Digital CPG Blog

Visitors to CPG brand Web sites buy 37% more in retail stores than non-visitors to the brand sites. That’s according to a new study from Accenture, comScore and dunnhumbyUSA, which attempts to shed light on the link between marketers’ on- and offline efforts.

“CPG marketers currently invest millions of dollars in their brand Web sites …,” said comScore Vice President Mike Zeman. “Brand Web sites can attract and influence the behavior of the most valuable segments of any brand’s franchise.”

For maximum impact, brands should update their online content regularly, making sure it contains value messaging that engages consumers while providing compelling reasons to purchase products at retail.

The study found that visitors to CPG brand Web sites are valuable and frequent buyers of the brand in retail stores — completing 41% more transactions than non-visitors. As a result, brand Web sites are able to attract heavier-than-average brand buyers.

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Forget Facebook. What are you doing on your brand site to engage visitors?

Social media agency Ignite has taken a closer look at Pinterest’s demographic data and compiled a profile of ‘those who pin’.

comScore says that the blossoming social curation site has over 4m registered users and is growing rapidly, while Google Ad Planner shows that nearly 1.5m people visit Pinterest every day – spending 14 minutes on the site on average.

Google Ad planner shows that users are:

• Largely women (a 80% to 20% ratio). So there’s some truth to Matt Buchanan’s post on Gizmodo yesterday that proclaims Pinterest as “a Tumblr for ladies”.
• Aged mainly between 25 and 44 (accounting for 55% of the group, 30% are 25-34, 25% are 35 – 44)
• Just 25% of users have a bachelors degree or higher
• The majority live off a household income of $25-75k

Experian Hitwise stats from December 2011 show that in the US at least, alongside the demographics, Pinterest users fall into three of its Mosaic lifestyle segments.

• Boomers and Boomerangs – the baby boomer adults and the teenagers/young adults who live with them. This accounts for more than 10% of Pinterest visits, in which they might pin travel plans and imagery related to their online habits. They also live in older houses so might be tempted by DIY and home improvement content.
• Babies and Bliss – the parents of large families (with five or more in their houses), and in their 30s and 40s. Mothers in this group tend to work full time and pride themselves on being computer literate. This group are ‘power shoppers with upscale tastes’ and value deals on high-quality products. They tend to pin things related to convenience, and so relate to brands that provide good online experiences, discounts and make lives easier.
• Families Matter Most – this group includes young middle-class families with active lifestyles who are interested in things that allow them to juggle work and parenting effectively. This group is not interested in window-shopping however, like the Babies & Bliss group, it’s more likely to pin useful, practical things like easy recipes, child friendly activities and healthy living.

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Marketers have long assumed content shared by friends or other influencers carries more weight than paid placements. Now GE has some proof:

People exposed via sharing had a significantly bigger lift in positive attitudes toward GE — associating the brand with such things as creativity and innovation — than people exposed via paid placements.

Overall, the “brand lift,” which measured the extent to which consumers said they saw GE as “creative,” was 138% higher for consumers exposed to via sharing through Buzzfeed than those who didn’t see it at all. Specifically, 17% of people found GE creative after viewing the content via sharing vs. only 7% of people who made that connection without having seen the advertising at all.

Consumers exposed via sharing were also 83% more likely to rate GE “creative” than those exposed to the content via paid advertising on Buzzfeed.

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Have you experienced shared content is better than paid advertisements? Has your brand experimented with this type of inventory?

Only about 30% of marketing executives feel like they know what’s going on in their content marketing department (evidenced by the Disagree slices in the pies above). That means 70% have no clue or are unsure about how to effectively apply digital tools to help their company grow, and lack a disciplined process for digital lead generation.

Given that every company is a media company nowadays, I’m surprised there’s so much uncertatinty in this area. Maybe we should remember, content doesn’t have to equal blogs or in-depth campaigns. It can be much simpler, and should start with a content inventory on your site.

Does your CPG brand know where it’s content is?

Businesses are beginning to get in on the Pinterest action, according to AdAge (via), including companies like Time Inc, Nordstrom, Etsy and Land’s End.

But, what’s the appeal? Several factors come into play:

• Traffic. Time Inc’s Real Simple magazine site saw more traffic from Pinterest last October than it did from Facebook.
• Purchases. Brands are counting on Pinterest’s ability to influence purchase decisions. During the holidays Land’s End even kicked off a contest focused on the site called “Pin it to Win it.”
• Engagement. Nordstrom, which created a Pinterest page last March, uses the site as a way to learn about the community and engage with customers.

Pinterest currently has no formal policy regarding business involvement on the site, though it does decry blatant self-promotion. As with the early, pre-business page days of Google+, brands are finding ways to take advantage of what the site has to offer and connect with a well-defined user demographic (Women between the ages of 25 and 44, which comprise 59% of its readership, cites Mashable.).

A post at Read Write Web – How Businesses Are Using Pinterest – lists three ideas for brands considering establishing a presence on the site:

1. Share ideas on how to use a company’s products. Whole Foods is doing this by creating “food porn” inboards that encourage use of its products.
2. Host contests. RWW said Land’s End contest resulted in 10 Pinterest users receiving $250 gift cards for creating “inboards” of their favorite Land’s End products.
3. Make products accessible. Users are posting images of their dream product – perfect last meal, over-the-top wedding or dream vacation – and companies are responding with images of their own.

Have you seen other successful company strategies on Pinterest?

It’s been awhile since we featured an infographic. Here’s one on social media based on AdAge data:

• Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and comments by 70%
• B2C Facebook results go up by 30% on Sundays
• 34% of marketers have generated leads using Twitter and 20% have closed deals using Twitter
• 55% of people access Twitter via their mobiles
• 40% of bloggers consider themselves professionals
• 56% of college students said that if they were offered a job by a company that banned social media use, they’d turn it down

From start-up entrepreneur and marketer Neil Patel, here are our favorite lessons from Fortune 500 companies about blogging:

Lesson #1: Let Your Audience Think for You

1. Ask for ideas in a blog post – you write a post where you share an idea you think you’d like to pursue [Think Starbucks and their crowdsourced blogs]. You then ask your readers to tell you what they think. You could also use this tactic to ask your readers what they would like to get as content from you in the coming year. 2012 is just around the corner…so why not give this idea a shot?
2. Create a separate platform for idea creation – My Starbucks Idea is really a huge forum that is open to the public. You can read any posts you want, but you have to be a member to comment and add posts. Forums for private members is really a great way to up the engagement of your audience. However, make sure you test this idea. I did and found that it didn’t work out too well. But you never know… it may work for you.

Lesson #2: Niche Blogs to Build Brand Awareness

When you think about General Electric (GE), what immediately comes to mind? If you are like most people you probably said “light bulbs.”

But GE is so much more than that. That’s why they launched a line of blogs to break the public view that all they do is light bulbs.

Here is what they offer:

• Txchnologist – this online magazine is about all things technology. From how climate has affected the way baseballs are made to self-healing electronics. Pretty much things that GE has its hand in.
• Data Visualization – GE takes all the really complicated yet useful data behind science and technology and creates easy-to-understand infographics.
• Ecomagination – this is the blog for the environmentally-minded GE customer, demonstrating their concern for the environment and how they are tackling the latest issues.
• GE Reports – great daily, detailed stories and reports on issues like the Top Five Technology Challenges Tackled by GE in 2011 and The Unsung Hero of the Maternity Ward Helps Deliver Baby No. 35 Million
• Healthymagination – this blog is dedicated to showing how GE is helping people live longer and healthier lives, for example, by providing top-notch cancer treatment and AIDS/HIV cures.
• The GE Show – this series of videos deals with topics like the future of flight and airplanes, railroads and solar energy, industries that GE creates products for.

Lesson #3: Never abandon your blog for Facebook

• You can’t fully brand your Fan Page experience –you can customize certain aspects about your Fan Page, but you won’t have control over such things as color, logos and messages.
• Facebook notes suck compared to blog posts – there is no comparison between the two. Besides, Facebook Notes hardly get read, right?
• They own the content – of course you could download the content if you wanted to, but why go through the hassle when you can publish the content on your site?
• Lack of SEO – inside Facebook it’s tough to control meta tags connected to photos, videos, updates and notes. On the other hand, you can easily optimize your blog. SEO on your blog will help you control your content’s ranking, bringing you greater visibility unlike Facebook.

Facebook is great for deepening your engagement with your readers, but it should never replace blogging. Ever!

Read more here. Blogging is still one of the most powerful corporate communication tools in my opinion. Other platforms will evolve, but blogging will continue to evolve as well.

Spice company McCormick introduced two social media applications on Facebook in December in order to inject itself into as many online conversations as possible. The Merry Merry Menu Planner lets users post menus that friends and family can comment and vote on; the Big Cookie Share provides tools for creating custom digital cookies, which can be sent to Facebook friends with messages.

“At a time when laptops and tablets rival spatulas as the most-used kitchen tool,” the company says in its release, “we are offering our fans new ways to share the holiday spirit and create memorable taste experiences — whether they’re putting the holiday menu up for a vote or frosting Facebook cookies for faraway family members.”

I like both of these applications, and would love to see what the results of their campaign. It looks like in December they had 9100 fans (see screenshot above), but if you visit their Facebook page now, they have nearly 280,000! Quite the increase if most of it came from their new initiatives.

Talent.

Finding staff with suitable digital skills topped the list in a recent survey by E-Consultancy.

We asked participants in the survey about the specific skill areas that they perceived to be the most difficult to recruit for.

Web analytics and data topped the list, followed by social media, and content marketing, indicating that there is already a potential skills shortage in these areas.

When respondents were asked which digital marketing disciplines they anticipated would be the key areas of growth in the coming year, the top answers were social media, content marketing, and web analytics and data.

The fact that those areas of predicted growth in resourcing were the same as those that are already listed as being the most difficult to recruit for means one thing: a looming talent time bomb.

In May this year McKinsey released a report (Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity) that brought sharp focus to this talent crisis in one key area: data.

The exponential growth in data it said,  driven by a growth in data-rich and real-time environments such as social and mobile, embedded internet (the so-called ‘internet of things’) and the increasing focus on analytics and owned media, will mean that the capability of analysing large data sets will become “a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus”.

…

Not far further down the list of areas that are challenging for companies to recruit for came web design and build. This was also notable in being identified as the most challenging area in which to retain staff.

And this doesn’t look like a problem that is going away anytime soon. A campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills and coding is gathering momentum, supported by large technology companies including Google and Microsoft.

What is your company doing to retain top talent in the digital space?

We talked about UGC (user generated content) earlier this week… so just how powerful is it?

Well, the potential for content monetization on UGC is stupendous. Starting with revenue estimates, Twitter made $45 million, followed by LinkedIn at $243 million, MySpace at $288 million and YouTube made $945 million in 2010. If you are wondering why Facebook was left out, well, it is because the figures for Facebook need their own line! Ladies and gentlemen, we learn from Facebook who made a whopping $1.860 BILLION in 2010.

All this makes one wonder if users should own their content. Where would social media sites stand then, if they can’t monetize on UGC?

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