Case Study - How Lilac James Launched Out'n'About's Digital B2C Strategy with Google Ads, Facebook Ads and SEO
Jamie Stenton
Digital Agency Owner @ Lilac James | Leading Digital Marketing Agency specialised in SEO, Google Ads and Social Media Marketing.
This case study will cover Lilac James used Facebook Ads, Google Shopping and SEO to drive huge return on investment for buggy supplier ‘Out’n’About’.
Who are Out’n’About
Out’n’About is an international supplier of children’s buggies, currently selling to UK and Irish markets.?They focus on selling highly practical, versatile and stunning buggies capable of tackling difficult terrain and enabling parents to effortlessly explore and go running with their kids.
Since they were founded Out’n’About has operated a distributor model whereby the sell their products to a network of shops and suppliers.?Several years ago the added an Ecommerce side to the business whereby they sell direct to consumers.
Out’n’About found Lilac James via SEO when they were looking for a digital marketing partner to help them grow the E-commerce side of the business and grow brand awareness across the UK market.
Initial Review
Prior to working with any client Lilac James conducts research to identify whether we can meet and exceed client expectations, once we’re satisfied client expectations can be met, we prepare our strategy and present findings to our client.
Lilac James identified the UK buggy market is extremely competitive with several international clients with very large budgets investing heavily in their digital marketing and capturing a large swathe of pre-existing demand.
Out’n’About had a great product, within a challenging market, and their product offered solutions not offered by major competitors which provided opportunities to insert Out’n’About into the digital market in a cost effective manner.
The Strategy
We hypothesised that by competing generically within the buggy market, competition would be extremely high and any improvement in brand awareness would be drowned out by large international competitors with extremely large digital marketing budgets.?Cost per conversion would then likely increase dramatically.
Instead, we felt the best approach would be to target niche terms where the Out’n’About buggies have a superior competitive edge.?
We quickly established that there is a good level of keyword demand on Google for buggies with certain characteristics such as ‘Running Buggies’ and ‘Off Road Buggies’ which play to the strengths of the Out’n’About range.?This presented a great opportunity for Google Shopping campaigns and SEO to get the Out’n’About range in front of their target market for more specific search terms that are less competitive, yet higher converting.?
We highlighted that by targeting certain niche terms, we could reduce the cost per click and drive down the cost per conversion on Google Shopping.
They also had great opportunity within SEO given their high domain authority and strong website performance.?Despite this, prior to working with Lilac James, Out’n’About had very few page 1 rankings for buggies within the UK and had surprisingly few page 1 rankings for informational search terms within their niche.
We advised by running a thorough on-page SEO project, a backlink detox and a short but targeted backlink building campaign, we could dramatically increase Out’n’Abouts rankings for search terms highly relevant to their niche, which in turn would drive increased sales.
Finally, we could see that Out’n’About had a moderately high level of traffic to its website of approximately 20,000 visits per month, but the majority of these visits were either from ‘Direct’ traffic, or they had used Google for brand name or product name searches to find the Out’n’About website.
We therefore felt that a brand awareness campaign on Facebook, coupled with a highly targeted conversion campaign to make direct sales would be highly beneficial both in the short and long term.
We also suggested creating remarketing campaigns to retarget individuals who have previously expressed interest in the Out’n’About brand in order to tempt them back into engagement and make the sale.
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The Results
Out’n’About commissioned Lilac James for an initial 3 months to run test campaigns on both Facebook and Google Shopping, we were simultaneously commissioned for 6 months project to develop SEO rankings.
Google Ads
With a moderate starting budget, Lilac James launched shopping campaigns on Google and gradually progressed this campaigns first to ‘Smart Campaigns’ then to ‘Performance Max’ campaigns.
Significant ROI was achieved in month 1 which was improved as we optimised the campaigns, by the end of month 3 Lilac James had delivered a total, 3 month campaign ROI of 1130% for Out’n’About.
Facebook Ads strategy varies to that of a Google Shopping strategy in that you have to conduct a great deal of testing to establish the best creatives, targeting and copy combinations that maximises ROI.
Initially in month 1 we ran several campaign types including conversion, traffic and brand awareness campaigns in order to test which campaign type delivered the best metrics.
Further testing identified that campaigns which targeted parents with kids between 0 and 12 months old, that excluded fathers, produced the cheapest cost per conversion.?Put simply, when it comes to buggies, mothers are far more involved in the buying decision, so budget was focused towards them.
Remarketing campaigns were then used, and optimised, to retarget people and bring them back into the sales funnel.
The results were a total three month campaign ROI of 1648% but the ROI from month 3 alone, was nearly 5000%.
SEO
Rankings were improved broadly for a range of key search terms but in particular, page 1 rankings for highly competitive search terms such as ‘sports buggy’, ‘running buggy’ and ‘off road sports buggy’ was achieved with 3 months.
The effects on the website traffic to Out’n’About were immediately clear to see, compared to the same period last year, new users to Out’n’About have jumped by 5.3%, sessions are up 16.56%, pages viewed per session is up 75% and average session duration is up 7.3%.?
We’re proud to announce that following this successful trial Lilac James will be the on-going?digital marketing partner of Out’n’About.
When we consistently produce results this strong, with clear ROI, it makes it very easy for businesses to choose to extend services and increase marketing budgets.
You can visit?their website here.