0:16 Hi, everyone. Thank you for attending this Bazaarvoice webinar. Cell on social cell with social the convergence of social media and e-commerce. 0:24 My name is Liz griffin, the global vice president of social commerce. And I'm joined today by Doug foulkes, an enterprise account executive of social commerce here at voice. 0:34 Doug, how many years have you been working with brands and social commerce now? I would say it's been about six, maybe almost seven years. 0:44 I started out here late now called social commerce here at bazaar voice in the marketing department. About a year or two in, I moved over from marketing to the dark side of the force in sales and have seen the space evolve dramatically since. 1:03 Very cool. We are happy to have you here. You are a huge asset that we got through that acquisition. That was really. 1:11 So today we have a jam packed agenda. We're going to talk through what is social commerce, the disruption of social commerce. We have a really cool case study, which we like to call a tale of two brands. 1:22 We're going to talk omnichannel, the rise of the social product page and the connected commerce universe. So let's get started. So what is social commerce? 1:32 There's the traditional definition, which is quite literally making a transaction on a social media platform. But we feel that definition is very limiting and doesn't fully capture the complexity of Truth Social commerce in today's omnichannel shopping world. 1:49 Doug, how would you say that brands and retailers work with bazaar voice on this? So Bazaarvoice today is a full funnel user generated content platform and we've been saying that for a while, but that's more true than ever today where we don't just deal in logical decision making UGC anymore, which I would consider to be ratings and reviews. 2:13 We also deal in emotional decision making UGC, which is the social proof that sells our brand predominantly in social campaigns. 2:22 But what we find is that today, consumers, they live across such a wide breadth of marketing channels when it comes to buying online different blogs, ads, influencers, different social networks, and they come in and out of style left and right. 2:43 The job of that content, it's to get clicks and essentially visual content online. It's the window display into our digital storefront, just like a window display on the street gets us into the physical store. 2:55 But unlike a physical store, most of our window displays online. They live in places that weren't designed to support e-commerce. When a product catches our eye between cute puppies or our friends on vacation and images of that type of thing, our path to purchase isn't universally seamless everywhere. 3:15 Meanwhile, we hear from brands and retailers that they don't know what made someone buy outside of correlating factors like impressions or a coupon code or comments or likes or follows. 3:28 And it's difficult to know where to invest more in what's working when we don't have the full funnel data, including revenue at the bottom to know what drove sales as opposed to what drove traffic and what drove initial interest at the top. 3:46 Yeah I would say, too, that there's just a lot of disruption within social commerce, right? So there's new platforms, there's new content types, there's new tools, there's new technologies. 3:56 It is a very chaotic environment and it's a lot of work for teams to really understand the entire, as we'll say, a complex commerce universe. 4:06 One thing that I think is really interesting, and especially since the pandemic, is what is now kind of become the preferred platforms for social shopping. 4:16 So over the past about 12 months, we've seen a very large increase in terms of the social platforms and the shopping there. 4:26 So we know that buying directly from an e-commerce site is still driving the majority of shopping. But what we're seeing, the growth is very eye catching. 4:36 So when you look at this chart, you can see both Instagram and tiktok, which both increased 185% and 500% respectively. 4:46 That's huge from a growth standpoint. And then what you can also see, which is no surprise because of the pandemic as well, is that the in-store shopping decreased by a whopping 60% I know for me personally, I'm a full time working mother and I would love to be able to go to a store and go shopping. 5:09 But I just, eh, don't have the time, don't really want to take my kids with me. So I'm doing a lot of shopping online. My preferred platform of choice is Instagram. 5:19 I follow some my friends that I just kind of love their style and a lot of influencers, and I literally do all of my shopping based on their recommendations and through Instagram. 5:32 Again, a lot of what I see and what we'll talk about today is that journey from the social platform onto the e-commerce side. What's also really interesting, too, that we've seen is more around authenticity. 5:45 So we see that consumers are really craving that authentic content to help them make a purchase similar to what you were talking about earlier. 5:54 So I think that we know that consumers want to feel validated with that social proof. Similar to like the ratings and reviews which were very well known for. 6:03 What's really interesting about this data is that it's not just that shopper photos and reviews are more likely to compel shoppers to make a purchase, but 32% are saying that ads don't work on them. 6:17 So it's really, really clear from this data, again, that they're craving that authenticity. And so for you as a brand, this really becomes your new currency. 6:27 So we see that 64% of shoppers want to see consumer content shared on social media. But then almost about 70% of shoppers have said that they've been inspired by social media content to make a purchase on another channel. 6:42 So now we want to take you through a really fun case study, which we like to call a tale of two brands. So I'll pass it over to Doug for this one. 6:51 Thanks so much, Liz. And yeah, the far, far better thing you can do than you've ever done is to use social content in more places than one. 7:01 And we'll take you through this comparison between two brands, Sendai and Denali. Shout out to anyone who got the tale of two cities reference Sunday has massive following, and while Denali has just a fraction of that following, as you look at these metrics for top of funnel, you might think that just by pure odds, sun would be driving more full funnel metrics down to revenue. 7:26 But we see that mid funnel and this is true when it comes to the number of visitors to site, but then this is also where things get a little interesting. 7:36 When you see is a shift in success when it comes to click through rate to the site. So we have a big following, which means lots of eyeballs, but those eyeballs head to the site. 7:47 And in one case, that group of people is clicking to the PDP at a much higher rate. So you might be wondering, why is that the case? And from there the tables turn where you see a dramatic increase in conversion rate and revenue. 8:00 And it's kind of a puzzle, right. So what happened when someone landed on the site. And what's the formula that made someone click, not only click also convert at a higher rate? 8:13 So what is about the gnarly. What about their site? Merchandising strategy was so successful. So let's start on social media. 8:22 Both look pretty good. Bright, fresh, relevant lifestyle content. And as a shopper, I'd say I'm inspired by this content. And you'll remember at this point, sun has a larger following and a larger volume of visits to the site. 8:37 But if I can compare how many people visit the site to my followers, I find that Denali is driving many more followers to the site. 8:47 And let's just take a closer look. We find out that about half of Denali content is actually user generated content. 8:55 So content created by their fans, by their shoppers wanting to celebrate their purchase, not just people that were paid to do so. We're done in a sort of like a photo shoot type of environment. 9:08 And moving along in that journey when we clicked through to the Lincoln bio, both have their Lincoln bios optimized for sales. And what I mean is a shoppable interstitial page that lets us browse different looks and get to the relevant product pages or destinations that relate to what sparked our interest on Instagram. 9:29 And this is one of many ways you can make Instagram shoppable, and it's best practice to take advantage of all. We'll get into that later. But when we get to the PDP page in this example, we notice a stark difference in the content and the metrics. 9:43 Tell the story very well. You see in Sunday that I click the link in bio ahead to the PDP and where there should be user generated content. 9:52 I see stock photography and one way we can really let down consumers on the product page is to not be consistent in what brought them there. 10:03 It's divorced from the inspiration that brought me to the PDP and PDP shouldn't just be full of rational decision making information. Is it in my size? 10:12 Is it on sale or should I buy it? For that reason, we should remind people of the emotional reason they came there to bought and also showcase other looks along those lines to build their confidence to buy, which is what this other brand has done so well. 10:25 Real authentic UGC so the same reason in feeling that I started on my journey is the same reason I'm going to click and check out. I'm inspired consistently with the same type of content in a really connected end to end way, and that's why the latter brand was more successful. 10:43 So what does this mean for you? Great shoppers are telling us that they expect to see user generated content shared to your social presence as the way to justify following you and feeling connected. 10:57 Like this is a real authentic brand and people are naturally celebrating the fact that they're participating and buying those products. But they also want to see this content shared to websites as a prerequisite for buying. 11:10 And that's not just social traffic that wants to see it, but when you think about all of your traffic coming to your product, page is not just social. 11:19 You can impact search, you can impact page, you can impact direct with this type of content. You can even impact folks that are not buying on your site but might be researching online and then buying offline. 11:29 Many of us carry our phones into stores with us and often check the product pages to see if it's a good decision to buy something they're physically in front of. 11:38 So this kind of content is really, really important to share, not just to social, but to sites where 74% of shoppers want to see it. 11:47 And we're actually projecting to see a 34% growth in social commerce sales this year. So this would bode well for you to do to increase that bottom line. 11:58 To drive home more dollars. So basically, why let social media teams have all the fun when e-commerce can extend the life span of that content and use it to drive at a higher rate, their own key performance indicators, their conversion rates on site, their AOV and their time on site and tie it directly back to social content as well. 12:21 This way, social teams can also point to what's printing the business money, as opposed to just pointing to what's driving traffic or impressions or likes and comments. 12:34 So as we look to the site. Websites today are traditionally designed or optimized rather for buying and for search. 12:46 Look at the most prominent calls to action of your own website or any site that you like to go on and shop. The most prominent calls to action or go to this category page. 12:57 Look at this diner menu of options of stock shots against a white background and choose a product based on that one that I'm not already aware of or familiar with or search and buying is very easy. 13:10 Today, too often is the case I can pay with my face if I'm on my phone and using Apple Pay and it arrives on my door in a couple of days. 13:19 That's not broken. But what's inherently broken with e-commerce today isn't necessarily buying or search. It's discovery. 13:27 And it's shopping. Shopping when I browse the aisles of a brick and mortar store and stumble upon something and add it to my cart. And inspect too. 13:36 That's inherently broken online, which we aim to solve by injecting the social content. The inspiration that drove me to site into where it's currently divorced when I land on site and when we use this content and make it shoppable. 13:50 As you can see by demonstration of this video, we not only demonstrate value and pique curiosity for products we haven't discovered before. 13:59 But we can silo products that live inside these looks that are otherwise buried in category cages I never would have gone to in the first place. 14:08 And we're replacing boring stock images with much more compelling content to engage with, contributing to higher time on site. 14:16 Hire a job by virtue of the fact, one selling products and making looks across multiple categories shoppable and ultimately driving more traffic to the product pages where this content follows us through to the moment we enter in our credit card information. 14:33 And as I stated before, we don't just want to rationalize someone's decision to buy with facts and figures about the product. It's on sale. You should definitely buy it for this reason. 14:42 It doesn't have the thing you're allergic to, et cetera. Right we want to bring in that emotional context back into the fold here and show folks not only the imagery that brought them to this product page as a reminder, but any other visual content you have around that product from social media, that could be another indicator for why they should buy and build their confidence to do so. 15:05 And as a result, we've actually, compared in the past product detail pages of partners we work with that had yet to implement social content on their apps and we sell up to 101% higher revenue per visit for the product pages that actually had social content on them versus the ones that did it. 15:26 And the journey of this content extends far beyond our own website. And when we think about bringing this content to site in other places like retail, we extend and expand the audience for this content. 15:41 When you think about it, how much traffic does your social presence actually drive to your site or to retail or wherever the next step is? 15:49 And when you look at your analytics, it's probably a very small bar graph compared to search, compared to direct traffic and some of the other things you do to drive traffic to site. 16:00 So why not take this content and place it in front of an audience that's going to be not only social traffic but search and paid and direct and all these other folks that might not have seen the content. 16:11 And on top of that, let's make sure they're all interested in buying it, which is why they're on the website. And if we're just viewing this content on social media. 16:21 Sure some of us are shoppers. Some of us are not, though probably most of us are not, were interested in scrolling to the next thing. So let's place this content in front of an audience that's 100% interested in buying something or open to the possibility. 16:34 And with Bazaarvoice. We're very uniquely positioned here as a best in class ratings and reviews distribution network. 16:43 We are using the exact same pipes we've played to syndicate ratings and reviews to retailers, to also syndicate the social content that you're investing in for your campaigns today. 16:55 We want to make that content evergreen and place it in front of the widest audience at retail where it has conversion, lift and benefit as well. Now while we're on site, right, the topic of optimizing our web presence, getting great social content into the site. 17:15 We're not just about making social look shoppable in more places. We're also about removing friction from any visual content, just generally. 17:27 A client of ours said this, and it was a really interesting analogy to me that I've taken and reused a lot. But imagery on the website should really be like that room in Willy Wonka where everything is edible. 17:39 I should be able to consume every single photo on site, and that extends to blog images and hero images. And really anything that's taking up real estate should be working hard to sell a product for you, not just take up space. 17:52 So with an additional solution we named reveal because it literally does that reveals the products inside of photo with the hover state of your cursor. 18:03 We can make look shoppable, help consumers complete their look and easily navigate from a look like this on, say, a blog post, a hero, a top of the category, some place taking up a lot of real estate on our home page to the products that caught our eye and increase click through rate on average by 110% because these photos are actually interactive by virtue of that fact making them interactive, we kind of stop traffic in its tracks and make someone want to engage even further and click through because it's actually kind of fun and interactive and this type of experience can live on to drive traffic from off site to because it's not really aware of where it lives. 18:47 So some of our partners actually use this as a way to make influencer blog post shoppable and drive traffic back to them in a measurable way. 18:56 Which brings us to. A more broader topic is how are we driving traffic from social media generally? And when we look at really important social channels like Instagram or tiktok, there are few places where we can use a link to drive traffic from. 19:15 And on Instagram in particular, which today still represents probably the most important social channel for brands at this particular time, there are four or five or so ways to drive traffic from it. 19:29 You've got your link in bio, of course, which we're going to talk about right now. Then you've got your stories, your ads where influencers share content and Native Instagram shopping tags. 19:41 If you're not taking advantage of every single way to make Instagram shoppable and drive traffic in a way that's not only frictionless for consumers, but also measurable against business goals like revenue for you, you inevitably leave money and insights on the table. 19:58 So starting off with your link in bio as a first step as table stakes, this is a really far down the funnel audience. 20:07 They're clicking through your link in bio because they want to leave what's arguably a pretty addictive platform and a lot of dopamine gets released as you use social media, right? 20:17 So someone's opting to step away from that and actually shop with you and click that link in bio to leave Instagram for your site. 20:25 Don't you want to know why they did that? What made them leave? This is a way to do that. That complements other shop tag strategies, not only making sure that we can make individual images and videos in this click through environment shoppable and break out the products that are for sale so we can get back to the right place on site. 20:47 We wanted to, but also engage consumers in other ways, such as capturing their email address, letting them know about upcoming campaigns or important category pages. 20:59 You could drive traffic to those places as well, not just expressly product pages, making it a more flexible environment to drive traffic, perhaps toward editorial content in addition to product pages. 21:13 And taking this a step further, because this is just one area we drive traffic. What about every other place? As marketers, we only have one link we get to use when we're trying to drive traffic within Instagram from a story, an ad when we give an influencer an affiliate link. 21:32 Let's look even broader than that. What about twitter? What about pinterest? What about facebook? What about standard display ads or email? These are all, like we stated before, the window displays into our digital storefront. 21:45 So how do we shop, the window display and how do we browse the aisles of a store? The best way to do that is a custom landing page and driving traffic to one that you're going to ask your IT team to build every single time you want to share some content out. 21:59 There is probably a pretty difficult task to scale. So that's why we do it for you. And pretty programmatically, without it involvement where we can create essentially social storefronts that can live inside your content driving traffic. 22:15 And when consumers click through, they're brought to this Bazaarvoice powered experience that not only displays the creative we click through on, allows us to play the video if that's the content. 22:26 It also breaks out the products very clearly. So I can click on one of these and get back to where I wanted to go on your site to make a purchase according to what inspired me. 22:36 Now, with that being said, if I'm flicking through an ad, an email, a story swipe up, chances are I probably don't have my credit card out ready to buy something again. 22:46 It's the window display. How often do you walk into a store off the street? Because a window got you. And then you say, hey, I want to buy everything in that window or buy what's on the mannequin. 22:55 Chances are you're looking to explore more. You're going to browse the aisles. You're going to find something perhaps akin to what pique your interest. 23:04 And we take advantage of that explorative mindset by bringing in either in a curated fashion selected by you or in an AI fashion, bringing in the most relevant looks and related products into this social product page. 23:21 You can think of it as on a traditional PDP. Similar products, similar looks. We bring this into the fold too, so consumers can click on these additional looks, shop them just like they did the original look. 23:32 They clicked on and increase the likelihood they find the product that they love, the way that they want to get back to site for and buy from you. 23:41 And you get to measure in all these places where commerce didn't live before and now it does. Not only what drove the click through, but what product drove the sale. 23:51 All right. So with all that being said, these types of solutions impact a lot of different departments from social management to social displays in terms of injecting e-commerce and into where it doesn't exist today. 24:03 In various areas, we display content to drive traffic as well as impact traffic, not just on our own dot com, but also visual syndication to take advantage of higher sales at retailers and leverage a unique, exclusive network that bazaar voice has built not only for syndicating ratings and reviews, but for syndicating social proof to those product pages as well, where they have similar results in terms of conversion left. 24:32 Amazing Thank you so much, Doug. I think a comment too on your social product detail page. What I think is really cool about that piece of technology that we provide is there's really nothing more frustrating when you are scrolling and you find an image that you love with a product in it, or you find you're finding an influencer. 24:52 But then when you have to click through, you go to the site and you have to go search for it. You have to go find what kind of Drew you to it in the first place. 25:01 So to bring that. You know, making it more frictionless, I think for the shopper with that sort of technology is pretty powerful. 25:11 And I think to kind of wrap up everything that Doug was saying and really just kind of throwing some power behind this, if that wasn't enough, is that we know that social content sells. 25:23 We see almost 170% increase in conversion, a massive 300% increase in time on site and 14% increase in your AOV. 25:34 So when you think about the kind of increasing your product discovery so that consumers can buy more and you recreate that in-store shopping experience and increasing really kind of that confidence in the product. 25:47 It turns out when you invest in that, you're really rewarded by your consumers when they're kind of opening up their wallets and spending more money with you. 25:55 I think something else that we have yet to cover off on is that when you are making your social content shoppable, it really becomes a goldmine into your insights. 26:09 So with the bazaar voice, social commerce reporting and our insights capabilities, we can help you define what does your ideal customer profile look like? 26:19 We can help you identify with our technology, the kinds of content that they engage with, and then you can actually measure the selling power of the different types of content. 26:30 So what type of content is resonating the most across what channel? And then you can really lean into what works dug out of these different types of insights that we provide. 26:41 What would you consider is the most important to the social marketing persona? Defining your ideal customer profile and trends within your content. 26:53 Remember we talked I mean, we've talked about a lot of further down the funnel metrics and why they're so important. And we've harped on that because often it's the case those are not available, but it's just important to measure what caught someone's eye. 27:09 Walking down the street, what got them into the store, as well as what they ended up buying in the aisles of that store. So the window displays into our digital storefront, right? 27:19 The kind of content that captures our imagination is one type. The kind that leads us in terms of traffic to the site is another type. 27:28 And then the kind that we convert on at the site level could also be another type. And we can measure each 1 respectively. So you know, what type of content is going to be most important for you to invest in for that particular marketing channel? 27:43 Absolutely and I think the other thing that is a good segue going into the slide right here is when we think about all of the different stakeholders that should be involved when it comes to social commerce, is that the lines are really blurring there. 27:57 So I know that we see at bazaar voice a lot of times when we're talking to clients, if we mention social media to maybe someone that works on the side, they'll very quickly say, oh, well, you need to talk to our social media team or this person because they handle social and vice versa that maybe your social media team doesn't care about specific things on the site. 28:17 But what we have seen is really like to maximize these opportunities. You must facilitate a seamless community, a seamless omnichannel commerce experience. 28:28 So whether you're investing in social commerce or you're just on social media or e-commerce or whatever that looks like, you really need to collect and display the right content at the right time to meet your goals. 28:40 And there are going to be different roles within your organization that kind of hold the key to displaying how your customers see themselves in the imagery. 28:49 But whether you are an e-commerce director or a brand marketing manager, you're on the social team, the influencer marketing team, whatever it looks like. 28:59 I cannot stress enough how imperative it is for you to collaborate and share business insights. So that you can reach your universal goals together and really create a beautiful full funnel experience for your shoppers. 29:11 So as we've been discussing, you know, this is kind of a very wide breadth of marketing channels, a complex ecosystem, but it doesn't have to be complex if you have one place to go to Manage everything. 29:27 And getting your content into all these places is just going to ensure that at the end of the day, you avoid the risk of leaving money on the table. 29:37 And that's what it's about at the end of the day. And our North star, even, I would say, regardless of visual content strategy, is to drive more sales. 29:48 And we do that by making sure that regardless of where your visual inspiration lives, to inspire extra frictionless, to buy from, and it's possible for you to measure in every which way. 30:00 It's driving conversion and engagement and traffic throughout the entire sales funnel. And we want to leave you with a really compelling case story, a case study where a home d��cor brand that I've personally used actually for some of my IKEA furniture that needed a bit of a refresh after dorm room days. 30:34 And, you know, I felt a little sentimental and didn't want to throw it away. And, you know, this is a fantastic brand. I highly recommend you check them out if you're looking to get. 30:47 Get a little makeover on your old furniture. But what they want to do is they want to increase conversions on site. They want it to improve their customer journey across all their channels and reaching consumers. 30:58 What better way to do that than what we discussed is make your broader website traffic aware of the fact that there's all this great inspiration out there and customers that have seen success. 31:08 So they brought content from social media, from their everyday campaigns that are evergreen hashtag strategy. So their fan created content, the influencer content they work with, and they brought it into their website and made it shoppable. 31:23 And because the content, as we stated before, far more engaging that social content than what they traditionally display on site stock shots against a white background, very search oriented and buy now oriented calls to action. 31:38 They made this a shopping experience with their social content. And as a result, by bringing more engaging content on site, they increase time on site by 270% They increased average order value, making their traffic, their broader audience aware of all the different products and possibilities with their service increased aov by 34% and they increase revenue. 32:06 This is the amazing bit by $1.65 million. Incredible success story and a great way to show how this content can absolutely print brands money. 32:19 If it's put in the right places and it's optimized to do the right things like drive sales. Absolutely and we have several other success stories similar to thems, but that is one of our most recent case studies that we've developed that we wanted to share today. 32:37 So to wrap up before we jump into our Q&A, just a few key takeaways from this webinar. 32:45 First and foremost, most importantly, leverage your social content everywhere you're investing in it, your consumers are creating it on your behalf. 32:54 Take that content and use it. Use it across the entire funnel so that it can work harder for you. Learn from challenger brands. 33:02 This goes back to our tale of two brands story that Doug told, which was an actual anonymized example of a couple of clients that we have here at bazaar voice. 33:12 Remember, if you're not taking advantage of social commerce and leaning into this space, other brands will be. Your competitors definitely are. 33:21 So stay ahead of them and continue to find all of these open opportunities where you can really utilize social to help sell more for you. 33:30 And then lastly, measure what matters. We're able to attribute revenue across the funnel for you. And more importantly, you're really dialing into the type of content that your specific consumers want to see. 33:42 So now we'll move into our Q&A.
