Search drives holiday shoppers, but Web 2.0 has changed the game. iCrossing's VP of corporate strategy explains how to retool a search campaign for holiday success.
It's that time of the year again. Yes, shoppers, start your engines, because the holiday season is about to begin. Too soon? Maybe so for all but the most intrepid consumers, but for major retailers and brands, the time to get ready for the busiest time of year is now, especially in light of several of the findings in the latest report in iCrossing's ongoing "How America Searches" series. Working again with research partner Opinion Research Corporation, we learned that consumers who shop on a monthly basis rose 30 percent since we last surveyed the online retail landscape in 2005, and more of them are spending between $500 and $1,000 per year (while fewer are spending less than $100). We'll have to wait a couple of months to see whether this translates into a more fervid holiday season, but the trends seem positive.
Beyond the obvious need to have the right inventory on hand and the ability to efficiently fulfill orders for online retailers, getting ready means being prepared for how, where and when consumers conduct their research and make their purchase decisions. Our research suggests that search engines continue to be shoppers' pathway to a broad range of product information as well as their primary means of finding retailers both online and off. We found an impressive jump in the percentage of shopping conducting searches around actual purchasing. Interest in finding an online retailer, for example, shot up from 54 percent in 2005 to 70 percent, while searches for offline stores where the purchase process could be completed rose from 43 percent to 56 percent.
This puts a premium on starting search engine optimization and paid media efforts well in advance of the season's most intensive shopping activity if brand and retailers want to take full advantage of opportunities to connect with in-market shoppers. For many retailers, this will be old news. However, we were surprised to find that some major brands still aren't taking advantage of synergy opportunities between paid and natural search. In plain English, that means they ranked in paid search for the retail- and gift-based keyword set against which we tested, but were absent in natural search for these same terms. Fortunately for the laggards, there's still time to make amends.
What makes this task more difficult (although arguably more rewarding) are the growing sophistication in online shoppers' research habits and the surprisingly broad set of influences on their purchasing decisions. As you might expect, prior experience with a company's products remains the most important factor, but we found social media and consumer-generated content sites emerging as places where consumers gravitate to obtain information about the products and services they are interested in buying.
Particularly eye-opening was the degree to which consumers appear to be listening to each other. Use of customer product reviews and evaluations to research online purchases jumped more than 20 percent from 2005 to 2007, with 41 percent of online shoppers saying they always or often consult consumer reviews before making a purchase decision, and 70 percent citing them as extremely or very important factors in their decision-making process. Consider also that 42 percent of all shoppers consider information about brands and products on sites like Wikipedia to be extremely or very influential on their online purchase decisions, while blog posts, videos on YouTube and brand profiles on social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook carry significant weight with those between the ages of 18 and 44.
As I've mentioned in several recent columns on the impact of social media, with more shoppers turning to emerging online research tools like shopping comparison sites, online image search and blogs, and with their attention consequently divided by multiple influences, developing and optimizing sites for a range of content – from product feeds to news, images, videos, local search and consumer-generated content – are vital tactics for achieving online visibility and engaging consumers. Done right, it is the proverbial, seasonally appropriate gift that keeps on giving. Sounds like all the makings for a rewarding holiday season, doesn't it?
Noah Elkin, Ph.D., is vice president of corporate strategy at iCrossing. Read full bio.
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