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The Otto Group uses Appinio surveys for its content marketing and data-driven storytelling

Client

Otto Group

Industry

E-Commerce

Use case

PR & Content-Marketing

Employees

Over 52.000

The set-up

Per 1,000 respondents

Nationally representative for DE by age and gender

Up to 10 questions

Duration: 3 h

The challenge

The Otto Group is a global trading and services group with around 52,560 employees and a turnover of 13.4 billion euros. With 30 major business groups, it is present in more than 30 countries in Europe, North and South America and Asia. With an online turnover of 7.7 billion euros, the Otto Group is one of the world's largest online retailers.

The Otto Group's corporate communication is digital. In addition to a corporate website, the team operates the corporate blog ottogroupunterwegs.com, various social media channels and its own podcast. The communications team tells stories about online trade and marketing, new work and technological innovations relevant to the industry. In doing so, the editorial team relies on data as a carrier of information to vitalise the storytelling.

For a while, the Otto Group was looking for a market research tool to conduct surveys for PR purposes as quick, easy and cost-effective as possible.

Since 2017, the company has been successfully working with Appinio's market research platform to survey consumers and use the results for corporate PR and content marketing.

This case study explains how data-driven content marketing works with Appinio.

Objectives

In the Otto Group's corporate blog ottogroupunterwegs.com, the communications team deals with current topics, trends and debates around customer centricity and new work, among other things.

The aim of the online surveys with Appinio is to conduct data-driven content marketing and PR.

Solution

Approximately once a month, the Otto Group surveys 1,000 consumers aged 16 to 54 on a nationally representative basis with Appinio on current discussions or trend topics such as digital detox, social shopping or digital voice assistants.

The Otto Group's communications team designs the surveys in-house and creates the questionnaire in Appinio's do-it-yourself market research tool. Before the survey is sent out to the field of participants, it is checked for methodology, logic and validity by market researchers at Appinio.

The survey duration for nationally representative surveys is usually only a few hours with Appinio. An important plus point of the tool if the Otto Group wants to quickly jump into current trending topics and debates on the Internet. Because discussions on the Internet often only have a short half-life. Those who communicate meaningfully quickly get a large part of the attention.

Results

The results of the PR surveys are prepared for the articles in the Otto Group's corporate blog and integrated into the storytelling. In this way, the blog articles are underpinned with sentiment pictures from the population. The aim is to create more transparency with the data and to give the stories a context. But the figures also function as a tool to convey the Otto Group's digital corporate image more forcefully.

Stories with data work better, as known by the communications team of the Otto Group's corporate blog. B2B stories in particular gain a different and important perspective through quantitative online surveys of consumers.

This is appreciated by the blog readers, who mostly consist of e-commerce decision-makers, media professionals and generally interested parties.

The results are also shared internally with other Otto Group departments on request so that a transfer of knowledge takes place within the Group.

Screenshot from the blog 'ottogroupunterwegs'

„We want to tell stories on our blog that have their finger on the pulse of the digital age. Data-driven storytelling is a target-oriented approach. With Appinio, we can easily create and evaluate representative online surveys. And it's super fast, too.“

Isabelle Ewald, Digital Communications Consultant, Otto Group