CheezeDMG Blog

The ease of online shopping has shaped the way consumers prepare for the festive season. With competitive offers, gift wrapping and free delivery online now offers that ‘perfect’ gift and has resolved that age old question of “what to buy?”. But has the effortlessness of a ‘click and buy’ generation misplaced the heart and warmth behind venturing into the real world and looking for that perfect gift?

Google Insights shows that searches for ‘Christmas gifts’ have reached unprecedented heights when compared to last year in addition to which searches for ‘personalised Christmas gifts’ have increased by 40%. Online advertisers this year are capitalising on this shift in consumer wants and needs, we no longer need just a gift but want that gift to evoke a feeling.

This holiday season John Lewis have successfully run advertising campaigns on and offline encouraging consumers to ‘find the perfect present’. With the option to shop by recipient we can now be inspired with the knowledge that if we choose to buy we are choosing an ideal gift. Similarly, Comet have now changed their slogan to reflect this shift from ‘we live electricals’ to ‘we deal in your ideal’.

To overworked, time poor consumers online shopping has provided the opportunity to not only find a gift but discover ‘the’ perfect gift for their loved ones this Christmas. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues into 2009 reflecting the change of consumer mindset or if this is just a way for retailers to get around ‘Crunchmas’…

Paid Search: Next season’s fashion must have!

As a dedicated follower of fashion and search engine marketing, possibly not an obvious combination, it is disappointing to see that the search market for fashion retailers is anything but fashionable.

With the rise of online clothing retailers such as ASOS and Oli, digital media is more important than ever for retailers to embrace. Paid search is still however being used in its purest direct response form, ignoring customer search evolution and the rise of celebrity fuelled inspiration.

Fashion retailers are not ignoring online as an advertising medium, the eCRM market is fierce with retailers sending at least two ‘on trend’ emails a week, John Lewis and Littlewoods Direct run strong display campaigns and ASOS has a fan page on Facebook with over 52,000 fans, and Top Shop has it’s own ‘fashion fix’ application.

Why then, when fashion retailers are updating content so regularly on their sites and emails are their search campaigns not seeing the same evolution?

The same golden rules apply for paid search marketing as they do to fashion. Ultimately great fashion is a number of well designed pieces combined to create an outfit. You may own this seasons to die for handbag, but teamed up with a shell suit and cowboy boots you will be appearing in Heat’s next worst dressed column! Similarly, your keyword list may be perfect but unless you have your paid search campaigns structured well with ‘on trend’ creative you will not be getting the best out of your digital marketing.

So here are Cheeze’s Top Ten Paid Search fashion commandments:

1. Ensure that vocabulary is reflecting the target audience and their purpose for searching. Arguably, someone looking for ‘little black dress’ should be spoken to in a different tone to someone looking for a dress for work. A well structured search campaign will enable different messages to be delivered to these differing terms.

2. One of Victoria Beckham’s fashion rules is to ‘invest in timeless classics’. It is essential to include more generic terms that are higher up the research chain in your campaigns. Exposure to conversion tracking has confirmed that more often than not users will start researching with a generic terms such as ‘dress’ but convert on more niche terms such as ‘little black dress’. It is crucial that these more generic terms are used as a branding tool to ensure that you are part of your consumers consideration set right from the beginning of product search.

3. However, it is also important to expand your keyword list to include style specific terms and to refresh ‘fashionable’ terms on a weekly basis, referring to top fashion channels for up to date inspiration. The term ‘skirt’ has 45 pages of sponsored listings (this could equate to over 500 advertisers), whereas ‘puffball skirt’ has just 8 advertisers appearing! The term ‘maxi dress’ has seen a 70% increase in searches in the last year yet only 11 advertisers are advertising on this term.

4. Keep up with celebrity fashion; it is where most of your target audience will get inspiration, and where ASOS found their niche. Despite ASOS building a brand based on ‘imitating’ celeb style their SEM activity currently does not reflect this. They have 25 Girls Aloud inspired items, but no search advertising under these relevant terms.

5. Bid on terms that relate to recent celeb clothing / trends / TV performances where relevant. Diana Vickers of X Factor fame wore a Top Shop (or very similar) dress for one of her performances, six people wrote about this on Yahoo Answers, however no advertisers are bidding under Diana Vickers terms.

6. Make sure that the copy is relevant to the term you are bidding on. Oli.co.uk have just launched a range of Peaches Geldof dresses, they are at number one on Google under ‘peaches geldof dresses’, however there is no mention in the ad copy of their new range.

7. Don’t be scared to stand out from the crowd. You do not need to have a large budget and be positioned at number one to attract the user – be as creative with your copy as you are with the fashion you sell.

8. Don’t forget your brand identity in your paid search advertising. Copy should reflect the messages you deliver to your audience through offline media, your site and your overall brand essence.

9. Perhaps most importantly, support PR gained from other sites and offline magazines. Today Look Magazine’s website is telling me to buy a Miss Selfridge fake fur leopard print coat, however when I search for this on Google, they are number one on organic search, however in the premier paid search positions Next are number one, followed by the lesser known fakefurfashion. Miss Selfridge isn’t appearing at all on page one of results. They should be number one with an ‘as seen on Look’ message. Every item that has been highlighted / showcased in a fashion segment should be pushed to number one on search engines for this term with copy reflecting this link.

10. Fashion moves fast, so does online advertising.  Style is timeless, and so is a good agency.  I am biased here but if you want to stay on top in the fashion SEM market, you could do well by talking to Cheeze. You should talk to Tom Griffiths - just don’t ask about his fashion sense!

Paid search should be as fashionable as the items you are selling. As Coco Chanel, my fashion idol, once said ‘Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening’ why not extend fashion into your search campaigns?

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Nina is the agency Fashionista and one of our wonderful Senior Media Account Managers.