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Recession Changes Shopping, Brand Perception

The ongoing economic recession has changed how consumers shop for and perceive food and CPG brands, according to a new study from Deloitte.

Caution will Outlast Recession

Statistics from the “2010 Great American Pantry Study” indicate that even when the current recession finally ends, US consumers plan to maintain the more cautious and bargain-oriented shopping habits they have developed during the past few years.

For example, 93% of consumers expect to continue spending cautiously even when the economy improves, and 92% have made some kind of change in their food and CPG-related shopping habits. Another 89% feel they have become more resourceful because of the economy, while 84% have become a lot more precise in what they buy.

Some key findings include;

Loyalty Cards, Coupons Gain Favour
In response to the recession, consumers are increasingly using loyalty cards and coupons, to save money. Eighty-one percent of consumers say it’s fun to see how much they can save using a loyalty card or coupon, while 65% say loyalty cards are an “essential/very important” money saving method.

Store Brands Gain Acceptance
Other results of the study show store brands gaining clear acceptance from a large majority of consumers. For example, 80% of consumers believe most store brands are manufactured by traditional national brands, and 74% are more open to trying private labelled store brands than they were two years ago.

Though not necessarily reflective of all industries and markets, Enform believes that there are strong potential indicatives here for all brands and brand managers. For example, there is a clear consumer mandate for the importance of loyalty programs in not just delivering savings but also providing a “game” to encourage regular buying and loyalty.

This would be relevant both at retail and distributor levels suggesting tighter brand engagement might deliver higher sales. The other finding could be seen as a double-edged sword as “home-brand” options become more attractive and credible however this also presents opportunities to separate national brand values from “home-brand” commodity perception.

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Women are More Social Even on the Internet

According to a recent study by comScore, 75.8% of women across the globe have visited a social networking site in the month of May, 2010. That should be around 3 billion people taken from the estimated 7 billion people now living on this planet. This accounts for 47.9% of the overall unique visitors, consuming 57% of pages, and around 57% of total time spent on social network sites.


Men on the other hand are behind with 69.7% saying they have visited a social networking site on the same time period. Women also spend longer hours on social networks clocking in 5.5 hours each month on average compared to the 3.9 hours for men.

Continent wise, around 94.1% of Latin American women do social networking compared to the 91.9% of their men leading all continents. North America then follows with 91% and 87.5% social network reach for women and men respectively.

85.6% of European women and 80.6% of their men have visited these sites while Asians only contributed 54.9% of women and 50.7% of respectively. Analysts say that the poor representation coming from the Asia Pacific region is largely due to the low access to broadband connection.

On another note, homosexuals and heterosexuals appears to have a rather significant gap in social networking activity in the United States with 55% of homosexuals saying they have visited a social networking site daily while only 41% of heterosexuals report the same.

Enform believes that this sort of segmenting is valuable for exporters and marketers in general allowing for appropriate adjustments basing on the demographics of your target market. However, the average number of hours committed to social media might be a wake-up call overall for some.

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Top 10 Social Networking Sites as of June 2010

Still going strong as the world’s leading social site, Facebook continues to grab the largest chunk of social media traffic at 54.96%, a 38.19% lead over YouTube’s 16.77% share. That’s an estimated 150 million unique visitors from across the world each month making it the second most visited website in the US, second only to Google while edging out Yahoo – the second most visited site in the web for the last 2 years until now.

Third comes MySpace with 11.54%. That’s around 60 million unique visits from the US alone.

The rest of the sites that make it on the list barely have 1% share starting with Twitter, Tagged, Yahoo! Answers, myYearbook, Windows Live Home, Mocoscape and MyLife ending the list with 0.32% traffic share.

In terms of demographics, the US leads in social networking visits (excluding data from India and China) while Australia holds the record for the average time spent on these sites – although it only ranks 9th in the total number of social network visits each month.

These statistics are just numbers if not interpreted correctly. However, if you’re concern about reaching out to your audience directly through these mediums, Enform suggests a coordinated strategy of engagement but only after working out some clear goals.

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Google – Still the Search Engine to Beat

More than 20 billion searches are done worldwide each month. According to the June 2010 rankings done by ComScore, 16.4 billion searches have been done in the US alone and 62.6% of this number went to Google.

Google’s “closest” competitors, Yahoo and Microsoft, managed a modest increase of 0.6% with 18.9% and 12.7% respectively. Ask stayed firm at 3.6% and AOL dipped very slightly with 2.2% compared to its 2.3% share of the previous month.

comScore Core Search Report*
June 2010 vs. May 2010
Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations
Source: comScore qSearch
Core Search Entity Share of Searches (%)
May-10 Jun-10 Point Change Jun-10 vs. May-10
Total Core Search 100.0% 100.0% N/A
Google Sites 63.7% 62.6% -1.1
Yahoo! Sites 18.3% 18.9% 0.6
Microsoft Sites 12.1% 12.7% 0.6
Ask Network 3.6% 3.6% 0.0
AOL LLC Network 2.3% 2.2% -0.1

Although Google is still leaps ahead of the pack, it should be noted that Microsoft’s league of search sites, MSN, Windows Live, and Bing, have been on a roll for nearly a year now growing 50% compared with its share in searches on the same month of last year.

An even more interesting fact is that Microsoft’s bigger piece of the pie came at the expense of its now “search ally” Yahoo since Google’s market share only budged 1.7% on the same period. If the trend continues, Microsoft could eat up Yahoo’s share in the coming years although what remains to be seen is how it could take a greater share from Google. This should be one of the more interesting things to watch in the coming years.

For now, since Google’s in control, Enform believes its best to continue to focus most internet marketing efforts in pleasing the internet’s clear search leader. This means carefully following its set guidelines in increasing search rankings while taking advantage of their paid advertising mediums if needed. However, marketers must keep in mind that Microsoft and Yahoo’s tag team is just around the corner and need to be considered.

Source: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/7/comScore_Releases_June_2010_U.S._Search_Engine_Rankings/%28language%29/eng-US

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Growing Trend of Going Digital Continues to Exceed Expectations

There is no denying “digitalization”. We are now at an age where the movement from traditional mediums – the likes of print, radio, and even analog television – to the digital domain is inevitable. The official report released by Price Waterhouse Coopers showing the continued decline of revenues generated by traditional media further establishes such.

According to the firm’s report, the 2009 revenues of traditional media didn’t just go down as expected, it even went beyond their initial negative earning estimates. The biggest losers of them all are the billboard advertisers whose earnings dipped 13%, that’s almost double the forecasted 7% decline. To put things into perspective, that’s an estimated $91,000,000.00 decline in the $7 billion out-of-home advertising industry of the US alone.

Projected and Actual Advertising Revenues

Two other traditional media that did the same come from print media, specifically the newspaper and the magazine publishing sectors. Both of which had their revenues going 2% lower than their forecasts with 12% and 9% declines respectively.

On the other hand, digital media did the exact opposite by earning higher than their forecasts. Internet advertising continued its soaring trend with a total rise of 4%, safely away from its forecasted 3% decline.

On the brighter side of traditional media, Sunday Magazine sales rose a healthy 13%. This is then followed by a 9.1% revenue growth coming from the National Papers.

Traditional media’s presence might be guaranteed to stay regardless of the ups and downs it has been facing however, Enform believes going digital is now the mainstream and is therefore the safer – not to mention more effective – way to reach your audience. We’d love to tell you more about it so give us a ring anytime.

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Wikipedia Tops FaceBook in Customer Satisfaction Survey Among Social Media Sites

FaceBook might have the edge in user base however, it’s the advertisement-free Wikipedia that earned big among American customers. According to the 2010 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), Wikidepia was ahead of FaceBook, Youtube, and Myspace with a score of 77 while the rest had 64, 73, and 63 respectively.

The key to Wikipedia’s higher marks apparently lies in its ease of use and the completeness of information freely available to its users, who by the way only visit the site every week with some going to it monthly – nowhere near the 57% mark of FaceBook users that use it daily. Surprisingly enough, there are only two things that Americans see negatively for Wikipedia. One of these is the apparent user-generated content which can naturally be of questionable credibility. The rest when asked about what they don’t like about the site said they have nothing they think they don’t like about it.
Social Media Sites ACSI Scores 2010
FaceBook’s users on the other hand had a handful of nays with security and privacy concerns leading the way. This is then followed by news feeds, the presence of ads, never-ending interface tweaks, difficulty in navigation, less-than-lovable applications that can’t stop sending out notifications, overall functionality, and of course, spam.

Surprisingly, regardless of the faults that the American consumers see on FaceBook, it still remains too popular to ignore. Can you imagine 9% of the entire American website visits go to it? And among all the social networking sites out there, 55% of Americans use it. If you factor in nearly 500 million users, could it be that the unsatisfied users are only normal given such an overwhelming user base?

Enform believes this is exactly the case and no matter the downsides mentioned, at the right hands, FaceBook and other social media sites’ influence especially among the younger adults (50% of 18-34 year olds find social media recommendations to be most influential in their buying decision) should not be ignored. Give us a call and we’ll take care of sifting through all of the negatives social media sites has to offer to get directly to your target audience.

Source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/facebook-earns-poor-customer-satisfaction-marks-13614/

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Your Website’s Page Size, Speed, and Your Customers

If you played your cards well enough, you should be able to know exactly how many visits your site is getting. Digging a little deeper, you’d be able to know how many of these visits stayed long enough to check a single other page on your website or otherwise. The latter visits account for what we call the “bounce rate” and this is something you really should attend to.

What exactly contributes to visitors leaving your site without bothering to check any other part of it? Aren’t your good looking high resolution images and out-of-this-world flash effects better than your competitor’s rather old-school-no-nonsense-html-dominated site? Not quite.

Although there are a number of factors that contribute to bounce rate (traffic quality, content, etc.), the size of your website and its effect – loading time – is something many web developers fail to consider these days. Why should they anyway? With all the endless list javascipts and flashy effects at their disposal, it’s hard to resist a few bling-blings here and there. However, this just might not be the best path to take especially if you consider the attention span (or lack of it) of internet users these days.

According to Google, the average (from 4.2 billion pages on the internet) page size is 320 kilobytes. How long does a 320 kb page load? It depends on the speed of your internet connection but given you are on 56k dialup, this will take at least 60 seconds.
Load Time and Bounce Rate Relathionship You might say that isn’t all that bad and you might be right. However, take this example (among the many other possibilities), someone does a Google search and your site is luckily one of the 2 sites that the searcher opens (the other being your competitor). Now, if your site loads at 60 seconds and the other at 120, do you think the searcher will take the time to wait for the latter before browsing yours?

It’s no big secret really, smaller page size = lower load time = lower bounce rate = higher take up rate. Get in touch with Enform today and see what we can do to put this equation into It’s no big secret really, smaller page size = lower load time = lower bounce rate = higher take up rate. Get in touch with Enform today and see what we can do to put this equation into perspective for your websites.

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Top 5 Social Media Misconceptions Exposed – Part 5

Last on our list of misconceptions, “Social Media is Hard Word.”

While this myth might be true for some and not for others, getting into the subject is no doubt inevitable. For those starting out, there’s no denying social media management is hard work especially with the learning curve (varies greatly from person to person) that comes with it. Come to think of it, even for the most seasoned social media marketer, this is still “work” although how hard might depend on a number of factors including the brand or service to represent, competition, among others.

With that said, the chances of you having to do work and put in an ounce or two of perseverance in this unconventional yet highly effective marketing environment is almost guaranteed. However, if work – regardless of intensity – is something you shy away from, you should start asking yourself why you are in business in the first place.

On the brighter side, if you accept social media as an extension of sort to your real life store and treat every engagement like you were taking to your best customer, then in due time the social media Gods will start blessing your efforts with even more good business. For the chosen few, social media might even bring in more of the good thing than their offline presence.

Of course, all in due time as the effects of a good social media marketing campaign takes months to be felt unlike other marketing means. Enform knows this myth best as we have been in the business of taking the social media work and lessening the period of perseverance for businesses for over 12 years.

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Top 5 Social Media Misconceptions Exposed – Part 4

Peter Wylie of SocialMediaExaminer sheds some light on the top 5 myths that’s been keeping a huge number of businesses away from an effective marketing medium, social media.

Coming in fourth on our list of misconceptions, “If I Engage on Social Media Sites, I’ll Get Loads of Negative Comments.”

Let’s face it, not even God can please every single one of his creations. And that’s God we’re talking about. There will always be a certain percentage of your customers that will end up complaining about the tiniest of flaws and regardless if it’s their fault or otherwise, your brand’s name is still at stake when this happens. Now, with advent of social media, this happens even easier and maybe for some, more frequent.

Social Media Participation

Luckily, for the keen eyed, situations like this – no matter how bleak and scary it may seem – is still a double-edged sword. In fact, in due time, you’ll even realize that these situations are actually diamonds in the rough and when mined in a careful and humane manner, it will eventually produce the finest of diamonds that will bring in positive light for your business for years to come.

So, how do you turn “flamers” into evangelists in the social media world anyway? The key lies in the transparency and voice that your company takes.

Gone are the days when your company treats these complaints as mere job orders that have to be dealt with in one way or another. To succeed in your social media presence, your company has to be a lot more personable and with over 400 million potential customers capable of not just listening, but jumping in on the conversation, you have to.

As long as you keep your cool and you sound sincere in correcting a customer’s complaint, then you’d even be surprised to see other users naturally taking the initiative in lifting your brand for you. At Enform, we call them “Mavins” and developing as many of them is part of our strategy for your business.

Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-5-social-media-myths-debunked/

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Top 5 Social Media Misconceptions Exposed – Part 3

Peter Wylie of SocialMediaExaminer sheds some light on the top 5 myths that’s been keeping a huge number of businesses away from an effective marketing medium, social media.

Third on our list of top social media misconceptions, “I Don’t Have Time to Manage Social Media.”

For the inexperienced, it is but natural to come up with such a misconception. Given such a relatively new form of marketing, it is no surprise that many marketers and business don’t even know how much time is needed to make social media marketing work. Further, most of us don’t even know such networks can even be used to get your message out in the open since most innocent users of such online services just take it for what it is, to socialize.

However, for those who are in the know, this misconception is probably the easiest to debunk. To start with, as mentioned in one of our previous Fact of the Week, it only takes less than an hour a day to feel the increase in traffic, subscribers, and opt-in list of any online business. According to a recently concluded survey, 67% have said that 6 hours a week spent on social media is all it takes to get results. And the best part, you don’t even need to be at your office to be able to get these results. You can achieve this while on your break or just at home checking your emails.

Although the results may vary given the same amount of time invested for social media, it is but natural since just like anything else new you encounter in life, there is a learning curve. And the more you get used to this, the better results you can naturally expect.

Social Media Usage Chart

Luckily for those who’d rather be doing something else than dealing with the learning curve of social media marketing, Enform is just a call, a tweet, a message, or an email away. But on a serious note, marketing and promotions outsourcing is a traditional solution with agencies and designers contracted for their expertise, digital social media marketing is no different.

Source: http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/top-5-social-media-myths-debunked/

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