Last week, Mothercare announced that it plans to reduce its high street presence over the next two years. Sri Sharma, managing director at Net Media Planet argues why the baby care market needs to focus on growing up online if the sector is to thrive not look to enter new markets.
Mothercare’s financial results are a further signal that the retail sector is struggling in the face of increasing inflation and reduced consumer spending. However, the results also point to the fact that the baby care sector could be doing more to improve its online offering.
Despite the rise of Mumsnet and other parenting sites such as Bounty.com, baby care retailers have been one of the slowest categories to react to the phenomenal growth in online retailing, partly a result of consumer demand to view and test the products. However, with consumers increasingly looking to search online and purchase in-store or vice versa, the online offering is going to become increasingly important for baby care brands.
There are five areas that Sri believes could transform the success of the baby care market’s performance online:
1. Increase your exposure – Many brands forget that there are search engines other than Google. For example, Mothercare currently does not feature extensively on Bing on Yahoo! search which has approximately 10% market share of the UK search engine market.
2. Help customers find you – fashion retailers such as Evans and Crew Clothing are fantastic at covering all terms consumers may search on to find them. However in the baby care market many retailers don’t cover the long-tail of keywords (where the brand or product is searched for alongside a function or feature, e.g. bugaboo chameleon pram), which can result in more quality traffic being driven to its site. Broadening search terms for products you stock results in more traffic being driven to its site.
3. Optimise across PPC, SEO and social – retailers should never ignore the power of combining their SEO and paid search offerings. PPC can bolster where SEO isn’t working and social can help increase saliency. However this is an area baby care retailers are lagging in.
4. Increase traffic through competitor analysis – combining competitor analysis and PPC means you can outperform competitors. For example, because PPC can be updated instantaneously, it enables brands to respond instantly to a competitor promotion, offering a better price promotion or an added value offer to steal traffic as well as build their online presence. In a highly competitive market, with parents always looking for the best deals, failing to respond to promotions drives traffic, and ultimately sales, away from your brand. Similarly, failing to leverage Google Adwords and user reviews divert quality traffic away from your brand – harness these and consumers will engage with you.
5. Integrate channels – relying on your website is no longer enough. In this day and age where consumers are typically online, watching TV and using their mobiles all at once, brands need to offer consumers a choice of how to engage with them. Actively promote your telephone number on your website, as some retailers do. Some people still like to actually talk to someone when placing an order and this strategy could mean more sales for the company. And, with new call tracking technology available, brands can now track the success of each of their online channels, such as social media, display, paid search, SEO, individually and tailor their campaigns to maximise effectiveness of each channel.
The need to integrate channels is a trend we are seeing take hold across the high street. Consumers are increasingly visiting the high street to select the products they want and then going to buy them online and vice versa. If retailers’ online offerings are not up to scratch and don’t tie into their offline offering, both in terms of style and substance, then they will continue to lose out to both high street competitors and pure-play online rivals.
By Sri Sharma
Managing Director
Net Media Planet
www.netmediaplanet.com
