Doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun!  We’ve got to April already (how did that happen, exactly?!) and, in keeping with our New Year’s resolution for 2012, we thought we’d have a look back over the first quarter of the year, reflect on the impact of the work we have executed for some of our clients and, importantly, shout about it!  So below I’ve pulled out some edited highlights from three key clients operating in the premium / luxury space; Feather & Black, Bastyan and Cox & Kings.

Looking first at Feather & Black, the luxury bed and bedroom furniture specialist, we helped them attract almost 40% more natural traffic year-on-year.  Their paid search campaign continues to deliver greater revenue for less cost, and is evolving to support their multi-channel strategy to generate greater footfall in their UK showrooms.

Feather & Black continue to grab the headlines; this year they have also been shortlisted for the Best Multichannel Retailer award at the 2012 Paypal awards. We are expanding both natural and paid activity from April, working ever more closely with their in-house team to keep momentum going on all fronts and build on the success of last year…when we helped Feather & Black grow online sales by 46%.

Staying within the retail sector with Bastyan (part of Aurora Fashions), we significantly exceeded revenue targets and delivered a return on investment (ROI) of over 14:1 across paid search.  In parallel, we are working with them to refine their core site, and from May will be developing their content strategy and channel prioritisation for their marketing.

Our work with luxury travel specialist, Cox & Kings, in Q1 has really focused on improving conversion rates; these have increased across both natural search (four times greater than the set benchmark) and paid search (exceeding benchmarks by an average of 30% across all campaigns).

The call tracking solution we put in place (that integrates with our analytics and attribution technology) shows exactly how the digital activity is generating phone calls, enquiries and sales. This intelligence, where we can track the customer journey during a long and complex buying process, allows us to optimise channels accordingly, leading to greater efficiency and ROI.

Anecdotally, looking at all of our clients as a whole, we would also observe the following from Q1;

•  Multi-channel activity, both in thought and execution, is growing in importance across ALL sectors
•  There is confidence to invest in digital where the results are clear (and positive!)
•  While the digital picture may look rosy, clients are still cautious overall about what the future looks like

Clients still want ‘brand prominence’, and happy consequence of remarketing activity, for example, is that it does just that – provides a sense of brand ‘scale’ to those people who have already engaged with the brand, over and above generating extra sales

At the end of Q2, I’ll provide a similar overview looking back at the first half of 2012, as well as some thoughts on how the second half of the year is shaping up.