Archive for the ‘Marketing Strategy’ Category

Case Studies, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Word of Mouth

Forrester recognizes USAA as social media innovator

March 12th, 2010 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

Today Forrester released a compelling case study about USAA, “USAA Uses Social Media To Drive Sales, Product, And Service Strategies,” noting that they are a pioneer of social commerce in the financial services industry.

Forrester worked directly with Tom Vaughn, Director of Social Media at USAA , who spoke at length about their relationship with Bazaarvoice and impact of customer reviews on all areas of the business.

USAA created a social media strategy focused on four pillars: listening, engaging, strengthening relationships, and innovation. A year after offering Bazaarvoice ratings and reviews to its members on USAA.com, thousands of members have provided reviews, and USAA has used those reviews to drive product improvements, improve Web site conversion, and increase interactive marketing effectiveness.

Here’s the executive summary:

Financial services firm USAA created its first formal social media strategy in October 2008. In 2009, it further refined and represented the strategy as four pillars of focus: listening, engaging, strengthening relationships, and innovation. As a tactic of listening and engaging, USAA engaged Bazaarvoice to offer ratings and reviews to its members on USAA.com. Nearly a year later, the results are astounding. Thousands of members have provided reviews, and USAA has used those reviews to drive product improvements, improve Web site conversion, and increase interactive marketing effectiveness.

Situation: USAA Pondered The Role Of Social Media To Its Business
Best Practice: USAA Brings Social Media Tactics To eBusiness
Ratings And Reviews Provide The “Authentic Voice” Of USAA Members
USAA Has Achieved Tangible Results From The Use Of Social Media On Its Web Site

You can find the full Forrester case study online. And keep an eye on this blog for an interview with Tom Vaughn in the coming weeks.

Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews

“Customer Favorites” email drives 200% category sales increase for Free People

March 12th, 2010 by Lisa Tu Client Success Director

As our CMO Sam Decker put it in his recent article in DMNews, “Email infused with authentic customer opinions adds a level of credibility and engagement that is seldom matched by other types of content.” The article features successful UGC-fueled email campaigns from Boden, Urban Outfitters and eSpares. And our recent blog post featured several client stories of transactional emails driving unexpected revenue.

Another client has found sales success in a UGC-powered email campaign. We’ve recognized Free People before for their innovative use of the customer voice in email – in a past campaign they recognized their Top Reviewers, and drove a 93% increase in review volume as a result.

This time the apparel and accessories retailer featured top-rated products, and saw conversion increases at both the product and category level.

Customer Favorites email The campaign

In late December, Free People launched a “Customer Favorites” campaign featuring seven top-rated products in an email to their subscribers. The email featured star ratings and review snippets for each of the products, with the tagline, “Gifts she’ll love… because she told us so.” A “See all top-rated gifts” button led readers to the Customer Favorites category page on Free People’s site.

The results

The email drove fantastic results at both the product and category level. On the day of the email, average sales for five of the featured products spiked to 71% above what they were the day before, with sales for one product increasing 150% over the previous day’s sales. And the results were even more dramatic at the category level, with sales in the Customer Favorites category 200% higher than category sales the day prior.

A recent video from GOOD magazine states that the highest performing businesses use customer insights in 80% of sales and merchandising. Infusing UGC throughout all of your marketing efforts – be they email, paid search, or traditional media – puts the voice of your customers to work for your brand to drive real business results.

Tags: email, retail

Marketing Strategy, Search & SEO, User-Generated Content

Discovering search in London

March 2nd, 2010 by Nadia King SEO Specialist, Social Analytics

A little over a week ago, I made the trip to chilly London to attend the Search Engine Strategies London show. Overall, it was an informative conference, with a solid cast of speakers and a nice variety of in-house and agency SEOs. I was especially looking forward to insight from the UK and EU SEO industry experts about what is unique – or maybe not so unique – about optimizing content for various search engines in Europe.

Across the UK, Google continues to dominate search engine market share (even more than they do in the US) at over 85%, and Yahoo and Bing split the remainder. And this ratio hasn’t changed in two years — it’s clear that Bing has not made as much effort as they have on this side of the pond.

Here are some thoughts from the various sessions throughout the week:

Keynote Day 1, Avinash Kaushik

Avinash spoke about monetizing the long-tail of keyword traffic, as he has discussed on his blog. We work on this consistently with our clients –user-generated content drives traffic from 1,000 – 100,000 different keywords in a single month across clients of all sizes.
To make this advice actionable: (1) Assign goal values to actions on the site (for example, £0.50p for a newsletter signup, or £0.30p for a downloaded whitepaper) and rank keywords based on the sum of their goal values. (2) Add long-tail keywords into pay-per-click campaigns.

Managing a Global SEO Campaign

Many of the panelists mentioned a standard best practice — put content on country-specific top-level domains (TLDs) so that the search engines are more likely to return your content to the correct country’s searchers. For example, put French content on www.company.fr and German content on www.company.de.
Actionable advice from the panel: (1) Create list of Keywords in English, (2) Create a glossary that includes definitions of every word, (3) Send both of these to your translation company so they have enough information to translate accurately. I’d also recommend: (4) Use Google Insights to determine which versions of translated words are searched most often and use those on your pages.

Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issues

Defined the concept of Shingles: Adjacent words and sections of a page (for example, portions of a page that are the template) that are compared between pages to detect duplicate content. If duplicate content is detected, the duplicate portion is filtered from Google index and not likely to be returned in search results.
This has been a particularly interesting topic that we’ve been monitoring for some time, so I followed up with one of the panelists about putting a handful of reviews on the product page (PDP) with a link to a page with all reviews. The response was this is not duplicate content because Google can detect the difference in intent between the pages.

I’m an SEO Specialist at Bazaarvoice; I help shape our SEO Strategy with our product team based on previous experience, analysis of our products’ SEO performance, and client insights. All in all, I’m glad I went – I met a few great partners and some sharp SEO folks. I missed out on Piccadilly Circus this trip but made it for some delicious dishes at The Modern Pantry. Cheers!

Tags: Search-Engine-Strategies, SearchVoice

Marketing Strategy

Australian webinar: Leverage your Customers to Drive Online Sales

February 18th, 2010 by Jacob Salamon Marketing Manager, International

The Web is becoming increasingly social, with networking tools such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and YouTube. Customers are demanding social tools, but how do you incorporate social with business? How can you effectively drive sales using social media?

Vodafone Hutchison Australia Enter social commerce — combining social interactions and community with a focus on increasing sales and driving measurable business results.

In this webinar, join Steve Rhodes, Head of E-commerce for Vodafone Hutchison Australia, and Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice, for a glimpse into the tools and strategies available to online retailers. Hear real-world results on how over 750 brands around the world are leveraging customer-created content such as Ratings & Reviews to increase sales, reduce returns, and make business sense of social.

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

What is social commerce, and how does it work for online retailers?
What tools and strategies are available for driving sales?
How are retailers measuring the ROI of social commerce?

Thursday, 11 March 2010

11:30 – 12:30PM Australian Eastern Standard Time

Tags: APAC, Australia, webcast, webinar

Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content

Nationwide’s strategy for facing the fear of UGC & overcoming internal objections to Social Commerce

February 15th, 2010 by Meghan Meehan Client Success Director

Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing at Nationwide

As a Client Success Director for Bazaarvoice’s Financial Services team, I’ve worked with several financial services brands to build social commerce strategies that increase online conversion and search, as well as improve customer service and client retention. But sometimes it’s daunting to make headway with new media in such highly-regulated industries.

When we started collaborating with Nationwide Insurance, they faced questions from Legal, Compliance, PR and Customer Service about the risks of participating in social. Nationwide created a strategy for overcoming objections to UGC and now embrace “customer oxygen” across all aspects of the organization, and have seen measurable business results from doing so.

Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media at Nationwide

In our recent webinar with Nationwide, Sue McManus, VP of Direct and Customer Solutions Marketing, and Shawn Morton, Director of Mobile, Social & Emerging Media, shared how they were able to overcome organizational concerns about adopting Social Media.

Facing the fear of UGC

One of Nationwide’s brand tenets is “we listen,” and they saw social commerce as a new opportunity to listen to the needs of their customers. Before moving forward, Sue and Shawn faced the fear that many companies face in embracing UGC: the fear of the unknown. What would happen, and how would they deal with it? What teams needed to be involved? Who would run it, and who would make sure it complied with industry regulations? Even with evidence like the J-curve indicating reviews would likely be positive, Nationwide wanted to see the results for themselves.

Strategy for overcoming objections

The key to Sue and Shawn’s success in gaining company-wide buy-in was to garner executive support across the organization. Gaining this support required a four part strategy.

Reinforce importance of participating in the conversation. Nationwide looked for best practices outside the insurance industry, taking inspiration from Dell’s IdeaStorm and Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation. They realized that participating – and being transparent in doing so – was important. “Our executives realized the time had come to stop watching and start doing,” Sue said.
Ensure brand protection through content moderation. Moderation was Nationwide’s golden ticket to social commerce. It allowed the brand to limit their risk while staying authentic.
Demonstrate the business value of investing in Social. Sue and Shawn showed execs the business impact of the investment, examining how UGC would impact Nationwide’s advertising, reputation management, PR, and SEO to provide better, more relevant content on the brand site. Tying social to real business objectives created a compelling case for moving forward.
Create a process for testing and measuring results. Nationwide tested the strategy first, sending review solicitation emails to a subset of customers to see what type of content they would get. As expected, customer feedback was extremely positive.

Using this strategy, Sue and Shawn were able to gain the executive level buy-in they needed to bring the customer voice to the center of the Nationwide brand.

Their biggest piece of advice to help position social commerce to senior management? Tie it to clear business objectives, says Shawn. It isn’t enough to say something is a “fun, new trend.” Make the business case the old-fashioned way, just as you would for any other investment. Demonstrate the value behind social in numbers; show how reviews impact decisions. From there it’s easy to gain the executive advocates you need to make a case for social across your organization.

Want more? The full webinar is available to download for free, here:

This is the first of two posts from our webcast for highly regulated industries. Stay tuned to our blog to see how Nationwide is using social commerce today, and how it’s transforming their corporate culture. You can also read more about Nationwide’s use of social on Shawn Morton’s blog, here.

Tags: financial services, insurance

Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Word of Mouth

Pizza Throwdown puts Domino’s Pizza Turnaround to the test

February 8th, 2010 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

They called it the “Pizza Turnaround.”

Taste tests and focus groups had execs at Domino’s Pizza cringing as unhappy pizzaphiles gave brutally honest feedback on the taste of their pizza. Domino’s executives had a choice to make: go about their business – as many brands would – or learn from this negative feedback and change their 50 year old recipe.

Domino’s chose wisely, embracing customer oxygen and revamping their recipe. We hear the “what about negative reviews?” question all the time. What Domino’s finally realized is an idea Bazaarvoice promotes to our clients each day – negative reviews are a gift, an opportunity to improve your products and services to further delight your customers. We’ve seen this philosophy work wonders for clients like Oriental Trading Company and Land of Nod.

Where many brands would privately have gone about their business by rationalizing or ignoring the feedback, Domino’s did the opposite. And the pizza chain took their efforts a step further, launching a national campaign promoting how bad their pizza used to be. Their message was simple: “We were failing you. We finally heard you. Here’s what we did about it. Won’t you try us again?”

As passionate advocates of customer oxygen, we naturally applauded these campaigns. But we were curious, as the ads no doubt intended – is the new Domino’s recipe really better? We decided to conduct our own scientific test (NOT… but we think close enough) to see how listening to and acting on the opinions of their customers had benefited the chain.

The Bazaarvoice Pizza Throwdown

Tasters' stated preferences before the taste test

We found ten self-proclaimed pizza connoisseurs to participate in a taste test of Domino’s against its top two national competitors – Pizza Hut and Papa John’s. We ordered large cheese pizzas with original crust from each, testing the competitors on the pizza basics.

Before the test, we asked the tasters to tell us which pizza they thought they liked best. Papa John’s was the clear favorite, with 60% of the vote.

Each taster was blindfolded to ensure responses were based solely on taste. They were then asked to taste a slice of each competitor’s pizza, and give their reviews, rating each pizza on sauce, crust, cheese, and overall taste.

The Results

Tasters' blind choices for best overall taste

We weren’t sure what to expect. Even if Domino’s didn’t win, we thought they still had a great story to tell, as they’d demonstrated action and accountability to customer feedback. But fortunately for this story and for Domino’s, the new and improved pizza was the clear winner, with 50% of the tasters picking the chain’s new recipe as the tastiest pie.

Domino’s outperformed the competitors in every aspect of the test, earning 3.8 out of a possible 5 stars for overall taste.

Pizza components' taster ratings

You can watch how the taste test was done in our video here and on Youtube:

By embracing their customers’ negative feedback, Domino’s was able to improve their product quality and impress their customers. And not only are customers happy with the change, but so are shareholders! Apparently the campaign is expected to be a sales hit – Domino’s stock is up close to 50% over prices three months ago.

Domino's three month stock prices

Operationalizing customer feedback to radically improve an entire organization is something we help our clients do every day. Does your business have the tools to embrace the voice of the customer?

Tags: Domino's, Pizza Turnaround

Community, Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content

Webinar recap: Participate. Interact. Sell. Building Relationships Online

January 25th, 2010 by Amber Quist Senior Marketing Manager

Building on one exchange to create another, more valuable one: that was the focus of the Bazaarvoice webinar last week with Ze Frank and Sam Decker, as they discussed their recent white paper, “Participation Chains Connect Customers to Your Brand.”

We see marketers today focusing on single actions when it comes to user-generated content – get a comment, get a review, answer a question. Sam and Ze discussed shifting that focus, recognizing that each time a customer engages with your brand is an opportunity to get them even further engaged, to turn reviewers into top contributors, then into loyal brand advocates and influencers. Moving from “How can I squeeze more dollars out of every customer?” to “How can I get each customer to contribute in ways that keep them engaged and bring in new customers?”

Ze and Sam decided to call this the participation chain – a strategy for cultivating user engagement such that each action builds upon the one before, building value along the way as the customer becomes more deeply engaged with your brand.

How to build your participation chain

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. When a customer makes the effort to review, they are invested in that review. They want to see the end result. We see 90% open rates and 50% click-through rates for email notifications notifying a consumer that their review has been posted to the site. When you’ve already got someone who is engaged and contributing, the next step is to encourage further contribution.

Consider what they want to achieve. Customers contribute for a number of reasons: to express themselves, to share information with their friends, to help the brand. Most often, customers contribute to help other shoppers. Build on this – give them more ways to help others.

Give them an opportunity to accomplish that goal. The key is to build a chain that keeps contributors engaged. Encourage them to publish their reviews to social networks. Invite them to answer other shoppers’ questions. Whatever the reason your customers are participating, create links in your chain that allow them to contribute in ways that meet each of these motivations.

Contribution encourages contribution. All these interactions deepen the contributor’s engagement with the brand. At the same time, this content lives on your site where it influences other shoppers, helping them make purchase decisions and become buyers. Encourage your customers to contribute in ways that help others, encourage others to contribute, and encourage others to buy. Word of mouth is the most impactful form of marketing, so each interaction is a building block, creating an authentic sense of community around your brand and your products.

Customer engagement cycle

How does the participation chain apply to your brand? Are you fostering engagement, or letting the conversation die? We’d like to hear your participation chain stories. Tell us about your best examples or plans in the Comments section for a chance to win a $100 AMEX gift card. Please submit your ideas in by Friday, February 12, 2010.

Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, New at Bazaarvoice, Research

Participate – interact – sell: Building relationships online

January 11th, 2010 by Amber Quist Senior Marketing Manager

Every interaction with a consumer – no matter how small – drives conversations, which drive business results. Our recent white paper, “Get Them Talking: How Growing Participation Chains Will Grow Sales” shows how even small interactions can increase sales and loyalty – and every word counts. Read more about participation chains in this blog post.

Now we’re following up with a webinar featuring new media visionary Ze Frank and Bazaarvoice CMO Sam Decker: “Participate, Interact, Sell: Building Relationships Online.”

Tune in to learn:

How to create a participation chain strategy that captures every interaction possible
How top brands build successful participation chains
Top reasons people are motivated to participate or contribute content

Join Ze and Sam for this webinar on Tuesday, January 19, 2010, at 1 pm CST by registering here:

Download the free white paper, “Get Them Talking: How Growing Participation Chains Will Grow Sales,” here.

We look forward to talking more about how to get consumers participating – and buying.

Tags: webinar, white paper

Marketing Strategy

Benchmarking your business performance, or just your baby’s weight?

December 18th, 2009 by Rachel Eng Social Analyst

Put simply, benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s performance against the standard or “benchmark” of your industry vertical, the performance leaders, and/or yourself. The purpose of benchmarking is to see how you are performing in relation to others. Are you behind, level with, or ahead of your benchmark?

As a society, we benchmark everything. For example, is your baby the proper weight for his age? We compare that with the benchmark, or the typical average among similar babies, along with other factors. The same is true with businesses.

When we use benchmarks, we keep several things in mind.

What are the goals? Specifically, what are the micro-goals and what is the main goal that your executives are going to care about?
How are you measuring your goals? What are your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s)? Do these provide enough information and context for your company to take action? (I found this slide deck helpful in differentiating between a metric and a KPI.)
Who are you benchmarking against? Who does your company aspire to be? The best in the industry, the best overall, and/or your company’s personal best?
What do you plan to do with the results? Do you have a project plan to take action? Who are the stakeholders in your company that can use this information?

All of these decisions have to be made by you as a company. One of Avinash’s blogs highlights BP’s presentation in which they measure their customer experience and website performance against some of the best companies. BP does not limit themselves to just their competitors, but compares themselves with companies who they can learn from and be challenged by.

(more…)

Tags: Community-Manager, Services

BazaarblogIdeas to Help Customers Build Your Business

Archive for the ‘Marketing Strategy’ Category

Forrester recognizes USAA as social media innovator

“Customer Favorites” email drives 200% category sales increase for Free People

Discovering search in London

Australian webinar: Leverage your Customers to Drive Online Sales

Nationwide’s strategy for facing the fear of UGC & overcoming internal objections to Social Commerce

Pizza Throwdown puts Domino’s Pizza Turnaround to the test

Webinar recap: Participate. Interact. Sell. Building Relationships Online

Participate – interact – sell: Building relationships online

Benchmarking your business performance, or just your baby’s weight?

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