Case Study
Standout.co.uk is a men’s fashion retailer whose founder discovered a gap in the market when he struggled to find an accessible online platform that housed all the best men’s designer fashion.
In 2005, the solution to this problem was born when he opened an online store selling a variety of designer clothing brands in one place to save consumers the hassle of visiting a number of stores to find the latest trend and style.
After years of success, Standout’s founder had seen sales on the Standout.co.uk website become stagnant for almost 12 months. These stagnant sales prompted Standout’s founder to contact us to discuss how the trajectory of sales on the website could be turned around, particularly in the context of a more competitive than ever men’s fashion e-tailer environment.
Following several points of contact between the fantastic team at Standout and our ecommerce specialists, we began to deliver a 12 month campaign to turn performance around using a full suite of the following services; paid search, email, SEO, PPC, content and social media.
CATEGORY OPTIMISATIONS
Collection pages such as specific brand ranges, different product types, etc., were optimized by creating new, keyword-focused meta and on-page content. Numerous duplicate titles were identified and rewritten to avoid cannibalisation and to help improve organic search invisibility.
BLOG CONTENT
We devise content calendars based on thorough keyword research, emerging trends and seasonal patterns, to craft monthly blog articles that answer questions, offer style advice and, of course, promote Standout’s latest products. Creating detailed product guides, tips on how to style Standout products, plus seasonal gift guides allowed us to rank for a range of specific search queries such as “what to wear with grey joggers” (390/mo) and “mens summer fashion” (4,400/mo).
USER JOURNEY OPTIMISATION
Our SEO team focused on improving customer journey and creating SEO-focused content, based around what’s best in terms of user experience – rather than concentrating primarily on search engines and ranking. This has vastly improved the quality of content we have created for Standout, as every task is designed with the intention of targeting rich keywords we see an opportunity to rank for.
TECHNICAL SEO AUDITS
We conduct regular technical SEO audits to quickly identify and amend technical errors such as broken links, images, and slow loading speeds. This helps to keep overall website health in check, which can be a significant factor in how your website fairs among others in organic search listings.
INFLUENCER MARKETING
After winning the account for the third year running, we began to work with Standout to build an influencer marketing strategy. By sourcing suitable influencers with large followings, we were able to promote Standout and its products to an already engaged audience looking for the latest designer menswear styles. By carefully selecting a range of men’s fashion and lifestyle bloggers with high engagement rates, we were able to reach Standdout’s target demographic and gain high-quality user-generated content that could be reshared on the brand’s own channels for a more authentic and personal approach than professional ecommerce photography.
FASHION BLOGGER COLLABORATIONS
Forming connections with fashion bloggers (based on website traffic and domain authority), we were able to acquire a steady stream of high-quality backlinks in exchange for gifted products, to help boost Standout’s own domain authority and traffic, which in turn helped to boost organic search visibility.
PR PLACEMENTS
Our team closely monitored PR opportunities, regularly pitching Standout for relevant features and placements in highly regarded and trusted publications that the brand’s target audience looks to for trusted product recommendations. This in turn strengthens Standout’s reputation and creates a steady stream of targeted referral traffic to the website.
We work in cohesion with Standout’s Google Shopping partner, mining conversation data to produce an effective, innovative PPC strategy consisting of best-performing brands and products. Regularly testing and monitoring targeted keywords and ad-copy, to help drive valuable conversions and support overall PPC revenue in a highly competitive ad space. Standout’s Google Shopping partner implements a very niche strategy to isolate converting search terms using priority settings, which in turn, helps effectively focus the budget on conversions, which drives down CPA figures – whilst still increasing revenue and ROAS.
We introduced retargeting campaigns across Facebook, utilising the platform’s precise targeting features to help Standout reach its target audience. We have created multiple campaigns using dynamic remarketing and ad carousels, meaning users who have previously visited the website but not converted are served personalised ads including the products they have already shown an interest in.
In addition to remarketing, we’ve also implemented another valuable Facebook targeting feature to our strategy called ‘lookalike audiences’. Facebook recognises qualities that are similar to existing customers and builds a group around them. Using lookalike audiences we’ve been able to reach thousands of new users who were likely to be interested in Standouts products. This strategy achieved a website purchase ROAS of +2,531% in the first 12 months of implementation.
We communicate seasonal trends, relevant product launches and engaging, informative content through a cleverly implemented email strategy. After analysing Standout’s email marketing strategy, the existing subscribers were receiving inconsistent, sporadic messaging solely about upcoming sales and promotions. To reactivate and replenish the subscriber list, we implemented a plan to send out fortnightly, informative emails crafted by our content writers – as opposed to the latter. As a part of this strategy, we developed a customer lifecycle automation email series to reactive customers to encourage repeat purchases.
The multi-channel marketing strategy has worked successfully in cohesion and has since increased organic visibility, audience reach and engagement. Our efforts are reflected best in Standout’s website showing the following fantastic results:
We are proud that this campaign was shortlisted in the North East Marketing Awards 2019 for the Digital Campaign of the Year.