GREATS designs classically inspired sneakers for men and women using luxury high quality materials and construction. Free exchanges and returns.
Source: The Playbook
As major brands exodus Facebook, social media again becomes a place where everyone is, but also a place where the countless point of views can be problematic for smaller companies. While sites like LinkedIn are more professional, it isn’t exactly the place to tout your wares and with buyers still quarantining (at least buyers who have common sense and trust science) there is an extreme amount of noise on social channels making it difficult to break through when you are a smaller company.
Greats Brand has always offered a blog on their site, but it had been dormant for a few years. While I am not a traditional shopper, I would visit the site randomly to garner style tips from the site. Most consumers overlook the brands website because they assume most brands are simply trying to sell good on their sites. The irony is a site like Nike with three different blogs/media sites is extremely active in the creation of digital content and customers visit their blog sites at a rate similar to how much they visit the sites of popular sneaker information sites:
SNKRS or Nike.com/launch garners 102.9 Million visits per month
SNKRS is also an app and the launch page registers as Nike’s homepage as well. So this is not a good gauge of how Nike is utilizing blogging. A better option for content creation via Nike is their News site which is akin to Greats Brand’s Playbook.
Nike News garner 1.4 Million visits per month
Nice Kicks (which has been bolstered by the presence of one of their writers being added to the ESPN platform) garners 2.06 Million visits per month
Stadium Goods is a sneaker resale platform that blogs, but is filled with hyped sneaker releases. These hyped releases drive search of Nike more than Nike News. The site garners 3.56 Million visits per month. To offset sites like Nice Kicks and Stadium Goods Nike launched air.jordan.com, moved SNRKS to a blog platform and an app and redesigned Nike News.
This is extremely important as people who search for information on sneakers view both these sites as sources for news and Google indexes all of these sites as news sources. This improves discovery of the sites and improves CTR for each platform. Nike benefits from the news they post as an additional traffic generator. It isn’t substantial, but Nike is looking at an extended, long-term solution to pulling its search back from sneaker sites.
Why is it important for a smaller brand to begin building their own content? New brands lose the opportunity for discovery in a shoe store. Without a physical location, the narrative around the brand is left to pictures and videos. When a brand makes the decision to generate content, they make a long-term investment into search via metatags and indexing in Webmaster tools. It’s an important strategy that is underutilized and undervalued, because the return on the time investment isn’t immediately felt.
In a Google search for “sneakers” Nike doesn’t even rate as the top link. Nike does appear on the first page; but the really interesting thing is that sneaker blogs like Sneakernews and Highsnobiety (one sells shoes, one just started their e-commerce) rank higher. Sites like Flight Club and Stadium Goods, both resale sites rank as high as retail chains and as high as Nike.
Which is why it’s important for a small brand, as difficult as it is to find writers and vloggers, to create content for the site. Social media works in driving traffic quickly, but the platforms shift by the season and engagement ultimately is left to chance. I’m not a proponent of following someone else’s playbook, but in this instance if every brand created a Playbook like Greats has done, it will pay dividends in beyond the moments that exist on social media.
Visit The Playbook and bookmark the site. They can’t update daily like Nike, but when they do it’s always engaging.