About Danner & LaCrosse Footwear:
Danner, Inc and its sister concern LaCrosse Footwear, Inc are into manufacturing of high quality, rugged, durable footwear. The products ranges from shoes for work to casual, hiking, hunting, uniform and military shoes. Both the brands launched their websites with e-commerce features. The sole purpose of the websites that time, was to provide product information to the customers in order to boost sales through dealer channel.
Danner & LaCrosse Footwear’s Business Objectives:
In 2004, both the brands revised their corporate strategies. Now the focus was to increase direct online sales to the customer. Danner & LaCrosse management identified Search Engine Marketing as the most cost effective tool to achieve the same. They were targeting to increase online sales of Danner by 35% and that of Lascrosse by 80%. The management further wanted to derive the following results from its Search Engine Marketing campaign
- Improve search engine ranking and targeted traffic to the website.
- Increase sales and positive ROI.
- Increase awareness among target audiences.
Strategies/Approaches Adopted By Danner & LaCrosse Footwear:
Danner & Lacrosse Footwear hired Amplify Interactive to help them in the implementation of the SEM. After doing a thorough study of both the websites, Amplify came across the following challenges:
- The websites were not designed with online selling as a focus nor was it designed with search engine optimization in mind.
- The products of both the companies were diverse and required specific keyword optimization strategy. As for example, military searches for specific Danner brand shoes whereas a construction worker searches for steel toe boots with non-slip sole as his requirement.
- The online footwear market being highly competitive, it required detailed implementation of SEM strategy across the web to improve the ranking.
Danner & LaCrosse in line with the advice from Amplify took the following steps:
- They made several technical & programming changes, which enables the content of the websites visible to search engine.
- Content optimization was done across the websites to ensure that each product has specific keywords which are unique to the product.
- Resource content (bookmaker’s workshop) was developed to provide information about the product cycle to the customers.
- Community content was developed like ‘dispatches from soldiers’ for Danner and ‘your adventure’ for Lacrosse. the purpose was to establish and differentiate both of them from each other as well as from the competitors.
Once the optimization of the website was done it was promoted to the search engine. Ad link campaigns were developed to generate qualified traffic to the websites and to improve their ranking.
Results Achieved By Danner & LaCrosse Footwear:
Within 6 months of implementing Search Engine Marketing, Danner and LaCrosse came across very favorable results:
- They were able to achieve the online sales target.
- The Search Engine Saturation (a measure of how many pages from your website are visual to search engine) saw a significant improvement.
- Inbound links (one of the best measure method to measure online awareness and overall visibility) also saw a big jump.
At the end of the year one of Search Engine Marketing:
- Danner’s traffic from serach engine increased by nearly 175%,overall visitors sessions increased by 158%.
- LaCrosse traffic from serach engine increasd by about 130% ,overall visitors sessions increased by approximate 184%.
- Both the companies exceeded their online sales goals for the fiscal 2004-20005.
Learnings:
- Content optimization is the key to drive targeted traffic to your website.
- Product differentiation is as important as product specification, it gives clarity to the customer
- Product campaigns should be relevant to attract qualified traffic.
- Each product should have specific keywords.
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