Shoe Internet: commonplace and evidence

I am responsible for the PR of RALF RINGER, including the promotion of the company and brand on the Internet. I am deeply convinced that the shoe market is now at such a stage of development that in order to obtain tangible (and possibly even outstanding) results, you just need to do everything that is written about in books. Marketing, sales, logistics, advertising. It is not at all necessary to invent and implement something completely unique and new. Sometimes such "findings" are even dangerous, as they are very expensive, and their result is unpredictable.

Text: Alexander Greb

This also applies to Internet activity. There are a lot of obvious “things” (tools and technologies) that for the most part are not mastered by the shoe Runet. And on the contrary, there are things in which people invest (spend their time, human and financial resources), but do not receive returns. And if you think about it, often such “no” exhaust could also be predicted from the very beginning. Therefore, in this article there will be no revelations, innovations. But there is evidence here that works.

The first evidence. Name

It would seem obvious that when going online, you need not only to choose a suitable name for your site (ideally, exactly the same as the name of the company), but also to make sure that neither competitors, nor disgruntled employees or customers can use your name against you. Namely, it is necessary to register not one name, but a number of domain names. If you do not, either your competitors, or your enemies, or cybersquatters will do it, who will then resell "your" name to anyone. And not the fact that you will like it. Three years ago I was offered an excellent domain name www.ecco.ru for $ 15. The price, in my opinion, is quite adequate. Even just to redirect from www.ecco.ru to your website and get additional traffic from potential buyers. Indeed, according to the logic of a normal person, the official ECCO website in Russia is located exactly at www.ecco.ru, and I am convinced that a sufficient number of people, when searching for an ECCO website, type in the address bar exactly www.ecco.ru, and not www.here-shoes.ru.

I also remember two sites that were aimed at damaging the reputation of large Russian retailers. In one case, it was said about the low quality of products and unwillingness to work with marriage, in the other - about the dangers of the products to health and the crimes of the company's top management. Moreover, the colors and design of official sites were used to create the feeling that these are the official websites of companies. Now, fortunately (and the honor of companies), I have not found these sites on the network. But this does not mean that this cannot happen with other companies. Domains are free. Moreover, some of them are in the public domain. Here, for example, to become the owner of the domain www.rossita.net, you need to pay only 560 rubles. And given that we do not have a law governing the use of domain names, you get the right to post any information on this domain. For 560 rubles!

The second evidence. Nice photos

How is the shoe buying process going? I see the following chain: I saw a beautiful couple, picked up (felt the weight, texture), tried on (felt like sitting), bought / did not buy.

That is, the first step on our part is to beautifully show the shoes. Obviously, photos on the site should be given special attention. Just because if a person doesn’t like a single “picture” of shoes on your site, he will not have the desire to go to the store. Assuming that a person will think: “This shoe is ugly here,“ in life ”it is better,” there is a misconception. Will not think. Nevertheless, a lot of sites show us frankly repulsive photos. The reason, I think, is to save the budget. But! Why make a website, why put a collection on it, if this collection potentially reduces the number of people who can become your customers? My favorite shoe “pictures” are published on the websites: www.ecco.com and www.clarksshoes.ru.

The third evidence. Promotion

Another obvious thing. Made a website - make it known.

In March 2008, at least 179 thousand people visited the sites of the Runet sector of the Shoes. At least so many visitors took into account the monitoring system. This site in March, the largest supplier of shoes to leading enterprises of Belarus www.belobuv.ru was visited by only 445 people. 445 of 179 000! Moreover, in Russia they know and love Belarusian shoes. This does not require evidence. And the site www.eldantes.ru in the same March was visited by only 228 people! Why spend time and money and maintain a site that 228 people visited during the peak month? Here are the investments in Internet “Mattino Shoes” (38 000 visitors in March 2008) or “City-Shoes” (15 000 visitors in March) I understand.

The site needs to be promoted. Moreover, this can be done in many ways. Put the site address on the box with the shoes, place it on the questionnaire and shoe care instructions, add to all advertising materials. Place links to the site on thematic sites and directories. Do not disdain any catalogs (in my database there are about 2,5 thousands of them). Engage in content optimization on the site, customize the text for the key requests of your visitors. If the budget allows, hire an agency that will be responsible for your promotion in search engines (open Yandex, look at the first 20 sites that the search returns for the query “shoes.” Not all of this list are the headliners of the market). And pay attention to contextual advertising. It is not a panacea, but so far it is able to give you a certain number of visitors for ridiculous money (from 1 rubles). True, this is until "everyone" began to work with the directorate. Perhaps a month after the publication of this article, visitors for one ruble will remain only in the memory of the pioneers of the shoe context.

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The fourth evidence. Your visitors want to know more.

Over the past couple of years, an amazing metamorphosis has occurred with our customers. Previously, for the most part, a person from a shoe site only needed a catalog of shoes and store addresses (which was exactly so, on the old RALF RINGER website there were about 6 000 pages, and 90% of the views were made up of several dozen, the vast majority of which were pages models of the current collection). Now a person wants to know! They read with interest information about the company (and not about the product), they visit the CEO’s Blog (about 5 000 visitors per month without any marketing and PR support), they look at the website for recordings of shows in which company representatives participated . They communicate with us on ICQ and ask questions that we did not plan to answer (why do you sew shoes in Russia, advise high-quality women's shoes, how many designers do you have).

It is wonderful! Use this. Give people the opportunity to chat with you, ask you questions. And get answers to them. The market situation is changing, and the reputation of the product is increasingly tied to the reputation of the company. And if you do not convey the values ​​of the company to consumers, if you are not (at least formally) open to consumers, they will begin to go to competitors.

The fifth evidence. Internet is worth the money

Great times, when the creation of a site and the launch of an advertising campaign on the Internet were conditionally free, have sunk into oblivion. This must be taken for granted. The time has come when working on the Internet, avaricious pays twice. You can hire a certain Internet-craftsman who will make your site cheaper than the "average hospital" in 2 - 3 times. But working with such a site in the future will cost you both time and money. It feels like the price of pleasure is approximately the following:

- make a website (230 000 - 600 000 rubles);

- annual site support costs (200 000 - 500 000 rubles);

- annual expenses for promotion in search engines (360 000 - 720 000 rubles).

Plus, such pleasures as direct, banner advertising, paid placement of information on thematic resources, the creation and maintenance of blogs.

And one non-obviousness. Attention to the text!

On texts, everyone is used to saving. So much so that sometimes the text for the site is simply "stolen". In 2006, we found on the Internet the website of a shoe company on which all content was “made” based on the contents of the RALF RINGER website. Moreover, the text was not processed so much that it looked like this: “Our shoes were developed by the best specialists of RALF RINGER, taking into account the anatomical structure of the foot of the Russians.” In general, thanks to such "mistakes" we discovered the fact of plagiarism.

This happens (not plagiarism, but saving on copying texts for the site) due to a misunderstanding of how useful and beneficial the text on the site can be. After all, the point is not only that good text increases the return on information on the site. And he really improves the return. I give a fresh example. In May 2008, we announced on the website the campaign “Set up your compass”. The site was supposed to encourage people to go to stores during the promotion period. I measured the effectiveness by visiting the control page, in this case the page with the addresses of the stores participating in the action. The logic is this: a person reads the description of the action, and if he is considering the possibility of making a purchase during the period of the action, he will want to find out the address of the store. So here. At the first stage, the text proposed by the advertising department was posted. Then, as an experiment, after two weeks the text on the site was replaced with the PR version (important! - this is not about whose text was better). Text change results: the time spent by 30% on visiting the page with the description of the action: “Set up your compass” increased, and the percentage of visitors who reached the control page (viewing store addresses) increased from 52% to 58%. I am sure that with constant work on quality, it was possible to “pump over” the text by another 5 - 10%.

But again, the value of the text posted on the site is not only in increasing the return of the site’s information. Correct text generates traffic to the site. And this is an amazing property of online texts. The property that texts in catalogs, magazines, and brochures lack. A person seeks information on the Internet in several ways. The most interesting person for a business is the one who searches for a product through search engines. Since he does this consciously, he is only a few steps away from the purchase. He is like a buyer who wants to buy shoes and goes to a specialized shopping center. Your task is to make it go exactly to your store and leave from there with the purchase. For comparison: the person who clicked on the banner is a random passerby who bought an ad and went into the store to see: “what’s there?” The probability that he will make a purchase is small. So, when a person searches for the product he needs through search engines, he creates certain queries. And by no means always these are requests like “shoes” with which optimizers work. By posting texts on the site containing phrases of popular requests from visitors, you bring them to your site. Thus, increase the number of potential buyers, increase awareness of your brand / company / product and save the budget for promotion.