About
Design Make Produce is an online fashion design and production house that provides full supply chain services from concept design to manufacturing. High quality production networks can be difficult to gain access to, especially for new designers and brands entering the market.
Existing brands guard their sources as a tightly held competitive advantage, so it's often a costly process for brands to break-in and find the right production house. Design Make Produce prides itself in solving that problem, offering ethical sourcing to independent designers to brands around the globe.
The Problem
When Design Make Produce first got started, they needed to position themselves as a market leader and demonstrate significant industry expertise. They also needed to attract brands that would be the right fit for them.
However, they didn't have a huge budget for outbound advertising and also knew their buyer personas potentially had a large sales cycle time from the consideration to purchase process.
The sales cycle in starting a brand or commencing production on a new line can take a long time, and sometimes take well over a year to plan. So when it came to the advertising spend and taking sales calls, Design Make Produce only wanted to target leads who were at the final stages of their evaluation process.
Strategically, Design Make Produce wanted to build awareness with brands at the start of their consideration process, but wanted to speak directly to brands who were ready to commit and work with them straight away.
As Design Make Produce was launching, they didn't have any content marketing or an existing user base. Therefore, I had to think of marketing solutions that would help them grow their cashflows in the short-term but also build their revenues for the long-term.
The Solution
In designing a content marketing strategy for Design Make Produce, I first looked for the low hanging fruit. I mapped out the customer buyer journey and I found that prospective clients would always conduct extensive research on all their potential production options.
More specifically, smaller designers and medium sized brands needed to identify producers which offered low minimum order quantities. Their production runs had to be limited, as these brands didn't yet know what exactly would sell-out and what would remain in stock.
Most factories don't offer low order quantities as the production business is driven by volume. However, Design Make Produce's value proposition was their vetted network of high quality, ethical producers.
In researching a keyword strategy, I found that Quora was surfacing on the front page of Google search results for many of the relevant phrases Design Make Produce wanted to target. And — there were no high quality responses to some of these questions.
So, I wrote 6-7 high quality responses. This would allow Design Make Produce to show up on Google's front page exactly when their target personas were searching for them.
To build trust, I framed Design Make Produce as a potential solution but I also listed out other alternative solutions and their service offerings so leads could easily compare and evaluate on the spot.
The Results
Many of the Quora articles gained over 10,000 views, but one particular article generated over 58,000 views and brought in $70,000 in revenue to Design Make Produce over a 12 month period.
I tested the performance of different types of answers and formats, some short and others long. By far, thoroughly researched and detailed answers with over 1,000 words, that were carefully structured with easy-to-scan headings, performed the best.
The articles created trust and credibility with the right audience. It also meant that when customers were ready to reach out and make an enquiry with Design Make Produce, they had already made up their minds about the exact services they wanted to try. Many came ready to purchase — eager to begin creating their first set of prototypes and samples on the spot.
Through this simple SEO hack, Design Make Produce were able to gain exposure to a high volume of potential customers at a very low cost, and bring in the sales.
