5 Steps for Brands to Meet the Needs of Social Shoppers

Earlier this week, Rosalina Lin-Allen, Delvinia’s Director of Client Strategy, hosted a complimentary webinar on the Canadian Social Shopper, sponsored by Tenzing.

Social networks have experienced explosive growth in the last few years. Today, social networking is the number one activity on the Internet, accounting for 23 per cent of user’s time spent online (source: Nielsen, September 2011). Consumers are using social networking sites and features in all aspects of their lives, including shopping.

Roz outlined the following five steps that retailers and brands can take to meet the needs of these social shoppers.

Step 1 – Listen

Understand how your target audience interacts with your category and brand on social media in their shopping process.

One example is to map out the customer journey and understand what the projected adoption will be. According to our survey in AskingCanadians™, 38.1 per cent of consumers follow or friended a brand on a social media page.

Step 2 – Define Strategy

Identify the sweet spot for your brand and category. Establish key performance indicators along the way. Taking Starbucks for example, they identified the most social component of their offerings – gift cards – and are selling them in the Facebook environment. Within that environment, consumers can select a Facebook friend and send them a gift card, which the recipient can redeem in store using the code that comes along with the card. Consumers can also include a personalized message. What Starbucks did well here was focusing on things that made sense in the social environment, complementing other customer touch points that they have.

Step 3 – Cultivate the Community

Before you can sell to consumers, you need to have a fan base and audience you can reach out to. While social commerce may be a couple of years away, start cultivating your community now.

Today, the top three reasons Canadian consumers engage with brands are to:

• learn about discounts and deals
• find out about the latest products and events
• get opinions/advice from other consumers.

It’s really about providing what they need balanced with what makes business sense. For example, deals and promotions should be used in a limited way. When overdone, it does not provide an upside to the business.

Step 4 – Experiment

Keep trying new things. We need to give credit to 1-800-Flowers for being the first one out on f-Commerce and for continuing to refine their f-Commerce model. While experimenting, get customer input. Social media is a forum for two-way dialogue and customers are expecting dialogue so tap into that knowledge base.

Step 5 – Measure

Measure against the key performance indicators you have set up. After all, you can’t improve upon what you can’t measure. Measure based on the sales funnel approach. When you look at the customer journey, you want to identify the trigger points where they will be using social media and keep them moving along the sales funnel. So research into engagement into conversion into advocacy and so forth.

Looking ahead

The future social shoppers are a lot more social network savvy than the mainstream consumers today. For example, 85 per cent of teenage girls use their friends and peers as a source of trend information and 45 per cent seek the opinion of those same groups when purchasing clothing or footwear (source: eMarketer, Nov 2010). And the average number of Facebook friends that average Canadians between 13-24 have is 330, that’s 50 per cent more than the average Canadian who has 225 friends (source: Facebook, June 2011). So as you can see they are a lot more active on social networks and their purchasing behaviour is very different and a lot more amplified by social network technology.

You can view the recorded Canadian Social Shopper webinar here.

Don’t miss the two other pre-recorded webinars from our three-part Canadian Shopper series:

Canadian Mobile Shopper Webinar: How retailers and brands should approach mobile shopping. WATCH NOW

Canadian Multichannel Shopper Webinar: How retailers or manufacturers should effectively engage their multichannel shoppers.  WATCH NOW

Sharing our Approach to Digital Metrics with the Next Generation of Leaders

Last week, I was invited to speak to MBA students on the topic of digital metrics, at my alma mater, the Schulich School of Business. This is the third year in a row that I have spoken to MBA students taking marketing courses.

Here are a few of the key takeaways from the presentation:

• The digital channel has great ability for measurement
• On the flip side of the coin, it is also really easy to get lost in the sea of data
• The key is to define metrics based on an understanding of your customers
• Finally, successful measurements are based on an integrated metrics grounded on an understanding of your customer and measured using financial indicators.

Using a technique like the digital customer journey, I demonstrated to the class how understanding your customers and the trigger points in the sales funnel—from product research through to conversion and advocacy—can help organizations maximize the power of the digital channel. Through understanding the customer and what triggers the customer, companies can then design the right experiences and measure the right things to enable better business decisions.

During the guest lecture, I also cautioned against the common errors, including:

• Action without clear objectives
• Measuring the wrong things (often due to a lack of clarity about customers’ digital behaviours and needs)
• Data without insights (due to siloed views or being lost in a sea of data)
• Insights without action
• Stopping at launch (rather than continuing the cycle of using the insights to further refine)

The discussion during the Q&A led me to believe that my message around understanding the customer as being core to digital strategy and measurement resonated with the group. I left the lecture hall feeling accomplished; having shared a smarter way to measure and make business decisions with the next generation of business leaders.

Webinar: Delvinia & Tenzing Present the Canadian Social Shopper

Join host Rosalina Lin-Allen, Delvinia’s Director of Client Strategy, at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, November 30 for a free webinar on the Canadian Social Shopper, sponsored by Tenzing.

Social networks have experienced explosive growth in the last few years. Today, social networking is the number one activity on the Internet,  accounting for 23 per cent of user’s time spent online (Nielsen, September 2011). Consumers are using social networking sites and features in all aspects of their lives, including shopping.

Join us on November 30th and learn about:

• How Canadian shoppers are using social networks in the shopping process.
• What expectations Canadian social shoppers have of retailers and brands.
• How innovative retailers and brands are engaging social shoppers.
• How retailers and brands can meet the needs of Canadian mobile shoppers.

REGISTER NOW.