Challenge
MERRITTS FOR HAIR Merritts for Hair specialises in high-quality salon products, ranging from hair care to electrical beauty products. Merritts for Hair was first established in 1972 as a hair salon in Bolton, Lancashire. In 2007, the company decided to branch out digitally and sell a range of competitively priced products online. The online presence enabled customers to easily purchase their favourite products without going to the salon between appointments. In addition to selling products to local clients, Merrits For Hair also has an international customer base, providing beauty products worldwide. INSIGHT Merritts for Hair was looking for a full-service digital marketing agency that could create and implement a more consistent, joined-up marketing strategy to drive sales. Previously, their marketing was done in-house, and their PPC was carried out by an agency, which often meant the marketing itself was inconsistent or sporadic. The company’s goal was to increase its digital marketing efforts by creating more unified campaigns that included all digital disciplines.
Solution
Our priority was to integrate all digital marketing channels into cohesive campaigns that would provide the best results for Merritts for Hair. Our SEO campaign started with a keyword strategy that included focused and relevant keyword research. The initial onsite optimisation took into account what Merritts for Hair was ranking for; in their case, this included relevant and competitive key terms. We built on this optimisation and raised the website’s technical SEO health. And by working closely with the company’s external developers, we were able to maintain and improve the website’s technical health. One of the campaign’s main aspects included improving the click-through rate (CTR) for users searching for product-specific keywords. These audiences were the most likely to result in product sales, so we focused on writing onsite content for product pages and ensuring their optimisation; we also focused on the CTR from search. Merritts for Hair was ticking many of the right boxes with star-rich snippets featured in search thanks to effective product and price Schema markups. We further optimised the metadata and carried out a competitor analysis to raise the CTR for product pages. In terms of content marketing, the onsite content we created played a vital role in ensuring keywords helped the pages rank. More specifically, we expanded and optimised onsite category content so that the pages could have the best chance of ranking. We also expanded and optimised product-level content to capture those who were searching for specific products. And we created regular newsletters that pushed key products and sale items. Regarding our social media campaigns, we focused on Facebook and Instagram, creating the accounts from scratch to differentiate them from the ones used by the company’s physical store (the hair salon). Our posts supported Merritts for Hair’s business goals, including boosting brand awareness. A paid social media strategy was also implemented, focusing on driving sales and building awareness of the company as an established and reliable retailer of well-known haircare products and electricals. We built and tested targeted cold and mid-warm audiences to raise brand awareness, including Lookalikes, Behavioural, Interests and Social Engagers. To support wider seasonal and event-led campaigns, we also boosted posts like competitions and sign-ups. To boost sales, we took a multi-campaign approach to target users familiar with Merritts for Hair. Using remarketing techniques, we targeted warm audiences like website visitors and converters, who were very likely to purchase. To recover cart abandons and further boost sales, we targeted these potential customers through dynamic remarketing, encouraging them to complete the sale. A PPC campaign promoted the Merritts for Hair website across Google’s Search Network while using the Display and Discovery Networks to retarget previous website visitors and customers. The aim was to drive users back to the site to complete a purchase or increase cLTV (Customer Lifetime Value). Alongside this, we targeted users across Google Shopping to capitalise on a virtual storefront experience – something essential given the digital-first approach everyone has had to adopt since early 2020. We placed optimised product titles, descriptions and images in front of varied audiences at different stages of their purchasing journey and from different markets (for example, B2B and B2C). With a successful Google Ads base, we efficiently scaled advertising across to Bing via Microsoft Ads. Due to lower competition levels, we achieved strong ROAS (Return On Ad Spend), further improving the return generated for Merritts for Hair. We leveraged several of Google’s automated tools to tailor specific campaigns to each audience’s needs. Our segmented, granular approach allowed us to reduce any wastage from campaigns and further grow advertising returns. Adopting automated bidding and dynamic campaign types allowed Google’s large audience insight database to predict consumer behaviour, automatically adapting bid levels and advert schedules to promote adverts more aggressively at peak times of the day.
Results
SQ Digital used a holistic digital marketing approach that integrated several disciplines, leading to cohesive campaigns that successfully helped Merritts for Hair to achieve the sales goals they were after. • Product revenue grew by 22.8% • Unique product purchases grew by 35.7% • 106 monitored keywords on the first page of Google search (44% of the overall campaign, when compared to the initial 12%) • Our paid social ads generated £22,500 in revenue, 915,000 impressions and 4,500 clicks to the website • Our PPC management led to a revenue increase of 37.54% and a ROAS increase of 14.69%
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