This article is taken from ReveNews

Looking for one of the best, most practical examples of how to sell more products with social media?  Look no further than Adagio Tea.  This successful small business is one of the most innovative online sellers of high quality tea.  The company’s use of social media is exceptional.  Because Adagio’s marketing team doesn’t get swept up in all the tactics.  They’re always asking themselves better questions.  The result: more time to design social media in ways that produce value for customers and sales for the business.

Adagio’s team is putting customers before the “best practices” of gurus and their team is processing designs before “just doing” social media.  They’re asking better questions and making sure social marketing connects to sales.  Let’s discover how they’re doing it.

Step 1: Solve a problem, be useful

When it comes to high-end teas, proper steep time is critical.  Too much or too little time will result in bitter or less robust flavor.  So if a tea drinker is to fully experience what Adagio  sells they’ve got to get the timing just right.  That’s what sophisticated tea drinkers need.  It’s what they expect.

So Adagio offers new and existing customers a “tea timer.”  The handy electronic timer is available free.  Anyone can access it.  Once downloaded, the small application sits on your computer desktop – ready for use at any time.

When having your morning or afternoon tea, just double-click and open-up Adagio’s little count-down timer.  Click on the kind of tea you’re steeping from the list of your favorite teas.  Then click go.  The countdown timer starts.  And, yes, the tea timer is customized based on the user’s stated preferences.  How cool is that?  It gets better.

Step 2: Create a lead

Adagio’s strategy focuses on the idea of being extremely useful.  In fact, it integrates its free tool with the daily lives of customers and prospects -– tea connoisseurs.  In doing so Adagio qualitatively improves customers’ experience with tea –- which the company sells, of course.  But Adagio’s approach also improves its ability to find, court and retain customers.

The tea timer isn’t just handy for customers.  It’s helping Adagio build a larger customer base and increasing sales transactions too.

In return for this handy tool customers and prospects provide Adagio with rather intimate details about tea consumption habits.  Users also provide their email address.  Before the timer can be downloaded users must quickly register and set preferences.

This requirement serves two purposes: to customize the experience for the user.  But also to provide qualitative information about the users’ tea consumption preferences and behavior to Adagio.

This process design allows Adagio to follow-up with new prospects who aren’t yet buying their teas.  And tailor that follow-up based on what the user is currently drinking. The tea timer serves to build a super-qualified leads list.

The company’s use of social media is exceptional.  While the rest of us are “just doing” social media, Adagio is designing it.  The company put together a process.  A rather simple one that focuses on the customer not the tool –- nor the trend of creating applications for the sake of creating applications.  Adagio is making darn sure its use of social media has processes that connect to sales.

Step 3: Take action, assess need

What can all businesses learn from Adagio Teas?  As it turns out, a lot.  This is another great example of social media success using the concept of utility.  Adagio focuses on the “proper steep time” need of serious tea drinkers.  The company’s tea timer helps customers  brew a perfect cup each time and mixes in a powerful, respectful marketing approach to all who use it.

Like other businesses profiled in Off The Hook Marketing, Adagio gives tea drinkers a useful tool.  In return, it gets access to intimate needs-focused information on the customer or prospect him/herself.  In essence, Adagio is creating qualitative online experiences that create more frequent customer behaviors.

“The engine of your social efforts is what your business does, not what you hire smart people to declare,” says international speaker, author and branding consultant, Jonathan Salem Baskin.  “The creative part comes in deciding how this reality can become real for everyone else.”

Adagio’s “ethical bribe” is appreciated by customers and profitable to the company — it’s designed that way.  That’s the key.  So what can you design?  Ask yourself:

• How can our business “snap into customers’ lives” in profoundly useful, relevant ways?
• How can we put the “form follows function” rule to work?  How can we foster mutually meaningful behaviors with customers?
• What do our customers need beyond our products/services?  How can these needs be used to create behavior?
• Do we already discover what our customers truly need (“offline”) and how can that knowledge be put to use?  How can that existing “listening” process be extended to a social application that creates behavior?

Adagio didn’t employ a secret formula or best practice from a social media guru.  They looked at their own scenario for answers and priorities.  They looked at what customers really, truly need to get by day-by-day.  The the tea timer was an obvious “must do.”

And for Adagio it started by asking a better question.   This small business realized, “Our sophisticated customers drink tea, and perfect cups of tea are hard to create if you don’t have a reliable means to properly time steeping.”

So what do your customers need?

This article is taken from ReveNews