Magic Beans Grow with Social Media
Magic Beans, a retailer of toys and baby gear, isn’t ordinary. All of the items the retailer sells are handpicked by parents for parents and come from a wide range of manufacturers. (As a parent myself, I found several items that were refreshingly unique – they weren’t the typical run-of-the-mill toys I often see at the big retailers – and that piqued my interest because of their impressive learning features, such as the Teach Me Time! Talking Alarm Clock and the I Feel Stamp Kit.) Also, the Web site is easy to navigate. Users can shop by age, item or manufacturer, and they can view Top 10 and Today’s Most Popular lists in multiple categories.
But perhaps most importantly, Magic Beans takes full advantage of social-media tools to market the business, interact with customers and build a community.
Co-founder Sheri Gurock said she thought of the idea to open a toy store when she was pregnant with her second child.
“Several toy stores in our neighborhood had gone out of business. Finally, after my favorite one closed, I decided to do something to make sure I could still find great toys in my community,” she said.
Sheri and her husband, Eli, opened their first Magic Beans store in 2004 and today have three stores in the Boston area. They launched the Web site in 2005 and re-launched it in November 2008 with a new design and technology platform, which includes an array of social-media tools.
Over the years, Sheri and Eli have tried several marketing strategies for the business, including print, radio and newspaper advertising. They also own an Elmo costume, which Sheri said has been great for guerilla marketing. Word of mouth – “happy customers telling their friends about us” – has also been an effective marketing medium, she said.
Magic Beans has social-media tools peppered throughout its Web site. For example, when a user clicks on an item, the user can click on a “share this” button, which opens up a list of more than 50 bookmark and sharing tools from which the user can choose, including Blogmarks, Delicious, Facebook, LinkedIn, Simpy and Twitter. The user also can “tell a friend,” “email a question” and “Tweet this,” among other options.
“We are a very social-media savvy company,” Sheri said. “We’ve been watching the Web 2.0 movement for several years and dreaming of ways to integrate it into our online shopping experience. The ability to share a product with friends is a simple way to help people engage in word-of-mouth evangelism in their online communities.”
The Magic Beans site also features a blog written primarily by Sheri called Spilling the Beans. She started it in 2005 originally as a method of communicating information about new products to store staff.
“I was writing these mini-reviews of all notable new products and sending them out by email. Someone said that would be good content for a blog. I said, what’s a blog?” She aims to update it three or four times a week and writes mostly about new products, coming products, “and occasionally about life as a parent and business owner.”
In recent posts she has commented on a company’s decision to move production of a stroller from New Zealand to China, introduced a reusable-baby-wipes system that keeps the wipes warm and damp, and shared a S’mores recipe to celebrate National S’mores Day.
Magic Beans uses both Facebook and Twitter regularly to deliver news about new products, events and other relevant information for customers but finds the Facebook community to be more active and responsive. Sheri said they also read posts on popular blogs and message boards and try to add value to the conversations. She said that they track the effectiveness of all of these tools and that social media is definitely a great source of traffic.
Magic Beans continues to use traditional advertising as well, including a printed catalog, which Sheri said has been quite successful. They also do limited print advertising in publications geared toward parents or babies and young children.
Sheri noted that Magic Beans has benefited from both types of advertising but that social media is more powerful.
“Social-media advertising is infinitely more trackable than traditional advertising,” she said. “You can see the click-throughs and conversions right on the screen, so it’s certainly easier to evaluate its success using concrete metrics. It also allows you to reach a real, targeted audience.”
She said traditional advertising is “more like a shot in the dark” and much more difficult to accurately track. “I still think it’s important to have my brand represented in certain publications, even if the benefits are less tangible,” she said. “But from everything we’ve seen, the results are much more impressive with social-media efforts.”
The downside of social media is the time it requires, Sheri said, adding that maintaining the blog, Twitter and Facebook takes a few hours each day.
The benefits, however, far outweigh any downsides. Sheri noted that social media has played a key role in enhancing the company’s level of customer service by making them more accessible.
“We built our business on a foundation of helping parents and providing a very high level of customer service. It’s been amazing to see how social media helps us be even more available to our customers to lend assistance, answer questions, and offer expertise in real time, at any time of the day or night. It also helps make us more accessible as individuals.”
She also enjoys the conversations she has with customers on the blog or on Facebook and appreciates the opinions and feedback.
“I’ve learned that there’s a high level of transparency and accountability that comes with social media. That’s a double-edged sword, but it keeps us on our toes, and ultimately, that’s a good thing for any entrepreneur.”
Post by Jessica Braun
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Jessica Braun spent 11 years in the news industry, working at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal for 10 of them. She recently made a shift from journalism to marketing but wants to keep one foot in the journalism door because she enjoys writing. She's also a mom of two little ones who keep her busier than she ever could have possibly imagined. Jessica can be reached at Jessica.Braun@momswhoblog.com. |
