When it comes to investing in your own personal brand, most of us think about buying apparel companies or purchasing a hotel chain, but did you know that you can invest in a quality product that will allow you to grow your business online?
Fossil, a fashion tech company, is a great example of an investment that can pay off handsomely. In fact, the brand just raised a cool $40 million in a Series B funding round led by Thayer Anderson, the founder of Pro Ventures. This round also included Tusk Ventures, Greycroft USA, and other private investors.
Fossil has had some pretty big names as customers including Anne Hathaway, Serena Williams, and Emily Blunt. If you’re looking to dip your toes into the world of online marketing with limited experience, then you can gain a lot from reading on.
The Basics
First things first: if you’re reading this, I assume you know what SEO is, or search engine optimization. It’s quite possible that you’re also familiar with the acronym SEM, which stands for Search Engine Marketing. These are all the techniques and tools used to drive traffic to your website from a search engine like Google.
I’m going to give you a brief overview of what SEO and SEM are and how they work, but for those looking for a more in-depth introduction, you can visit the SEO Institute’s free Basics course.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of improving your website’s ranking in search engine results. By doing this, you can gain more traffic to your site. SEO usually involves two steps: On the one hand, you need to ensure that your website contains all the keywords and phrases that customers are using to find information on your topic. On the other hand, you need to improve your site’s user experience so that they’re more likely to stay on your site instead of going to your competitors. The better your website’s SEO, the more traffic you’ll likely see from organic search results on search engines like Google.
SEM (search engine marketing) is a form of SEO that involves paid advertisements on social media channels like Google Ads and Facebook posts. These are the ads that you’ll see if you log into your Google Ads account.
Paid advertising is one of the most common and the most effective forms of marketing. Depending on your budget and how much you’re willing to spend on advertisements, you can target the right audience and gain more qualified leads and customers. Once you have their attention, you can continue the conversation and hopefully close the deal.
Why Choose Fossil As An Online Marketing Investment?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to use Fossil to improve your online marketing, let’s take a quick look at its history. If you’re unfamiliar, Fossil is a luxury fashion brand that was originally founded in New York in 1977. But it didn’t make much money that year, so it wasn’t until 1982 that it started becoming a profitable company. In the years since its founding, the brand has grown to become one of the most recognizable and influential in the industry. It’s currently valued at around $16 billion.
The brand is most well-known for its watches, but it also makes jewelry, sunglasses, and fragrance. What’s more, if you’re an online marketer that’s been seeking to gain traction and make an impact, then you know that gaining brand authority and trust is the key to success. Luckily, Fossil is the perfect brand to help you become more authoritative and trustworthy in your marketing.
How to Use Fossil To Improve Your Online Marketing
Now that we’ve covered the basics of SEO and SEM, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of how you can use Fossil to improve your website’s SEO and SEM performance.
Step One: Select Keywords And Phrases To Target
If you’re looking to target the right audience and gain more qualified leads and customers, then you need to choose keywords and phrases that are relevant to your site’s content. When we are conducting keyword research, we usually start with the most popular search queries on major search engines and then expand our focus to include more niche-specific inquiries. Using tools like Google Keyword Planner, you can easily find these keywords and phrases and determine the competitive keywords and phrases so that you know what others are targeting and what obstacles you might face in the future.
Step Two: Create Keyword-rich Content
Having keywords and phrases lined up is only the first step to effective SEO. Now, you need to make sure that these words are used in the content that you create on your website. If you’ve been seeking to gain credibility and brand trust with your customers, then you need to make sure that the content that you create is both relevant to and tied to your brand. This is going to be your guide to creating content that satisfies both your customers and the search engines.
Step Three: Build Links To Your Site
SEO is all about gaining credibility and trust with the search engines, so you need to make sure that they see your website as a go-to source for information on your topic. One of the best ways to do this is to build links to your site from other sites. When Googlebot crawls a site, it’ll look for links to other sites and if it finds a number of links, it’ll rank your site higher in the search results. You can use tools like Google’s free web master tool to easily find these links.
Step Four: Measure The Results Of Your Effort
Now that you’ve started getting some traction with your SEO and SEM efforts, it’s time to measure the results. Just like a restaurant that bills itself as a luxury brand catering to the well-heeled society of New York, you want to make sure that your hard work does in fact bring in the revenue that you’re after. Luckily, Google provides us with some excellent tools to do just that.
The first step is to log into your Google Analytics account and then create a new report. From there, you can choose to view either a summary of your efforts or a detailed analysis of your site’s performance in the past month. The former will let you see how much traffic you’ve received from organic search results and the latter will show you where that traffic came from and what keywords and phrases brought in the most interest. From there, you can drill down into even more detail using the powerful tools that Google offers.
The Artistry Of Marc Jacobs
Before we wrap up, let’s take a quick look at the brand that we’ve focused on this far: Marc Jacobs. Located in New York City, Marc Jacobs is not your typical luxury brand. For one, it was founded by Marc Jacobs, a designer who started the company with his wife, Georgina. Second, the designs are generally more youthful and fun in nature, which is a departure from the traditional luxury brands that you might be used to. Despite these differences, Marc Jacobs is a brand worth knowing and using, as evidenced by its large customer base and celebrity followers.
If you’re seeking additional information on how to use luxury brands to improve your online marketing, then I highly recommend you read the complete book that this article is based on: The Luxury Brand Owner’s Manual. Authored by my colleague, Anja Kirshner, this is an excellent guide to using luxury brands effectively in your marketing.