Farfetch are a global community of designer fashion boutiques offering an inspirational shopping experience to fashion-forward consumers.
8MS have been working with Farfetch since 2013, with a strategy focused on the creation of unique and interactive content assets that can be used for blogger outreach and, ultimately, create SEO benefit. Farfetch constantly strive to provide inspirational content to their customer base that will showcase boutiques and clothing lines across the world.
The Challenge
Our content marketing work with Farfetch had some clear objectives:
- Achieve a 15 per cent response rate from bloggers that were contacted
- Support the overall organic traffic target of increasing 22 per cent YoY in September and October
- Support the overall organic revenue target of a 25 per cent growth YoY over the same period.
The Strategy
One key piece of content we created was the Farfetch Boutique Finder. The primary function of this widget was to help customers and fashion lovers discover Farfetch boutiques across the world by answering a series of questions related to their personal style. After making all their choices the widget would recommend the boutiques that most closely matched the types of clothes they liked.
At the end of the series of questions the widget allowed users to “shop the collection” directly on Farfetch. This ensured the widget had the potential to be a direct revenue driver in addition to its primary use for SEO.
After the development of the widget the challenge was to generate a buzz amongst the blogger community and get them to host it on their websites. Firstly, the widget was designed to be as blogger friendly as possible by simply allowing people to copy and paste the code into their own website to share the widget with their readers.
Our own proprietary tool Advoca8 was used to support the internal teams at Farfetch find the most relevant bloggers and key influencers who would use and promote the tool.
View the full video case study here.
The Results
The blogger outreach was a massive success with a 31 per cent response rate to the 300 people contacted. The feedback was overwhelming positive and over 40 bloggers chose to embed the widget within their blog – at no cost or incentive.
The combined social media reach of the blogs was over 30,000 people on Twitter alone and the comments and interaction rates were high. Overall, the Boutique finder was the most successful piece of SEO content that was developed in 2014 and led to 30 per cent increase in organic sessions YoY following its release in September and October. Gross transactional value for organic search increased by 48.25 per cent YoY in September and October and site conversion rate for organic traffic also increased by 12.3 per cent YoY. The Boutique Widget also spearheaded the increase in keyword listings during this period with the following results:
- The number of keywords in positions 1-3 increased by 27 per cent from the beginning of September to the end of October
- The number of keywords in positions 4-6 increased by 16 per cent for the same period
- Overall, “SEO Visibility Score” from Sitemetrics increased 18 per cent in the two months following launch of widget.
Due to the overwhelming positive feedback the widget is being launched in Portuguese and French in Q1 2015 as well being integrated directly onto the Farfetch website.
It was also winner of Best Organic Search and the Grand Prix at the 2015 Performance Marketing Awards.