Community, Content and eCommerce Conversions: How GoPro’s Bold Brand Experience Strategy Paid Off
GoPro has gotten its camera in skateparks and oceans, on trails and slopes the world over, and to a large extent, its brand-building activities have organically been taken over by its active and energetic community of fans.
This community of thrill-seekers and storytellers is responsible for the tight link between GoPro’s product and the action-packed content and raw footage that has become synonymous with the brand. A lot of this content lives on the GoPro platform and is a key part of the GoPro.com visitor experience.
GoPro, Its UX and Direct-to-Consumer Sales Goals
A lifestyle-dedicated supplier of action cameras since 2002, GoPro isn’t just selling a camera — it’s promoting the ability to create lasting visual memories of your life adventures. As such, the site is much more than just a showcase of the product — it has to communicate the possibilities of the brand.
This is not to say that consumers merely head to the GoPro site to immerse themselves in the brand universe; they also make purchases and purchase decisions that may see them converting on partner vendor sites. As such, eCommerce conversions are a must for the brand.
Aside from the additional selling opportunities other marketplaces offer, they also bring forth the additional challenge of engaging customers and influencing their purchase decisions to favor the brand above its competitors.
For GoPro, onsite sales represent larger margins, of course, but more importantly, they afford the brand greater control of the customer experience within the GoPro.com ecosystem, and a richer opportunity to connect with its community of users.
For this reason, the brand has been actively focused on increasing its direct-to-consumer sales, while at the same time providing a meaningful experience to consumers who may go on to convert elsewhere.
The GoPro Hero7 is the seller’s flagship item and the brand was hoping it can boost eCommerce conversions.
Laying Out an Impactful Content Plan
To achieve the broad objective of increasing direct-to-customer sales, the brand began by focusing on its most heavily trafficked page (and primary revenue stream): the Hero7 camera product detail page.
The previous iteration of the page had been fairly simple, and the team felt it lacked the visual wow factor the brand has come to be known for. The team was keen to try out a new, media-rich version of the page that would give prospective customers a first-person view of the camera’s capabilities.
The challenge was: how to go bold with the content while keeping the customer journey friction free? How to know what content was encouraging engagement and conversions? And more to the point… how much content is too much content?
Gaining Visible Insights into the Customer Journey & Page Elements
To understand the content ROI of the Hero7 camera product page, the brand first dived into a broader depiction of analytics, that of the customer journey, to see how the visitors were arriving at the page.
After analyzing user paths, the client looked at the in-page behavior of the product page using Contentsquare’s zone-based heatmaps. Through this feature, the brand studied individual page elements to determine what exactly gave rise to conversions, hesitations and bounces.
Looking at unique metrics such as engagement rate and attractiveness rate as well as click rate, the team was able to understand how visitors consumed the content, which elements triggered interactions and which were UX dead-ends.
UX Implementations & Their Outcomes
Based on the data that our sunburst and behavioral metrics provided, GoPro confidently redesigned the product page by way of bulking it up with more content. This spurred a more customer-centric experience for the site visitors in that it focused on their unique consumer journeys and their personal interactions with distinct site elements.
Since videos received a lot of clicks and views, there was clearly a hunger for this kind of content and the client decided to capitalize on that.
The redesign provided a unique customer experience that allured and engaged a stronger community of customers. This resulted in a whopping 80% increase in conversions. The mission of upping direct-to-customer sales was decidedly accomplished.
Unique metrics from Contentsquare overlaid on GoPro’s page elements helped foster UX decision-making.
Casting Unique Experiences for Unique Brands
The GoPro case shows that behavioral analytics don’t only serve as evidential data to use for making basic UX decisions. While we highlight that data keeps you aware of the goings on of your website and helps streamline the path to conversions, it can hold even more power.
As the GoPro case has proved, content holds a major position in the customer decision journey and in the UX space at large. It can act as the deciding factor behind a user’s ultimate hesitation — that of leaving, or that of converting.
For GoPro, content is paramount, as the content is intertwined with the product itself, and is a vehicle for articulating the brand’s uniqueness.
Whether or not your end goal and overall branding is content-heavy, you should always consult with behavioral data to see how your website is accessed and used. Data adds a safety net to your innovation strategy, and helps you better align your creative content with the needs and preferences of your customers and brand ambassadors.
