The baby brands outranking big-name retailers thanks to content marketing

October 26, 2023

While it’s not uncommon to see established brands dominating their industry, smaller brands are outperforming household names in the baby product sector. 

And the secret to their success? Content marketing. While many well-known brands fall into the trap of relying solely on reputation and word of mouth, independent brands that don’t have this advantage have begun to surpass industry giants in the SERPs and win sales thanks to innovative content strategies.

Two of these brands are our own clients: Direct4Baby and Soren’s House. In this blog post, we’ll give you a glimpse into our content marketing strategies that led these brands to outperform their competitors in the SERPs, and potentially in sales.

The baby product market at a glance

While baby product consumers have historically favoured in-store purchases, the COVID-19 pandemic saw a shift in the way they shop for these items. Baby cots, prams and car seats are high-ticket items, and consumers understandably want to view them in person before parting with their money. But during the pandemic, this wasn’t possible, so new or expectant parents had no choice but to turn to online ordering. 

This gave baby ecommerce brands a big opportunity. The industry as a whole has long been dominated by a few big-name retailers, many of which have relied on their high street presence. Many of these businesses failed to invest in their websites pre-pandemic, and paid for it once brick-and-mortar stores closed down. 

Multi-channel or ecommerce businesses were coming out on top when it came to website user experience, the online checkout process and in organic search rankings, giving them a chance to win sales from big-name competitors and build trust with consumers who may have previously had reservations about ordering online. And there’s a lot of business to be won – according to the World Bank, 25% of the global population was under 15 years old in 2021. The baby product and childrenswear sectors are booming – and content marketing is the way to succeed in this lucrative industry. 

Direct4Baby

When we began working with Direct4Baby in 2019, the biggest challenge was competition from high street retailers. But D4B has two strong advantages over its competitors – affordability and a stronger ecommerce presence. SEO and content marketing was (and still is) the key to winning sales. The brand’s key selling point is that it offers a huge range of quality baby products, all in one place. During the pandemic, we mainly focused on D4B’s online presence, but once showrooms were allowed to reopen we pivoted the strategy to increase football as well as online traffic, targeting location-based keywords and activating PR campaigns to publicise openings.

Within 12 months, we’d achieved record breaking success – organic traffic had increased by 147%, with SEO activity delivering a 3703% return on investment. 

As of October 2023, Direct4Baby ranks for over 13,000 keywords. Over 1000 of these are in the top 3 positions on Google, putting them above most of their competitors for high-value terms like “baby prams”, “pushchairs” and “egg travel system”. 

Soren’s House

The Soren’s House ethos is simple: natural, organic and eco-friendly. Selling everything from children’s toys to nursery furniture, Soren’s House has been bringing Scandinavian inspired, design-led products to the UK since 2016. Originally they operated a brick-and-mortar store, but made the move to ecommerce in 2017. Scandinavian interior design has been trending in the UK in recent years, and this has extended to nursery designs, thanks to greater focus on sustainability, gender neutral spaces and natural colour schemes, so we knew that Soren’s had a great opportunity to capitalise on this. 

As of October 2023, Soren’s House ranks for thousands keywords, 21% of which are in the top three positions on Google, positioning them as market leaders within their niche. For example, they’re outranking competitors for valuable keywords like “wooden ride on toys”, “scandi nursery” and various brand-focused terms relating to Liewood and Fiona Walker.

How did they do it?

While every content marketing strategy is tailored to the brand in question, our approach for brands operating within the baby product and childrenswear sector can be broken down into four stages.

Research & content plan

All good content marketing strategies start with a plan, and it was no different for D4B and Soren’s House. We began by conducting thorough research into search trends within the industry, keyword gaps/opportunities and deep dive competitor analysis. From here we developed a content plan for various parts of the website, from category page copy to blog posts. When developing new websites for these brands, we were able to use our research to devise a slick plan for the menu and decide on how the website should be structured. We collaborated with both clients every step of the way to ensure we were working in line with their goals and needs.

On-page copy & meta data for core category pages

Using keyword opportunity analysis, we were able to optimise key category pages, putting both brands in a position to rank for high-volume, product-focused keywords as well as specific products from popular brands that they stock. We ensured that category pages had both top and bottom copy, allowing us to utilise space on the page to weave in keywords in a natural way.

Brand-focused campaigns

In the baby product industry, there are several big brands that are synonymous with trust and quality, especially when it comes to prams, pushchairs and multi-travel systems. Direct4Baby and Soren’s House stock many of these brands, and each one brings a whole host of keyword opportunities. The goal was to outrank key competitors for the most sought-after brands. This meant creating dedicated landing and collections pages, alongside supporting blogs to target long-tail brand keywords and questions around a particular brand’s products and how they work. For example, we implemented this strategy for Direct4Baby for Joie, and shortly after sales of Joie products increased by 1281% year on year. For Soren’s house, we’ve used a very similar approach, incorporating ‘brand focus’ blogs into the content plan to shine a spotlight on what makes the brands they stock worth buying to increase conversions.

Blog content

We focused the blog strategy for these brands on long-tail keywords to deliver ‘value added’ content most relevant to new and expecting parents, as well as those navigating the growth and development of their child through the years. Answering questions with search volume behind them, as well as parenting guides and product comparisons allowed them to reach new customers and keep existing ones coming back to the site for trusted guidance and parenting advice.  

Are you struggling to stand out in the baby sector? We’ve got a wealth of experience in this industry – get in touch to see how we can help, or take a look at some of our previous work here.