Previously I posted about growing brand buzz organically. In addition to focusing on aspects such as product performance and customer service, it is important to leverage your brand website. Company websites are among the most trusted sources of information about a brand. According to a survey by Nielsen Online, 53% of consumers seek information about a product by researching information posted to a company website.
Consumer Generated Media (CGM) also emerges as an important component. 26% of consumers review Internet comments and ratings when researching products online, while 17% of individuals post specific questions to a forum to acquire information.
To get consumers buzzing about your brand website and encourage pass-along value, the site needs to be useful, relevant, current, dynamic and engaging. Here are a few items that any company should consider including:
- Updated regularly: Consumers are not going to share old news; make sure the content is timely and current. Answer consumer questions, offer advice, respond to threats and promote the benefits of your brand. Pay attention to what consumers search for or which pages on your site get the most traffic to inform the content you create.
- Solicit feedback: Encourage consumers to provide feedback directly to you. Prominently place “contact us” buttons throughout the site. The easier it is to find the feedback portion of the site, the more likely consumers will use it. Trends may emerge through feedback and can inform the content you post.
- Consumer testimonials: Embrace CGM by enabling consumers to post product reviews directly to your website. Consumers trust the opinion of their peers and this action lends credibility at the point of purchase.
- FAQ: You need to highlight your Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) tool; ensure consumers are one click away from the answer they are seeking.
- Site is searchable: Make every effort to ensure that consumers can easily find the answers to their questions. Add a search function so they can locate information quickly and easily.
- Pass-along enable everything: Make it easy for consumers to share information from your website. Any cool apps, videos, podcasts, games, etc. should be easily sharable.
Tags: buzz, cgm, website
This week, Brandweek (also owned by The Nielsen Company) published an article on a topic near and dear to my heart. “Why Pharma Fears Social Networking” by Jim Edwards provides a good overview of the challenges and opportunities that Pharmaceutical companies face when thinking about “listening” to consumers in this new era of social media and user-generated content. It includes thoughts from a number of leading pharma PR and advertising agencies, and references research we released in early September. We agree that the prospect of venturing into this territory isn’t easy and that there are considerations unique to the pharma industry that require careful planning and consultation with legal and other regulatory departments. But like Joe Natale, VP, New Media at Johnson & Johnson, we think it will be “well worth it.”
Tags: brandweek, cgm, pharma
At Nielsen Online, we see copious examples of how people are using the Internet to look for healthcare information and to inform their decisions and choices. We wanted to learn more, and in Q2 of this year we conducted an online survey with 1,022 respondents to find out what resources consumers use and trust - both online and offline - as they look for information as part of their healthcare decision-making process. I recently conducted a webinar on this topic (download the full presentation here), but wanted to share an overview of our findings on “Connecting the Dots” as well.
- Doctors and other healthcare professionals remain in the lead when it comes to a resource that consumers would use and trust for healthcare information and this is true across all of the segments we looked at.
- Online resources come in a strong second place - consumers especially trust websites with professionally written content, like the American Diabetes Association website or the content areas of WebMD or Revolution Health. We have entered an era of collaborative healthcare - patients want to play an active role in their treatment decisions - and the ubiquity and 24-hour availability of the Internet is clearly making it a resource that people want to use as part of their healthcare information-gathering and decision-making process.
- When patients and caregivers look online for healthcare information, they are most likely to go directly to sites they know. Pharma/healthcare marketers need to promote their brand and website address across all communication channels to make sure that patients know where to look for this information when they are ready for it.
- People who are frequently involved in social networking (every day or a few times a week) are more active than the average respondent in seeking healthcare information across all different media types. Not only are these frequent social networkers more likely than the average respondent to consult online resources, as we would expect, they are also more likely to turn to family/friends, and even traditional print channels such as newspapers, magazines and books. This is a group of people with intense information-gathering tendencies - they are important to pharma/healthcare marketers because they can be reached through multiple information channels and, in turn, they have the power to influence others through the amplification of their voices in the online/social media environment.
- We also identified a segment of individuals who are Ad Unaware - unable to identify the correct treatment area for some of the top-advertised brands in the world. This group is important for pharma/healthcare marketers because they are not currently being reached through traditional DTC advertising channels. Interestingly, this group seems more open to pharmaceutical companies’ websites than the average respondent. This group is also significantly more likely to participate in social networking than the average respondent. By leveraging some social media/Web 2.0 tools on their own brand websites, pharmaceutical companies may be able to bring this unaware population into the fold.
The Frequent Social Networkers and the Ad Unaware are of special interest to me - I didn’t expect to see some of the behaviors that came through in their survey results. Watch for some additional insights on these groups to be posted in this space in the coming weeks.
Tags: cgm, healthcare, pharma
Attention marketers and brands. Did your idea generate major buzz? Nielsen Online is partnering with Adweek Media (a unit of The Nielsen Company) on this year’s Buzz Awards to celebrate innovative promotions, campaigns that caught fire and concepts that went from video to viral. Don’t let your efforts go unrecognized.
The deadline for submissions is August 18th, so enter your campaigns here. We’ll award prizes across seventeen categories, ranging from viral marketing, radio and print to wireless promotion, public relations and social media. The Grand Prize winner snags a spread 4/c ad in Adweek, Brandweek and Mediaweek profiling the winning effort (valued at $64,100). Enter the 2008 Buzz Awards today.
Tags: adweek, buzz, cgm
I recently sat down with Steve McClellan at Adweek to discuss my new book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000.” Check out the video interview here, where I discuss the importance of consumer loyalty to a brand’s strategy and how maintaining a brand’s credibility and listening closely to consumers can foster that loyalty. (Disclosure: Adweek’s parent, The Nielsen Company, is also the parent of Nielsen Online.)
Tags: cgm, customer satisfaction, Pete Blackshaw
