Whilst we pride ourselves at Passion on always looking to the future, it’s often crucial to look at the past – even if it is just to celebrate what happened. This is why we’re taking a moment to reflect on some of the amazing work our Passionistas carried out for our clients in 2021.
It was so difficult to pick our standout marketing campaigns and we’re proud of all the work we’ve done for every client but this is a blog post, not an epic! If you’re looking to take your brand to the next level in 2022, get in touch! We’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, settle down for some of the past year’s client work highlights.
Organic Marketing 2021 Highlights
SEO – Stashbee:
Stashbee is a platform that connects people with unused space to those that need it. It’s an online marketplace featuring a wide range of storage spaces and parking locations, easy to find and book near you.
The market contains some well established brands including Gumtree, JustPark and YourParkingSpace. Stashbee needed to supercharge its organic visibility to compete. And that’s where we came in.
We approached the challenge using technical SEO, on-site optimisation, content marketing and outreach. The first task was to ensure the site foundations were covered: optimal information architecture, lightning-fast page speed and a killer UX. At the same time, we conducted a very large keyword research piece across all products and locations to identify which pages would need to be created in order to start ranking for local queries. But we didn’t stop there. We wanted those pages to be unique and rank high, so we created optimised content and even a new blog to have a constant stream of engaging and strategic content.
The results have been phenomenal and we have a tremendous increase across our two main priorities: parking and garages.
We’ve seen:
- 72% increase in organic sessions
- 103% increase in organic sessions from generic searches (excluding brand/homepage)
- 424% increase in organic sessions for the parking section
- Page 1 rankings up 46.5%
Organic Social – Downey:
Is there anything better than a luxury client? We don’t think so – especially when you have a longstanding relationship with them.
We’ve been working with Downey, who specialise in luxury printing services (think gorgeous bespoke wedding invitations, beautiful stationery, exquisite packaging and more), for over seven years. However, 2021 is the year we decided to kick things up a notch by managing their Pinterest account – making Downey our very first organic Pinterest client.
Our goal was to use Pinterest to drive and increase traffic to their project case study pages. Our approach included optimising the existing pages on the website – such as the Graff Diamonds Luxury Presentation Box page and the Cartier Presentation Boxes page – and then creating optimised pins for Downey’s Pinterest that targeted those project pages.
In the first six months of the programme we saw some fantastic results:
- 200% increase in impressions
- 130% increase in engagement
- 50% increase in clicks to website
As a direct result of our organic Pinterest efforts, we have seen a few pins ranking on Google – which is a fantastic bonus from an SEO perspective.
2021 posed the challenge of proving that organic Pinterest is worth it, as this campaign has been a Passion first – in 2022, we look forward to seeing even more wins with our measurable Pinterest strategy.
Our Organic Marketing team certainly kept busy in 2021, achieving stellar results for clients. But it was never plain sailing. With Google updating its algorithm seemingly every five minutes, navigating the SEO seas brings a unique set of challenges to the table, which makes the successes of 2021 even sweeter. We’re sure the coming year will bring a new set of opportunities for our Passionistas, and we’re keen to continue driving organic performance for our clients.
Content – SaaS Company:
We work with a large SaaS company that is a leader in its field. Our priority has been a new product line focus, with our goal being to dominate the SERPs for high value non-branded relevant keywords in a very competitive market. We wanted to ensure that our client is covering all content opportunities to become a thought-leading source for everything related to the new product line.
We approached this challenge by conducting a competitor audit, a keyword landscape and content gap analysis to drive our SEO recommendations. We optimised existing pages with unique and quality content to target valuable keywords, optimised content to rank in featured snippets and highlighted linking opportunities, to name a few. In order to ensure all significant topics were covered, we also created content briefs for fresh and relevant blog posts to provide visitors with everything they are searching for.
We have seen incredible results across the new product line focus pages since our recommendations have been implemented, just 3 months in.
Here are some results using just one page as a case study:
- 77.8% increase in organic clicks
- 300% increase in high value keywords
- 2 highly competitive keywords ranking in the top 3-5 positions
Impressions and clicks on one page for the new product line focus
We are already seeing huge year-on-year increases in traffic, and are excited to continue making our client the go-to content and solution hub in their field.
Paid Media 2021 Highlights
PPC – Science Museum
The Science Museum shop is an e-commerce platform selling science-themed and exhibition range toys and gadgets. We were first approached to improve the profitability of campaigns across paid shopping throughout the Christmas period back in 2015. Passion has now carried out this campaign ever since… 6 years later and we continue to enjoy success! 2021 saw some of our strongest results to date.
Utilising historic data, we determined the most effective areas of activity and continued to build on these as a consistent source of revenue while we explored additional opportunities – one of which was the full utilisation of ‘Automated Bid Strategies’ and ‘Smart Campaigns’. Back in 2020, we were quite hesitant to implement these. However, 2021 saw us go all-in, thanks to the improvements in the performance of the Google products.
We also used DataFeedWatch to optimise the product feed, and the Google Sheets functionality allowed for streamlined feed updates (Custom Labels), further enabling us to create effective campaign structures.
Following best practises, smartly structuring our campaigns and using an un-capped Target ROAS strategy, we saw the highest ROAS to date.
YoY results:
- 9.2% decrease in costs
- 23.4% increase in revenue
- ROAS up 36% YoY
Bring on Christmas 2022!
Paid Social – Instagram Follower Campaign
One of our lovely e-commerce clients launched a new spirits brand at the end of 2020. They challenged us to grow their organic Instagram following with a target of 10k followers by the end of 2021.
We had never run an Instagram follower campaign before but we love a challenge at Passion so, naturally, we immediately got stuck in! We first tested dark ads on Facebook, but performance was slow and we wanted to grow fast, so we went back to the drawing board. Instead, we identified the top performing organic posts that showcased the product, communicated the brand story and delivered high engagement with the existing followers. We boosted these posts to key audiences, closely monitoring performance and optimising creative assets based on key learnings and insights. This enabled us not only to grow the account following for key audiences, but also to provide recommendations to refine and improve future posts based on paid engagement levels.
This is what we achieved in 90 days:
- 10.9k followers
- £1.34 cost per new follower
- 39k post interactions (likes, saves, shares, comments)
- £0.37 cost per interaction
The impacts of this campaign were wider than simply follower growth. Traffic from the Instagram campaign generated low cost conversions which certainly surprised us! Over a short space of time, Instagram went from being a key story-telling platform to one of our strongest sales drivers.
Through testing different content themes and formats, our client’s Instagram page now has 21,00 followers and it is still growing!
Performance marketing at its finest, wouldn’t you say? 2021 was an exciting year for our Paid Media team, not just with all the fantastic results above, but also the structural change in bringing together the PPC and Paid Social teams under one roof. We’ve seen brilliant consequences of this (check out our blog post on the new structure for the details) and are looking forward to this formation blossoming further in 2022.
Insight & Strategy 2021 Highlights
Sustainability Research Project – Ashleigh & Burwood
Ashleigh & Burwood is a home fragrance company that has traditionally focused on B2B trading and is now wishing to back this up by improving its B2C digital presence. The Passion team has worked with them extensively throughout 2021 on various projects, including a branding overhaul on social media, a new website design and an SEO migration – which is currently in progress!
In November, Ashleigh & Burwood came to our Insight & Strategy team with an interesting research question. Sustainability is of growing importance in the home fragrance sector, and the client was aware that their website wasn’t properly communicating all of their efforts to make their business, products and processes more environmentally friendly. Our brief was to recommend how they could better communicate their sustainable credentials to their website users and customers.
We achieved this by:
- Conducting competitor research to scrutinise how other brands in the category were communicating their sustainable credentials
- Understanding all the touchpoints that users have on the website
- Identifying a sustainability angle that fits with the company’s values and branding
- Recommending the relevant sustainability messaging at each touchpoint
- Putting together a work plan that sets out all the required steps to implement the recommendations, with workflows across multiple stakeholders
The client was very happy with our insights and practical implementation of our recommendations on the website. Now, we are working on incorporating all of the suggestions in early 2022, ready for deployment in March.
There you have it, a whirlwind tour of Passion’s 2021 campaign highlights. Get in touch if your business could do with a digital marketing lift this year. We’re pretty obsessed with driving results for clients and would love to do this for you!