Brand Marketing

If you are British, or have lived in a country that is part of the commonwealth, then Christmas Day means watching the Queen giving here annual Christmas Day speech. Expect this year instead of watching the speech on BBC America, I opened up my laptop and went online to watch the speech on YouTube.

The British monarchy has launched its own YouTube channel called The Royal Channel. The Royal Channel was launched on December 24th and it includes footage of royal-related events, including garden parties, funerals and a documentary called “Long to Reign Over Us,” about the monarchy. There is also the queen’s first-ever televised Christmas message, which took place 50 years ago, in 1957.

While shoveling our walkway this morning, my mind drifted to an article that I read recently in BtoB Magazine about the difference between traditional and social marketing campaigns.

With a traditional offline advertising campaign, the client hires an agency to run a specific campaign for a specific period of time. Most of the work is done upfront and once the budget is used up the campaign typically ends.

But that is not how a social media campaign works. In an online environment in which customers expect to have a relationship with brands and in which search engines insure that content never dies, a successful campaign may run for months or even years.

It has been well documented that user-generated reviews (a social media tactic) can and will increase sales. Well now a SellPoint study conducted by Coremetrics found a significant increase in product purchases after online shoppers viewed audio/video tours of products.

The numbers from the study we really extraordinary:

• There was a 35 percent increase in the sales conversion rate among shoppers who viewed the tours vs. those who did not.
• Shoppers viewing the product tours spent more than 2.5 minutes, on average, engaged in viewing detailed product information about each product viewed.

An interesting article on Clickz showed that Bath & Body increased sales by 10-12% after implementing customer feedbacks and reviews on their site.

Bath & Body Works specializes in fragrant beauty products for bath and body care, facial skincare, hair care and spa items. The company has an active customer base who is enthused about their products. The challenge was to convert this offline enthusiasm into something tangible online. Shannon Glass director of Internet operations put the challenge this way:

Fortune had a very interesting post on the battle between Google and Facebook for the online advertising market.

Google is primarily in the search ads business, and they are extremely successful at it. Search ads account for some 40% of online advertising, but they work. They drive revenue — Google’s search ads deliver click-through rates just over 5%, according to Nielsen Online, compared with rates of 0.2% for online ads in general.

While some e-retailers are still figuring out what social networking is, and whether they want to be involved, Bodybuilding.com did not take a wait-and-see approach to social networking. A year ago it created its own social network called BodySpace, and the result has been an increase in brand awareness, traffic and sales.

With customer reviews being the next big thing in online retailing, I was not surprised to read  that Jeff Bozos and Amazon (which pioneered the user-generated customer review) has launched something called video reviews. Now Amazon users can use video to share their opinions and demonstrate the use of products on the site. Customer-generated video reviews are located within the customer reviews section of items in the Amazon.com catalog.

“We are dedicated to offering our customers an information-rich shopping experience so they can know which products are right for them,” says Colin Bodell, vice president, Amazon.com. “The chance to see product demonstrations as submitted by fellow customers is just the latest benefit to shopping on Amazon”.

We have written a lot about how customer reviews have and will increase sales. So I was interested to read in Internet Retailer about a new shopping study from The E-Tailing Group titled “Social Shopping Study 2007” which showed that the growth in online customer reviews has led to a new breed of shopper called the “Social Researcher”. This social researcher is someone who puts significant emphasis on peer feedback in product reviews when making online and offline purchasing decisions.

According to Mediaweek MySpace will begin offering advertisers a way of targeting users based on all that personal information they supply about themselves.

MySpace, who has been conspicuously quiet recently as Facebook has taken its mantle as the social networking favorite is said to be rolling out a new HyperTargeting ad platform. This ad platform will allow brands to target narrow audience segments using user-interest data. MySpace has been beta testing this service since the summer with a select group of major marketers like Procter & Gamble, Microsoft and Toyota.