updated on the upcoming flavors of tea. Customers are incentivized to subscribe by the promise of receiving a welcome box that includes their most popular blend.
Subscriber Benefits:
- First to experience 2 new OolaTea blends each month (14 individual teas per flavor; 28 loose-leaf sachets total)
- 20% off retail pricing and 20% off individual orders
- $2.99 fixed-rate shipping on subscription boxes
- 1 OolaGoal sticker/month to write down 1 goal you want to accomplish before the next month's box arrives
- 2 DIY recipes/month
- Each subscription box will provide 2 meals to a child in need
- Unsubscribe at anytime.
As you can see, Oola Tea rewards their customers for subscribing with things that their customer base will appreciate. Not only do they receive a 20% discount, but they also get recipes, exclusive first tastes of the new blends and a goal sticker. In addition to that, the customers have the peace of mind that they are helping to feed a hungry child.
Getting the Word Out with Influencers
In checking out the twitter feed for Oola tea, I discovered that there were influencers that were writing reviews of this wonderful tea. They also generated some public interest and were featured in magazines, such as Parade.
Oola Tea made sure to thank their influencers on Twitter and retweet any article that they were featured in. This is important not only because you acknowledge the people who were recognizing you, but you will also show up in newsfeeds a second time for those who may have missed the first tweet or post that your company was mentioned in.
One of the great things about using influencers to promote your business is that it expands your network. Ideally, you'll want to look for bloggers, youtubers or Instagram influencers that have a large following. Reach out to these individuals and ask whether they'd be willing to review your product. You can offer to pay them for the review. Some of them may be willing to do it in exchange for a sample of your product. It will depend on how large their audience is and how many others sponsored posts they are working on.
Not sure where you can get publicity for your business? Try HARO (Help A Reporter Out). You can sign up to receive a daily query and discover publicity opportunities that you never thought about. Reporters are often looking for experts in their field to interview for stories. This is a great place to submit pitches to reporters.
Conclusion
A great ecommerce experience doesn't end when the customer leaves your website. Connecting and keeping in touch with your customers ensures that your brand lives, gets publicity and talked about for years to come. In fact, if you build a great audience by connecting with them on facebook, you can create additional income opportunities, such as a customer base for your next book, t-shirts, or mugs with your branding on them.
Oola mastered the art of connecting online and it has served them well. The main thing that has benefitted them with their Facebook strategy is consistently posting great content. If you follow Oola's marketing strategy, you should be able to build a great following on Facebook and start to see an increase in your own business.
Need more inspiration for your next marketing campaign? Take a look at the Marketing Strategies from these companies:
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Melinda is a blogger at ReferralCandy. She loves learning about internet marketing and maintaining her own fitness blog. She enjoys running, swimming, dancing and Pilates.
