Post on 08-May-2015
description
HOW CAN WE MAINTAIN OUR CURRENT ONLINE COMMUNITY ETHOS WHILE CREATING MORE WAYS
TO SELL PRODUCTS?
Monetizing Online Community
BE THE GRATEFUL DEAD,NOT METALLICA
Our focus should not be one-off customers, but loyal long-
term relationships.
Recognise Online Buying Behaviour
In order to sell effectively online it is vital to recognise the buying behaviour of online users. Most users do not opt-in to buy until several trips to
a website. The top selling websites provide unique reinforcing
messages each visit. And without sufficient trust users will not complete
a purchase.
The Influence of Peer Opinions
91% say consumer content is the #1 aid to a buying decision (JC Williams Group)
87% trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic (Marketing Sherpa)
Social network users are 3x more likely to trust peer opinions over advertising when making purchase decisions (Jupiter Research)
Understand Decision Making
Too many choices overwhelm us. Consumers care most about safety and
reliability. Most good decisions will follow these steps: Figure out the goal(s). Evaluate the importance of each goal. Array the options. Evaluate the potential for each option to fulfil a goal. Pick the winning option. Later evaluate the consequences of the choice for future
possibilities.
Create Your Own Look
Become a popular stylist and win a prize.
Enhance Product Interaction
The Objective
An online community is the perfect environment to cultivate trust through long-term relationships and sell more products.
Enable our most vocal fans to become our word of mouth advocates.
Empower customers to co-create the sale. By putting customers first it is possible to innovate
faster and stay relevant.
Astor & Black Facebook Promotion
Fans are able to create their own suit combinations through an interactive tool on Facebook.
Fans share the suit combinations with their friends.
The fan with the most likes receives a free suit.
The authors of Wikinomics, describe prosumption as a non-passive consumer who wants to participate in the creation of products
and services.
"I never thought I'd use my computer coding skills to build something like this. But the response from our "beta" testers has been off the charts."
The Solution
Revenue generators to be introduced: Enhanced user experience integrating shop with
community. Create wishlist allowing users to bookmark products. Personal, custom merchandising. Retain purchase history and credit card information
for quick impulse purchases.
Investing in our Community Members
We need to empower our community members to take a more proactive role
By encouraging more members to get involved by editing content and managing threads it will be possible to ensure a higher level of user generated content. This content will be of higher quality and able to be
distributed in more places within the online platform and externally.
Enlist True Fans to Develop New Products
The first way that LEGO turned to fans to help strengthen the company and their product was through the LEGO Ambassador Program.
The Ambassador program is made up of forty LEGO fans, aged 19 to 65, from around the world. LEGO has built personal relationships with these fans and turn to them for ideas and advice.
Peer Influence Analysis
•Engaged people generate 500Bdigital influence impressions on each other about products and services every year.
•Influence is highly concentrated — 16% of the people generate 80% of the influence.
Peer Influence Analysis identifies & analyses these mass influencers by
industry.
Persona Creation
Metrics need to be compiled to create the personas to create new features, build enhancements and digital products by the departments responsible for reporting on: online traffic, customer service, and the current state of the online platform.
Who creates our personas? Online Marketing QA Customer Service Online Community Manager
Benefits
Focusing on our community to generate sales our business strategy can revolve on what we do best- create the best products and services, and other benefits include: Less reliance on traffic generating promotions. Spend more time focused on our existing online
customers. Ability to curate high quality user generated content.
Brands of Prosumption
JOIN THE LEGIONS OF CUSTOMISED DIGITAL EXPERIENCES.
Threadless
Converse
BMW
Blurb
STA
DK
WHAT IS ON THE HORIZON? WHO’S COMING UP BEHIND YOU?
The Future of Online Community
What can we learn from Blockbuster?
Although Blockbuster began a rentals-by-mail and streaming service belatedly in order to fight against competitors like Netflix, they didn’t come on strong enough or soon enough.
Blockbuster filed for Bankruptcy & put itself on sale for $290 million.
Borrow Yelp’s Advertising Model
Businesses may advertise with Yelp for preferred search result placement and extra listing features.
For the advertising fee, the business may include an individualized message and photo slide show onto the web page for its listing as well as receive reports on listing traffic.
Additionally, these advertisers, called "Sponsors" on the site, are allowed to highlight a specific review and communicate with reviewers.
Additional Resources & Reading
The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More (B. Schwartz)
The Cluetrain Manifesto (R. Levine, C. Locke, D. Searls, D. Weinberger)
Groundswell (C. Li, J. Bernoff) The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping people in
mind throughout product design (J. Pruitt, T. Adlin)
Cultivating Communities of Practice (E. Wenger, R. McDermott, W. Snyder)
Diving into LEGO's Strategy Behind Connecting Their Amazing Network of Fans -- presented by Jake
McKee
EconAffinity: The Winning Balance Between Original, Syndicated and User-Generated
Content