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There’s no such thing as a perfect marriage. But companies know bonding fresh content with brand engagement creates a strong union. Bridesmaid manufacturing company The Dessy Group used Curalate’s Fanreel, a tool that allows brands to bring user-generated images onto their ecommerce sites, to drive brand engagement and form lasting customer relationships.
The Dessy Group signed on with Curalate, a visual analytics and marketing platform provider, about four months ago and was offered the opportunity to test Fanreel two months later as part of the vendor’s beta program. Alan Dessy, CEO of The Dessy Group, says he had been pining for a way to obtain images of customers wearing the brand’s dresses in real weddings to drive engagement post-purchase.
“Normally, we’re part of the planning process. They buy the dresses, and then we never see them again,” Dessy says. “A lot of our competitors go out and pursue customers post-sale. They build galleries. It’s something that we were a little deficient on.”
By using Fanreel, The Dessy Group is able to “go out into the wild” and curate images of women wearing the brand’s dresses from Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Google Images, Dessy explains. The brand can then tag itself in those images with the hashtag #DessyRealWeddings. Most of these images have already been shared with The Dessy Group’s retailers, Dessy adds. The brand also encourages customers to share their own images, such as by promoting the hashtag through Facebook promoted posts. The Dessy Group then posts the accumulated pictures in an image gallery on its ecommerce site, social networks, and blogs. Since launching Fanreel, The Dessy Group has seen engagement rates of more than 30% with the Fanreel image gallery.
And a little brand engagement can go a long way in terms of impacting a brand’s bottom line. Although The Dessy Group declined to share Fanreel’s impact on company sales, according to the “Content Marketing Trends in 2013” research paper by Axonn Research, consumers and businesses are willing to pay up to 10% more for goods and services from companies that offer engaging content and social media experiences. Visual marketing is providing increased opportunities for brand and social engagement. According to Simply Measured’s third quarter Instagram study, released May 2013, 67% of the Interbrand 100 brands use Instagram. The study also cites that 23% of active Interbrand 100 companies post more than 50 times a month and that these organizations see more than 5,600 engagements per photo. Seventy-six percent of the Interbrand 100 compaines also maintain Pinterest presences.
