Online shoppers rely on a healthy mix of search and social media throughout the buying process. A recent research by GroupM Search with comScore has highlighted this combination, something that causes skepticism in salespeople who do not believe that social media have so much influence on online shopping habits.
But for them, the results presented by the study are overwhelming, 48% of buyers use the combination of Internet search and social networks, about 51% who do it only in searches, and the number continues to rise steadily.
On the other hand, when consumers are exposed to both search results and social networks, the search clickthrough increases by 94%, which indicates that investing in social media can help merchants influence to consumers during that process.
However, sellers seek to capitalize on the role of Social Media by identifying new brands, so they should look beyond the standard communication channels: Facebook and Twitter.
Buyers are looking for more brands every day than their colleagues know and which they have already expressed positively, and this is demonstrated by the result shown in the study where it is recorded that 30% of them are based on the evaluations of their peers, in so much that only 17% on Facebook and 9% on Twitter.
In the 90 days prior to the purchase, less than 1% of buyers have been guided by the channels controlled by the brand, ie Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, as well as ads on social networks, while 16% of them have committed to vertical links or specific sites with expert opinion.
The reliance on social channels focused on media review, makes it very difficult for the sellers, as they are overwhelmed to control the exposure of the consumer to the unauthorized messages of the brand as well as the negative comments that can be read from they.
The additional results of ForeSee Results place more emphasis on the role played by product review websites and their influence on online shoppers. But it also influences mouth-to-mouth in equal measure, that is, the word recommendations that are made both in the real world and in the virtual world.
Something contradictory found in the study in the high satisfaction that consumers showed in the interaction with the brand messages and advertising in social networks, which indicates that it is a mature area to investigate and understand much more the influence of the brand with your messaging on the networks.
In fact, this data shows the complexity of the access route to the purchase process and further justifies the need for traders to track their individual marketing campaigns, specifically those that focus their efforts on search engines and media. social, to discover which are the channels that demonstrate the optimization of the experience for consumers.