Hubs, Spokes, Wheels and Marketing – Featuring Oasis Spa

In October, Doug Lacombe, a friend of mine, sent me an email saying that Oasis Spa was looking to try some new things to promote gift certificates to the Calgary market. Every year the owner, Peter Smed, offers various denominations of certificates to people who need an elegant, valuable, easy to buy gift for a loved one as a Christmas present. Believe me, these sell like hot cakes during Stampede.

I sat down with Peter and his team and we talked about various ways to use digital channels to increase the public’s awareness of the gift certificates offered by Oasis Spa. I presented a framework that Doug had introduced to me called “The Hub & Spoke Model”. I had used variations on this technique in the past but never this specific model. Let me say that it is effective – you should try it. But I added a twist that makes it even more effective. More on that in a bit.

Jeremiah Owyang has written an excellent article on various models that companies use for organizing social media. In his blog post, he presents 5 models but concludes that the Hub & Spoke model is the one most often used by companies.

The idea is to pick a central location (or hub) and focus all marketing and communications efforts to that central spot. When I teach marketing concepts we call this “Integrated Marketing Communications”.

I like the model but it lacks action, direction, movement, or flow – all the components just sit there. To me an effective model for marketing and for social media should point or direct people toward a certain goal. Or to put it another way, there should be a call to action. As you can see in the model above, there is no real call to action 0r at least it isn’t obvious.

Being a true marketer and wanting my customer to be successful, I changed the model. As you can see below, the campaign that we developed for Oasis Spa is built on the structure of the Hub & Spoke model but with a difference. The “hub” is a Facebook landing page with various communications channels driving people to the hub – e-Newsletters, Calgary’s Twitter community, Radio, LinkedIn, Facebook ads, Google AdWords, and potentially a video on YouTube.

But the campaign needed a purpose or an objective; some type of action. We considered the objective of increasing Likes on the Facebook page but for a holiday season marketing campaign that objective didn’t seem like enough. We wanted to meet Peter’s objective which was lots of sales and many happy customers. As a result, we modified the model by adding another circle in the lower right corner. We wanted to show that we people should land on the Facebook but then move to an e-commerce page where they could actually order a gift certificate.

One channel that proved to be very effective was involving others in the YYC social media community. The following people blogged, tweeted and posted on Facebook:

• Marie-Eve Mayrand – @MeMay2 – http://bloomingmarketing.com/oasis-spa-calgary
• Randy Milanovic – @Kayak360 – www.kayakcreative.ca/blog/bid/105123/Holiday-Online-Marketing-Campaign-for-Oasis-Spa-Facebook-Style
• Crystal Tost – @RemaxCalgary – www.calgarylistings.com/oasis-spa-calgary
• Al Dhalla and Doug Wagner  – @Doug_Sunwapta – http://blog.sunwaptasolutions.com/weblog/2011/11/buying-attention-in-social-media-does-it-work.html
• Mike Nelson – @sabrecaptain
• Linda Trinh – @RentClickCgy
• Cidnee Stephen @CidneeStephen
• Deepa Acharya – @TheDeepster
• Ryan Kelly – LinkedIn
• Tom Hanger – @TomHanger
• Toni Guffei – @ToniRoni
• Susan Rutherford
• Christina Burnside – http://graysacademyesl.com

The campaign was wildly successful. By December 24th, hundreds of people had purchased online and thousands had visited Oasis Spa to buy certificates in person.

Now that the infrastructure has been developed we are looking forward to Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and maybe even Father’s Day.