Posts filed under 'Guest Columns'

Heart-Shaped Box

Drawing more eyes to your Valentine’s Day ads

If you’re like me, you probably wonder why the heart became the symbol of Valentine’s Day – and why it looks nothing like an actual heart. But fortunately for you this Valentine’s Day, your users don’t have to know any of that. They just have to know that hearts on the Yahoo! search page mean Valentine’s Day products.

For the Valentine’s Day season, Yahoo! is running a heart border around Valentine’s-related ads on the right side of our page. The hearts will show up on certain Valentine’s queries for gifts, candy, cards and, of course, Valentine’s Day itself.

We’re not just doing this just because it’s cute (even though it is). Our hope is that users searching for Valentine’s Day gifts will more easily spot the ads and see something they’re looking for.  If your ad shows up on the right side of the page, instead of the top, you may also get more exposure in that position than you would have before.

For more to help you capitalize on this big retail day, read our Valentine’s Day search marketing tips.

— Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Cross-Selling for the Holidays

Our “gift” of holiday advice may help you increase your sales

You may have heard once or twice that the holidays are the season of giving, but given the current market, you should probably rely a little less on consumers’ giving spirit and a little more on tactics that can give you an edge. Which is why — in the spirit of giving, of course — we wanted to share some cross-selling tips from Laurie Briggs of Yahoo! Small Business that any of our online retailers should be able to use.

Below you’ll see some of Laurie’s advice. For all of it, read the full article on the Yahoo! Store Blog. And watch this blog for a series of articles about beefing up your search marketing for the holidays.

Add-ons

If you sell products that require batteries or other accessories, add them as a cart cross-sell for those products. This way, once someone has made that first step towards purchasing, you can offer them a product that they’re going to need anyway — and they might as well buy it from you! In the case of batteries, even if they don’t need them for something they bought at your site, it may remind them that they didn’t buy batteries for a previous purchase at another store and baddabing! — you’ve just increased your order size by several dollars.

Product pairs

Last Christmas, it seemed like every kid who wanted a Hannah Montana doll also asked for a High School Musical doll (my four nieces with the same gift request has got to be a pattern!) but auto-suggestions can’t predict what new items will be hot together this year. For your newest items, go to a brick and mortar store and see how they are merchandising. Also, keep an eye on your first few orders — they will help you determine some dependable cross-sells that you can set up using cross-sell rules. Once your sales of these items are on a roll, you can opt to auto-suggest only.

Unique products

During the holidays, shoppers are looking for a range of gifts for a range of people. Shoppers also tend to be much more open to suggestions, unlike other times of the year when they tend to focus on a particular purchase. Think about it — how many relatives do you have to buy for? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get shopping done for multiple people at just one store? And for how many of them do you have no clue what to get? Shoppers are intent to buy, but not necessarily intent to buy one particular item, and the suggestions you give can be quite welcome to a shopper in a gift-giving conundrum.

— The Team

Search Marketing for the Big Event

3 tips to capture more impressions and clicks through hot happenings

Between the presidential elections, the Olympics in Beijing, and NASA Messenger’s second flyby past Mercury, 2008 is a year of big events. Search marketers should take note.

Why? Because whether you’re dealing with a nationwide political decision, an international sports event, or a hot dog eating contest, “big events” can drive serious search activity. And if your business has a reason to connect with those “big event” searchers—say, you’re a political publication covering the presidential campaign, a sports magazine with Olympics coverage, or a hot dog vendor—you can use that event-driven search to engage those searchers in a meaningful conversation.

Here are three hot tips on how to start talking about that big event:

1. Don’t forget to add the keyword
If you’re hoping to capitalize on a big event, your first course of action should be to remember to advertise in search for that event to begin with.

This sounds obvious. But I can’t tell you how many sports sites with dedicated Olympics sections, news sites with Election ’08 coverage, and science and nature magazines with NASA Messenger images have failed to advertise on crucial event keywords like “candidates 2008” or “mercury photos.” Those businesses have ended up hidden on relevant search terms—and they’ve missed out on a window of opportunity.

Don’t lose out on these opportunities. If you offer something of value to a sudden influx of searchers, let them know about it by advertising the appropriate keywords Yahoo! Sponsored Search.

2. Beware of ambiguous terms
Search terms like “presidential candidates 2008” are clearly event-related. But other terms are more ambiguous. “Cycling,” for example, could represent a search for an Olympic bike race, or it could be a search from someone who wants to buy a bicycle or is planning a long bike ride of her own.

Since big events are short-lived and capture popular interest, big event search marketers face a real challenge from ambiguous keywords such as these. That’s because big events can create sudden, diverging meanings for the same term. On the July 4th weekend, a search for “hot dogs” might be a search for the processed meat (as it usually is year-round); but it might also be a search for übereater Takeru Kobayashi, in anticipation of the annual Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. Confusion—and wasted search spend—can ensue.

As a rule, your attitude toward ambiguous keywords should be determined by your search budget. The less you have to spend, the warier you should be of ambiguous event terms. If you’re interested in scale, though, advertising on those ambiguous terms may be a worthwhile gamble. You might attract a lot of bike shoppers to your Olympics pages, but you’ll capture a lot more Olympic cycling enthusiasts, too.

3. Say it with creative
If you do decide to advertise on ambiguous search terms, your ad should let searchers know exactly what you offer—and, by implication, what you don’t offer. For example, if your site features Olympics coverage and you’re advertising on the keyword “cycling,” make sure that your ad copy explains that you feature Olympics scores, articles, and videos—and not sales on Schwinns. “See Olympic Cycling Photos” might be a better ad title than simply “Cycling,” or even “Men’s Cycling.”

If you use your ad copy to tell searchers exactly what you offer, feature or sell, you’ll get fewer of the wrong kinds of searchers—and more of the right ones—clicking on your ad.

Do you have your own strategies for running search campaigns around a big event? Post your comments below. Maybe I’ll talk about your suggestions at my next conference…and then, of course, you could advertise in Yahoo! Sponsored Search around the event.

— Abe Mezrich, Communications Manager, Didit

Photo courtesy of David All via Flickr and Creative Commons

Search Engines Are Like Your College Professor

How treating a web page like a research paper can help you in search listings

You should always keep your audience in mind when you’re writing landing page text. But what do you when you’re optimizing pages for search engines and your audience isn’t even human?

According to search engine optimization expert Jessica Bowman of SEM Inhouse, it may help to think of search engines as your college professor. Jessica recently gave a workshop at Yahoo! on search engine optimization, and she pointed out that search engines read your web pages an awful lot like professors read a college research paper.  Although you might normally read us for search advertising tips, we thought we’d pass along something that can help your performance in natural searches, too.

They’re alike? Really?
Before the comparison brings sweaty visions of the worst part of college to your head, it doesn’t mean your web copy should be 20 pages long. In fact, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that. But, Jessica says, professors are like search engines in that they have to read a lot of papers, which means they have to make some of their judgment calls by scanning. These are some of the elements that both look for:

• Title: Both of them need to know at a glance what the document is about.
• Headlines, emphasized words and lists: Anything called out with headlines, bold or italicized words, or bullets is likely to be important. Call headlines in your web copy out with tags like <H1>, <H2> and <H3>.
• Conclusion: A good conclusion restates the theme of the opening paragraph, which drives the argument home for your professor and confirms what your page is about for the search engine.
• Sources cited: Professors like to know that you researched the paper, and search engines like to see that you’re linked to other websites.

How to get on the bad sides of professors and search engines
There are a few of the things that both of them hate:

• Plagiarism: You know that little research paper-buying incident that got your frat brother thrown out junior  year? Turns out that search engines don’t like it when you steal other sites’ content either. And given that they’re searching the web, they might notice when 15 copies of something show up.
• Too many quotes: Original thinking is important. Just as you wouldn’t devote most of your research paper to huge quotation blocks, you don’t want to rely too heavily on syndicated content.
• Bad writing: Search engines are more liable to penalize your page in results when you stuff your copy with unrelated keywords, strand important content at the bottom of your page, and rely too much on headlines and lists.

Search engines and professors love…

• Verbosity: You probably realized this about your professor when you had to analyze three paragraphs in Dante’s Inferno for 15 pages.  In the search engine world, verbosity means substantial, relevant, wordy, full-length, original content.
• Reinforcing your stance: Just as professors like it when you repeat and back up your claims, you want your main concepts and keywords to be repeated throughout the page.
• Good writing: For a search engine that means variations on your keywords, including different endings. If only your professor’s definition had been that flexible.

—Jeff Sweat, Blog Editor

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Nic McPhee

The Top of the Page

How to Reach Today’s Demanding Searcher

News Flash: The expectations of search engine users are up. And their patience? Down!

But is this truly news to you? I doubt it. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that these measures have been trending this way for some time now.

However, what may be new info is that such user behavior and attitudes have important implications for marketers. Before we begin our discussion of how you can capitalize on what your users think and do, take a look at the findings from an April 2008 study conducted by JupiterResearch, as it illustrates these trends:

So what are the implications of these findings?

There’s an obvious need to optimize your Web pages and obtain links from credible, relevant sources to maximize the chance of your site to be found on the first few pages of search results. But there are also two other important implications.

Low-Hanging Fruit
First, by using and optimizing all of the assets in your digital library, such as images, videos, audio files and press releases, you can gain a competitive advantage. Seek out these assets within other areas of your company, and if they are appropriate to use, place them on your website and support them with other relevant content.

But don’t stop there. Take these same assets and find resource sites (e.g., YouTube) and social media sites (e.g., Facebook) to post and tag them, so that you can expose your brand to visitors of those sites who may otherwise have never visited your corporate website.

This step is especially important now that all of the major search engines show more than just text in their search results, in what we call “blended results.” Now, such digital assets—on your website or elsewhere—have the potential to supplant your competitors’ listings on the search results pages for your most important keywords. And performing these steps with all your digital assets in a holistic manner will help your brand to dominate the search results page.

Pay for Play
The second implication is that barring the ability for you to effectively compete with other organic (algorithmic) search results—either with your Web pages or the digital assets just discussed—implementing some new paid search strategies can help obtain a greater presence for your brand within top search results. The questions from the study were specific neither to organic nor paid search results, so search engine users are looking at both types of results prior to making their “click or re-launch” decision.

In organic search results you may be competing with competitors that have several years’ head start, thousands of pages of optimized content, thousands of incoming links, and thousands of digital assets that they’ve distributed all over the Internet. But paid search (like Yahoo! Sponsored Search), using compelling ads and strong calls to action, can be used as a great equalizer to overcome any advantages they have in the algorithmic results.

Clearly, users’ expectations continue to rise, and their patience continues to wane. Smart marketers will capitalize on these trends by showcasing their digital assets, and initiating paid search campaigns to help their companies into the first few pages of results.

— Robert J. Murray, President, iProspect

Robert J. Murray is president of search engine marketing firm iProspect in Watertown, Massachusetts, and can be reached at rob.murray@iprospect.com.

So Happy Together

5 ways to integrate pay-per-click search ads with online display ads

What kind of online advertising should you use: search or display? Well, if you want to drive targeted traffic to your site, build brand awareness and increase sales, you should be using both.

When you tie search ads, display ads and your landing pages together with a consistent message, the mixture can help your advertising resonate with users and drive site traffic and sales to a whole new level.

Here are five tips that you can use to integrate your Sponsored Search ads with display ads:

1. Know your target audience.
This one comes first, because knowing your target audience is the key to any form of Internet marketing. Before a penny is spent on advertising, you must ask yourself: Who do I want to target? What are their needs? Which words should I use in my ad copy to get them to click on my ad?

2. Determine the goals of Sponsored Search and banner ads.
The goals of both types of ads should ultimately be the same: attracting qualified traffic to your site. But the way each accomplishes this may differ. Generally speaking, pay-per-click ads are primarily used for generating leads and sales, and secondarily for increasing brand recognition. The majority of the time, banner ads lean toward branding and to support other search marketing strategies.

3. Write the search ads first and then expand.
When launching Sponsored Search ads and display ads at the same time, it’s generally easier to write the ad copy for the search ads first, and then use that theme to expand the banner campaign. Why? Because you’re working with a finite amount of space in the search ads. Once the search ad copy has been written, your graphic designer will have a better idea how to craft your banner ads.

4. Target your ads for the same places.
It can be very effective to get search ads and display ads displayed in the same general area of a site. For instance, if you operate a travel company in San Francisco and want to target tourists, you might launch a Sponsored Search campaign with Yahoo! Search Marketing, submit your website to Yahoo! Travel Submit, and purchase a banner ad in the Yahoo! Travel San Francisco-related section. This way, visitors can find your ads via search, read reviews in Yahoo! Travel, and see your banner ad on the same page, such as on this page.

5. Test, then test again.
With all online advertising campaigns, you should plot out your campaign at the beginning and test different ads and ad copy, offers or landing pages to achieve the highest return on your advertising investment. Be creative and don’t be afraid to try different things. Some ads that you think will be very effective might tank, while other ads you think will be worthless might take off!

– Nick Stamoulis, President of Brick Marketing and Blogger at Search Engine Optimization Journal and Pay Per Click Journal

Bullseye! photo courtesy of mfshadow via Flickr

Convert Your Clicks

Ten landing page tips to turn visitors into customers

There’s something about a ten-item list that makes us want to get all Hestonian on you and break out the archaic pronouns, especially when it comes to something like getting people who visit your site to actually buy from you. After all, you work hard to get clicks. What could be more important than turning those clicks into customers?

But we’re kind of a live-and-let-live bunch here, and we’re not so big on telling people what they have to do. So consider these a set of suggestions about how to help optimize your landing pages. That way, when people get to your site, they’ll be more likely to make a purchase.

1. Tell them why they should buy from you
According to Marketing Experiments Journal, “Clarity of your value proposition is the most important factor in determining whether a customer buys from you or not.” To evaluate your value proposition, ask yourself the question: “Why should I buy from this site?”

2. Keep ‘em with you
There’s no way you’re going to get a potential customer to the intended destination—the “sale completion” page—if the path to get there is overgrown with weeds or rife with dead ends. This is what Marketing Experiments Journal calls “site flow disruption”; the way to combat it is to express your value proposition throughout the shopping process in a consistent and compelling way.

3. Don’t try to say too much
Don’t clutter your landing page with unnecessary details. Instead:
• Clearly state your key message using as few words as possible
• Use summary descriptions, sub-headings, bulleted lists and short paragraphs
• Adopt a standard one-column format for easy reading.

4. Make it simple
Improve the user experience with a site that is easy to navigate. A simple page layout that employs a clean visual and straightforward design is best. Here’s how:
• Design your site with a clear hierarchy with color and contrast for easily legible text
• Use meaningful and high-quality graphics (don’t clutter with too many)
• Use breadcrumbs to let visitors know where they are on your site
• Employ a clickable logo that takes the visitor to your homepage
• Use color to distinguish between visited and unvisited links.

Just as important, make sure you don’t:
• Employ horizontal scrolling
• Direct links to new browser windows
• Have flash-based content unless required.

5. Call them to action
Focus on one primary action per screen (don’t stuff too many products onto one screen). Make the call-to-action button clearly visible without having to scroll; don’t bury it under pages of information. Consider using tabs or a pop-up box to consolidate information.

6. Get specific
Provide product details and a large product image while displaying incentives—such as free shipping and warranty information—high on the page and close to the product. Don’t discourage visitors by requiring registration to your site.

7. Flaunt what you’ve got
What differentiates you from your competitors? Free shipping (both ways?), discounts, a 365-day warranty, price protection, privacy, customer service, etc.? If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

8. Search yourself
Make your site easy to navigate by helping potential customers find what they are looking for as quickly and easily as possible. A search feature box should be simple and visible with a type-in field, not a link. To help increase conversions, make sure your search results link to product pages.

9. Rally the believers
Credibility is a true testament: people don’t buy from websites, people buy from people. Thus, testimonials from devout customers—or even a letter from the CEO/Editor—persuades the unbelieving.

10. Let them make the choice
“Why should I buy this specific product?” Almost every e-tailer forgets about this, but it’s the question that’s key to Mr. or Ms. Customer’s mind. Prove to him or her why they should buy this over the competitive product by offering reviews, ratings and comparisons.

– Amy Borowicz

The Three Biggest Mistakes in Search Marketing

Knowing What Not to Do is Important, Too

Editor’s Note: Here on the Yahoo! Search Marketing blog we usually like to “accentuate the positive,” as Johnny Mercer would say. But in search marketing, knowing what not to do can be just as vital as knowing what to do, especially when you’re just starting out. Veteran search marketer, Mike Moran author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. and Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules, offers us some useful tips on how to avoid some of SM’s biggest pitfalls.

Search marketing is becoming mainstream (as opposed to sidestream, I think), but I still find people drowning in that stream. They forget that search marketing is more about marketing than search, because the search technology piece seems so new and different. Woe to the search marketer who misses the marketing part—they’re likely to make one or more of these mistakes:

1: The Rank Amateur Error
Rookie search marketers often fixate on the rankings of their ads, thinking that getting a #1 position on an important keyword is the road to success. Now understand, being #1 usually beats being on page 17 of search results (unless you are targeting the obsessive-compulsive segment), but the days of even knowing your page’s ranking are coming to an end.

Search engines are personalizing more and more search results, so that different searchers get different results for the same keyword. If you focus only on rankings, soon you’ll wake up to find that only the search engines themselves know your rankings. Rather than slavishly reviewing your rankings, your time is better spent finding another metric that best captures the business value of your marketing efforts.

2: The Traffic Report Error
Well, if it’s not rankings, it must be traffic, right? After all, the purpose of search marketing is to drive traffic to your site. That’s true, of course, but the business value of search marketing stems from buyers, not lookers. For paid search, in fact, having more lookers with few buyers is the worst possible situation to be in, because you pay for every searcher who clicks, but you’re getting next-to-no sales to show for your investment.

Instead of studying traffic reports, focus on conversions—the sales that result from your search campaign, whether online or offline. Very often, search keywords that send heavy traffic to your site convert at low rates, while less popular keywords drive more revenue. Focus on the keywords that drive sales, not just traffic.

3: The 24/7 Sales Pitch Error
Some search marketers who avoid the first two errors still fall for the third, blanketing their web site with sales pitches without the proper background. Of course, it’s natural for you to emphasize information about your products, such as advanced features, special deals and capabilities that differentiate your wares from competitors’.

However, that information targets people who already know they need to buy something—folks who know that your product (or your competitor’s) solves their problem. What about the people who know they have a problem, but have no idea what to do about it? Do you have the kind of problem-solving content that those customers are looking for? If you do, figure that some of those people will appreciate the information and stick around to buy from you.

As you gain experience in search marketing, focusing on content across the entire buying cycle (including problem-oriented content for folks not ready to buy yet) will provide you with the widest net with which to snare searchers and turn them into customers. And you’ll be measuring just how many of them buy, instead of tracking only rankings or traffic. By avoiding these big three mistakes, you’ll be ready to make a few lesser mistakes—or maybe even get it right.

—Mike Moran is an IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM’s OmniFind search and analytics products

Going Social

Four Rules for Winning in Social Media

Editor’s Note: I heard Larry Bailin, author of Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From? speak on “Using social media to drive traffic to your blog” at BlogWorld Expo in Vegas a few weeks ago. I was impressed and asked him to pen a piece about how online advertisers can help build relationships with their customers and supplement their Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns using social media—not just blogs, but sites and tools like MyBlogLog, Flickr, del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook and so forth. He outdid himself, and came up with four immutable rules of relationship-building that apply even beyond media.

Being from New Jersey, it’s hard for me to associate the term “traffic” with anything positive. In fact, the word “traffic” sends the wrong message and is counterproductive to the thought process needed to succeed in social media.

If you are to truly succeed in the competitive social media landscape, you need to remove “driving traffic” from the top of your goals list and replace it with “driving customers.” In short, you need to stop measuring visits, and start measuring victories.

Offline business rules have always applied in the online space. It would be a safe bet that the social rules we all grew up with—the ones our loving parents (hopefully) drilled into our heads—would also apply when used in online social situations.

Social Rule No. 1: Choose Your Friends Wisely
It seems that building a large number of friends is the goal for most online socialites. The more friends you have the more popular you are. In an offline situation, a good example of this is high school. The less popular, nerdy types only had a few friends who happened to be other less-popular nerdy types with similar goals and interests.

By grouping together, sharing ideas and staying hyper-focused, this social solidarity seemed to always achieve levels of success later in life that most of us could only dream of (Bill Gates, for example).

The Take-Away: No, the first rule of social media is not “Don’t talk about social media.” Quite the opposite, in fact. But you will want to be picky about who you talk to and what to talk about. A smaller group of like-minded individuals allows you to spread your message through a more targeted audience. Large groups of broad targets and views will muddy the waters and stop you from achieving the results needed to succeed.

Social Rule No. 2: Remember the Golden Rule
“You get what you give” is a rule that has stood the test of time. You cannot expect people to do for you unless you do for them. If you are to make a mark on the social scene, you first have to do for others. You need to participate, comment, visit and support others if you expect them to do the same in return.

The Take-Away: By participating, you become part of the community. People start to recognize you and appreciate your efforts. These efforts will not go unrewarded. I started my blog [ConnectedCustomers.net] eight months ago. I spent the first six months visiting other blogs in the marketing category and commenting on them. I added some to my blog-roll and even sent personal messages to a few that I really liked. The result was that others responded in kind. Within eight months I developed a following of more than 15,000 readers.

Social Rule No. 3: If You Have Nothing Nice to Say, Don’t Say Anything at All.
This one is simple. Bashing and negativity runs rampant through the social scene. I’m not talking about negative comments—if you don’t agree with something, you should post your opinion.

Bashing someone is something totally different. If you are nasty or tend to post inappropriate negative comments all the time, it won’t be long before a community labels you a jackass and no one will take you seriously. Obviously, this is counter productive to your goals.

The Take-Away: Take the time to think through your comments and actions. Try to give constructive criticism as opposed to a negative view. Choose your words wisely, and it will showcase your expertise as opposed to your dark side.

Social Rule No. 4: If You Keep Doing that, You’ll Go Blind.
Whether it is a website, blog or MySpace page, put your users’ interests first. Lots of renegade code, widgets and advertisements will not only slow down your site, but may even crash a browser or two. Take the time to think about how every element will be seen and reacted to by your potential customer (which is what a visitor is). Will it have a positive or negative impact, and does it enhance or detract from your message?

The Take-Away: Take the visitor experience very seriously, because this is where the rubber meets the road. Make things that you want viewed easy to access. When a site is cumbersome to use, people will stop using it and they will become blind to your existence.

Wrap-Up
Following these rules can help you achieve higher levels of success and create your own personal set of rules to socialize by. But remember: Social media is a two-way street, and the oncoming traffic can either help you or kill you. The choice is yours.

—Larry Bailin, CEO, Single Throw and author of Mommy, Where Do Customers Come From?

Getting the Word (of Mouth) Out

Editor’s Note: Leveraging a recent Yahoo!-comScore study, Search Marketing’s Edwin Wong talks about using social media to develop advocates for your brand.

One recent evening my wife told me that she just spent $250 on a new digital camera. I replied, “Which Canon or Sony did you buy?” She laughed and replied, “I bought a Casio.”

Now, when I think “Casio,” it’s always in relation to college calculus—I still shiver. But I’m sure that many of you tech-savvy readers, like my wife, are saying, “Haven’t you read Ken Rockwell’s camera site? Casio’s picture quality is similar to some expensive DSLR cameras.” This user-generated blog spurred my wife to spend hundreds on a brand that barely registers on most digital camera awareness surveys.

The next morning, I spoke to my co-worker Sebastian about this incident, and it became clear to both of us: This is the inspiration for new research!

The Evolution of Word-of-Mouth
“Word-of-mouth” isn’t a new concept for any consumer. I’m sure we all have our favorite “trusted” friends/family on speed dial, ready to consult with right before that big ticket purchase. However, the Internet is causing word-of-mouth to evolve.

Research released recently by Yahoo! and comScore, titled “Engaging Advocates through Search and Social Media,” is the first study of its kind to look at how consumers use social media, search and communication tools like email, instant messaging and blogs to talk about the brands, products or categories about which they are passionate. The research focused on influencers and “thought leaders”, a population segment that marketers also call “loyalists,” “mavens,” “advocates” and other code names. This small group can usually take your brands to new heights because not only do they make purchases just for themselves, they also influence their social circles to do the same.

The study surveyed consumers who have recently purchased high-priced ticket items: consumer electronics over $300, a new or used auto, a new home loan or a hotel room.

What is an “Advocate?”
Brand advocates are adventurous opinion leaders and social influencers who are slightly younger, more educated and spend more time online than non-advocates. They represent more than 35% of the internet buying population across the four categories mentioned above.

We found that brand advocates start the shopping/research process by leveraging a larger number of resources than a typical consumer. This results in a broadening of the brands they consider for purchase. In fact, advocates are significantly more likely to seriously consider more than one brand for their auto and consumer electronic purchases.

This intensive research process gives marketers the opportunity to connect with advocates at multiple touch-points, and reinforce messaging that can ultimately lead to consideration—especially for higher ticket items.

Semper Fidelis
Despite having a larger consideration set, advocates are much more loyal to the brands they buy. We used two highly respected scales of loyalty to test this theory: Net Promoter and Burke SCI. In both scales, advocates were considered more loyal, which should lead to greater lifetime value for the brands they buy.

Additionally, more than half of all advocates speak to their friends, family and strangers through a variety of online channels post-purchase. Only 20% of other consumers do so. It makes sense, because 60% of advocates believe that good brands are worth talking about, versus 25% of non-advocates. Advocates spend their time promoting a brand more often than negating it, and approximately 90% will write something positive about a purchase they made.

This point may come as a surprise to many marketers. Most believe that if you hand over your brand to consumers, they will tear it apart with negativity. The study found the reverse to be true. Most importantly, advocates appear to be very persuasive influencers. They have at least a 2-to-1 rate of converting an actual friend or family member to make the exact same product or brand purchase. For consumer electronics, 21% of advocates had at least one friend purchase the same exact product, compared to 6% of non-advocates. Of course, some consumers actually influence more than one friend to buy.

A great example of a living, breathing brand advocate is 23-year-old Lynette, whom we met during our research. She’s fits the typical advocate profile perfectly—she’s friendly, connected and outspoken. Recently her mother handed her credit card over and asked Lynette to book ten airline tickets and hotel rooms for their annual family trip. She told us that her mom considers her the “trusted resource” for travel deals, and using her daughter takes all the work out of travel research.

Lynette is also a new 2006 Toyota Corolla owner, and has used a variety of online communications tools to tell friends about her new “ride.” As a result, she’s founded her own little Corolla club, as two of her best friends have recently purchased new Corollas—in different colors, of course.

Where do you find Brand Advocates?
Brand advocates are taking full advantage of social media tools and are also actively leveraging these channels to talk about their purchases. They are 119% more likely to use instant messenger when compared to non-advocates, and 40% more likely to use podcasts.

Brand advocates are also more active searchers, and, on average, conduct 25% more searches in a given month—an average of 48 searches per month, compared to 39 searches per month for non-advocates. In addition, 76% of advocates report that their use of search engines has increased from the previous year, compared to 64% of non-advocates.

Conclusions
This is much is clear from the research:

• Brand advocates are incredibly valuable to marketers because they are better connected consumers with a larger sphere of influence.
• As thought leaders, if you can reach them, they will influence a larger group.
• Advocates are avid researchers who consider more brands, and this makes them more open to dialogue with marketers.
• Post-purchase, they have higher levels of brand commitment, are more likely to recommend brands, and tend to talk about positive experiences.
• Advocates are opinion leaders who influence other people’s purchase decisions, telling at least twice as many people about their purchases than non-advocates.

So how can you engage and influence brand advocates? Search, social media (blogs, message boards, podcasts, etc.) and online communication tools are the paths you should take to capture this extremely valuable audience and amplify the influence of those favorable to your brand.

By the way, did you know that Casio makes a fantastic digital camera? Let me tell you about it…

— Edwin Wong, Senior Manager, Market Research

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