Launching an Ecommerce Challenger Brand

Creating a brand identity, content and SEO strategy to confidently enter a marketplace as challenger.

Project: New Site Build for SILKUP
Services: Ecommerce SEO, UX Design, Conversion Rate Optimisation
Industry: Luxury Retail

A new brand with an innovative product enters an established market.

Brief:

At Erudite we want to lead by example and have long wanted to create an ecommerce business of our own. A project like this allows us to instil best practice into our technical marketing from a client perspective. A passion for natural hair styling and protection led to the idea for https://silkup.com

We gave ourselves the brief to establish a market presence, create a social media audience and design a beautiful progressive web app.

The Solution

We created an Instagram account and invested in high quality photography to begin a story of both our origins and countdown to launch, as well as messages of empowerment and support for those on a natural hair journey. Our Instagram account attracted over 2,000 followers in the month prior to launch, leading to ambassador opportunities and pre-sales interest.

In order to launch with a great brand presence, we then turned our attention to brand SEO strategies. First, we conducted a Social Graph Audit to identify areas of inconsistency across the various platforms. We found different naming conventions (SILKUP, SilkUP, Silk Up), different bios and descriptions, and many of the social platforms weren’t linked to each other. Further, there was no WikiData entry for SILKUP.

We ensured all social platforms used the correct naming convention, consistent descriptions and linked to each other (as far as possible) and, crucially, to https://silkup.com. Completing the WikiData entry was the final step at this stage before monitoring and analysing the results.

How we did it

Experience-Driven Strategy

We have over 10 years experience accelerating sales for ecommerce sites, we drew a lot from that experience when developing our strategy. Our approach was mobile-first, incorporating SEO, accessibility and CRO best practice into the build from conception until launch. This ensured the site was at its optimum ranking potential from day one and free any technical errors.

Social Strategy and Entity Building

To ensure SILKUP was visible and in demand from the day of launch, we worked with other channels to build our brand entity and grow our audience. Our Instagram account had over 2,000 followers at launch. Insights from our social channel helped us build our content strategy leading to high engagements metrics.

Progressive Web App (PWA)

Progressive Web Apps are cross-browser & platform applications that provide fast, reliable & engaging web app experiences, regardless of the network state. Based on our experience we knew that a high percentage of users would be visiting the site on a mobile device and our goals were to provide them with the best possible experience by making the site a PWA.

Significant brand demand from site launch

We received numerous brand ambassador applications prior to launching the business, meaning we were ready with an amplified social media marketing strategy before we even had the site indexed.

The site itself, is a full Progressive Web Application (PWA), meaning it is fast, reliable and installable, with the additional benefits of offline availability and push notifications.