Author Archives: Lucy Freeborn

The blurring lines between online and offline PR

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

I’ve been thinking about the benefits of integrated PR and the common questions raised by clients. A range of queries such as ‘how can I leverage my offline PR activities?’ and ‘what is integrated PR?’ led me to believe that such questions deserve a blog post so marketers could also benefit from this insight. After all, if clients are questioning PR’s purpose, how many more are there? In most cases brands perceive marketing communication as separate online and offline activities, without giving much thought on how this perception can deeply affect its marketing activities. With this in mind, I wanted to raise the importance of integrating PR, so great ideas are pushed to the right consumers at the right time without overloading the balance sheet.

No longer should traditional PR be seen as a separate discipline from online PR. Marketers must learn to measure and integrate traditional and non-traditional approaches as complimentary disciplines, to fully enhance their marketing communications through consistent brand messaging. Although the logic may seem obvious, this is overlooked across a variety of industries. An integrated approach to your PR activity will leverage your SEO impact on the search engine results page (SERPs) and sustain a strong brand message to your consumers both online and offline. It will facilitate a 360 degree view of your brand through carefully executed content that aligns all media messaging and brand propositions.

Only a marketing agency that has a thorough understanding of your online activity and customer behaviour will understand what is actually driving your consumers. Delivering integrated PR will take into account an analysis of the client’s financial targets, business goals and online activity trends of the customer journey. Using this information means your offline marketing messages will have a better impact as your messaging will be unified as one voice, maintaining its tone and delivery on all touch points.

It’s important to remember integrated PR should not just drive traffic but increase brand awareness that is consistent across all channels. The ROI in combining online and offline PR also means you have a stronger insight into measuring your campaign’s effectiveness and what is actually driving website visits or footfall. In addition, one agency overseeing your integrated PR means you can streamline online and offline activities, so you are only one phone call away from all your marketing communication needs.

To be cost effective and efficient brands must embrace integrated PR and avoid separating it into two disciplines. Take for example leading luxury brand Burberry who reportedly invest 60% of their marketing budget in digital channels1 . Their innovative approaches, such as ‘click to buy’ Burberry films and ‘runway to reality’ VIP app are good examples of how to combine activity.

Interestingly, Burberry announced an 8% rise in revenue – £883 million – for the first six months of 2012, followed by a 6% increase for the second half2 . Demonstrating leapfrogging competitors with innovative, integrated campaigns cuts through existing marketing ‘noise’ in the competitor landscape. So, if brands want to reap such rewards they must learn to blur the lines between online and offline PR before it’s too late.

1 & 2 http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/news/burberry-celebrates-london-this-christmas/4004678.article

A great example of a premium shopping experience

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

With the imminent arrival of our first baby, myself and my husband have been finally getting round to decorating the house we moved into more than a year ago.  Without a car, him commuting up to London every day and me getting bigger and bigger, we have been reliant on online suppliers and home delivery services to help us source what we need, which has been a fascinating exercise for me in how different sectors approach their online customer service, delivery and post purchase engagement.

At Leapfrogg, we believe that securing sales isn’t just about having a great product and a good website; it is concerned with understanding your prospects and customers at every stage of their buying journey from reach through to advocacy.

There are lots of different elements of the digital marketing mix that an online brand can do to tap into their customers as they move through these different stages of this buying cycle, which I will highlight with a recent personal experience.

One of the most impressive online services I used to help get the house decorated is Wallpaper Direct.  Not immediately a site that screams ‘premium retail’ at you, but everything about the online service they offer is slick, easy and jammed packed with added value.

Acquisition & conversion:

The first gold star I mentally awarded to them was making it easy for me to find what I was looking for.  For those uninitiated, unless you’ve seen a design you really like, looking for wallpaper can be a nightmare.  Wallpaper Direct enables you to search in a variety of ways: colour, brand, type of design and features of the wallpaper.  While searching, you can save ones you like in a wish-list.  At the end of a search, you can very easily order A4 sized samples to be sent to you.  Unlike many other sites, there is no limit on the number of samples you order.  You can only get a limited number for free each time, but you can order as many as you like in one go.

They further impressed me when it came to ordering the correct number of rolls.  I can’t lie to you, reader, I can plumb in a toilet and put up shelves, but the patience you need to match up patterns to wallpaper is beyond my capabilities – so I’ve never even tried it.  Having the tool within the site to input the size of your walls / area to be wallpapered is really useful and enables you to order the right number of rolls first time.  Should you require “talking down” from any wallpaper induced hysteria, they have excellent telephone support to double check you’re making the right purchases and to handle any queries or returns.

The delivery service was also excellent.  From ordering, the wallpaper arrived quickly and my expectations were managed beautifully by both emails and texts detailing the date and time of delivery and very easy steps to follow should I want to change delivery options.


I was also thrilled with how the wallpaper arrived.  It was boxed up with a handle on top of the package to enable me to carry it home easily.  One of the brands of wallpaper I ordered was also gift wrapped with stickers and tissue paper!

Wallpaper Direct may not have the brand presence of a luxury interiors brand, but if one of the hallmarks of a premium brand is an ability to understand a customer’s pain points and offer quality service and user experience, then for me, they score very highly indeed.  They made what could have been a real chore, a pleasure and I would have no hesitation in using their services again and indeed recommending them to others.

Advocacy:

If making the actual process of searching for and ordering wallpaper fun and easy wasn’t enough to convert new users to a sale, there is a lot of added value throughout the site all designed to win your trust and encourage you to buy.  The news and reviews section, although not third party generated, is clearly visible from the home page:

Reach:

The brand also generates it own content to help inspire users – some thing Leapfrogg believes vital to help brand build with new customers in their ‘reach and research’ phase of the buying cycle.  Producing a stand-alone and brand neutral online magazine to help customers make decisions about the products and services you sell is a great way of exposing your expertise in a field and inspire purchase.

All in all, a great service that has ultimately secured the best accolade you can from a happy customer – advocacy!

The importance of customer insight to search strategy

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

How well do you think you know your target audiences?  Do you know why they love your brand?  Do you know what makes them loyal to you?  Do you know what they do in their spare time?  Which of your competitors they also shop with and why?  How often they hang out online, what social networks and media outlets they read?  How much they are prepared to spend in one single transaction and what they think about your delivery service?

At Leapfrogg, we believe that no marketing campaign can be truly effective unless you have a genuine understanding of the audiences you are targeting.  This is even more important in digital marketing where you have opportunities to influence your publics ‘in the moment’ via natural, paid search and social channels.

Customer insight is at the heart of all of our campaigns as reflected in the graphic below:

Whether it be it from a client’s ongoing work with a data research partner, our own market research projects for clients into their existing and target audiences, our ‘secret shopper’ campaigns, or regular ‘temperature checking’ of your audiences via social channels, you can only build a compelling digital marketing strategy if you understand what your target audience cares about, what compels them and what they want from a brand, product or service.

Once you start developing an understanding of your customer, you can then build a compelling and strategic content plan that cascades through all your digital marketing channels, including search, on-page website content, PR activity and social media.  The content workshops we run are always informed and led by insight and understanding of our clients customer personas, which means that all creatives or campaign ideas brainstormed during these sessions are already targeted at specific audiences.

We’ve often found that learnings from digitally orientated research have also helped shape off-line spend.  We recently undertook some research work into the digital reading habits of a client’s trade audience.  Being in a position to ask a target audience what journals and newsletters that they actually read and why, has informed much sharper offline and third party partner above the line plans.

Leapfrogg also conducts its own insight projects once a quarter, the most recent of which explored the habits and behaviours of consumers purchasing premium products and services.

One of the most surprising pieces of insight that dropped out of our own recent research was the average income bracket of the ‘premium shopper’: £23,000 per annum.  When we talked this through with our clients, it significantly broadened their own image of who their target audience was.  Supported with detail around how these people shop and what online functionality compels them to buy, it is encouraging us to test search terms and try social and paid search tactics that may add huge value to digital campaigns.

Customer Insight isn’t just a one off project; you can’t soak up everything you need to know about your target audiences in a single hit. As your brand evolves, as does your understanding, engagement level and conversations with your existing and developing audience and that’s one of the most exciting things about it – your customer can often move as quickly as the digital landscape in which you are operating.

The ultimate objective from understanding your target audience should be to develop such a good relationship with them that they become not just repeat customers, but advocates of your brand.  If spending time and a relatively small part of your marketing budget on customer insight in the beginning enables you to communicate more effectively and amplify your brand through an engaged and positive public, surely it’s an investment well spent.

Survey results: Inside the mind of your premium retail customer

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

Last week, I presented Leapfrogg’s first piece of customer insight research of 2012 at SheerB2B, the conference specifically for retailers in the premium and luxury sector.

We will be producing a piece of insight into the premium retail industry each quarter this year and our first research piece focused on exploring the habits and behaviours of consumers purchasing premium products and services.

As the UK economy slides back into recession, the news agenda is packed full of doom and gloom about consumer spending on the high street and we were interested in finding out what the reality is for premium brands who sell online.

Significantly, 61% of premium UK shoppers say they will not reduce their online spending habits in 2012.  Great news for premium and luxury brands reading the Government’s gloomy economic report from Q1.  Indeed, 30% of our survey respondents claimed they are actually planning on spending more in 2012 than they did in 2011, due to increasing levels of good service and confidence purchasing online.

We also uncovered some surprising details about who the ‘premium retail customer’ actually is.  The average household salary of our premium shopper respondents was just £23K per annum – really exploding the myth of who the premium retailer customer is and inspiring us to dig deeper into this in our next quarter’s research.

We also looked at how the premium retail shopper uses the internet during their buying journey. More than a third of consumers use the web to compare and check prices. For 20% of respondents, online search is used for product inspiration and research. Surprisingly, only 14% use online to search for offers or vouchers, reinforcing what we’ve believed for a while, that retailers need to focus on the longer term investment in providing genuinely quality products, competitive pricing, useful information and great service over quick-win approaches such as voucher codes.  There’s no doubt that voucher code sites and smart tactical pricing to help shift stock and introduce new customers to your products plays a part in a rounded multichannel approach. However, maintaining a ‘bigger picture’ focus and protecting your brand equity is key.

Naturally, 39% of respondents said that lower prices would encourage them to spend more with a premium brand in 2012, but excitingly for our clients currently looking at developing better relationships with their customers, 21% of our respondents claimed that the proven quality of a product and great service is enough to encourage increased spend this year.

We’ve put together this infographic to bring to life the stats that we believe to be the most noteworthy from the research, but the full report, complete with advice on what to do next and actionable insights for brands, is available to download at absolutely no cost!

Click here to read and download the Leapfrogg Premium Shopper survey

A guide to ‘hotspotting’ video content

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

Hotspotting allows viewers to engage directly with your video content by introducing clickable areas (hotspots) that link through to further product information or even directly to a shopping basket to purchase the item. Hotspotting delivers a two-tier benefit. Firstly, it creates a richer experience for viewers – if they see something they like in a video, one click of the mouse delivers more detailed product information, which they might otherwise have spent hours trying to track down. Secondly, the video itself, if well produced, optimised and marketed supports natural search objectives. The content has the potential to feature in ‘blended’ search results and garner all-important links.

We recently hotspotted the launch video for a new luxury fragrance from Penhaligon’s called Juniper Sling. We linked two hotspotted product sections to the Juniper Sling e-commerce page on the Penhaligon’s website to ensure any coverage of the video would provide a purchase opportunity. Other uses for which hotspotting works well are catwalk show videos, lifestyle footage with product placement or bespoke hotspotted campaign videos like Cartier’s Winter Tale for Christmas last year.

The hotspotting process

In hotspotting video content, we use a piece of software called LinkTo provided by Markettiers4DC. You have two upload options:  using a mov video file which is hosted by the LinkTo domain (costs apply) or you can use an existing Youtube link to the video from a brand’s YouTube channel (this is a cheaper option). However, unless a brand has a paid for ‘brand channel’ on YouTube, unfortunately the final hotspotted content will not appear on the YouTube channel itself.

Your video can be any duration, so long as the file size does not exceed 500MB. Once you have uploaded your video, you can also upload a preview image which will appear at the start of the video before your viewer presses play.

To create the hotspots, play your video and pause it when you want to add a hotspot. The hotspot will appear on your video with white corner markers and an associated hotspot timeline will appear below the video timeline.  You now resize your hotspot to cover the area you want to link and drag your hotspot timeline to where the feature (a product, for example) moves off screen. To test your hotspot is appearing and tracking correctly at any time, just play the video on this page.

You can now create as many hotspots with different associated interactive landing pages as you like. You can associate the hotspot with an interactive landing page with further product information or link directly to an e-commerce page.

Finally, you can choose from a range of skins for your video player and preview the final hotspotted video. Once payment is authorised, you will be supplied with embed codes for your final video.

How to work with hotspotted videos

Hotspotted videos are best used for online media press kits and across a brand’s own website and marketing channels. For Penhaligon’s, we sold in the video, fragrance samples and backstory of the perfume creation to key lifestyle, cocktail and fashion blogs. The Penhaligon’s website and Facebook pages used the LinkTo generated video code for the hotspotted video.

Results

Our objective for this activity was online PR coverage and over a two week period we secured twelve mentions on our targeted blogs with an audience reach of 750,989. We achieved additional mentions in social networks reaching an additional 50,489 followers – including a Tweet by Sunday Times Style.

Hotspotting works well for securing creative coverage and links but it’s still a relatively new content tactic and needs to be further tested for concrete e-commerce effectiveness.

See our hotspotted Penhaligon’s Juniper Sling launch video below:

Should you open a Google+ page to aid search engine rankings?

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

Travelmole reported recently that Google is urging travel firms to set up Google+ pages to aid their search engine rankings. According to Marketing Land this is all part of Google’s “Search Plus Your World” update (live in US, not UK yet).

Numerous articles have been written on the introduction of Google+ and “Search Plus Your World” so we’ll keep things brief in terms of what it means from a user-perspective. In short, there’s a new “Personal Results” view that appears in Google searches, personalising the listings you see based on both your own behaviour and social connections. Search results combine personal signals (your search and web history) along with social signals (who you are, who you know and what you and your friends like and share). If you have a Google+ account, it will look through anything that’s been privately shared with you, to see if it matches what you’re looking for. Those results then get mixed in with web-wide matches.

To see these personalised results you have to be logged into your Google account (i.e. Analytics, Gmail or Google+) otherwise it will not affect the results you see as you are searching “anonymously” (however you will still get listings down the right hand side about “People and Pages on Google+” related to your search query). It is worth noting that all search results are personalised to a degree based on your behaviour and have been for a number of years. The launch of first Google+ and now “Search Plus Your World” are extensions of this with Google seeking to make search results even more relevant based on your social connections. You can see a full, up-to-date guide to every aspect and angle of Google+ and how it impacts search on AJ Kohn’s blog.

In terms of other social networks, “Search Plus Your World” doesn’t include content from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or any social network or place where content might be shared. As such, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”, according to Search Engine Land. So ultimately, this is Google favouring its own Google+ social networking service. However, having a Google+ page does not, at the moment, directly affect your main website ranking. However, in time, if the network really takes off, a lack of a branded Google+ page and activity across the network will undoubtedly have a negative impact on how Google perceives your business.

Things to consider before you create a Google+ account

So should you be jumping on the latest social media bandwagon and setting up a Google+ profile? An important thing to consider is the demographic of the platform compared to the audience you may be aspiring to attract. According to a report by Website-Monitoring.com, two thirds of Google+ users are men, 42% are single and the most popular occupation listed is ‘student’. This goes against the popular notion that women are far more prolific users of social networks. So if your primary audience is women, you might be better building a strategy around a different social network…for now anyway.

As with any social media activity we would also recommend building a strategy around content before diving in. There is no point opening a Google+ page, or any other social media channel for that matter, unless it is supported by genuinely useful and engaging content.

For the moment, as an agency we’re not jumping on the Google+ bandwagon until we have carried out internal testing and have more visibility of the platform. We are advising our clients to carefully consider their objectives before they invest significant time and resource. All too often agencies push their clients to set up social media accounts ‘just because they should’ without considering the audience, content strategy to support social media activity and the time and resource to manage it.

It’s early days so it will certainly be interesting to see how this plays out. Bear in mind, this wouldn’t be the first time Google have attempted to enter the social media space…with pretty disastrous results. Remember Google Buzz anyone?

Digital and retail marketing trends: 2012 is the year of…

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

So here we are…the start of another year.  Having settled back in to the swing of things after a much needed festive break, we’ve looked back on the events of 2011 to make our (slightly belated!) predictions for the key digital marketing and retail trends of 2012.

So here goes…

 

Mobile integration into multichannel retail:
While marketers have been proclaiming it to be the “year of mobile” for as long as I can remember, 2011 was perhaps the year when this was actually realised.

We saw a significant increase in the numbers of retailers integrating mobile tactics into their multichannel campaigns in 2011.  Most recently we saw John Lewis trialling QR codes in Waitrose window displays across various UK locations (Brighton included) to promote their click and collect service.

2012 will see more effective mobile integration into online and offline marketing campaigns as brands really start joining the digital dots, breaking down the silos between those channels to deliver seamless customer experiences.  As the penetration of smartphone use grows, mobile optimisation of websites, multichannel promotions and campaigns redeemable across social, mobile and print have to be the norm for forward thinking brands by the end of 2012.

It is also the responsibility of genuinely consultative digital agencies to de-mystify mobile for their clients and ensure investments are made when the right ‘tipping point’ has been reached. For example, we are typically seeing 10% of traffic to our clients’ sites coming from mobile devices. Comparing conversion rates between desktop and mobile visitors enables us to quickly calculate approximate losses in mobile revenue due to the lack of a mobile optimised site or application, which in turn helps build a business case for investment.

Social commerce:
If brands operating in the retail space aren’t already thinking about how they can enable customers to purchase via their social media channels then we’d argue they are already behind the curve.  The easier you make it for your customers to research, consider and purchase your products, regardless of the channel (website, mobile, social media, etc), the better it’s going to be for your sales figures.

We’re working with our clients on a variety of simple social applications to encourage sales via social channels.  Wary brands don’t need to commit to full Facebook shopping functionality immediately, but by starting to capture data, encourage honest reviews, have customer service teams communicating to customers via social channels and enabling social sharing once purchases are made, we can start more accurately demonstrating how social can have a measureable effect on the bottom line.

Genuinely putting the customer at the heart of your strategy:
With budgets inevitably squeezed in 2012, maximising return on investment from every activity is more vital than ever. As well as scrutinising every penny spent, 2012 also needs to be the year where you genuinely put the customer at the heart of everything you do.

Only if brands understand what their target audience genuinely care about, what media they consume, channels they use, how they want to interact with the brand and how they perceive the brand online and offline, can a digital marketing strategy reach its potential.

We’ve noticed an increase in our clients signing off customer insight projects during Q4 last year to refresh their understanding of their customers so that, in turn, their digital marketing strategy and tactical execution is relevant, compelling and effective as possible.

In recent years there’s been an explosion in brands getting excited about digital and allowing some creative hotshot agencies to convince them to throw vast sums of budget at a potentially great, but untried, idea – often without robust objectives, KPIs and measurement tools in place. These days are over – 2012 is going to be the year when brands invest time and money to ensure they truly understand their target audience, their most profitable customers and the lifetime value of those customers.  In turn, every digital activity will become more accountable. If it fails to increase customer acquisition, average order values or repeat business, it will be thrown out. Digital marketing will become genuinely targeted, executed and evaluated based on much greater focus on the customer.

For me, a happy client with a double-digit sales increase from activity we’ve delivered is more exciting and rewarding than a night out at a creative awards ceremony!  This is not to say we shun creativity, far from it! But creativity needs to be balanced with commerciality.

Delivering cross channel ROI and measuring the impact of online activity to offline sales:
It’s becoming increasingly important for brands to demonstrate how a digital tweak here, can have a positive impact in offline sales there.

In 2011, we significantly expanded our tracking and sales attribution tool set. In one case, we’ve worked with a client to integrate call tracking software into the multichannel attribution software we use.  This has helped the client gain a full 360 view of the impact each of their marketing channels plays in the research and consideration phases of their customer buying journey. Tracking the relationship between online and offline sales has meant that we have been able to measure how online activity influences offline sales with some really exciting results.

As marketing budgets comes under more scrutiny, combining offline and online data to build a more accurate view of customer behaviour and importantly, accurately attribute sales to their respective marketing channel, is going to be vital in 2012. This will help brands better understand their most productive marketing channels so they can take a flexible approach to their wider marketing budget and siphon budgets into channels that are genuinely making a difference to sales.

That’s what we think 2012 has in store. What about you?

Our study shows that 47% of premium retail shoppers make purchases via their smartphone

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

 

Inspired by our clients gearing up to Christmas, the Leapfrogg Customer Insight team recently conducted a survey into the shopping habits of premium retail shoppers.

Below we report back on the key findings and recommendations for retailers operating in this space.

 

Mobile

Questioned via an online survey, the most interesting finding concerned the use of mobile.  Our survey found that 47% of consumers purchasing premium and luxury products access retail apps to research and buy items, seemingly integrating mobile into their personal multi-channel experiences.

We found that those making purchases via mobile, purchased frequently, buying smaller ticket items with low emotional and time investment: music, entertainment, fast fashion and groceries, for example.

Mobile’s role within multichannel seems to becoming increasingly sophisticated as the more affluent users become more confident with their devices.  Statistics that back up our own experience from Google imply that 65% of smartphone users claim mobile engagement also drives footfall to in-store purchase.

Our findings give retailers who haven’t started planning their mobile strategies for 2012 some interesting quick-win clues to engaging quickly with a committed and purchasing mobile audience. As such, our advice would be…

  • Make sure your site is optimised for mobile – the first step towards encouraging sales from the smartphone savvy consumer
  • Merchandising strategically – encouraging repeat purchases of low perceived value items with a high profit margin is key delivering ROI
  • Be clever about the time of day – our clients have seen mobile-based searches and sales for products at traditionally bizarre times.  For example, we’ve seen bigger ticket items like beds or mattresses, with usually long and multi-attributed sales processes, being bought first thing in the morning from a mobile device – potentially in a fit of frustrated pique after another dreadful night’s sleep!  Question how well you know your target audience so you can target them when they are “in the moment”.

The internet’s influence on multichannel

We wanted to discover how consumers buying high-end products use the internet during their purchase journey. When asked how they ranked different types of activity to help buy products, there was a clear winner for our respondents; using the internet to research products and brands to be inspired or to help with ideas was the most popular use of the internet for premium shoppers within the multichannel buying cycle.

Ranked below, in order of popularity, are the other ways in which premium retail shoppers use the internet to help them shop:

1. Checking and comparing prices before completing purchases online
2. Researching online to ‘short-list’ products before going in-store to actually buy
3. Despite the explosion of coupon and offer sites this year, using the internet to find discount vouchers was only the fourth most popular use of the internet within the buying cycle
4. The preference to go in-store to ‘touch and feel’ a product before going home to purchase was the least popular internet role within the buying cycle

Interestingly, it would appear those purchasing premium and luxury products are not highly price-driven. The use of vouchers is not as prevalent as one might expect in the current climate, although it would be fair to say that luxury brands in particular are less active in discounting their products.

Whilst it would appear that respondents are likely to research products online before going into store, the behaviour is not so prevalent the other way around.

Our take out from this part of the insight was that strategic use of search marketing, online PR and social media will ensure visibility for brand and non-brand searches to drive engagement and aid the research phase of the buying journey. However, mobile outreach can meet a more functional need: helping your customers buy quickly when they know what they want, when they want it and helping them find your stores when out and about.  Making sure online and mobile tactics join the dots with your offline and in-store activity is vital to ensuring a seamless multichannel experience – the days of viewing your online store in a silo are well and truly over.

Future proofing your sales

We also found that the majority of our respondents (nearly two thirds) did between 50 – 75% of their shopping online – with 4.5% claiming that they do all of their shopping online!  Exciting stats for us digital geeks!

Almost two-thirds of our respondents claimed that 90% of the shopping they did online was for non-food items. 8% of respondents claimed that they shop for all non-food items online.  This is a hugely positive vote of confidence for premium retailers in the middle of one of the most important retail periods of the year and as we enter, what is expected to be, a tough 2012.

The most popular non-food, premium purchases online were shown to be:

  • Travel and holiday accommodation
  • Gifts for others
  • Clothing and fashion
  • Homeware
  • Shoes and accessories
  • Furniture
  • Jewellery

For retailers, the interesting take out from this part of the research is not to lose focus on the products you’re actually selling.  With a digital industry awash with technological advances, keeping your actual products front of mind can sometimes be a challenge when you have an excited digital marketing team keen to experiment with tactics.

If our research has shown that gifts are the second most popular premium purchase online, then how can learn from this and merchandise or promote your products for this need? Can you offer gift wrapping services and offer to deliver to the gift recipient?

With 2012 just around the corner, are there ways in which you can use this insight to ‘de-seasonalise products’ and future-proof potentially difficult times ahead?

Retailers: the good, the bad and the ugly…

We also asked respondents which premium retailers are doing online well and why others do it badly.  Unsurprisingly and unprompted, John Lewis, ASOS, Amazon, Net-a-porter and Not on the high street were all given positive mentions, with praise for “easy navigation”, “clear photography”, “excellent information about the products” and importantly for products bought online that “items arrive when they say they will” and “they offer free delivery”.

When asked to describe why some online retailers are still doing it badly, unprompted responses included:

  • “poor product display”
  • “confusing layout”
  • “looks untrustworthy”
  • “really bad on and offline experience – no link up between the two”
  • “checkout process was painful”

We’ll refrain from naming specific brands but needless to say a number of recognisable retailers are failing in delivering a rich, intuitive experience for visitors to their websites. How does your site compare against the comments above?

Conclusion

In conclusion, taking that step back and understanding what your customer wants from the shopping experience you offer not only enables you to focus on what is genuinely going to make a difference to your online sales but really tailors the experience to a target audience and delivers online strategies that align with offline and in-store marketing activity.

 

Methodology

Research conducted via online questionnaire in October 2011
112 premium retailer shoppers completed the survey

The importance of content planning to search, sales & social media

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

For a long time, we’ve been driving home the importance of content to meeting your online objectives. In fact, Ben wrote about the relationship between content, search marketing and social media back in 2009.

Content can be used to connect with and engage your audience at each stage of their buying journey. As such, I believe that content planning should be core to your digital marketing strategy. A solid content plan gives all of your disciplines creative direction, streamlines resource, ensures messaging is consistent and works to enforce the role that each stakeholder (internal and external) plays in meeting online goals.

At the heart of content planning is a strong understanding of your target audience. By understanding the needs and motivations of your prospects and customers it will help you to create content that is in line with how your audience wants to consume it and therefore where to market that content to support search, website optimisation and social media objectives.

How customer insight and content supports these three channels is best reflected in the infographic below:

Starting with search, the information presented back to us when searching comes in a range of content types i.e. maps, images, video and shopping feeds (in Google’s case, this is called Universal Search). In turn, this means brands must create, optimise and market useful and engaging content that benefits both the target audience and supports SEO objectives.  In light of Google’s Panda update earlier this year, good quality, relevant and interesting content for the end user is more important than ever. Adopting old hat techniques such as keyword-stuffed press releases and articles, created purely for SEO purposes, might just bring you to Google’s attention…and not in a good way!

Content also has an integral role to play once visitors arrive at your website. A content driven approach to e-commerce helps create a richer and more rounded website experience, which in turn aids conversion rates and average order values. Strong imagery and video, for example, are proven to engage visitors and drive up sales. Marks and Spencer, with its pioneering ‘M&S TV’, has reportedly seen three times as many product views when supported with video and an average uplift in basket size of 23%.

Content is also vitally important in giving your brand a voice across your social media channels. Too many brands fall in to the trap of using social media to simply broadcast special offers and promotions. Content is the foundation of which a truly engaging social media experience is built and therefore how you can build a following by having your customers share your news, views and stories with their colleagues and peers.

This diagram reflects the interdependency between search, social media and content; one discipline cannot operate in isolation of the other two.

Practical steps to creating a content plan

So with content playing such a vital role in search, conversion rates and social media outreach, where should you start?

I recommend working from a central content plan as it helps to ensure consistent and clear messaging from each of your company’s communication channels and ensures any content output is aligned to your business objectives.

The first step to creating great content is to align all communication channels to work together. Holding regular content workshops involving all those responsible for creating content is a great way to achieve this. The objective of these workshops is to mine the business for all marketing plans across online and offline disciplines and brainstorm raw ideas, thoughts and materials.

You can then shape the resulting output into a comprehensive six-12 month content plan that cascades into all online communication channels, for example:

  • Content to support sales, such as buyers guides
  • Blog content
  • Emails / newsletters
  • On and offline PR
  • On and offline advertising, such as catalogues
  • In-store event ideas

This level of planning provides the necessary structure and formalising of responsibilities to maximise the value of the content created by all stakeholders.

The output is a month by month plan (it can be as simple as using an Excel spreadsheet) that details what content will be created, in what format, by whom and through which channels it will marketed and when. It sounds simple but I’m amazed at how many businesses we speak to are creating content in a totally disjointed manner meaning they fail to maximise its value to meeting digital marketing objectives.

Conclusion

Don’t fall into the trap of creating content purely for the purposes of gaming search engines. Really think about your customer and create content that is genuinely useful and engaging. Get all of your content creators in a room and plan, plan, plan. In turn, you’ll be rewarded with stronger search engine rankings, higher conversion rates and more fans and followers who feel a genuine connection to your brand.

Leapfrogg’s approach to social media (infographic)

Posted on by Lucy Freeborn

Social media is an integral part of your audience’s digital engagement with your brand. At Leapfrogg, we take a holistic approach to social media; our approach reflects the interdependency between search, social media and content; we believe that you cannot operate a successful digital marketing campaign in silos.

We advise our clients on the best channels by which to reach their audience by conducting comprehensive research; in short, how and where their prospects and customers spend their time online. Using this information, we develop a centralised content plan, which is also aligned to the greater marketing strategy. Having all departments (agency and client side) working to an agreed plan not only gives clear direction but also ensures that messaging remains consistent through all marketing channels, regardless of the channel your consumer prefers to engage with you via. This is essential to giving a retail brand a voice across social media channels that extends beyond special offers and promotions; it’s about offering a more compelling reason to follow that brand.

A centralised content plan also helps deliver the consistent experience that customers expect as they move between channels, something which is essential for retailers to get right but much easier said than done!

This approach is illustrated below with this rather wonderful infographic:Phase one: Insight & understanding
Creating a successful, engaging and compelling space for relationship building with your target market is only possible if you know who your target audience is, what they care about and how they like to communicate; and you measure that relationship accordingly. Taking time to understand your target audience feeds directly into phase two.

Phase two: Centralised content strategy, operation structure & clear objectives
A solid content strategy gives you creative direction, streamlines resources and ensures all messaging is consistent. This also allows you to engage with your target audience in the appropriate way and set clear objectives for your activity.

Phase three: Pool of clear results
Done well, content planning and social media can deliver brand awareness, customer engagement, ownership of search results, stronger relationships with the media and drive direct sales. Only by structuring your approach, execution and measurement will you be guaranteed to add value and deliver tangible business benefits.