Turtle Wax expands its reach with customer-generated content

Turtle Wax reaches customers far beyond its website with Bazaarvoice

Transforming its website from a static, catalog-style presence to a dynamic place to showcase its products became a priority for Turtle Wax when it realized that it was losing relevance and trust with its target consumers. To achieve this goal, Turtle Wax worked with Bazaarvoice to add ratings and reviews to its website. Turtle Wax learned that getting content in front of consumers was imperative and its business could benefit from other types of user-generated content (UGC) as well. The company particularly shines when it’s able to share consumers’ photos and videos showing the results of using Turtle Wax products on their vehicles.

With Bazaarvoice Ratings & Reviews generating Turtle Wax’s ratings and reviews, the company is driving 1.3 million page views with this content. Bazaarvoice Curations provides the ability to curate photos consumers post online to Turtle Wax’s product pages and, in less than six months, this content has seen more than 125,000 interactions, proving it is valuable and relevant.

Once we started to get these really great reviews on our website, we wanted to figure out how to push that content out and get more consumers to read the reviews, says Courtney Lauer, marketing manager for Turtle Wax. We also wanted to expand the types of consumer-generated content we shared, since our product category lends itself so well to showing results through visual content, not just reviews.

Taking UGC to customers — where they shop

Bazaarvoice enables Turtle Wax to share UGC — both reviews and images — not only on its own website, but also on major retailer websites where consumers go to buy Turtle Wax products.

Consumers are often not going to go to your brand site when they want to buy your product; they’re going to go to a retailer’s site, explains Lauer. With Bazaarvoice, we’re able to syndicate consumer-generated content across multiple retailers so that we’re amplifying consumer views of our ratings and reviews.

Content syndication allows Turtle Wax to better partner with retailers, because the more UGC a brand provides, the better equipped the retailer is to sell the product successfully.

Our retailers are always looking for content, says Lauer. This is a great way they can leverage what we’re already collecting — and not just product catalog information, but also content led by the consumer that’s going to help them sell more products.

Turtle Wax has generated a high volume of reviews using the Bazaarvoice platform, which is especially helpful when competing head-to-head on a retailer site with another company that may not have as much UGC to share. Plus, with Bazaarvoice, Turtle Wax will be able to show the images collected with Curations on retailers’ websites that accept this content — providing the result proof points in a visually-driven category.

We often have a hundred reviews where our competitors only have reviews in the single digits, if they have reviews at all, says Lauer. We’ve seen huge success as a result of this, including a year-over-year sales increase of over 50% at some of our retailers online.

In addition to syndicating ratings and reviews on retailer sites, Turtle Wax also pursues other avenues to increase word-of-mouth: sharing UGC on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages; via a monthly email newsletter; and at trade shows, where the company is innovatively using UGC as part of its booth design.

Gleaning insights to improve the customer experience and improve products

Turtle Wax’s initiatives for gathering UGC have also provided insights into Turtle Wax customers and products. These have been extremely useful to better understanding customers and to undertake product-quality improvements.

The company uses the review submission page as a place to capture information to help understand its target audiences.

For example, we wanted to find out whether customers were mainly using Turtle Wax Ice Spray Wax for deep cleaning or for quick cleaning occasions, so we asked the question on the submission form, says Lauer. Turtle Wax also uses the submission form to get information beyond traditional demographics, such as the types of vehicles customers’ drive, how old the vehicles are, and so forth.

The submission form is a great way to listen and learn from your consumer base, says Lauer, who adds that Turtle Wax has also been able to use the Bazaarvoice platform to capture data that’s valuable from a product development standpoint.

At one point, we started seeing a lot of feedback from ratings and reviews telling us that the trigger on one of our products was failing midway through use, she says. So we were able to immediately send the data to our quality team, who ordinarily wouldn’t have been aware of the issue until much later, after the problem had affected many more consumers.

Making Bazaarvoice part of the larger strategic team for Turtle Wax

Bazaarvoice has become a trusted member of the Turtle Wax team of partners and agencies, working closely with the full team to explore new opportunities to benefit from UGC.

We’ve definitely gotten some great ideas from our Bazaarvoice client success director, like running a sweepstakes on social media to drive review volume, says Lauer.

We have a great collaborative team, and we’re happy we’ve been able to loop in our Bazaarvoice client success director to contribute to that effort.

It’s enabled us to benefit even more from our partnership.