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The power of blogs in influencing consumer purchase decisions is stronger than you might realize. According to data from a research study conducted by Research Now, nearly nine in 10 consumers (84%) make purchases after reading about a product or service on a blog. Among consumers between the ages of 18-34, blogs ranked as the most important source of information to make buying decisions. Among consumers between the ages of 35-54, blogs ranked as the second most important source behind friends, family, and colleagues. Even older consumers (55 and older) value blogs when making purchase decisions ranking them third in terms of importance behind friends, family, and colleagues and editorial articles.
For brands, this data is critical. The research found that blogs influence household purchase decisions for 54% of the survey respondents, gifts that consumers are buying for themselves (45%), and gifts they’re buying for other people (30%). In fact, 25% of respondents indicated that they buy something each month based on blog content!
Consumers are turning to blogs for specific reasons as they travel through the path to making a purchase. Nearly one in two (46%) use blogs for initial product investigation, and 43% use blogs for inspiration. One in three consumers (33%) use blogs to narrow down their purchase options while 30% use blogs to confirm their purchase choices. In other words, blogs play a role at every stop along the marketing and sales funnel....
With all the conflicting information on millennials' relationship with social change, how do we successfully engage these generations in positive behavior change? Do they care about your brand's social impact? Do they actually align their spending with their values? Or are they so cash-strapped and overwhelmed with information that clicktivism is the most we can expect?
In reality, all generations share a set of core motivations that drive our decision-making (hint: it's not our rational thought). But millennials and Generation Z have grown up in a different context and with a new set of digital tools that also influence behavior.
To best mobilize this audience around your brand and mission, we need to understand what core values and trends that drive behavior change...
By leveraging Twitter, start-ups can monitor online conversations that 255 million consumers worldwide are having and understand their preferences and tastes better. Specifically, they can listen to their target audience’s conversations and learn about their problems, dissatisfactions, and product features they desire. This marketing research approach can help start-ups discover new business opportunities and unravel overlooked problems.
To help start-ups take advantage of Twitter for effective marketing research, here are three techniques and complementary tools you should use...
A central problem for marketers is how to convince consumers of their products’ value. How long will customers listen to all the benefits of starting their day with Cheerios before they dismiss everything as manipulative bunk?
According to the 2 professors, Suzanne Shu of UCLA and Kurt Carlson of Georgetown, the answer is the rule of 3: Making up to 3 claims about a product’s value is effective advertising -- any more than that, and people’s cynical defenses kick in....
A three-year study from Scratch, an in-house unit of Viacom, found that a third of millennials believed they won't need a bank in the future. These millennials, defined as those between ages 18 to 33, also ranked the top four banks in the "ten least loved brands" and would rather go to the dentist than to their bank.Is this surprising?
This segment of the population has grown up in an era that saw trust in banking erode due to the financial crisis and a near stagnant economy. This is also a period when new technology has enabled firms like Simple, Moven, Square and PayPal to be more relevant with a generation that would rather handle finances on their phone than in a branch.
Here are some of the findings from the Millennial Disruption Index:
It was fun (and affordable) while it lasted.
Frozen meals, long associated with the American affinity for eating dinner in front of the tube, are a nearly $9-billion business in the US, according to data from the market research firm Euromonitor. Through decades of intense growth, frozen foods have found their way into just about every American household—99% of them, according to a 2012 report by AMG Strategic Advisors (pdf).
But TV dinners are losing their ubiquity. Just ask Nestlé, which is struggling with its Lean Cuisine frozen food line. The food giant is even considering unloading its $400-million frozen foods business entirely. And with good reason. After nearly 60 years of sustained growth, frozen ready meal sales have finally started to dip. Since 2008, they have either fallen or come in just about flat....
Even before you entered into the world of “business”, you were watching your competition. Whether it was in a classroom or on a sports team, you not only wanted to keep up, you wanted to know where the marker was set so you could go one step further. It was about finding new opportunities and setting new goals based on someone you aspired to beat.
At this time, when search is so important and detailed, and the Internet has grown so extensively, you have tons of different factors to consider when spying on your competition. This is where marketing tools come into play.In many cases, tools that help you monitor your own web performance also can help you gather data on your competition. So, you might be using some of these tools already, without using the features that help you evaluate your competitors. Here are some of the best tools out there...
The ever-evolving media landscape presents significant challenges to marketers.
... To find out how marketers are adapting to deal with the change in the way that people engage with media channels, Econsultancy and Mediaocean have today published a new report entitled Managing Media Convergence. The report is based on a survey of 124 agencies as well as in-depth interviews with 18 executives from agencies and brands, all with significant interest and experience in managing media.
It covers how to define the convergent environment, identifies pain points in managing new workflows and examines how the measurement of media is evolving as a result....
Marketing metrics tend to overlap with key business analytics. Here's a handy overview on how to distinguish their differences and leverage both to make better informed business decisions..
Ever wonder how Amazon predicts exactly what you want to buy? The answer lies in business analysis – understanding patterns of what happened in the past to predict what might happen in the future.
With the explosion of lead and customer data available at marketers fingertips, it is no surprise that marketing analytics has become the rising star of business analytics. In fact, spending on marketing analytics is expected to increase 60% by 2015.
This post explores the goals of business analytics, how marketing analytics is playing an ever crucial role in business analysis, and how organizations can make better business decisions using real market feedback....
96% of consumers acknowledge having received mistargeted promotional information and 94% have taken steps to break off communication...
... The study conducted by Blue Research, an independent research consultancy, which surveyed a nationally representative sample of nearly 600 social media consumers in October 2013, confirms that marketers are wasting money providing content to consumers-ads, offers, promotions, etc., that has nothing to do with their interests. People are fed up and taking action. One of the ironies of marketing is that marketers are taught to “go where consumers are” but consumers don’t want marketers interrupting their online time....
Everyone s talking about Big Data these days, and it has marketers buzzing with anticipation. In fact, data proliferation is expected to grow from 130 exabytes to 40,000 exabytes by 2020.
So my advice to brands is not to get seduced by the lure of Big Data and ignore the power of Relationship Data. Want to find out how people really feel about your product or a particular service? Just ask them. We’re so much more connected today that we have many more opportunities for developing relationships. And if we concentrate our efforts on building and expanding those relationships, they’ll help us glean priceless information about how our prospects and customers feel about our products and services....
The information Google Analytics and similar tools like heatmaps provide us with is incredibly valuable; however, let’s not forget that computers and software are dumb. Binary code and user interaction tracking has its limits. That’s why programs recording user-testing have been created to show site owners the thought process and pain points - the web journey.
But we can do better than that.
By fusing personalized outreach with social listening, we can measure people and receive phenomenal qualitative data – data we can act on....
Loyalty is an increasingly fleeting thing. In fact, the average Gen Y mother now defines “brand loyalty” as a window of allegiance lasting 6-12 months before she moves on to explore alternatives. And suffice to say, there are plenty of alternatives out there for her to explore, regardless of category. So, given the increasingly elusive nature of loyalty and the abundance of brand and product choices available, one might be inclined to argue that there’s never been a more important time for you to implement a loyalty program.
But it’s simply not true and here’s why…
Any loyalty program you create probably won’t work. But don’t feel too badly because as it turns out, most loyalty programs don’t work – at least not the way the companies who own them would like to believe. In fact, a recent study from Edgell Knowledge Network found that the level of actual brand loyalty among consumers who are part of a loyalty program versus those who are not, is not materially different.
So, why don’t most loyalty schemes work? Research points to several reasons....Loyalty programs are transactional. Loyalty isn’t....
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Consumers love a deal, and even more so if it’s customized just for them, right? Not so fast, says Itamar Simonson, a marketing professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Simonson has found that rather than being enticed by them, consumers are skeptical of those personalized offers that flood their inboxes.
His research, “Beating the Market: The Allure of Unintended Value,” was published in December 2013 in theJournal of Marketing Research.
Marketers have long assumed that touting a promotion as “customized,” “based on your past purchases” or “especially for you” will persuade customers that the product will fit better, fulfill more needs or otherwise prove more satisfying than others. But “telling consumers that an offer is tailored for them can backfire” and lower the chance that they’ll bite, writes Simonson, who co-authored the study with Aner Sela of the University of Florida and Ran Kivetz of Columbia Business School....
...Let’s start with the first excerpt shall we for this speaks directly to the ominous title of this article. Yes, while some will laud the 35% of marketers who are investing in a seamless or integrated shopping experience, I for one would rather focus on the 65% who are not and in turn not giving the consumer what they want.
The statistics come courtesy of a survey conducted by The E-tailing Group Inc. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact the 35% of the respondents who say they expect to offer a seamless shopping experience plan to do so in 2014 or 2015. Doesn’t that in turn mean the 65% who DON’T plan on offering this to consumers will go at least until 2016 before even beginning to plan for it?...
Social media marketing is the driving force in most bloggers’ strategy. You’re probably posting to social media every day, using your blog links as bait to lure the reader to your site in some form or fashion. But, for some reason it may not be working…
There are a lot of things happening behind the scenes in your social media marketing. Relationships need to be built on social media, and a lot of people really don’t dive that deep into this sort of stuff, because you can find lots of articles about how to do the same old things over and over again....
...Few fully understand what big data is, much less what the term’s offshoots entail. But big data is evolving and smart data, identity data and people data are here to stay. Think of them as the human discovery of fire, the wheel and wheat. Just as those inventions couldn’t have occurred without humans, these subset terms couldn’t exist without big data.
Of course, the human race wouldn’t be where it is today without those three key finds, and these data segments will prove to do the same for big data — making it comprehensible for the masses.
Are these definitions all-inclusive? No, but they will help you to wrap your head around the terms that will influence digital media careers and online experiences for years to come...
Experian Marketing Services released its 2014 Digital Marketer Report, with the theme of “becoming a cross-channel marketing mastermind.” The report, available for download here, is an extensive analysis of the landscape as it currently sits for digital marketers in 2014.
This is the sixth iteration of the report, which runs over 100 pages and is chock-full of digital imperatives. For travel brand marketers working towards planning their next fiscal year budgets in the coming months, this report also reveals some key areas of shifting focus. Here are some of the benchmarks and trends being tracked in the report – this is only a taste, as the report is truly extensive in benchmarking scope....
Understand which social media brands your audience is attached to and dependent on - then be creative with how you can help reinforce their identity.
Discovering that Twitter didn’t even make the top five social media brands that people are most attached to was one of the most intriguing things from a new study released last week by UTA Brand Studio on which social media brands users are most attached and dependent on with Facebook coming out on the top. Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit followed.
According to the UTA Brand Studio:Brand dependence measures how strong of a connection people have to a brand (brand- self connection) as well as how easy their thoughts and feelings about a brand come to mind (prominence)...
The e-commerce shopping mall is littered with abandoned shopping carts.The e-commerce shopping mall is littered with abandoned shopping carts. Consider this: an average of 73.9 percent of carts don’t make it to the check out, according to the most recent data from SaleCycle. While it’s no surprise that the preponderance of discarded baskets are found in the travel industry (think: where some people are just comparison shopping for cheap flights or dreaming of luxuries they can’t actualize), coming in second is apparel.
“Only about 10 percent of apparel and footwear purchases happen online,” Romney Evans tells FORBES. The co-founder of TrueFit, a data analytics company, believes sizing plays a big part in consumers’ lack of confidence. Drapers Etail Report found that sizing problems accounted for more than 70% of fashion purchased online was subsequently returned...
Americans own an average of four digital devices (including high-definition TVs) and spend 60 hours a week consuming media across them collectively.
“The number of digital devices and platforms available to today’s consumers has exploded in recent years. As a result, today’s consumer is more connected than ever, with more access to and deeper engagement with content and brands,” stated a Nielsen blog post today on its Digital Consumer report....
We live in the world where online shopping has become a new way for us to purchase items from electronics to books, travel coupons to cookware and clothes to beauty products. Online shopping has basically changed the way we live and has made life much simpler and convenient. It is a fact that most of the internet users have made at least one online purchase and this is enough to stress on the popularity of this phenomenon...
Much of what we believe about Big Data is wrong, which will be demonstrated in 2014.
For many enterprises, Big Data remains a nebulous goal, rather than a current reality. Yet it's a goal that more and more enterprises are pushing to the top of their priority list. As Gartner surveys have shown, everyone is keen to board the Big Data bandwagon, yet a comparative few really understand why. And as Gartner analyst Svetlana Sicular points out, the myths that hold back Big Data adoption vary depending on where along the adoption curve an enterprise happens to be.In 2014, many of the sillier Big Data myths will crumble to be replaced by increased experience with data-driven applications...
It’s certainly been awhile since my promise to post a social media statistics update every month… but better late than never right? Here are 83 awesome statistics on Social Media Marketing, B2B, Enterprise, Small Business, Blogging, Mobile, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest to start your 2014. STATISTICS! You love them, I love them, and here they are in all their glory...
...I think the folks at Harvard need to go back to school. I understand why they believe that data scientist will be "the sexiest job of the 21st century", but what I don't understand is the lack of applying basic business school fundamentals to the claim and then taking the next step. I realize that I'm a little late to criticize an article that's nearly a year old and I hope that people will cut me a little slack given that it was just brought up again in these pages a few weeks ago (which was the first time I saw it).
Right around the same time, the HBR article was published, I wrote an article that also foretold of the rising power of Big Data professionals, but where HBR saw "ability to code" as the prime differentiator, I saw insight and artistry as the prime radiants....
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Very useful for marketing and brand enhancement
Some really interesting statistics on how blogs are influencing consumer behaviour when it comes to buying choice.
Interesting information #blogging