Author Archives: Greg Lee

Sticking to our New Year resolution…a summary of great client result in Q1

Posted on by Greg Lee

Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!  We’ve got to April already (how did that happen, exactly?!) and, in keeping with our New Year’s resolution for 2012, we thought we’d have a look back over the first quarter of the year, reflect on the impact of the work we have executed for some of our clients and, importantly, shout about it!  So below I’ve pulled out some edited highlights from three key clients operating in the premium / luxury space; Feather & Black, Bastyan and Cox & Kings.

Looking first at Feather & Black, the luxury bed and bedroom furniture specialist, we helped them attract almost 40% more natural traffic year-on-year.  Their paid search campaign continues to deliver greater revenue for less cost, and is evolving to support their multi-channel strategy to generate greater footfall in their UK showrooms.

Feather & Black continue to grab the headlines; this year they have also been shortlisted for the Best Multichannel Retailer award at the 2012 Paypal awards. We are expanding both natural and paid activity from April, working ever more closely with their in-house team to keep momentum going on all fronts and build on the success of last year…when we helped Feather & Black grow online sales by 46%.

Staying within the retail sector with Bastyan (part of Aurora Fashions), we significantly exceeded revenue targets and delivered a return on investment (ROI) of over 14:1 across paid search.  In parallel, we are working with them to refine their core site, and from May will be developing their content strategy and channel prioritisation for their marketing.

Our work with luxury travel specialist, Cox & Kings, in Q1 has really focused on improving conversion rates; these have increased across both natural search (four times greater than the set benchmark) and paid search (exceeding benchmarks by an average of 30% across all campaigns).

The call tracking solution we put in place (that integrates with our analytics and attribution technology) shows exactly how the digital activity is generating phone calls, enquiries and sales. This intelligence, where we can track the customer journey during a long and complex buying process, allows us to optimise channels accordingly, leading to greater efficiency and ROI.

Anecdotally, looking at all of our clients as a whole, we would also observe the following from Q1;

  •  Multi-channel activity, both in thought and execution, is growing in importance across ALL sectors
  •  There is confidence to invest in digital where the results are clear (and positive!)
  •  While the digital picture may look rosy, clients are still cautious overall about what the future looks like

Clients still want ‘brand prominence’, and happy consequence of remarketing activity, for example, is that it does just that – provides a sense of brand ‘scale’ to those people who have already engaged with the brand, over and above generating extra sales

At the end of Q2, I’ll provide a similar overview looking back at the first half of 2012, as well as some thoughts on how the second half of the year is shaping up.

Making sense of Facebook’s latest updates

Posted on by Greg Lee

Much has already been spoken about in the blogosphere about Facebook’s F8 conference last week, and the changes introduced, not least the Timeline feature.

We believe it is still far too early to draw definitive conclusions for what this means specifically for retail brands within Facebook, certainly in terms of how they organise and share their content and encourage people to do this on their behalf.

Why?  Well, to start with, an article on 16th Sept (before F8) by Paul Fabretti on Social Media Today suggests that while Facebook has generated huge followings (although he observes that in the top 20 ‘most followed’ within Facebook there are zero brands), engagement with these groups by ‘core fans’ is tiny.  The % of ‘core fans’ engaging with the top 20 is comparable to the % CTR one might expect from banner advertising…hardly a glowing endorsement of engagement.  Logic suggests therefore that the solution to poor engagement is ‘better’ content. This isn’t new news to anyone, and harder to deliver it seems.  Especially content that people want to share, to pass on.

Will the updates revealed at F8 make the delivery of ‘better’ content easier or more difficult, then?

Anecdotally at Leapfrogg International HQ(!), opinion is divided.  Some love the new layout and the freshness of Timeline, while others are concerned that if Facebook is starting to decide what constitutes a ‘top story’, rather than having posts fed through chronologically, it raises a question mark over posts that a user might previously have seen that now get missed.

Is there an element of information overload now – how many types of posts can anyone really look at, in different places on one page?  For brands, this seems a risk as well as an opportunity.

Ciaran Norris raises some interesting concerns in his article on Search Engine Land , as does Travis Pitman in Tnooz.  The launch of Gestures, offering the facility for people to share every song they listen to, every book they read or place they go to more easily than ever, could invite ‘stream fatigue’.  If Facebook’s new content structure means that brands are fighting for page real estate in the ticker section of the page with an increasing volume of information from friends, standing out from that ticker stream is going to be more and more difficult.  The thought that the ticker feed is simply ‘the current News Feed on steroids’ is valid.

One solution for brands may be to invest in sponsored areas of the pages; it cannot be a coincidence that within the refreshed content structure, the areas where Facebook generate revenue from brands remain larger, colourful and more impactful than the ticker feed.

At the same time, it seems more important than ever that brands and businesses ensure they have Facebook’s presence embedded within their own sites, to ensure it is as easy as possible for people visiting their sites can broadcast information back to Facebook as easily as possible.

In short, for brands and Facebook, it’s not ‘why?’, but ‘how?’  Our reason for this is simple; not only are more people (800m+ globally) registered, but recent data shows they spend more time there than on any other social media property;

 


Image source: Citi Investment Research and Analysis

The value of a positive review gathers pace

Posted on by Greg Lee

The importance of reviews within the online consideration and buying process has grown in importance in recent times.

A recent industry report suggests this importance is going to keep on growing – and quickly.

The next step is for customers to be asked for their feedback not just on the product(s) they bought, but also the service they received while buying.

This can cover customer service, delivery and whether they’d recommend the retailer from whom they had just made a purchase.  The report suggests just under 60% of consumers will search for online reviews before buying from a retailer they don’t know.  The report also suggests people who read service reviews are more likely to buy.

This approach will help retailers switch customer focus from trying to compete on price to being able to differentiate themselves on customer service.

Those retailers who can grasp this quickest will be best placed to succeed.

Facebook’s evolution gets even more personal

Posted on by Greg Lee

It seems difficult to believe that it’s only just over a year since Facebook released the ‘Like’ button, yet they claim that 10,000 sites use this plug-in daily.  Yet following hard on the heels of the ‘Like’ button now is the ‘Send’ button, which will allow individuals to be much more specific about who they want to share content they like with, rather than simply posting a message onto their own Facebook page for all of their followers to see.  A logical evolution, and one that lends even more weight to the power of advocacy, or positive user experience, of rich and engaging content and for brands to really think about how they can harness the untapped potential of their audience for mutual benefit.

And, of course, this reinforces Facebook’s position as THE dominant player in brand to consumer social media marketing.

More on how Facebook has evolved their widgets in less than 3 short years from Techcrunch.

More than the sum of their parts; user-generated content and SEO

Posted on by Greg Lee

At Leapfrogg, we’ve been really excited by the possibilities opened up by Bazaarvoice’s new Smart SEO technology, and are looking forward to learning more about it.

To us, the ability to leverage the power of user-generated content (UGC) to the tangible benefit of brands – by using this content to underpin their natural search visibility – marks a real step-change for marketers.

It means brands who curate their UGC actively and effectively will immediately be at a competitive advantage for page rankings.  Too frequently, brand blogs and forums have become something of a wasteland of consumer engagement.  They tend to suffer from a lack of content from the host brand, a lack of active responses to customer posts, or both.  Therefore brands who engage with their audience will benefit twice; by providing (hopefully) a better / more satisfactory experience for those with whom they are engaging, as well as making their brand more visible within the search engine results page (SERP). Turn the weakness into a strength, and the benefits should be seen and felt pretty quickly.

We’re keen to understand how this technology works, and how it can be applied not just on brand sites and content but also within social media.  In theory, we believe this approach can add real differentiation and advantage for our clients.  We hope the reality will bear this out.  More news when we have it!