Welcome to the Froggblog

Out of the many editorial link development tactics we use on a weekly basis, hijacking the news agenda is certainly one of the most challenging, but also one of the most exciting and potentially lucrative. Jumping onto a live story requires the team to keep a keen eye on the developing news agenda, spotting an opportunity for a client and then crafting a relevant response.

Our most recent news hijack is also one of our most successful to date and was on behalf of long time client, Ecclesiastical Insurance.

To provide a brief background, 70% of weddings are uninsured and when you consider that the average wedding costs £20,000, this is a huge financial investment not to cover.  Our client Ecclesiastical’s cover is famous for it’s ‘mix and match’ policy, that enables couples to personalise their insurance depending on the elements they are investing in.  Most wedding insurance covers a standard set of suppliers or circumstances so we’re always looking for opportunities to educate the target audience on Ecclesiastical’s offering. So when as a part of our daily scan of the news, we spotted wedding site confetti.co.uk possibly going into administration (22nd August), we jumped into action.

After a quick call to the client (who as a marketing veteran had similar ideas!), we agreed a plan of action.  To speed up approvals, the client’s internal PR team drafted a release for the offline media, which we were allowed to edit and tweak to work for our online contacts and include key anchor text (one of our targets for Ecclesiastical is to improve rankings for the key non-brand search term, ‘wedding insurance’).

As the release was being approved, we drew up a media list of key national and insurance media.

Selling in of the story began on 23rd of August, the day Confetti.co.uk actually went into administration and after our initial sell-in to our key media, we ‘followed the sun’ on the sell-in and handed the release over to the international news wires so it could be distributed to insurance and financial media across the world.

Although we were confident that we’d get some pick up, the response over the next two days was phenomenal. By the end of the week, we had secured 125 links from separate domains for the story – 98% of which featured our key non-brand anchor text, ‘wedding insurance’.  A fantastic result within an incredibly short space of time.

Even more exciting was the calibre of sites that picked up the story.  Yahoo! Finance, Marketwatch.com and the Fox news channel sites all ran our release, amongst many others.

Within the space of five days we had spotted a story, worked with a client’s online and offline marketing team to maximise the opportunity and secured 125 editorial links for key anchor text.  All in all, an exhausting, but exciting week for the Leapfrogg social media and content team, and more importantly a great result for the client.

Learn from the Froggers - News hijacking do’s and don’ts:

So how can you replicate this success? Well, here are a few pointers for both agencies and clients to consider in making this work:

Do read and watch the news…like a hawk!:

Opportunities can pop up at any time, but certain types of brands will always find something to jump on at certain times of the year.  For example, retail brands should always be looking to comment around traditional sales times or seasonal peaks. Travel brands should keep an eye out in the run up to summer – airline strikes give you good opportunities to be the consumer champion, for example.

Do agree a plan of action or process well in advance:

Stories will always need to be turned around quickly – often same day - before the news agenda changes again, so prepare as much templated information and discuss the agency / client processes well before any opportunity arises.  Who would draft the release? Who would approve it?  If key contacts are on holiday, who makes the decisions? And if the media need quotes, images or case studies urgently, who is the go-to to source the collateral you don’t already have to hand?

Understand that the media is a fickle mistress!:

Sometimes today’s news can most definitely be tomorrow’s chip paper – understand that and appreciate that if you don’t give the media what they want and when they want it, you’ll lose the opportunity.  Conversely (and perversely!) some stories can run and run.  It’s difficult for the news editors themselves to predict what’s going to happen next, so appreciate that your agency will not be able to anticipate the twists and turns of a story.  In this way, trust your team to sell in when they think it’s right and to be real consultants to your client and advise you when it’s time to give up.

Enjoy it!

News hijacking is fast and furious, but when it works like it has done for us this occasion, it is one of the most rewarding tools that we keep on ice in our little link development pond here at Leapfrogg.

If you have any similar experiences, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Paco Underhill, the author of “Why we buy” is a master in the “Science of Shopping.” I have recently been reading his book and considering how many of his ‘bricks and mortar’ theories can be applied to the online store.

Last night I was revisiting the section on ‘decompression zones’ within a store and how to use them effectively. If you’re wondering, the decompression zone in a store is the area just inside the entrance. It is the area that is used to welcome and acclimatise customers and drive them to the right part of the store. It is key to maximising sales from each customer.

Paco says that as customers enter this part of the store they are:

“busily making adjustments-simultaneously they’re slowing their pace, adjusting their eyes to the change in light and scale, and craning their necks to begin taking in all there is to see. Meanwhile, their ears and noses and nerve endings are sorting out the rest of the stimuli-analysing the sounds and smells, judging whether the store is warm or cold. There’s a lot going on, in other words, and I can pretty much promise you this: These people are not truly in the store yet.”

What Paco is saying is that it takes a while for customers to adjust to being in the store. Therefore to bombard them with merchandise, messaging or staff too quickly will be a waste of effort, or in some cases a big turn off.

In the online world, it is only the sense of sight that has to adjust to entering a website, but often there is still a sensory overload that needs to be processed by the brain in exactly the same way. Therefore, should there be an online decompression zone to allow site visitors to acclimatise before being bombarded with merchandise or messaging?

Is the home page your key selling area, or should you save your core messaging for inner pages and let the home page act as a decompression zone to then drive people to the right areas of the online store to make their purchase?

Studies have shown that in the bricks and mortar world those companies that have got the decompression zone wrong have found sales massively effected. Companies have placed sales literature in that zone only to have it ignored. Companies who have had staff greet customers straight away actually ended up alienating them. This is similar to having a pop up on your home page. How do you think interrupting visitors before they have had a chance to acclimatise to your online store will affect conversion rates?

Applying decompression zones online

Paco makes suggestions of what you can do with the decompression zone within a store that I believe could be applied online.

“You can greet customers - not necessarily to steer them anywhere but to say hello, remind them where they are, start the seduction”

This recommendation can absolutely be applied online. It is fundamental that when people enter your site that you greet them or welcome them, make them feel wanted and also let them know what they can do in the store.

“You can offer a basket or a map or coupon.”

OK, so the basket may not be so useful online but having a coupon/offer on the home page could increase the basket size by encouraging the visitor to buy something else in addition to the product they came in for. Offering a map to the store is of course crucial online, whether that is just a prominent link to a site map or more importantly having well laid out navigational links to make it really easy to find products. A well constructed site will have both.

Visual merchandising is understandably a fundamental part of the decompression zone:

“Right inside the door of an H&M, Gap or Wal-Mart, there’s what’s known as a “power display” a huge horizontal bank of sweaters, or jeans or cans of Coke, that acts as a barrier to slow shoppers down, kind of like a speed bump. It also functions as a huge billboard. It doesn’t say “Shop me.” It says “Just consider the idea.” Is serves as a suggestion, plan and simple, and it also gets you in the mood for the rest of the store. You can catch up with the product later, at another time, typically in another section of the floor. Remember that more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn’t on our list. And no, this isn’t the same as an impulse purchase. It’s triggered by something proposing the question “Don’t you need this? If not now then maybe in the near future?”

This is how visual merchandising should work on your site as well. If you view your home page as a decompression zone then consider the way you want to merchandise within that section. You want to allow visitors to acclimatise to the site but also make subtle suggestions of what they may like to buy, in addition to what they actually came for. Don’t bombard them with products, just give subtle suggestions, whilst clearly directing visitors to the relevant part of the store they require.

An extension of this in an online store is ‘dynamic merchandising’. Average order value is proven to increase with the visual suggestions of products that “complement” or products that “other people bought”. This would be too much to do on the home page/decompression zone but a great sales tool as visitors move through the site into categories and product specific pages.

How do some of the major retailers stand up?

So let’s look at some of the major retailers and whether they have applied my ideas around the decompression zone online:

John Lewis

There is definitely an air of the decompression zone on the John Lewis site. When you enter you are not overpowered with sales messaging or a multitude of products. There is a suggestion of specific products that you may have not been intending to buy but they do not form a barrier in moving to the part of the site you are looking for. Once you are used to the site there is sales messaging towards the bottom (in the red box) but its positioning allows you to acclimatise to the site first.

One thing missing is a welcome message to help you feel comfortable and at ease.

Marks and Spencer

The M & S site certainly does not allow you to decompress before hitting you with sales messaging, although it does not bombard you with a myriad of products straight away.

The sales messaging hits you straight away but the links within the image to product sections prevents the image from being a barrier to moving to the relevant parts of the store.

The offers appear very high on the page, akin to being placed right inside the door of a physical store. Perhaps as a result of this they may be missed by a number of visitors. Perhaps M & S are missing a trick here with no subtle product placement. It would be interesting to revisit once the the sale is over.

Gap

Gap have been sighted as using the “Power Display” in the decompression zone in store as a billboard for suggested products and to slow down movement through the store.

This type of activity is also present online with the “Back to School” power display on the home page. You may not have entered intending to buy school uniform items but the thought is now present in your mind that you need to get that sorted over the summer break, perhaps even right now!

The sales messaging is on the right hand side giving you a little acclimatisation time before your eye hits it.

The pop up hits immediately which does act as a barrier to moving through the site. It is important to gather email addresses for marketing purposes but hitting people with it immediately may be off putting and disruptive to the passage through the site.

I Want One Of Those

I Want One Of Those is a pure online retailer and has a very different home page layout. The page is packed with products and hotspots bombarding the visitor as soon as they hit the online store. There is little chance to acclimatise to the site. I wonder how this affects the online experience. How many of these messages are being missed as people head through looking for a particular product and perhaps ignoring the promotional banners present on the homepage.

There does not seem to be any strong welcome to the site before the visitor is hit with merchandise.

Not On The High Street

Not On The High Street is another pure online retailer and again the home page is very product focused hitting the visitor with a range of products as soon as they enter the store. Sales messaging is displayed at points on the page that are viewed slightly later however I wonder how much acclimatisation is made before the visitor feels overwhelmed. Does this lack of decompression zone affect the store experience and if so in what way? They may sell more of the promoted products but by putting them in the way of the customer are they preventing them from also purchasing the products they entered the store for in the first place?

Summary

I am not drawing any firm conclusions from this very brief study but I do think it is interesting that those retailers that have a large offline store presence do seem to be setting up their home pages in more of a offline-decompression-zone-style than those pure online retailers that will not be used to using this tactic in physical stores.

Is a decompression zone even required with an online experience? I would argue yes, there is a definite need to allow visitors to acclimatise in some form before hitting them with sales messaging and merchandise. The home page should never be a barrier to finding products but more an entrance zone that will welcome you to the store, help you move through the site, suggest additional purchases and provide incentives, such as vouchers, all aimed at improving the shopping experience.

Should the idea of the decompression zone be applied to every page? Or is it unnecessary when people are entering specific product pages having already searched for the product?

I would be interested to hear your thoughts. Is the decompression zone a concept that should be applied with the online retail experience or is the online experience so different that to hit people with merchandise and messaging straight away provides the highest conversion rate or average order values?

At the end of last month, social network LinkedIn rolled out some fairly major changes with regards to how the site’s groups feature works. LinkedIn is a really useful tool for developing your career; whether it’s for networking, sourcing new employees, or quickly finding out the answer to a difficult question. Since the groups feature was introduced last August it has proved an invaluable tool for networking with industry peers and keeping up with the latest news in your sector.

So what have they changed? Well first of all, conversations threads are a lot easier to follow; when group members post links to external pages they appear as they do in the news stream on the home page. This allows you to view important information much faster – essential if you’re trying to find something quickly and easily.

The success of Facebook’s ‘like’ button has inspired LinkedIn to add a similar feature. So users can find the most popular and useful content, everyone has the chance to vote on whether they ‘like’ the information that’s been contributed. This saves time and lets everyone find the most important content without having to search through the irrelevant stuff.

The biggest change LinkedIn has made, and arguably the most exciting, is the profiling of the most influential users in each group. Previously, you needed to scroll through all of the conversations to find out who posted the best content. That has all changed, as LinkedIn now does the leg work for you by rating the top influencers.

Now users can find out who the most influential members are straight away and keep up to date with what they are contributing. The new changes let you choose to receive email updates when individual members post comments or ‘like’ a piece of content.

We are always preaching to clients about how useful LinkedIn groups are for discovering news and insight from industry peers. The changes make it a lot easier to find new content; but more importantly they let you find out who is regularly posting it.

Once you discover who is posting really good content make sure you follow them; find out if they have a blog (most LinkedIn users have links to their blogs or websites on their profile), and find their Twitter details (again these are usually found on the user’s profile page).

Once you are following them start engaging; ask them questions, offer advice and get involved! LinkedIn selects the most influential users based on the amount they post and the number responses their posts get. So start posting interesting and useful links and you too could become a top influencer!

Hi, I’m James one of newest members of the Leapfrogg team. I’m originally from Brighton, although I lived and studied in Bristol for a couple of years, before the lure of sea air and lack of cider drinking farmers was too much for me and returned to the seaside back in 2008.

My role at Leapfrogg is as Digital Marketing Trainee, which I’m really excited about since I have always been interested in social media, digital marketing and frogs…well, maybe not so much the latter.

The last month or two has somehow flown by, as quickly as my notes have mounted, however I’ve learned an awful lot about a lot of things, in particular web optimisation, paid search, copy writing and social media. This has been a really interesting inception to agency life, with the whole team making me feel very welcome and showing me around.

For my first post on the Froggblog I thought I’d write about the Nike Football Facebook campaign and what we can learn from its success.

When Facebook first started to get popular back in 2007, the only real commercial representation on the site was from music promoters and dodgy students offering dissertation ‘writing’ services. As we all know, with the massive increased popularity of the site (Facebook just overtook Yahoo in the US for regular visitors) many brands, particularly those with a youth oriented audience, have flooded to the site to promote themselves. Obviously some have done a better job than others and in my view Nike have done a better job than pretty much everyone else.

Nike Football’s fan page is certainly the best one I’ve seen on Facebook. The page has been spruced up with fancy bits of FBML (Facebook’s version of HTML) and looks nothing like a traditional default fan page.

It is often said that social media is a great way to interact and engage with your consumers – Nike has taken this interaction to a whole new level. The page features a training section which contains videos that users subscribe to. The videos featuring training tips and sessions with some of Nike’s superstars, such as Liverpool FC’s Fernando Torres. They import snazzy graphics and are professionally executed, which you would expect from a global brand.

What makes these videos so successful is the content they feature is genuinely worth something to the user. What makes the videos so effective for Nike is that they are able to cram as much of their branding in as possible and also add some less-than-subtle product placements that they could never get away with on TV or offline.

As well as the training videos, the page contains regular status updates on the football issues of the day; these updates receive hundreds of comments and ‘likes’ from Nike fans all across the world – all of which helps to increase awareness though Facebook’s news stream. Nike have also launched an IPhone App which updates users Facebook accounts about how far through the training schedule they’ve got.

So what can your brand learn from Nike? Obviously not everyone has the resources or budget that Nike does, however, that doesn’t mean you can’t create useful and engaging content and universally spread it (virally) via Facebook.

At the core of the Nike Football’s page success is the simple idea of offering content that is really useful and valuable to the user and allowing the content to spread so quickly. Instead of flashy training videos with millionaire superstar footballers, a cookery company, for example, could offer simple yet effective cooking tips in videos on the Facebook page. If the content is useful enough for the user it will spread and more and more people will find out about your brand.

Another important point to take from the Nike campaign is about scheduling your content. Their training videos are set up for a week-by-week programme; they could have been condensed into one longer video but that means users would have no reason to come back so by creating a schedule the user becomes far more engaged.

I am really looking forward to getting involved with similarly successful Facebook campaigns for many of our clients here at Leapfrogg; especially in the luxury retail market.

If you’ve been searching on Google in the last couple of weeks you may have noticed some changes to the layout of the search results page. Google has launched its new advanced search layout and there are plenty of snazzy things you can do with your search results, some of which were available before but perhaps tucked away and therefore you may not have known about them.

There are plenty of great blog posts (like this one from @dannysullivan) that run you through the different options available and how to use them. However, we thought we would focus on some of the main functions that benefit retailers and how they can use them to improve on their multichannel marketing efforts.

First let’s have a look at the new column on the left where all these lovely new tools sit.

If we conduct a search for “designer handbags” this is the page of results we get.

For a while now Google has incorporated a number of different media types, such as images and video, into their natural search results (this is called Universal Search in Google’s case or blended search elsewhere). Google’s new look search results page now includes a very useful list of search options on the left hand side making it easy to refine your search according to images, blog posts, news, video and so on.

Once you have refined your search,  to view video results only for example, you are presented with a further set of options in the lower part of the left hand column to refine your results still further. In the case of video, you can refine by length, quality and source (amongst others).

We believe this added functionality presents a number of opportunities for multichannel retailers, namely to:

• Increase brand & product visibility to shoppers
• Find influential people to review and talk about products
• Find and engage with customers
• Research hot topics to help shape a social search strategy
• Help measure the impact of your marketing efforts and tweak accordingly

Let’s look at each of these in turn:

Increase brand & product visibility to shoppers

Consumers are becoming far more sophisticated in how they search for products online. The new layout from Google will facilitate this and retailers need to be aware of the areas where they must be prominent by presenting relevant content:

Images
Although image search has been a large part of the Google experience for a while now the more prominent advanced search option opens up opportunities to increase the visibility of your products to engaged searchers.

As you can see, a search for “designer handbags” now brings up the normal page of results but with a whole new bunch of refined searches in the left hand column. You can now refine by size, type of image, and even colour.

By creating great imagery in the first instance and then optimising it accordingly, this is a great opportunity  for retailers to have their products featuring for a wider range of targeted searches. Make sure your product images are named according to the type of image (i.e. photo, drawing, etc) and include other details, such as colour.

e.g. /red-d&g-tote-designer-handbag.jpg

The more well optimised imagery you have on your site, the more exposure your products will get within image search. And as retailers will only be too well aware, when prospects are shopping online, especially for higher ticket items, great imagery can have a significant impact on conversion rates.

Video
Video is a further extension of good imagery and allows a higher level of engagement with customers. Product demonstrations or showing the product in a real life situation, such as catwalk style clips for clothing, can have a dramatic impact on conversion rates. And with a more prominent position on the search results page, and numerous options to refine video results, we should see more searchers viewing more videos on the search engines.

With the rise of YouTube and social media it’s been increasingly important to get involved in creating video content for the past few years. Now that Google has opened up its video results it is even more so.

Again, make sure you are optimising your video properly whether you are putting it on your site or on channels such as YouTube.

Maps The maps results option in the new layout shows Google Local Search results overlaid on a map. Therefore those looking to buy a product in a particular location can find the nearest store stocking that item. This has huge potential for retailers, especially as so few currently appear to have local business listings for their stores, optimised with their key products. Look at the results when we conduct our search for “designer handbags”:

Regardless of product range or number of stores there is huge potential in setting up and optimising Google Local Listings to ensure you are visible to regional shoppers, and importantly those searching on smart phones using mapping applications.

Find influential people to review and talk products

As search marketing and PR have converged, an essential component of a successful digital marketing strategy for retailers is engaging with ‘influencers’. In other words, bloggers, journalists, twitterers and owners of Facebook groups whose opinions, comments and product reviews can have a significant bearing on a retailers sales, brand visibility and reputation, as well as search engine rankings (every review can generate a link to a brands site).

There are two sections of the new advanced search layout that we think can help retailers in their search for those all important influencers.

Blogs
Using this advanced search feature, when searching for product related keywords, will yield a list of bloggers most relevant to those products i.e. those people that appear to be most active in talking about, designer handbags, for example:

This gives the retailer a great starting point to select the bloggers they should be building relationships with. It may be that a retailer sends their latest product as an exclusive for the blogger to review, perhaps offer some useful content or ask if they could have a guest blog slot. By building these relationships it gains the retailer extra visibility, traffic and perhaps even a link or two!

The refined search options include ‘by timeframe’ so bloggers can be approached who have been talking about the retailers type of products in the last few days, making this search option fantastic for identifying those talking about the latest trends and topics (particularly relevant to fashion).

Updates
The ‘updates’ section in the advanced search results shows what’s happening on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. These networks are highly relevant to retailers as many of their prospects and customers will be active in talking about, sharing and reviewing their latest purchases. Like bloggers and journalists, individual customers can also have an influencing affect over their friends, colleagues and peers.

Using the updates results section retailers can look through the list of people mentioning their specific products, or similar products, and what they are saying about them. They can then click through to visit relevant Twitter or Facebook profiles to see how many followers/fans/friends they have to determine their level of influence.

Engaging with prospects and customers across social media channels, in an open and public way, can lead to a positive mention of a particular product which will be seen by all the influencers followers. In addition to this, updates from networks such as Twitter, are increasingly being featured in search results, and in real-time, so regular mentions of a retailers brand or products in these spaces will start to have more and more impact on their search engine visibility.

Engage with customers

There are 2 areas of the new layout that retailers can utilise to engage on a one on one basis with customers:

Updates
This section as we have mentioned previously not only allows a retailer to research influential people who are talking about their products but also allows them to engage directly with them.

This great blog post by Danny Sullivan shows that by searching using terms such as “anyone know + key product” it will show all of the updates from people likely to be asking questions about those products. In turn, the retailer can answer those questions publicly therefore engaging with a customer or prospect, whilst also demonstrating to anyone else who might see that conversation that they are personable and care about the individual customer.

Discussions
In exactly the same way as an update search, the discussions search will show discussions happening in forums across the web related to particular products. This, again, is a great opportunity for retailers to get involved where their target audience is hanging out and provide the answers to their questions in a completely transparent manner. Be informative but friendly and the added brand visibility, loyalty and back links could have a dramatic affect on sales.

In the example below we have used the “anyone know” search again.

Again, there are a number of refined searches that can be used to filter by time and length of discussion, for example. Retailers should utilise these to make sure the discussions they get involved with are timely and on topic.

Research hot topics for a social search strategy

Central to the success of a digital marketing strategy for retailers is creating great content, in a wide variety of formats.

Creating useful content aimed at prospects and customers increases time spent on site, conversion rates, brand visibility, loyalty and search engine visibility. But how do retailers decide the type and format of content that will be most useful to their audience?

They use Google advanced search features, such as News and Updates of course!

News
Retailers will know the key products they want to create content around (the ones that yield the most sales and/or best margins). Using relevant search terms within the News section of Google search gives great insight into what is being written around those products at the moment and by who, as well as further insight into changes in the retailers industry that might affect core customers.

Retailers should look at what is being said within the online publications that their target market would read. If there is talk about “designer handbags being stolen” then write a guide to keeping expensive accessories safe or insuring against theft. If there is a key celebrity endorsing a certain handbag then write a blog post about how a particular range would suit the outfits they wear.

Again the search can be refined by date so retailers know they are writing about hot topics.

Updates
Researching using updates can give great insight and ideas to help shape a content strategy.

A key piece of information is the time line at the top of the page which shows peaks and troughs in mentions of a certain product. Retailers can therefore plan to release fresh content around a certain product at the time where activity online is at it’s highest. Strike while the iron is hot!

See the impact of marketing efforts and tweak accordingly
The Update tool is also extremely useful to measure the impact that a marketing campaign is having on brand mentions and conversation online.

The example below shows the conversation around the Burberry “Art of the Trench” campaign. It combines Facebook and Twitter updates and shows what people think of the campaign and the way they are engaging. Burberry can use this data to tweak the campaign to address any issues people have with it and focus the content around the campaign to fit with the language their target audience are using to talk about it.

As the updates are in real time, using these search filters can give an instant picture of online sentiment surrounding a campaign as it is launched to allow tweaking for better engagement and results.

Retailers can find the people who are evangelising about the campaign, engage with them and get the message spread further, deal with any confusion others may have about how to get involved and tweak the optimisation of content according to the language people are using online.

This type of response tracking works equally well with other types of marketing material likely to form part of a multichannel marketing strategy. Just sent out a catalogue? Then check what people are saying online. Are they happy to have received it, what do they think of the layout and so on?

Or perhaps track people’s immediate response to a new advertising campaign, such as this search for ‘M and S’.

Summary

We have only really touched the surface here on the opportunities offered to retailers with the new layout from Google. We have not even mentioned Google Shopping Search!

As mentioned before many of these options for search have been around for a while but many people using Google will not have been utilising them. Now they are right there in front of the customers eye retailers should be working hard to ensure their digital marketing efforts tie in with them.

The additional research tools offered are absolutely free! Any retailer who can’t afford sophisticated buzz monitoring and social media research tools should view Google’s added functionality as a viable alternative.