If you’re working in content marketing, you know that there’s been a lot of challenges the past two years. Everyone is doing infographics, journalists know the value of content marketing for companies and want paid content, and there’s more and more SEO knowledge among editorial teams. To tackle these and many more challenges, for us 2019 was the year when we leaned towards data-driven and personalised content. But first, let us bring you back…
What has changed the past few years in content marketing?
We’ve seen a lot happening in 7 years of content marketing & link building at Stylight. In 2014 we’ve been one of the first in-house teams in the world to roll out a creative link building strategy. No more bloggers and guest posts. Just a team of creative minds and a lot of outreach emails.
In 2015 our Minionistas content campaign boomed. We decided to turn the tables and imagine what the biggest names in fashion would look like with a Minion makeover. With this campaign we reached about 80 million users, got 700+ website features (60% of them linking to Stylight) in 54 countries worldwide.
Since then we’ve had dozens of creative content campaigns and thousands of links built globally. With really ambitious SEO goals we built and strengthened Stylight’s 16 domains. But something was missing: it was sometimes hard to reach our SEO link building goals and at the same time perfectly fit our brand positioning.
At least since 2018 we all know how hard it is to build links and get media coverage, especially when your global communication strategy leads towards a strong brand positioning and you have to fit your SEO goals in it.
Goodbye, functional links…
Hello, content that help our branding!
Since the web is so hyper-saturated with content, we wanted to provide journalists with unique data and insights they wouldn’t be able to have on their own. No external numbers that everyone can find, but just what makes a 12M monthly users company strong: a deep knowledge of what these shoppers want. And this fits what magazines are looking for: data to support their content.
We wanted the links and mentions we build to perfectly address our target users. This means we had to make sure the content we produce is 100% appealing for fashion, beauty and design magazines. It’s on these premises that our micro-page Stylight Insights was born.
Our data driven reports are being produced by analysing the search and purchasing behaviour of our users, allowing us to predict seasonal trends or measure the effect of newsworthy events on shoppers. Trend forecasts, consumer behaviour reports, influencer & celebrity endorsement impact – you can find this and more.
And how did we get there? We simply made use of our 3 biggest strengths:
- 12 million monthly users
Stylight is visited by 12 million unique users worldwide every month. When looking into the shopping behaviour of our users, we are able to analyse several key figures, including clicks on products, brands or pages, search queries and the content of users’ wishlists.
- Market insights and data intelligence
27M products and 25k brands live on Stylight coming from over 1,300 retailers all over the world: data is our bread & butter. With this project we brought our Data Intelligence and Content Marketing teams closer, creating a perfect cross-team strategy.
- Fashion, beauty & design knowledge
We don’t need numbers to know what’s trendy, but we know how to deal with this data. We are a team of editorial minds with a strong analytical approach and use data to link fashion content to shopping trends using big queries, SQL codes and some Google Analytics magic.
The goals we have with Stylight Insights
Besides publishing content that fits 100% our brand and giving journalists unique content that helps them backing up their articles with trustworthy data, there are some other goals we have with Stylight Insights as well:
- Brand Awareness & attract new users.
Gone are the times where any link was a good link for us. 10 years after the launch of Stylight and thousands of links built, our goal is to get media coverage that strengthens our brand awareness not only among journalists but also among our target users.
- Support our B2B positioning towards partner shops.
SEO, Content Marketing and Business Development have never been closer. Through our content strategy we want to support the development of Stylight’s business thanks to a strong positioning as data-driven and always-up-to-date company.
- Links. But mentions, too.
We would lie if we said a link doesn’t matter anymore. Stylight Insights supports our link building needs to keep strengthening our core markets domains.
A case study:
365 days of fashion in “The Stylight Fashion Recap”
The Stylight Fashion Recap is the result of a year long research looking into the purchasing behaviour of Stylight’s 12 million monthly online shoppers. In this huge report, we identified the most popular online fashion of 2019, split across 3 sections: brands, sneakers and trends.
Our goal was not to showcase only high-end trends or luxury brands, but rather display what the average online shopper was actually interested in during 2019. Key figures included were: top clicked fashion brands, top emerging labels & sustainable brands, hottest sneakers of 2019, and most searched trends, with a focus on trends surviving 2020.
A part from great results (links & mentions), the Fashion Recap allowed us to establish our fashion expertise among the world’s biggest online and offline fashion & lifestyle magazines.
This had a positive, “qualitative” spill-over from a branding perspective and has strengthened our relationships with press and industry experts, that now consider us as a go-to source of fashion data. As an example: after the release of the report, Vogue France has reached out to us for tailor-made reporting, that has been featured in several news articles.
Our latest release: Stylight NOW
Being fast and on top of the news is crucial at a time when the news lifecycle is sometimes the same as the one of an Instagram story. On Stylight NOW we are sharing instant insights about how our 12 million monthly shoppers react to breaking news, events, celebrity styles or special sales.
Was it JLo-s dress or Meghan Markle’s coat to drive clicks and searches on Stylight? What was the top clicked sneaker this week? How does the shopping behaviour change in times of COVID-19? Go find it out or subscribe to our monthly recap newsletter.
Now it’s your turn!
Go check our international Insights pages
If there’s 3 things you should take away from this article and our learnings from the past 7 years of content marketing, then:
1) Make your content localised but scalable.
2) Make it customisable.
3) Make your content fast and reactive.
And now check our international Insights pages and the latest reports that we published yourself! It’s available in multiple languages: English: insights.stylight.com German: insights.stylight.de French: insights.stylight.fr and Italian: insights.stylight.it.
This article was written by:
Ilenia Sarman, Head of Brand & Content Marketing, and
Anna Kraus, Lead Designer at Stylight
