Your customers’ stories sell better than yours

For building a community, developing loyalty, and acquiring new visitors, nothing beats a customer story.

Bazaarvoice Stories™ enables your customers to tell their authentic stories within your site. This solution brings high-volume, customer-to-customer and brand-to-consumer interaction directly to your pages.

With Stories, a brand creates a place where consumers can share their experiences with products, the brand, a special occasion - it’s your choice. The resulting content uncovers consumer sentiment, creates a gathering place for like-minded visitors, and impacts brand loyalty and, ultimately, sales.

Beyond product reviews, Stories enables you to influence the “inspiration” phase of the purchase cycle. Rather than reading a review of one hotel, Stories enables a customer to tell the story of their perfect weekend in Boston. Before a bride chooses her wedding dress, stories help inspire her entire theme.

• Stories inspire purchase cycles. Stories acts at the inspirational phase – before someone even knows what they want to buy. “I’m having a baby – what do I need to know?” “I want to take a trip; tell me about your favorite weekend getaway.”
• Stories uncover brand advocates. When La-Z-Boy ran a contest asking for stories of comfort, they gained 13,000 new opted-in prospects but they also gained authentic sentiments about their products. These authentic sentiments can influence future marketing and fuel in-store sales.
• Stories attract new site visitors and instantly engage them with your most passionate customers. User-generated content drives natural search traffic. When the beauty brand philosophy® created a place for brand advocates to share their mother’s philosophies for Mother’s Day, those writers encouraged their friends and families to read their stories. During the campaign, 39% of site traffic originated on a Stories page, and Story readers had a 20% higher AOV. While contests in general drive traffic, only Stories traffic creates a community based on sharing experiences.

Half of all online shoppers want to find testimonials online (“User Ratings Top Consumers’ Online Wish Lists,” Forrester, 2008). Giving visitors a place to share their stories increases brand involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence. Far beyond just increasing time on site, personal stories engage visitors and writers alike, all increasing overall loyalty to your brand.

Flexible, easy to deploy, and fully customizable. Stories are white labeled and can be deployed and styled around holidays - decribe your best Valentine”s Day - or special promotions. Want to reach out to new home buyers? Collect stories about “my first home.” With complete flexibility, the possibilities are unlimited - and you can create a new community as often as you’d like. Your makes going live a breeze (maybe say somewhere else that it is white labeled?), and your Community Manager can brainstorm campaign ideas and help you understand how to use the Workbench and your Web analytics provider to uncover dramatic results - from huge traffic increases to impactful contest results. Once Stories are live on your site, Bazaarvoice content moderation ensures you’ll only see relevant, customer-friendly content.

Stories™ don’t have to be stories

• Bazaarvoice Stories™ can be deployed in so many ways, including:
• Consumer-generated Product Tips
• How do you use this product?
• What’s the biggest cleaning job you’ve tackled with this product?
• What makes this product your “secret weapon”?
• How-to Guides
• What’s your favorite recipe?
• How did you install your deck?
• Show us your favorite faux painting technique
• Travelogues
• How was the cruise?
• Where did you spend your last long weekend?
• What is your favorite vacation spot?

Stories™ feature overview

We never stop. We introduce new features on this and all our solutions every seven weeks. These are just a few features that help drive sales and extend your community.

• ShoutIt! – ShoutIt! enables users to share a story or profile on Facebook, Digg, or del.icio.us (screenshot)
• Hero image – Let stories stand out with captivating images (screenshot)
• Video uploads – Enable customers to tell the full story with video uploads (screenshot)
• Ratings and Comments on Stories – Enable consumers to rate or comment on stories, engaging a new audience (screenshot)
• Tags – Tags enable consumers to find the stories most relevant to them (screenshot)

Stories™ helps your customers market for you.

Call us at 1-866-522-9227 or contact us here to get started.

• Next Steps

• Why Bazaarvoice?
• Content Moderation
• Analytics & Reporting
• Technical Support
• Community Management
• Partner Integration