Strategy+Design

 

The Challenge

An industry gets rocked by new, aggressive competition.

Bookbyte is one of the early pioneers in the online sale of used college textbooks. While they were adept at selling textbooks online, they did not spend much time creating loyalty and therefore the student customers did not easily recognize or connect to the Bookbyte brand. In addition, new entrants into the marketplace excelled at communicating with the Millennials that make up the core audience. Social media, SEO, customer experience, and mobile web are all new elements of the new marketing mix that was being used by the new entrants to communicate with the audience and grab market share.

The Strategy

Get Strategic, Leverage Social Media, and allow Millennials to spread the word.

Bookbyte was not in the conversation for the highly social millennial cohort that made up the largest portion of the market they were selling to. The organization needed to engage them throughout the course of their energetic, open online lives. The insight we gleaned was that because of rising school costs, students care most about saving money everywhere, especially on those forced purchases. Based on this, we reshaped Bookbyte’s brand to speak about the topic most dear to students: saving money. We developed the message that Bookbyte is the top destination for textbook savings. And knowing that the audience was trending towards non-traditional forms of communication, we developed online social communities that connected students with the Bookbyte brand and even developed a brand ambassador to lead the charge. We Also leveraged our eCommerce experience to tweak the shopping experience, brand messaging, mobile website, and mobile app development.

“We didn’t realize we had fallen behind in such a short period of time. Thankfully it was caught early and SterlingKlor showed us the right direction quickly.”

Andres Montgomery, Chief Strategy Officer

The Result

A student-focused brand competitive enough to reverse market share loss and grow revenue.

Once we tackled the task of updating Bookbyte’s online presence to be visually relevant and engaging to the core audience, we focused on creating a better customer experience by improving the functionality and usability of the website’s e-commerce and account features. The next step was to create focused promotions and campaigns aimed at engaging customers in student related dialogue. Our goal was to have the customers share their fantastic experiences with Bookbyte through various channels, to their peers and online reviews.  Once the new marketing elements were implemented, Bookbyte saw their audience much more engaged through social shares, comments and mentions. This direction resulted in significant growth in website traffic up over 60% in one quarter. Return visitors grew by 30% and an improved bounce rate to under 40%.

The new brand presence and communication style immediately helped and added 20% to the bottom line by connecting with and servicing students in relevant ways.