The success case of Hotel Ristorante Pergola and the concept of community from the real world to the digital world.
Facebook is a paid tool. True, very true indeed.
It is possible to achieve excellent results in some cases even without paid adv campaigns. This is also true.
Today in Square Marketing blog, our digital marketing agency, we will cover a topic that demonstrates that very often marketing is not a zero-sum subject but an activity constantly influenced by a multiplicity of factors that can confirm or completely overturn the initial thesis.
Examples of this are the two conflicting statements with which this article begins.
As already introduced, we start from the assumption that Facebook for business solutions can be considered for all intents and purposes as a paid tool: in essence, in order to attract new customers or potential customers, it is necessary to allocate an adv budget appropriate to one’s goals. If this is not done, it does not go very far, especially for those operating at a regional or national level.
This is because Facebook’s algorithm, over the years, has drastically cut the organic reach (reach) of business pages. Partly (probably) by choice of the upper echelons of Menlo Park, partly because competition has increased and so the user is bombarded with content that he or she often does not even look at.
Organic reach of the page: what is it? Simple: it represents the people to whom you show your business post organically, that is, for free.
Some research shows that the average organic coverage of an SME (fan base on the company Facebook page between 1000 and 10000) is around 20%.
What does it mean? Example: if you have a Facebook page with 5,000 fans, when you post your content, only 20% of them, or 1,000 people, will see it. This means the remaining 4,000 people will not hear from your company and will not be in contact with you. Does it always happen like this?
No, and we will show this later by briefly analyzing the Pergola case.
Check the number of fans on your business page, and with this average data, you will understand how many people you can reach.
These, as mentioned above, are average data that demonstrate the platform’s tendency to decline organic coverage of company pages over the years (and updates).
The reason is quickly explained: one of the basic principles of digital marketing is to show the right message, to the right person, at the right time.
If you have never interacted with that particular business page, put a trivial like, commented or searched for some information about them, it is conceptually correct that you do not see their updates.
Because in general you will not be interested in what they have to say.
However, if the message we give is relevant for our fan base (i.e., we receive interactions), Facebook’s algorithm will reward us by increasing the organic coverage and thus the people reached of our posts. This is because if a lot of people interact (especially in the immediate post phase), it will probably be content worth showing to other people, without paid campaigns.
To sum up, Facebook’s organic coverage has steadily declined over the years, with an opposing increase in paid campaigns; nevertheless, carrying your community of customers that you cultivate in your daily work with a lot of sacrifice, it is possible to achieve excellent results and manage to be “visible” without paid campaigns. This is because Facebook is nothing more than (or at least should be) a mirror of who you are as a company in everyday life.
We at Square Marketing, as a digital marketing agency, want to talk to you about a case study that demonstrates this: theHotel Ristorante Pergola in Legnago (VR), a well-known and historic company in the Hospitality sector, a reference point for the province of Verona and beyond for the quality and care of their services.
Thanks to the close collaboration with our agency developed over time and the resourcefulness of the owners Davide and Ivan to tackle the digitalization path of their business, we managed to break down what are the average data of organic visibility on Facebook.
Bottom line: the company page of Hotel Ristorante Pergola is visible, very visible (compared to benchmarks), without the creation of adv campaigns. Contextualizing, we are talking about a Facebook business page with a fan base of about 4700.
Now we want to give you some data on the coverage and interactions that this page is able to achieve:
Post created on the occasion of the delivery menu (Figure 1) designed by Pergola Restaurant during the lockdown period.
As you can see from the data at the bottom of image nr°1, thanks to a massive network of shares (105!!) this post reached more than 10000 people and got almost 3000 interactions. A surprising result, considering also the commercial nature of the message.
Content created on the occasion of Christmas (Figure 2), to maintain the relationship with the customer community through a sincere greeting message.
Here the data show another important result when you consider that out of a coverage of 4017 people, 1108 interacted: more than 1 in 4 people! (Consider that, according to average statistical data, we are talking about an average interaction rate of 2%. In these Pergola cases we are at 27 percent!).
After some introductory data (we will spare you dozens more indicators) let us now analyze the one that interests us most: how so? How can a business achieve 14 times the average interaction rate? How is it possible to reach even more people than one’s fan base in some cases?
This is where the concept of community, or the set of people around your company who talk and interact with you, takes on a key role. This happens every day in your company but also in a digital scenario. That is why it is critically important to come prepared.
In the Pergola case, a strong community of people who like the company’s services and the people who are part of it have continued to show their appreciation, even supporting the company’s messages through shares that only increase the organic reach of the page. Free visibility that a company can deserve through posts relevant to its community.
Therefore, to report some guidelines of this successful case:
- Facebook is a paid tool for businesses, but with a strong community, free messages can also be conveyed, being helped by the sounding board of the people around us.
- If in everyday business your company is relevant with a good strategy on major social networks, it will also be relevant in the digital world.
- Social networks are perhaps the most important tool these days for keeping in touch with your customers once they walk out your company’s door. This helps strengthen the positioning of your business to your customers (the famous brand positioning).
- A close connection with your community will only encourage your customers to speak highly of you, both in real life (word of mouth) and digitally (through shares, comments, reviews, etc.).
- If your values as a company are well defined transporting them to social networks, with the help of a digital marketing agency, the process will be simpler and with a higher probability of success.
- Achieving significant numbers on social media improves your corporate image, allowing your company to benefit from important social recognition. This is often recognized by people who are already your customers but not so much by potential customers who see your digital position exclusively. If your company on the digital world in 2020 does not exist, or even worse, does not represent what you really are, you are lagging behind your competitors
Concluding with a final consideration:
If your business maintains contact with customers through social media, which will convey
in turn your messages and to other potential customers, they will see you on social channels
with your real business value, how do you think your business will proceed?
Objectively it will only be able to grow.
