Community Marketing: Using Customer & Peer Endorsement to Lift Conversions, Generate Leads, and Drive Engagement
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Websites that leverage peer participation and allow visitors to interact socially drive more results. 79% of online retailers reported that consumer-generated rating and reviews improved site conversion rates (eMarketer). And the trend doesn’t affect only consumer-facing businesses: 90% of B2B buyers first turn to the internet, including user-generated content (TechTarget/CMO Council). Learn: • How leveraging peer endorsement can lift conversation rates and drive more sales, leads, or revenue. • Different ways of fostering participation on your website - comments, ratings, reviews, and polls. • Actionable steps you can take and best practices for implementing community features.
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Community Marketing: Using Customer & Peer Endorsement to Lift Conversions, Generate Leads, and Drive Engagement
- 1. Community Marketing Using Customer & Peer Endorsement to Lift Conversions, Generate Leads, and Drive Engagement Prepared by Chris Oquist, Percussion Software August 09
- 7. What is Community Marketing Community Marketing can generate: Awareness Conversions Leads Revenue Trust New Products and Services Self-Support Engagement Loyalty
- 30. Polls
- 36. Comments
- 46. Rich Media
- 65. Pulling It All Together
- 66. Pulling It All Together
- 83. Percussion Community Marketing Solution
- 84. Percussion Community Marketing Solution Delivery Tier CM Tier CM Server Existing Web Applications Web Servers Online Interaction Services Third Party Applications Database Security Internal Applications Dynamic Web Experience Business Users
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Hi Everybody, Welcome to the first Webinar in our Best Practices Series, “Using Customer & Peer Endorsement to Lift Conversions, Generate Leads, and Drive Engagement.” We’re going to be talking a lot about strategy and how to implement social media on your website and introduce some tactics and best practices. This is not just a product demonstration – Nate is going to give you a peek on Percussion’s Community Marketing Solution, how we're using it on Percussion.com, and how it looks in CM System. When folks want to see some follow up and go deeper on how ratings work and how polls work, we can set that up, but this is webinar is really just to introduce the strategies and the topics and hopefully share some knowlege with you, and get some feedback on what you'd like to see more of. Like I mentioned before, this is the first in what will be a continuing series on best practices – we want our customers to succeed, and we want to bring you the kind of information you and those in your business want to see. So we definitely hope you’ll send feedback our way when we’re done – let us know what you liked, what you didn’t, and hopefully some topics you’d be interested in hearing about in the future.
- So, today we’ll be covering quite a lot, but this webinar will be recorded and available to you afterwards for reference. First, we’ll discuss what community marketing is and why it’s important. Then we’ll go through and look at a whole bunch of best practices for engaging your users on your website. You’ll also be hearing from one of your peers. Patrick Lapenna from Grand Rapids Community College will be joining us to talk about what GRCC has done in social so far, and where they’re planning to go. Nate Barad will give a short demo of the Percussion solution, and then we’ll open it up for Q&A.
- So – what is community marketing? Basically, it’s enabling your users (whether they are customers, prospects, partners) to behave on your site the way people are hardwired to – socially. It’s enabling your users to talk about your brand, your products or services, and share their insights with you and your other customers. Leveraging peer endorsement, mostly by way of user-generated content. If it’s anything – it’s enabling your own customers to do some of the marketing “heavy lifting” for you. And when we talk about User-generated content, I’m referring to various types of content that are created by end-users – Ratings, Reviews, Comments, Polls, Rich Media, even third-party content that you can pull into your own web presence.
- So let’s dispel some myths really quick. Social media is not new. Community aspects and social features have been around since the advent of the internet.
- It’s also here to stay. More people have access than ever before. And it’s not that there are more adopters, per se. It’s that social is so woven into the fabric of the internet that we’re simply seeing more and more people participate. This eMarketer chart shows how quickly the number of content contributors online is growing, and how it is expected to continue to grow.
- Allowing your users to participate, and in effect giving your audience access to their peer’s opinions, testimonials, and ideas, can drive a lot of results. As we’ll see, user-generated content can lift conversions, leads, and sales. It can also generate engagement and trust through credibility. It can create awareness. It can allow your customers to self-support each other, and can be an idea generator for new products, services, and improvements. It’s where it’s at. It’s also critical.
- The internet is everywhere. Not just in the home, in the office, in a hotel room, but everywhere. We’re all aware of it, but it’s important to point out. If a customer in a store wants to look up consumer reviews of your product, they can do it right in the aisle. If they’re in a cab on a trip and need a service, they can find information before they even step out onto the street. And – as I discovered a few weeks ago on an Airtran flight – if I want to leave a comment on your service at 33,000 feet, I can.
- Traditional marketing is also less effective than ever. Consumers don’t trust corporate marketing or advertising. But…
- They do trust each other. 78% of users say consumer recommendations are credible. 84% trust user reviews more than expert reviews. And, from your own peers: Site owners say that user-generated content lifts conversion levels, increases traffic, and boosts average spend.
- And it’s not just for B2C.
- 93% of business users consider ratings and reviews very valuable to decision-making, and others have removed suppliers due to negative reviews.
- The third reason – users are empowered. They have Google. If I need to find information about what new energy-saving windows I should install in my apartment, I’m likely not going to call Home Depot and ask them for advice. I’m going to search online. And your company better be found when I do. Let’s take a little use case that actually happened to me a couple of days ago.
- I’m a photographer in my part time, and the other day I figured, OK, I’ve saved up a bit, I’m going to by myself a nice 50mm prime lens. So, I looked on Google.
- Three of the top five results were to pages with user-generated content? UGC drives SEO. And one of the other two remaining results was to an independent photographer blogging about lenses –only one result, sad number 5, was to the actual Canon site. And note: I didn’t search for “Canon 50mm reviews”, or “Which Canon 50mm lens should I buy?” – I just searched 50mm lens Canon.
- A Deloitte study showed that communities can increase revenue per customer up to 50%.
- And you don’t need to be Dell or Starbucks to engage your audience. Actually, because you’re not Dell or Starbucks – you need to engage your users.
- We’re going to talk about a few simple ways to do that. Ratings and Reviews, Polls, Comments, Rich Media, and using third-party content. We’re going to go through each of these and look at some best practices for putting them to work for you.
- Ratings and Reviews. Here’s a screenshot from Wine.com showing some reviews on a nice merlot.
- Why use them? They can lift conversion pretty significantly. They can drive traffic through search. They can also align your user’s needs with their actions and set expectations.
- So how should ratings and reviews look on your site? Well, they should look familiar. As long as they’re familiar, they’re usable. Amazon pretty much invented this – stick to the formula that people trust.
- Use star ratings, for instance, instead of some weird proprietary logo or oblong circle, or five thumbs up in a row.
- Show the information for your user and the date of the review. It puts it into context. Even if the review is older the added detail will make it real.
- Allow users to rate the ratings – that way you can sort and show the most appropriate or helpful ratings first.
- And summarize review information at the top, always. This is on a product page by the way, right beneath the product information.
- Make them prominent – in search results and category pages, always display reviews. Best Buy does a great job.
- Allow customers to use them to sort or narrow their results.
- And – don’t forget to ask for them! Again, right on the product page, invite action. There’s a good likelihood they’ll be excited when they receive the product and come back to give you some kudos and boast about their experience.
- Polls are another good way to engage your visitors.
- They allow you to gain real-time, valuable insights into your customers’ thinking, engage them by allowing them to participate and make their opinions known with little effort, and they also show your relevance to the market by virtue of the fact that people are participating on *your* site, promoting your site
- Again, make them familiar. Here’s a screenshot from CNN.com.
- Include a clear call to action.
- Use radio buttons – some polls shows checkboxes or some other strange and unintuitive voting mechanism. Don’t do that.
- Allow users to both Vote and simply see results. Sometimes, they’ll click in to see what people are voting, and, when they disagree with it, they’ll vote themselves.
- Comments are really powerful. They’re an integral part of blogs, and contribute to making them both SEO powerhouses and highly interactive environments. Every blog post is the beginning of a discussion. And blogs can either be incorporated onto your own site or run on a separate property. ( we’ll likely be holding a Best Practices webinar on blogging soon, which will contain a lot of information on how best to implement and think about blogs in the context of your content and web strategy, but for now we’ll talk about best practices for comments- the community marketing aspect of this piece )
- Empower Your Readers: without comments, you’re cutting yourself off from a lot of potential relationships with your readers, and missing out on one very powerful element. Ownership. If you empower your readers to have discussions on your website, you are in essence giving them a sense of ownership and stake in your brand. Source Their Insights: Not only are you adding a layer of authenticity to your content, you’re leveraging an important force. Crowdsourcing. Your customers are going to give you ideas, take the conversation in directions it might not have gone, tell you a lot about what they want you to give them. Community begets community.
- With comments, you want to make it easy. You want as little obstacle as possible to your visitors contributing to the conversation. Your users want to contribute, but an obstacle will often stop that in its tracks. I’ve often wanted to post a comment on a blog post and left as soon as they asked me to register just to post a comment.
- How to make it easy? Place the comment form directly below the comments on the permalink page. It’s generally where they’ll look.
- Present a complete, open form – don’t make them click through to another page to comment.
- Clear call to action and clear, concise instructions will clear up any confusion.
- Link to your blog comments policy. This isn’t hard to do, and it’s a great way to reserve the right to remove comments if you need to.
- Acknowledge participation. And show off a bit. Display the number of comments right beneath your blog post title. When people see there’s a discussion going on, they’re more likely to dive in and take part.
- Show your commenter’s names, and allow them to include their URL to link. Everyone wants to drive traffic to their own site, and often people will post comments to make themselves known. Leverage this drive, and embrace it.
- Respond. Here is an example of the comments on a Southwest Airlines blog post. A customer wanted to post his own experience with Southwest, asked a question in the comments, and the original author responded. Don’t ignore you’re your customers – it’s a two-way conversation, and you would be surprised how much a simple response will make them feel like part of your family. That’s a very powerful thing.
- Rich Media – all kinds of user-generated and user-uploaded videos, photos, audio, articles.
- It generates traffic. As an example: HP (Hewlett Packard) launched the You On You Project last Friday, an innovative social media branding campaign that challenges people to express themselves creatively through video for a chance to win $300,000 in prizes. Source Their Insights: Not only are you adding a layer of authenticity to your content, you’re leveraging an important force. Crowdsourcing. Your customers are going to give you ideas, take the conversation in directions it might not have gone Within 4 days, it had 430,000 pageviews. It’s inherently sharable. Creating anything “viral” is easier said than done, and it’s often just one of those things that just “happens” – but the format of a lot of user-generated rich media efforts makes it inherently suited for that kind of behavior. In a contest, for instance – especially one with peer voting – users are driven to spread the word themselves to promote their own entries. Community begets community. Finally, it’s a great (and more importantly, free) way to add content to your site. How much effort is it to put together a white-paper, or webpage around a specific topic, or a guide. You’re letting your customers work for you – and they want to! TripAdvisor, for instance, saw their UGC assets grow from a very respectable 5 million items to 20 million in just two years. And that’s all content that’s indexable for SEO, and that very much drives conversion and trust.
- Make it relevant. Speaking of TripAdvisor, here is a page for the W Hotel in Chicago, showing user-uploaded photographs right next to the Book Now button.
- And right at the bottom, a clear call to action. The words “Add Photo” “Or Add Video”, or simply “Submit” work really well. The goal here is to avoid any kind of ambiguity and put absolutely no obstacle in front of a user trying to contribute to your site.
- Continuing that thought, make it easy. Just like comments.
- A very simple title, clear – not too cute.
- Short, very clear instructions. Try to explain the task and set expectations in 15-20 words. People will just move on if it looks like you’re going to make them work too hard.
- Finally, you’re sourcing all of this amazing content. Display it. Especially here, as it gives the user a chance to imagine his or her upload featured on your site.
- Finally, you’re sourcing all of this amazing content. Display it. Especially here, as it gives the user a chance to imagine his or her upload featured on your site.
- On the action page, remind people of that they’re doing. Things like this erase that very thin layer of ambiguity that can turn a conversion into an abandonment.
- Streamline the process for your customers.
- Give them clear instructions, again. Let them know what you want them to do, as clearly and in as few words as possible.
- Any time you’re accepting uploaded content, you’ll want to include a quick disclaimer to ensure your user owns the content they are uploading – you’ll be using it, after all. Make it non-threatening, but clear.
- And let them preview their submissions.
- And, acknowledge your visitors’ efforts. Here National Geographic has done an absolutely stunning job of giving their users kudos. As a travel photographer, I want to upload my own pictures and vie for some of that attention.
- OK, so all these best practices are great, but what about…
- Negativity? Well, most user reviews are positive – people, contrary to what you might think, aren’t online to complain. They’re online to share. The vast majority of user-generated content is positive. Also, a number of studies have shown something very interesting, and maybe a bit counter-intuitive. Conversion rates are higher for products and services with both positive and negative reviews. The reason? Users trust the process more, and they feel that they’ve vetted and are aware of concerns before they buy the product. Yeah that lens has all these great reviews, and now I’m aware that someone said it’s not good in low-light. I can deal with that – make an educated decision, and I might be pleasantly surprised when I receive it.
- Moderation? You need to decide whether to moderate things like comments or reviews. Especially if you’re in an industry that gets a lot of grief – like clean coal or something. But do it lightly, and don’t do it without purpose. Transparency is very powerful.
- Always keep barriers low. Don’t require registration when you can avoid it. It will stop a huge percentage of people from participating.
- Pulling it all together is where everything really gets fun. The real power in user-generated content is in its reuse – making use of it all over your website where it’s most needed.
- Here, Change.org is pulling in top and most recent comments, as well as showing how many people are participating on a given action page – all right on their homepage to spur more people to act.
- UGC is an asset, like any other piece of content you create yourself. Use it just like that. Feature user questions on your homepage.
- Pull ratings onto your homepage if conversion is your goal.
- Make use of your social interactions and show people that you’re interacting. Import content from across your web presence onto your homepage or web pages. Here, recent Tweets are being featured, and updated in real-time. That can both drive a lot of followers and show your visitors that you exist where they do.
- Also, use RSS to automate the distribution of content and enable your users who also publish their own content to talk about you on their own sites.
- Aggregate from external sources. Back to our point with rich media about the cost of creating proprietary content- find out where your users are getting content, and pull that content in, as long as it drives value. Here, our friend at VisitLondon.com are importing TripAdvisor reviews to educate their customers about the best places to stay.
- Let your visitors drive your content strategy, If they voted on a poll, write a blog post about it. It’s not hard to come up with ideas for new content when your users are telling you what to write about.
- Tie your website to your web properties.
- How do you apply all of this to your own business? Well – make it purpose-driven always. It’s not about Ratings, Testimonials, or any other kind of generic label. It’s about what those things do for your customers. If your business is wine, let your customers share reviews of their favorite wine pairings. Higher Education can leverage UGC to allow instructor or course ratings, or alumni video testimonials. A financial site can show thumbs up or down for different investments. A good rule is to determine what content your users are looking for, and let THEM provide it to each other,
- So, here we’re going to have Patrick LaPenna join us and tell us about GRCC and social. Let’s get Patrick on. Patrick?
- And now Nate will talk a bit about the Community Marketing Solution.