Digital Marketing for Baby Shop – Simply Baby Lancaster

Simply Baby Lancaster is an independent retailer based in the heart of Lancaster, not far from our own city centre offices. As a digital marketing agency in Lancashire, it’s always a pleasure to work with local businesses. We’ve been working alongside the owner, Julie Shaw, for over ten years, driving her company’s digital marketing efforts and making sure its online presence is as strong as its physical presence in the city.

Simply Baby has shown remarkable resilience over the years. The small business has bounced back stronger than ever when severe flooding hit the city in 2015 and continues to thrive and grow despite the Covid-19 pandemic. The Simply Baby team’s hard work has always been complemented and supported by digital marketing campaigns born from one key objective: to drive footfall into the Lancaster store.

Digital Marketing Brief – Adapting to Change

For a long time, Simply Baby’s website was used as a platform to offer the knowledge and expertise of the in-store team to web users within a commutable distance of the shop. SQ Digital focused on delivering local users to the site, tracking keyword positions in local areas and making it easy for these users to find directions to the store. With such a large emphasis on generating footfall to a physical location, the restrictions placed on businesses and the public during the pandemic led us to reassess our goals.

With fewer people able to visit the store, we knew the objective driving Simply Baby’s digital marketing campaigns needed adapting. While previous marketing efforts had focused on local traffic, we identified several opportunities to attract customers from further afield. We recognised that with more people staying at home, the emphasis needed to shift towards encouraging website visitors to convert through the online store.

Whilst we explored these new opportunities, it was important not to lose sight of our original goals to encourage people to visit the store when it was safe to do so. With this in mind, our proposal was to implement a cohesive customer journey that supports both in-person and online customer transactions. Our digital marketing strategy was to focus on two main objectives:

1. Convert more sales on the website

2. Encourage customers to visit the store to complete their order, should they feel comfortable doing so.

Digital Marketing Services

Web Design

To support our digital marketing services on this project and increase the online visibility of Simply Baby Lancaster, our in-house web design team proposed a a new website. The new website would improve customer navigation, offer clear and relevant information about the products without having to visit the store, and make converting through their online store easier.

SEO Transfer

When the new website went live, our technical SEO team performed a full SEO transfer to ensure the old website’s SEO data was not lost. We were able to maintain keyword rankings positions we’d worked hard on for many years to achieve. In addition, during this transfer period, we closely monitored the rankings to make sure we retained complete control of the migration. We were able to respond to any alternations in the ranking positions instantly. We also removed several pages at the request of Simply Baby Lancaster, and these were redirected to suitable alternative pages.

On Site SEO

The next step was to increase awareness and visibility of Simply Baby’s brands by allowing the website to be found online for more terms relating to their products rather than the store location. As an SEO agency, this is our bread and butter. We knew this approach would enable us to target people further afield, searching for terms relating to their products rather than just their store location.

We created optimised landing pages and improved user experience by highlighting some of the main product groups available from the brand stocked by Simply Baby. Through a combined effort between our SEO and content writing teams, we continued to optimise the brand pages on the website to create a strong internal link structure and give visitors more opportunities to convert from the pages they were landing on.

We’ve seen an increase in the ranking position and visibility for keywords relating to these brands from the work we carried out. We continue to optimise the brand pages on Simply Baby Lancaster’s website and regularly create fresh new content. SEO is an ongoing process that requires constant maintenance to achieve consistent results.

PPC

Throughout 2020 and beyond, Simply Baby Lancaster experienced continued growth in conversation, purchase value and traffic to its website thanks to our pay per click Google Ad

campaigns. We introduced new campaigns to focus on Simply Baby Lancaster’s branded keywords, updated remarketing banners and increased budgets. As a result, the campaign delivered:

Increase in conversions of 132.68% during the calendar year
An increase in phone calls
Increase in contact form submissions
A boost in sales and overall traffic to the website.

Through PPC campaigns, users sent to the Simply Baby Lancaster website increased by 66.38% in 2021.

We also worked closely with Simply Baby Lancaster to create new remarketing banners that present previous website visitors with the latest ranges of products. ‘ ‘We’ve also improved their calls to action and the overall strength of the Simply Baby brand.

Digital Marketing Results

The success of our work with Simply Baby Lancaster is a direct result of taking the time to understand the business, its strategies, needs and goals. In doing this, we aligned every digital marketing effort, from eCommerce web design to our PPC agency services, and made sure everyone involved was working towards the same, clearly defined objectives.

As a result of our efforts, Simply Baby Lancaster could navigate through a difficult period and maintain a presence in 2020 and 2021 despite having to close its physical location due to the pandemic. Furthermore, in 2021, the company saw an overall revenue increase of 25%.

We love working with Julie at Simply Baby Lancaster and hope we can continue to for a long time to come.