There was a lot of information shared yesterday at SIMA’s New Media Boot Camp in Dana Point, Calif. Panelists from the surf media world, interactive marketing experts from Vans, Skullcandy and Roxy, and the West Coast sales manager of Google all provided insightful tips and insights on the changing face of digital and multimedia platforms related to the surf industry.
I thought one of the most interesting speakers for the day was Beth Greve, the West Coast sales manager for Google.
Google Search is one of the most powerful tools people use every day to find out exactly what they want and where they can get it.
When it comes to purchases, it seems that this could be a tool that brands could take more advantage of.
Bounce rates
One of the most powerful metrics businesses should look at is their bounce rate. Bounce rates tell the percent of visits that result in an immediate exit from a site.
For example, if someone types in an industry brand name and dress and lands on a page with only men’s boardshorts or just the girl’s athlete page with no dresses and then exits the site because that’s not what they were looking for, that would be considered a bounce.
A high bounce rate means your site is basically blowing it. “If you type in what you are looking for and you land on wrong site, you suck,” Greve told the audience.
Go to Google, type in boardshorts, dresses and your brand’s name and see what comes up. If you are not directed to exactly what you were looking for on your own site, Greve advises talking to your web team.
Organic vs. paid search
Greve explained the difference between an organic search and a paid search. An organic search is free. It’s based on an algorithm created by the geniuses over at Google that comb through everything on the internet in less than a second to come up with whatever is the most relevant and accurate page based on your search terms. Relevancy is often driven by new content to the website, key words, tags, and backlinks.
People can use SEO – search engine optimization – to increase relevancy. If your site has the highest relevance for the word surfboard when a user types it into a Google search, your website link should be first on the search results page.
A paid search refers to ad placements on the right or above the organic search results page based on whatever word you searched. A paid search is not free.
For example, if a user types in surfboard you can pay to have your brand page be at the top or the right of that page. The cost of one of these ads is based on an auction model and you only pay if someone clicks on your ad, which is called an acquisition.
Greve said, in the case of a surfboard if you spend $40 on an ad to sell a $600 surfboard, it might be worth paying for an ad. If you spend $40 using Google ads to sell a $45 pair of boardshorts, Google ads might not be the best investment.
See Page 2 for more on Google
If you are a retailer, you can buy ads based on location. So if someone types “surfboard, Los Angeles” and you have a store in LA, you can pay for an ad based on that geography or a certain mile radius around your shop in Los Angeles. You can do all the same things with words in Google search as you can in Google Images using photos with keyword rich titles.
Greve did a study with national auto manufacturer who didn’t believe in using paid searches. They wrote a list of keywords related to their brand to see how traffic went on weeks they paid for ads versus weeks they did not.
The results were obvious. Sales went up dramatically the weeks that they paid for ads.
Greve said brands can use Google ads to drive customers to their own site as well as to retail partners.
She said if you are going to start paying for ads, make sure your site is ready, and that you don’t have high bounce rates.
She also said everyone should try to use Google Analytics and Google Trends to measure site traffic and to test past queries against other words respectively.
Google Instant
Last week, Google launched Google Instant. It shows results as you type. When you type in “We” it may pull up weather. I typed in “surf,” and “Surfline” was the first word Google offered me.
Digital
With more smart phones popping up on the market, people are using phones more than ever to search for products.
Google Goggles is a new application for phones. It allows users to take a picture of a product and it will pull up searches for that product including where to buy it. Applications for retail are endless. A user can take a picture of a dress and it may show ten websites with that dress and where to buy it.
YouTube
Greve talked briefly about the power of video, video search and YouTube. She said there are over two billion video views on YouTube a day. With brands making multiple videos, they can utilize video platforms to drive their audience, They can also sell videos for users to view through YouTube.
See Page 3 for the Surf Media panel
Surf Media
During the surf media panel, there was a lot of talk about what new tools the surf magazines (Transworld, the ASG group and Surfer’s Journal), Fuel TV and Surfline were doing in the new media age to gain more viewers and readers as well as keeping advertisers happy.
All of them showcased innovative examples of new technology they are using and some talked about subscription models and the power of being able to talk to a focused audience.
A lot of the magazines are offering a digital version of their magazines. Even Surfer’s Journal digitized all their archives. The free service though, is not a profitable model so some of the magazines said they still need to figure out how to utilize new media to increase their subscription base.
Many of the magazines are offering extras online, like videos behind ads with the people featured in the ad.
Surfline
I thought Surfline.com has an interesting model. Whenever a user watches a Surfline movie or clicks through a Surfline story, they first have to view a 15-second commercial. Someone asked Surfline’s Jonno Wells if users complain about having to watch the commercial before getting to the content.
He said there has not been one complaint and that advertisers get high click through rates from those ads.
Wells also said users at Surfline are used to paying for content, since they pay to search web cams and forecasts already. He said users are already trained to accept the sponsor and their sponsor’s commercials before they click on any content.
He also said that as Surfline has progressed, users stay on their site longer. In 2002, the average user stayed on Surfline’s site for two minutes. That’s when there were just surf cameras. Now, the average user session stays on Surfline for nine minutes to check out content and page views.
When you offer something people really want, they will pay for it online, he said.
At Surfline, Wells said one challenge has been their women’s content. While they have been able to draw a large women’s audience for their women’s specific content, they have had difficulty selling advertisements to Junior’s brands.
Fuel TV
Regarding TV, FUEL TV’s VP of New Media and International Development Gene Pao said they have had success in the U.S. with on-demand webcasts of events as well as live broadcasted coverage of surf events in Australia.
One of the challenges surfing faces compared to other sports, though, is that there is no season with a beginning and end like other sports in the U.S.
See Page 4 for the Interactive Media panel
Interactive Media
The day ended with a panel of interactive media experts Brett Barlow of Skullcandy, Tara Rynne of Roxy, and Nikki Scoggins of Vans.
Skullcandy
Barlow of Skullcandy provided an example of the brand’s new optics inspired headphones. Skullcandy launched the product using multiple digital and video platforms.
While Skullcandy received average click throughs from basic banner ads that had 360 degree product views and strong calls to action to buy the product, he said there was double the conversion rate using eye tracking technology where users could test the headphones online themselves to see what they looked like.
Barlow found that customers will interact if given the opportunity and that increased interaction leads to increased conversion rates.
Roxy
At Roxy, utilizing a high profile fashion icon, as in the Cynthia Rowley for Roxy campaign, Roxy was able to gain $1 million in global sales from the 30-piece product line.
Rynne said use of fashion blogs and other social media tools were extremely beneficial to hyping the products.
Vans
Lastly at Vans, Nikki Scoggins showed an example of Vans’ involvement at Coachella to show that a brand can create a powerful user experience using social media with little money.
Scoggins hired a team of four people to go, and created a Vans.com/Coachella site utilizing Blogger, a WordPress site on Vans Girls page and also posted to Twitter and Facebook throughout the entire event. They also posted pictures to Flickr.
One of the key strategies Scoggins talked about was posting different content on different sites and posting content in as close to real time as possible.
She said tagging and titling photos appropriately was also extremely important because that’s how Google searches.
On the Vans Flickr site alone, the brand received over 38,960 views in seven days. All those views came during the event. If she had uploaded them and posted after Coachella was over, the number would have been much lower.
During Coachella, the multimedia team also took a lot of video. It wasn’t professional-quality video. One of the people she used to cover the event was a team rider who edited video through iMovie. In four days, Vans posted 11 videos and had 5,798 views.
Lastly over the course of the event, Scoggins said her team posted two items a day to Twitter and Facebook. Both posts were different, and over the course of the event, they received over 700,000 impressions.
