Posts Tagged ‘study’

dunnhumby Study Proves Offline Sales Impact of Digital Media

Tuesday, October 11th, 2011

Our friends at dunnhumby released the findings of a great study today. They prove the importance of digital media promotions to in-store purchases of CPG companies.

Working with Comscore, dunnhumby linked a permission-based panel of a million internet users to their anonymous loyalty card in-store purchase data. This was done so no identifiable personal data was disclosed. They compared the in-store purchases of households exposed to online promotions to those not exposed to it. The results show how important digital media is to CPG marketing:

Exposure to digital media promotions lifts in-store sales 21%

Households exposed to online promotions for the products bought a median of 21% more CPG products in retail stores. 5 of every 6 campaigns measured generated a sales lift, and 40% of them had a lift that exceeded 30%.

Targeting consumers based on buying data lifts in-store sales 42%

The sales lift doubled when targeting based on in-store purchase data was added to the mix. A new Microsoft tool called CPG Online Effect provided targeting algorithms based on anonymous dunnhumby buying data and Comscore web browsing data.

“Based on these results, the power of purchase-based ad targeting is clear. By delivering a relevant and persuasive message to the appropriate consumer segment, brand buying at retail stores can be increased substantially. It’s clear that the level of accuracy in reaching a brand’s consumer target that is possible with the Internet can drive ROI several times higher than what can be obtained using traditional media channels.” Guy Fulgoni, CEO, Comscore

This study is based on exposure to online ads. BzzAgent is now using this same in-store purchase data to target something even more influential – active brand advocates. Combining loyalty card purchase history with social media savvy customers may be the biggest growth opportunity for marketers today. These “Social Shoppers” have a deep connection to your brand and they rely heavily on social media to discuss products and recommendations with a big audience of followers. Download our latest ebook “From Loyalty to Advocacy: Driving Sales with Social Shoppers“ to drive sales results like these using the most persuasive voices around your brand.

Tags: dunnhumby, study
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Brand Advocates Clean Up

Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

This is part of BzzAgent’s “Voice of the Advocate” series where we summarize the latest trends in a product category and review how to get brand advocates talking about them.

Home cleaning products are staples of daytime television. You can’t get through a single commercial break without seeing ads for products that clean your soiled clothes, grimy bathtubs and filthy floors. From Ajax to Windex and from Lysol 4-in-1 to 2000 Flushes, there are products to clean everything… and we all have some of them in the house.

Did you know these products are also among the most discussed among brand advocates? Social marketing programs have been successfully deployed to drive millions of dollars of measurable sales for these products.

Let’s have a closer look. Here are 3 trends from Mintel on the category matched to opinions from over 5,000 BzzAgent brand advocates who use these home cleaning products.

Trend #1 DIY

Overall new product launches have been soft in the past year, but the home cleaning category is strong due to the economy. The recession has caused many to cut back on professional maid and cleaning services which has led consumers to take on cleaning themselves. Use of professional services for those with $100k+ incomes dropped from 19% to 7%.

Both men and women take on cleaning in the home, but let’s not kid ourselves. Women are the primary cleaners. 56% of women report being the main cleaner in the household, compared to 32% of men. A big problem for marketers is that many of these women believe store brands perform just as well as the costlier name brands.

What Our Advocates Think:

They are hands-on when it comes to cleaning products. A significant majority of those taking our survey were women and 84% of them buy these products at least monthly. 75% of the time the purchase is made at a discount department store like Wal-Mart or Target where they are likely purchased with other products for the home.
These are savvy cleaners. These products are very self-explanatory and people know how to use them so home product demonstration parties and access to “how to” content from the brand have limited appeal. The focus is entirely on the product and how it makes their job at home easier.
They are eager to sample products they haven’t used before. 95% of them are very interested in trying new cleaning products and sharing coupons with their friends and followers.

BzzAgent advocates are heavy users of home cleaning products. A BzzCampaign puts the product experience into the hands of these consumers so they can see the results in their own home – showing them what they are missing with the economy store brand they’ve been using. The precision of targeting is also a key advantage. Reaching a specific segment of women using these products frequently at home ensures your message is personal, relevant and highly effective.

Trend #2 Green Theme

Products with green and natural claims made up 54% of the recent new product launches. But there is a disconnect happening with consumers, as only 25% use green cleaners regularly and as many as 40% have never tried them. The biggest barriers to adoption are the higher costs and doubts about product effectiveness. Not surprisingly, 18-34 year olds are most likes to go green while those 55 and up are least likely.

What Our Advocates Think:

“Green” may be the hot marketing theme, but our advocates don’t feel it’s very talkable. “Green” falls far down the list of topics after other product attributes. It’s likely that there hasn’t been enough education from marketers on why they should care.
Other product attributes they care more about include new scents and formulas. 7 in 10 are very interested in talking about these topics – especially the 55+ audience.

If you are marketing with a strong “green” message, make sure you focus on the most receptive audience and spend the time to explain why this is important. Address the concerns around the high cost perception directly. If your green product works just as well as the leading competitors, make sure to ask advocates to demonstrate this through video demonstrations or written product reviews. BzzAgent create a BzzGuides for every campaign to provide product facts and education on the key benefits so your key messages come through clearly.

Trend #3: Convenience

Many consumers report feeling a sense of accomplishment when cleaning, and 75% have a clear cleaning routine – usually in the morning. Since the day starts early, time-saving and ease of use are valued by a wide range of consumers. A third of launches featured this claim with products that have resealable packaging, ergonomic bottles and on-the-go variations. These features are so valued that many consumers are willing to pay more for these benefits.

What Our Advocates Think:

Innovation is important. Advocates are always looking for what’s new. A new product launch in the category is a big deal, and for 84% advocates report being very interested in discussing it.
BzzAgent advocates are very social and they love to share what give them a sense of accomplishment. 92% are very interested in writing detailed reviews of cleaning products online and 78% want to post reviews on e-commerce sites like Amazon. They also value the opinions of the friends and followers. 83% will help spread the word by commenting and sharing great reviews posted by others around them.
Advocates are interested in getting more involved with the brands they trust. 7 in 10 are very interested in participating in contests or sweepstakes surrounding cleaning products.

There aren’t a lot of products that give consumers a feeling of personal accomplishment. Home cleaning products can do that and advocates want to talk about how they feel. BzzAgent gets users of your products to tell their personal stories in their own words so others can see why your new features, enhancements and product launches save time and give people pride about living in a cleaner home.

Tags: advocacy, CPG, study, voice of the advocate
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Did Social Media Kill Impulse Buying?

Sunday, June 5th, 2011

Yahoo says it did. A new study released with Universal McCann finds that consumers are now less impulsive in their shopping because they are taking the time to check for consumer reviews before committing to a purchase.

According to the study, social media and mobile have made the path to purchase a game. Finding deals is “cool” and consumers are collaborating with each other in a game to find and share the best ones. The study found that 49% of consumers freely give advices to others to help them make better decisions. This is a lot of what we saw in our advocate study last month.

Social helped the internet surpass print and television to be the most trusted information source for information about products and services.

Does that mean impulse shopping is dead? It is for marketers. Consumers aren’t jumping at ad messages anymore. We need a sanity check with other consumers.

But what if the message is presented from a friend or online follower? Does the source of the message make a difference?

Take a look at Groupon – they’ve become the ultimate social impulse buying machine. There’s even an emerging aftermarket for deals that people no longer want. Now a new Groupon service, called Groupon Now, is teasing the impulse urge even more with deals that are only valid at that time at a particular location. We see the power of consumer-generated impulse (CGI?, nah already been taken) here at BzzAgent. It’s not unusual for BzzCampaign-promoted products to run out of stock at retailers or to get people lining up outside a store for a deal.

Whether impulse buying is dead or not, one thing is certain. The brands with strong consumer discussion and vocal advocates will be the ones that get people jumping for checkout line.

Tags: impulse, study
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[Infographic] The Actions, Motivations and Influence of Brand Advocates

Wednesday, May 4th, 2011

Brand advocates are one of a brand’s most important resources. They lead frequent discussions about products and their actions persuade the opinions and purchase decision of many others. To help marketers understand who these people are, what they do, and why they do it, we conducted an in-depth study with Dr. Kathleen Ferris-Costa at the University of Rhode Island, College of Business Administration.

The study provided a wealth of great data on advocate behaviors, interests and motivations. We found that brand advocates are 83% more likely to share information about a product than typical web users, and 50% more likely to influence a purchase. Advocates enjoy solving problems and helping others make better purchase decisions. They are 75% more likely to share a great product experience and three times more likely to share product opinions with someone they don’t know.

These stats, and many others in this study, show that advocates act and think very differently from typical web users – they are a different breed of consumer.

The findings from this study make up the first “Field Guide to Brand Advocates”. Check out the infographic below and download the complete study at http://u.bzz.com/FieldGuide.

Tags: advocates, infographic, study
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Twitter’s 50/.05 Rule

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011

Everyone knows about the 80/20 rule, but did you know that it doesn’t apply to Twitter? Not even close. We’ve always know that a few dedicated users generate much of the discussion, but new research from Yahoo finds that 50% of the tweets are created by just .05% of users. A very small group of people are creating the content that drives discussion and shapes perceptions of all Twitter users.

The Yahoo study uncovered some other facts about Twitter that we haven’t seen before.

They found a significant homophily with the categories of users. People like to follow others like them. Celebrities typically follow celebrities, media follows other media, bloggers follow other bloggers, etc.

Posts from different types of people have very different lifespans. Posts originating from the media users have very short lifespans while posts from bloggers live the longest. A blogger’s post is more likely to be retweeted months and even years after its introduction.

The topic matters too. Posts linking to videos, music and product reviews on Amazon have lifespans that are “effectively unbounded and can seemingly be rediscovered by Twitter users indefinitely without losing relevance”.

The data on celebrity Twitter users is interesting considering that some companies are paying celebs to Tweet about their products. If this is something you are considering, Yahoo found that celebrities have among the largest followings on Twitter but their posts are the shortest-lived and the least likely to be retweeted by others. That doesn’t sound like influence to me.

Recent reports state that there are 175 million registered Twitter users. 90% follow less than 50 others and only 1.5 million follow more than 500 others. We see a lot of that at BzzAgent. Charting follower counts of Twitter users looks like a reverse bell curve. Most people either have many thousands of followers or a small group of close friends. There are far fewer in the middle.

Does this mean that a marketer doesn’t need to take Twitter seriously? Not at all. In fact, comScore says that Twitter users spend a lot of money online. They outspend general web users by as much as 64%.

The key is to work with the right people. Even if you are not connected to that top 0.05%, you can find those with an expertise and significant influence in your topic area. Tools like Klout and PeerIndex can help you narrow down the audience. They’ll give you those with a voice and a large following in your marketplace, but don’t stop there.

Once you find them, what do you do with them? You’ll want to introduce them to a program designed to expose them to your product and all the information they’ll want to share with others. This is an ongoing process that builds momentum with new activities promotions and offers… and it monitors their contributions (remember the FTC is watching). Then you can measure their influence in terms of sales generated and not just their potential for action.

Tags: study, twitter
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Your Facebook Page is Not Enough

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

If you want to use social media to influence product sales, it’s not what you put on your Facebook page, it’s what consumers put on theirs.

That’s the takeaway from a recent GroupM and comScore study about the consumer path to purchase. They studied the web activities of online shoppers 90 days before a purchase and found that just 1% of purchasers engaged with the brand’s Facebook, Twitter or YouTube pages before the sale. But that doesn’t mean that social isn’t influential, its just the wrong social media. People are looking for each other. 16% of purchasers were involved with user-review content posted on social media sites about the company.

Marketers need to look beyond their own branded social media pages and focus on starting conversations all across the web where their customers live and play. Reviews from friends and other users of the product are the strongest influence on sales, and that purchase decision may happen long before they consider your brand, let alone take the time to visit your Facebook page. Consumers know where their friends talk about products and the message has to come from their own Facebook pages and communities.

Paid search ads have long been the marketer’s tool for driving ROI online, but this study also shows that search really needs social to be effective. People who buy online are almost as likely to use a combination of search and social resources (48%) as they are to just use search (51%) prior to the sale In fact, when consumers were exposed to both brand-specific search results and social media, search response rates increased by 94%. What search marketer wouldn’t like to see a performance boost like that? For two media formats that are so tightly intertwined, isn’t it funny that in most companies search and social live in completely different departments?

If that wasn’t enough, ForeSee indexed a variety of media sources based on their ability to influence an online purchase. As you can see below, the top 3 sources are all reviews from consumers or close friends. Messages from the company Facebook page are down at #7. Interestingly, search engines are at the bottom of the list.

Source: ForSee “Social Media Marketing, Do Retail Results Justify Investment?”

Tags: facebook, influence, study
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GlobalWebIndex on the Future of Social Media and Why it’s Wrong

Monday, February 21st, 2011

Many studies on social media usage provide powerful stats and persuasive charts on how we use social media, but they often rehash the same stories. The recent GlobalWebIndex Annual Report is different. It is certainly loaded with interesting stats about the state of social media around the world, but it also presents an interesting perspective on the future of digital media and social media. The problem is, I don’t think it is right. Here’s why.

The study shows that social media has matured. It is being driven by three trends that are creating a new age of social entertainment through internet platforms. The three trends are:

Social media has reached mass maturity. Today it’s no longer about massive growth but a shift of already active social consumers to ‘real-time’ technologies, such as status updates or tweets.
The open browser-based web is losing out to packaged internet platforms. (ie mobile apps, internet connected TVs, tablets, e-readers, pc apps, gaming and video platforms)
Professional “traditional style” content is now a core part of the consumer online experience. Providing professional media with the means to create sustainable internet business models.

According to the study, the “packaged internet” emphasizes professionally created content and the consumer takes on the role of a real-time distributor of it. Packaging the internet makes it easier for companies to monetize it in ways the browser could never do. To capitalize on this, publishers will “re-engineer the web around apps destroying the notion of the internet being a singular entity”. Consumers will be reoriented away from creating content on blogs, forums, and discussion boards to become curators who predominately share publisher content flavored with their opinions and commentary.

Here’s the full report:

Welcome to Social Entertainment – Annual Report 2011

This is a logical view assuming current trends continue, but they never do. The web has never been predictable. There has always been new trends or innovations that evolve quickly and change everything. I love idea of apps and the experience they provide, but I’m not convinced they’ll continue to grow to create the fragmented web this study envisions. Apps are less interesting if every publisher, broadcaster, game company and business with a blog creates their own app island. That just sounds like a very cluttered and unconnected version of the web we have today. This is not what consumers want and they won’t let it happen.

Apps created by publishers aren’t very social. They may evolve to include more “real-time” commentary, but they’ll never be consumer-driven. Look for newer apps to become technology-assisted content curators pulling information from other apps, social networks and communities and presenting it in a much more engaging way. Think about what Flipboard can become.

The GlobalWebIndex presents a very business-centric view of the web. Businesses have never successfully driven the consumer’s experience online. Social media has proven that the web belongs to consumers. Even though apps may provide a nice clean brand experience, they aren’t going to suppress the need for consumers to express themselves in any way they want. They won’t be limited to the narrow confines of an app.

Consumers will always be more trusted than brands. eMarketer reports that the GlobalWebIndex study found a 50% increase in the trust people place in product recommendations from their social network contacts. Traditional media sources barely gained any trust during the same period. Even if the consumer appetite for apps appreciates like the study suggests, web users will still spend most of their time in the places where they can connect with each other and discuss what they want. I agree that it probably won’t be within a browser 5 years from now, but we aren’t going back to a traditional media dominated world. The closer “traditional media” content into our lives, the more we’ll turn to each other for trustworthy opinions and recommendations, not less.

I know you have an opinion on this, let’s discuss it here or on Twitter.

Tags: future of social media, study
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How Are You Measuring Social Media?

Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

A new study from SmartBrief and Summus shows that not many of you are measuring anything. The “State of Social Media for Business” report finds that less that 15% of businesses are measuring their social media regularly. In fact, more than twice as many companies have no measurement practices in place at all.

Measurement isn’t hard and there is certainly no lack of data available. The challenge is to look at the right data. If you consider the universe of data available to analyze, everything a company can measure in social media falls into one of three categories – media outputs, audience outtakes and business outcomes.

(more…)

Tags: Measurement, ROI, study
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