Loop Earplugs saw great growth targeting night clubbers, festival-goers, and musicians, here's how
Loop Earplugs and Re:signal won the Consumer Goods category at The Drum Awards for Search. Here is the award-winning case study.
A still from the Loop site
We began working with Loop Earplugs in June 2021 when the team consisted of a 6-person start-up, to Loop now employing over 160 people. Loop Earplugs wanted to establish themselves as a marketplace leader, especially within their priority markets of the US and UK. The aim of this project was to improve organic search performance for Loop Earplugs for relevant conversion-driving terms, building on last year’s performance.
Objective: The organic targets Loop Earplugs outlined for 2022 were solely revenue-based. Their target for 2022: Grow Organic - significantly! This was achieved by continued technical analysis and implementation, in conjunction with a detailed and focused commercial and editorial content strategy that targeted a range of customer profiles. We initially completed a thorough SEO technical audit, a performance review, and a content gap analysis, from which we were able to uncover opportunities and increase organic performance.
Target Audience: Initially focusing on night clubbers, festival-goers, and musicians, the predominant target audience was 18 - 25 years old with an active party-going lifestyle. However, the target audience has developed considerably over the past 18 months broadening Loop’s horizons by targeting a much wider range of consumers based on their use of Loop’s products. These consist of, but are not limited to: Sleep, Snoring, Noise/Sound Sensitivity, ADHD, Autism, Anxiety, Misophonia, Phonophobia, Tinnitus, Other mental-health related sensory processing disorders, Parenting, Travel, Motorcyclists, Focus/Concentration, Studying, Working. While also maintaining the initial target audience of the active event attending lifestyle such as; night clubbers, festival-goers, ravers, and musicians.
Strategy: To help with their change in target audience, we analyzed the customer buying cycle at the Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion stages. This shaped our content strategy and outlined our key objectives, which were:
Awareness: Introducing new customers to the Loop Earplugs brand during the initial research stage and inspiring them to find solutions for their noise sensitivity in different conditions.
Consideration: Ensuring continued visibility of the website at the point of purchase so that Loop Earplugs are front and center when people are deciding which product is right for their situation and comparing them with competing brands/retailers.
Conversion: Ensuring that Loop Earplugs ranked for their product terms as well as generic terms such as “ear plugs”, “ear plugs for musicians”, “ear plugs for motorcyclists” and ensuring the pages those users land on are optimized and guide the users to the right product pages.
With the refined target audience, we were able to create a strategy focused on creating commercial, informational, and editorial content to rank for relevant keyphrases pertaining to this audience, ensuring we engaged with customers at each stage of the buying cycle. The main category and subcategory pages were designed to capture transactional, bottom-of-the-funnel searches while supporting content enhanced their overall topical authority and drove mid-high funnel organic traffic. When combined, this supports an increase in organic revenue through the category and subcategory pages while enhancing overall visibility and non-brand traffic for a variety of searches throughout the sales funnel.
We focused on high search volume terms that would produce conversion, specific to each user moment identified to diversify into other keyword universes with less-varying search demand. We wanted to target the generic head terms around ‘ear plugs for…’ as these terms have high search volume and huge potential to convert.
Results: Together we achieved +112% of the agreed KPI (Jan - Dec 2022 vs Jan - Dec 2021)
Sessions: +25.64%
Revenue: +34.02%
(Jun 2022 - May 2023 vs Jun 2021 - May 2022)
Sessions: +60.3%
Revenue: +106.9%