Case Study: A beauty company was in trouble because its online presence was not representative of the great products it had manufactured for decades. Additionally, competition from big brands was heating up. This post summarizes how Tangelo took this smaller brand and prepared it to compete with Sephora and Ulta Beauty and how they won online.
Content Strategy
Natural. Personal. Connected. These three converging trends define the Future of Beauty, according to Nielsen. At first blush, you might think that an online DTC company centered around natural, sustainably sourced cosmetics is poised to ride the waves of consumer sentiment and dominate the market. In reality, it can be challenging for a smaller brand to be heard above the chaos on the web – and then the problem becomes converting attention into revenue.
Relevant Traffic And Finding The Right Customer
Potential customers were coming to our client’s site but were not filling their carts or checking out.
The Problem: Noise
The blog posts, which should have boosted conversions and educated readers on why and how to use the products, were attracting less than 2% of site traffic. That is a small amount of traffic to the content pages for this or any other online store for that matter. Your content should drive the most traffic across all your pages. If that is not the case, you have a big opportunity for monetization since your content is underutilized.
The Solution: Be Authentic
Understanding the value of your products is a good start. Understanding what your customers want is a different ball game. When large brands compete, they do it with volume, not necessarily with quality. That is the opening for smaller brands.
Large brands have the advantage of budget and volume, while smaller brands have the advantage of being closer to customers’ needs and to the product itself. We’ve learned that the claims made by larger brands are often window-dressing and have no proven effectiveness. That’s where nimble and authentic smaller brands can shine because consumers are moving away from big generic brands.
Build Digital Connective Tissue
One of our central observations about the existing content was that it had to be turned around and face outward. It needed to highlight the benefits of beauty products instead of just uplifting the brand. This is a key concept developed by Tangelo. We turned branding on its head and drove brand value by using the products rather than the traditional method.
Connect Silos: Social, Web, Search
Our initial strategy was to create a synergy between the website and social profiles. We created a compelling story with in-depth blogs that tied back to messaging in the brand’s Instagram Stories. We also tied featured products to blog topics as part of the marketing plan. The featured products would be highlighted on the homepage with a motivational call to action (CTA).
This messaging was reinforced with a blog post on the same topic with a secondary CTA. We sent blog readers to the shopping pages on the site and site visitors to the blogs with links wherever products were listed, including on the main category pages as well as on the product pages themselves. This helped encourage on-the-fence users to convert. Providing them with necessary reassurance, explaining the benefits in finer detail, and showing them how to use the product.
Email marketing is not dead
Email marketing is not dead; in fact, email programs are key to the success of your content marketing campaign. To personalize the brand and energize the audience, a set of motivational emails featuring blog content was put in place.
Lastly, in transforming content, we aimed to ensure visitors understood how much value this brand would bring into their lives. For example, instead of saying that an all-natural collagen boost face mask was less costly to produce, we highlighted why natural ingredients excelled at smoothing away wrinkles safely. This turned out to be crucial to the content strategy’s success. We used analytical keyword research on the site, including competitive data and keywords, to optimize the blogs and ad copy.
The content was optimized to impel action and answer common questions that held visitors back from making a purchase. For instance, removing uncertainty over which product was right for them with a step-by-step guide. The amplification established trust and kept the brand in the public’s eye.
The First Online Campaign: All Aboard the Lip Liner
The standout winner in Tangelo’s campaign was the company’s lipstick-related content. We established a 30-day testing window and measured categories like lipstick, where the revenue was exactly $0 at the start of the test.
Metrics
A month later, our client was able to write down $80,000 in revenues with a lipstick pencil. The conversions followed a massive spike in traffic, thousands of hits, for keywords like “lipstick guide.” Understanding which keywords target shoppers were searching for was central to the success of this project. We optimized the site content around highly actionable keywords tied to the biggest hesitation-related questions visitors had. Instead of just “Lipstick” as a category, we optimized around «lipstick guide,» so buyers could answer which lipstick they needed based on a host of variables. The same logic applied to cosmetics, such as «blush for your skin color» keyword optimization and blogs on «how to apply X.”
One of the essentials of an intelligent SEO strategy is not to fight battles you can’t win. You build on your strengths, just as the right look for you is one that accentuates your best features. We researched the market to determine which terms had a relatively low volume of high-quality content and relatively high interest.
By doing this, we made feel visitors feel more comfortable and confident in their purchases by hitting home on the exact points that were «holding them back» from trying something new. We validated our methodology by measuring traffic after the test ended as well, and the client did indeed notice that traffic fell, indicating that the revenues were correlated to the campaign. They could clearly see the business case for maintaining a commitment to fresh and engaging content around visitor-specific keywords.
