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â–¶ Customers Trust Consumers’ Reviews: Consumer reviewers trump professional reviewers as the key purchase influencers, according to the just released “Buy It, Try It, Rate It” study from Weber Shandwick.
The study shows that the majority (65%) of potential consumer electronics purchasers are inspired by a consumer review to select a brand that had not been in their original consideration set. Other study highlights include:
• Consumers navigate a maze of information. Buyers invest deliberate effort into making a well-informed decision—conducting multiple activities to gather opinions, reading an average of 11 consumer reviews, evaluating review authenticity and even demonstrating tolerance for negative reviews.
• Nearly nine in 10 consumers (88%) say they are somewhat or very knowledgeable about consumer electronics, yet still consult reviews, consumer and/or professional (60% and 52%, respectively), when looking to make a purchase.
• Consumer reviews trump professional reviews. Consumers report that they pay more attention to consumer reviews (77%) than professional critic reviews (23%). The gap between consumer and professional reviews closes noticeably, but not entirely, for more advanced technologies like tablets and computers.
Source: Weber Shandwick
â–¶ SMB Advertisers Add Social to Communications Mix: While close to one quarter (20.5%) of small businesses plan to increase their ad spend on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, most SMBs have not yet adopted methods like promoted postings, sponsored tweets and social games/contests, according to the latest Small Business Marketing Forecast by Ad-ology Research. Other findings include:
• More than half of small business advertisers say they market to their customers on a 1-to-1 basis. It stands to reason then that direct response and email marketing will take the bulk of many small-business budgets in 2013.
• Of the small businesses that use email marketing, many are using it heavily—19.1% sent out email messages 11 times or more in the past 12 months, and 9.1% have sent out 26 or more emails over the past year.
• Optimizing their sites for search engines is a priority, with 20.5% planning for this activity in 2013.
• Although most small businesses do not currently take advantage of online/mobile video, 12.2% indicate they plan to spend more money and/or time on the medium in 2013. PRN
Source: Ad-ology Research
â–¶ Public Confused with Social Monetization: A survey from Harris Interactive on behalf of The Search Agency finds that large numbers of people in the U.S. don’t really understand how Facebook and Google make money.
The study asks 2,000 adults whether agreed with the question, “I understand how Facebook makes money.” A slight majority (54%) say that they strongly or somewhat agree. On the flip side, 46% essentially do not understand. Other findings include:
• When it comes to search engine revenues, people do better. Just over three-fourths (78%) understand that search engines made money through advertising “that runs with search results.”
• A striking 36% of respondents think that search engines “sell users’ personal data to marketers.”
Another 29% think that “companies pay annual dues for use.”
• Finally, 20% believe that users pay search engines for “premium features.”
The lesson here? While the U.S. public may not understand social media monetization, what’s important to communicators is that they populate social platforms and are actively engaged. PRN
Source: The Search Agency/Harris
Interactive