How The Hut Group Uses SEO to Turnover £1.1bn (Digital Marketing Deep Dive)

Key Takeaways

a pizza a pizza hut kentucky fried chicken and a pizza by the way the hot group ceo matthew moulding is probably the most shredded 48 year old you're ever gonna see if you're the sort of person that likes feeling a little bit lazy you like seeing the ultra ultra success of some companies because it pushes you and makes you think that you should be doing bigger and better things with your marketing then you're going to love today's video because in today's video we're going to be reverse engineering one of my personal favorite businesses digital marketing we're going to be looking at the hot group now the hot group is a global ecommerce mega beast with over 100 different sites turnover of 1.14 billion pounds and 7 000 different employees they have their own airplanes i'm not talking about private jets i'm talking about the jumbos they've got a worldwide distribution service and they've got some ridiculous digital marketing going on so in this video we're going to reverse engineer the digital marketing that has helped them get that growth from being just one site to being a huge huge global player going up against some massive massive businesses and winning more often than not so sit back relax and enjoy so first up what is the hot group well the hot group got started in e-commerce back when pretty much everyone else was getting started in e-commerce in the early 2000s they started out selling cds and dvds the general public and then went on to buy a whole bunch of different brands and build their own ecommerce platform fast forward to today and they own and operate over 100 different websites like look fantastic coggles i want one of those my protein and they also own a whole bunch of brands like espart across beauty nutrition lifestyle sales for their most recent financial year were 1.14 billion pounds and with a fairly out of date valuation back from 2017 of 2.5 billion that still makes them one of the uk's largest privately owned companies now where they have an advantage over many e-commerce sites is they sell a lot of their own products so rather than having to compete to sell branded products at a lower price which they still do around two-thirds of their sales actually come from their own brand products and we'll look at how they do that later on okay so how did the hut group start well the hot group really started taking off when it started to build e-commerce sites for the likes of tesco asda argos and w h smith see it would white label its e-commerce platform under their name so that they could sell products through the white label solution and this is still something that the hot group does today offering its ecommerce platform humbly called ingenuity to a whole bunch of different retailers and beauty brands but really over time the thing that's generated the most profit for them has been acquiring and building out their own e-commerce property selling their own brands this has been their main focus before we get into the specific digital marketing strategies that they've used i wanted to talk about the acquisition strategy and the growth plan that they've used because a lot of this is really important to the growth of the business it's not just in the digital marketing they've also chosen and focused on very specific niches in order to succeed now first and foremost they don't build on other platforms they have their own e-commerce platform humbly called ingenuity and they have their own warehousing data they have digital marketing content language payment processing customer service and delivery teams all built into this ingenuity product this is essentially the platform that they build on and then when they acquire a business they'll put that business onto their platform now there are obviously cost savings to this but there's also efficiency savings because it means that all of these different brands can use the same processes the same warehousing the same delivery network all of the websites talk the same language so they can be networked together now this is obviously a massive efficiency benefit but it's also one of the reasons that's allowed the company to scale so quickly because all of the different websites and all different stuff talks in the same language so they're not having to translate and they're not having to communicate between the website and the warehousing because they built both of those things so they can talk together nice and simply so as we said they started off by building white label e-commerce solutions for well-known superstore brands like azda tesco argon but over time they then began to acquire other e-commerce brands and some of these through administration so xavi was the first one in 2009 which they bought out of administration look fantastic which today is one of their premier sites in the beauty space was also an acquisition as was mankind and then in 2011 they bought my protein probably for some of you ecommerce still looks a little bit straightforward and just to give you an indication of the confidence of this strategy their goal when they bought these companies was to double the revenue in the first year of ownership so obviously they have to have a platform and a structure and a process with these businesses that makes them very confident that they can grow these businesses quite quickly which is why the digital marketing has been so key so that's the overall strategy let's now look at how the hot group has actually done this ie how does the heart group buy and transform ecommerce sites and just sell a whole freaking load of stuff through e-com well the first thing to say is actually going to sound a little bit self-serving coming from a digital marketing agency but the hot group spends a whole ton of money on their digital marketing in fact their most recent set of accounts has them spending 8.6 of their sales on marketing which is a huge number this isn't some tiny little startup this is a company doing 1.14 billion pounds a year spending 8.6 of their sales on marketing this is huge now this tells you two things number one they are extremely extremely aggressive with their new customer acquisition the second thing is you know they must have a really good back end and really good operational efficiency to allow them to invest that money and still make a good around 10 net profit each year and by the way how much does your business invest in digital marketing eight point six percent more like point six percent it's interesting to know isn't it that some of the fastest growing businesses invest seriously in their marketing because this is how you grow a company and by the way if you want some help working out what you should be prioritizing in your digital marketing then you can request a free digital marketing review from exposure ninja just click on the link or go to exposureninja.com to request your review one of the team will record you a 20 minute video showing you exactly where to focus your digital marketing attention to generate the highest roi and start your journey to becoming the next heart group well we can get you some of the way okay let's take a look at the websites because really the core to an e-commerce empire is the e-commerce website if these websites don't perform well the whole thing is completely pointless now luckily the hot group has their own system called ingenuity as we've said and they've got 400 people working full-time on building and maintaining and optimizing their system we can have a look at what they've got to see exactly what they've learned so we don't have to go through the pain that they've gone through to figure out what works with e-commerce the first thing to notice when you look at a site like lookfantastic.com which is one of their headline properties and by the way all of the sites in the group share pretty much exactly the same layout is that their ecommerce platform is not reinventing the wheel now these are good-looking professional clean easy to use websites but they are not doing anything groundbreaking they are fairly generic looking now this isn't meant as an insult actually one of the key elements to ecommerce success is giving people something that feels familiar that feels recognizable and just gets out of the way of the purchase you remember your website layout isn't ever going to sell anything you just need to give people the information that they need in order to make the purchase make the checkout nice and simple and get out of the way and that's exactly what they've done with these sites so they're very well thought through and there are a few key elements which help increase their website's conversion rate and we're going to look at those right now so if we compare two of the sites in the group for example here we're just looking at look fantastic versus coggles we'll notice that actually the sites share a lot of the same layout features for example on this home page we are looking at a mixture of product categories we're looking at some specific products these are feature products either new arrivals or bestsellers and then we've got a bit of content as well and we'll see that content is actually one of the main pillars to the hot group's success maybe not as much for focus as it used to be for them we'll come back to that a little bit later on so the combination of products and content seems to be their kind of modus operandi so as we go to look fantastic we see a very very similar sort of layout so we've got some featured products up at the top here then we've got some categories either brand categories or product categories then we've got some more feature products then we've got the content so it's always a combination of products categories and content on the home page you'll also notice on every site across the group they've got these site-wide benefits bars now these site-wide benefits bars are really important they're showcasing key usps or answering particular questions that people might have and they're obviously visible on every single page so whether you come through a google shopping ad or you come through social media or you come through search you're going to see this at the top of every page so look at what we've got we've got delivery terms we've got an incentive for a first purchase which is very important and we'll come back to you in a minute we've got free uk next day delivery over 100 pounds so they're trying to incentivize you to get over a particular purchase threshold and then this site also has its own app if we look at coggles which doesn't have an app we've got information about delivery terms so normal services running during lockdowns again another incentive for first purchase this is important we'll come back to it again and we've got free worldwide delivery available now you notice that both of these are also pushing sales and um selling on price but not appearing to look cheap seems to be one of the common traits across the look fantastic group so very rarely are they charging more for a product than anybody else right this is not a low cost sale none of their sites are necessarily low cost but they're competitive on price when they're selling comparable products that you can get elsewhere now if we go into the site one step deeper we see the e-commerce category page layout which they adopt across the group so here we've got a brand page for mac makeup you'll see that we've got a shop or mac headline at the start and then we've got some e-commerce category description text here which is still very important you'll notice that they often have internal links to specific products or other sub categories in this text as well then we've got the filters down the left hand side which is really nice and easy to use and then we've got the generic kind of product list down here now these filters are pretty important because there's a whole lot of products in some of these categories so it's very important that you're not just dumping all of the possible products that someone could buy in a particular category in front of them and you actually give them some filters to use so that they can start to narrow the selection down and they have a more manageable list of products to work through this is interesting they have quick buy options available for products that you will be able to quick buy now a lot of sites like you know typical shopify templates will include a quick buy option on all products or you're selling something that's a little bit new or higher-end or it's a bit more of a risky purchase for someone actually nobody is going to necessarily quick buy an iphone right they're going to click through and they're going to go and they're going to read more about it and they're going to want to look at reviews whereas for something like this where actually i might have bought this product before and i just want to go straight to my basket and get on with it then a quick buy does make sense but on coggles where they're selling clothing and footwear not going to be possible to offer a quick buy because you're going to need to choose your size before you can purchase and also 165 pound pair of sandals is not the sort of thing that you buy without looking at them from at least two angles as we go down to the product page level we start to get a sense of how much they're investing in these properties because they're writing their own product descriptions and by the way this is no mean feat when for example looked fantastic has around 50 000 different skus so they're writing individual product descriptions for all of those products rather than just using the manufacturer's boilerplate stuff which has been found on a whole bunch of other sites now this is really smart from an seo perspective because obviously this is unique content and gives google a reason to rank this site over any of the other sites selling exactly the same product with exactly the same text and it's also very smart for their own brand because it means that they can make sure all of these product descriptions have the same sort of format and have the most important information in as well now you'll notice that for some of the products they have these um tutorial videos in there as well although not for all and if we go onto the goggles site we'll see for example with these with this footwear thing we've got the product description here which has been custom written and then we've got pictures from different angles but we do not have a product video for every single one now the other thing you'll notice about these product pages is that they share a very very similar layer we have some really key elements here so first up no surprises they're taking a very very familiar well-trodden e-commerce product page layout we've got the product on the left-hand side always we're not messing around we're not trying to all let's try doing it on the right-hand side product on the left hand side button and order information on the right so we've got the product headline here we've got delivery restated we've got quick review mentioned but not actually detailed reviews those are below just like on amazon then we've got the price then we've got the shade or the size or the variation quantity and then the add to basket now below the fold we've got some payment options and it's really interesting that they're even offering payment options on this which is a 20 pound product you can break that into four payments if you need to do it what they're doing is they're making it as easy as possible for people to buy whatever their circumstances so the lesson here as many payment gateways as you possibly can and also if payment options are going to increase your e-commerce conversion rates freaking do it the next thing that we notice is we've got a stock notification and a dispatch notification as well if you're looking for this product on a few different sites more than likely you're going to go for the one where you can get it soonest even if you don't necessarily need it right now you just want to know when you're going to get it you'll also notice they've got live chat and this is common across the sites in the group now the live chat isn't a sticky widget at the bottom of the page because my guess would be they don't want people just talking to them with the volumes of traffic that they're going to be doing but they do offer live chat on the product pages i haven't spoken to them i don't know why they're doing this but i would guess that this is because the conversations that they're able to have with live chat on product pages are less about oh maybe you should try this product or maybe you should try this product but more about questions about actually purchasing this specific thing questions about that particular product or questions about delivery terms stock you know that type of stuff which is relatively easy to answer and it's much more focused biased stuff rather than just hey do you guys sell t-shirts right so interesting they've put the live chat window actually on the product pages we then have the countdown timer now fantastic for scarcity and adding a little bit of urgency just a nice little gentle nudge to let you know that if you buy this now you're gonna get it next day and by the way the clock is ticking you've got to buy it so if you're like me just even seeing that timer ticking down gives you a little bit of anxiety raises the heart rate a little bit and that's exactly what they want underneath the product descriptions we have upsells or cross-sells so frequently bought together so notice at this stage they're not actually trying to ship you up to another product that comes here other customers bought so this is suggesting other things and you can quick buy them to add them to your basket not disrupting your flow straight through to the checkout then we've got the reviews and you can order them just like you can on amazon so let's look at the checkout procedure and again very similar with all of the different sites so first thing you need to do is pick your particular product when you add to basket you get this immediate visual notification that something is in your basket this is good because it means you can go straight to the checkout or straight to the basket without having to do anything else it's also a little visual cue that gets you all right that's in my basket that's logged great you can also upsell even from this little pop-up as well which is quite nice too let's just go straight through to the view basket and we'll see what we've got going on here so we've firstly got a little nudge a little upsell nudge that we can spend more to receive free uk next day delivery wouldn't it be great if they had a product in there that cost about that much that was also bought by people who buy these products we've also got notification that we're getting access to particular offers which is great and then we've got to choose our gift here now why are they doing this because i've already put it in my basket they don't need to necessarily incentivize me with anything else to get me to go through my basket or do they because what they're looking at here is check out abandonment rate they want to decrease that abandonment rate by giving you little nudges as you're moving through the process to make you more likely to complete the process now the other thing is they're probably not paying for these samples the manufacturers are probably paying to send them these samples and it's obviously going to lead to upsells later on so this is a great way of identifying what other products people might be into so that they can then email you and upsell you those products too now here's one thing i'm sure they've tested but they possibly could optimize a little bit further because they're throwing up this page which is a potential barrier rather than just getting you to start filling in your details and then do an automatic lookup on your details as you're typing them in to say hey looks like you're already a customer why don't you just sign in here so i'm not entirely sure why they don't do that because usually we'd expect a step like this to actually decrease the basket checkout rate the next thing to notice in the checkout is how many payment options are available they are giving you whatever way to pay you can possibly imagine so we've got regular car payment we've got paypal we got google's we got clearpay we got labeled visa checkout alipay apple pay wechat pay however you want to give them money they are happy to accept it if you're really keen you can press square left up square left and send them a postal order stapled to a carrier pigeon don't don't do that vegan ninjas i was joking don't do that so lots to admire about the e-commerce layout a lot of e-commerce businesses wrestle with the idea of do we offer a discount code one of the challenges lots of e-commerce businesses have is they wrestle with the idea of do we have discount codes because if we have a voucher or discount code box in the checkout form and we're not offering people a discount code what they might do is go to google or use a browser extension or something to get a discount code they would have purchased anyway but we've then kind of just incentivized them and given them some money off for absolutely no reason it's interesting that all of the hut group sites do have a discount code box not only that they actually give you a discount code in the header of the website that you can use isn't that interesting so they're actually anticipating the product prices being lower than their advertising on the site and they're building their financial models around that now if you want to sneak peek into what their priorities are as a customer here's one way that you can identify them firstly i'm going to check out as a guest and notice that the immediate pop-up you get as soon as you put in your email address to check out as a guest is something that basically is asking you if they can email you offers this is their gdpr pop-up but look at how it's worded it says before we continue from time to time we would like to send you emails containing new product launches exclusive discounts and early access to sales and then you are asked to choose either yes please or no thanks now this is a little bit risky because they're actually inserting another step in the checkout process where you could bounce you could say wait what they're going to start emailing me and bounce from that there is going to be fall off because of this now it might not be much but there is going to be and when you've got the amount of traffic that the hot group has got this is going to be fairly significant but here's the thing my guess is that they are perfectly willing to do this because so much of their strategy depends on the follow-up purchase if i don't click yes please on this gdpr pop-up i'm kind of dead to them they can't give me the follow-up offers which is where they're really going to make the money from me so they're willing to take the slight drop in conversion rate here because they then get the opportunity to upsell to me and sell to me forever and ever and ever and ever so i think it's a very smart move but you've got to know your back end numbers and what your average customer lifetime value is if you're going to do something like this so why do i say this gives us a glimpse into their priorities well if you think about what the hot group actually sell they tend to sell consumable products so either things like makeup and protein shake which are washed off our bodies and washed down the toilet and need to be replaced or things like fashion items and clothing so all of these products are the sort of thing that you buy over and over and over again and this seems to be their model this is why they're willing to invest so much in their digital marketing because once they get a customer for one of these websites they know that they can keep extracting profit out of that customer over and over again through things like loyalty schemes and of course through their email marketing to continue upselling cross selling and repeat selling to you over and over and over again in other words they're happy to sacrifice margin on the first sale which is why they give you a big discount on the first order to get you through that basket to get you checking out because they know that you're gonna come back and that's when they're gonna make the money because they don't have to pay for your acquisition over and over and over again once they've got you as a customer brilliant and when we look at the traffic generation they are so aggressive and they're willing to what looks like overpay for customers and it'll be because they know that they can monetize that person over and over and over again so from their e-commerce platform what did we learn about how to make a good e-commerce website well really the main lesson is don't drop the ball don't go for something that's super wacky or super creative stick to the proven fundamentals of e-commerce and don't surprise the visitor so we're looking at good quality product images good quality product descriptions but you can see on the site they're not particularly long we're talking about simple checkout process we're talking about incentivizing the first purchase knowing that you've got a back end and we're talking about offering a range of payment services including allowing people to split the payments obviously a website is only ever going to perform as well as the amount of traffic you drive to it so let's now take a look at how they're driving traffic to each of these e-commerce properties now the hub group broadly has two types of websites they have sites like look fantastic where they sell loads of different products from different brands and then they have sites like myprotein.com where they sell branded products so their own brand and that's all that they do what we're going to do is we're going to look at an example of each namely look fantastic and my pro team what we'll find is that their traffic generation strategy is broadly the same for both of these so if we just look at a quick overview for each of the sites and we're going to look at uk traffic although the picture is very very similar in the us obviously the numbers are a bit bigger so in the uk we can see here that you know these sites are generating huge volumes of traffic so semrush is estimating almost a million organic visitors per month so the common trend here is massive amounts of traffic loads and loads of links heavy investment in paid search heavy investment in display traffic as well and this is pretty much the pattern that we find across their properties there's no getting around it this is consistent with a business that is spending a huge amount of money on digital marketing but very successfully so exactly what are they doing within search well firstly let's look at organic search and the traffic that they're generating through seo common across pretty much all of the sites is that one of their biggest keywords tends to be their own brand name so we're looking at myprotein.com and we can see that my protein is the keyword that is driving the most traffic to the site with an estimated 301 000 searches in the uk per month which is ludicrous but here's the thing this shows how good they are at generating repeat business because a lot of this will be people who are rebuying right if you need to buy from my protein you're either going to go into an email that they've sent you previously or you're just going to go straight to google and do a branded search and end up on the site that way so this organic strategy is a combination of cold traffic organic but also repeat business now as for the cold traffic organic they're ranking extremely well for a whole bunch of really commercial good quality terms so things like whey protein number one protein shakes number one pre-workout number one uh protein powder number two come on guys why protein powder number one collagen powder number one creatine monohydrate number one you get the gist this business has gone heavy with seo all going well you might say completely dominant you might say there's not really anything else they could do with their seo you might say well yeah but also no you see actually if we have a look at the us traffic for my protein as an example their organic traffic absolutely dropped off a cliff in august 2018 and still hasn't recovered and actually still hasn't recovered to the levels it enjoyed prior to that in fact actually by some russia's estimates organic traffic to the u.s my protein site has pretty much halved since july 2018. so what has happened well it's kind of interesting because actually one of the strategies i used to celebrate most about myprotein.com was their content strategy and particularly the use of their blog if we have a look at the keywords that they were ranking for prior to this brutal drop in traffic in august 2018. we'll notice that a lot of their top performing keywords were actually articles on their blog that were ranking for example they're ranking number one for what is way and it wasn't a product or category page it was ranking for that it was one of their content pages on the zone well if we fast forward to today a lot of those zone pages aren't ranking anywhere near as prominently as they used to be so whilst the site has maintained or increased ranking for its commercial pages iu products and category pages these content strategy pages inside the zone have lost a lot of visibility so actually this gives us a bit of a clue as to the cause of these massive drops now august 2018 coincides exactly with the time that google rolled out its medic update and a lot of the sites that were hit during the medic update offered health information through either unqualified or uncertain reputation sources now my protein essentially used to be a massive content site with a shop attached to it a bit like how a magazine would then have adverts selling product well now that balance has completely flipped because the zone has been decided by google that it doesn't deserve as much traffic as it was getting the ranking and traffic has fallen to the zone meaning that the total traffic to the site has also dropped now if we go to the zone today we'll see that they've still got content on there and they're still updating it but really it feels like much more of an afterthought they've got these kind of things are categorized but only a little bit for example if we click on supplements here we'll see that we've just got a list of posts we don't have any kind of sub categorization or anything useful this is really a pretty useless content section if we compare it to like a content site like health line for example which has lots of categorized stuff you can search content and all that type of stuff this is really i mean it's barely categorized this is just dumping content onto a website so whether they've just decided to take their focus away from the zone and focus on other areas which generate more revenue for them or what maybe they were discouraged by the drops that they saw during medic and have kind of pushed things to the side i don't really know but it feels like this is a real opportunity for them and they used to be doing really well in this area so i don't know why they've let things slip now they've added information with each of their authors about their registrations and their accreditations presumably to try and regain some of that visibility lost during medic because that's one of the things that a lot of the sites that saw benefit during medic had in place but it doesn't seem to have done the trick for them to me this is a real shame because these sections of content on the sites used to be massive massive traffic magnets now i just want to be 100 clear this isn't to say that the hot group sites have lost loads of organic traffic whilst some of them have lost some organic traffic actually the product and category pages still rank incredibly well and these are if anything the main pages that you would want to rank well because these are the ones that are focused on the highest commercial intent keywords but i'm just saying there is an opportunity for them to regain some of that more informational traffic and turn these sites into more of a destination for people that are interested in buying not just the people that are ready to buy right now okay let's take a look at links and what their link strategy is now the first thing to say is actually pretty difficult to diagnose any particular link strategy because the volumes of links are so large and these sites are so popular it's actually quite difficult to identify the fingerprints of particular link strategies but what we can see are some of the different categories of links that they are getting so if you're trying to build your ecommerce brand these are some of the categories that you can be pursuing as well so we'll notice that they've got quite a lot of links through voucher codes and discount code sites so these are obviously affiliate sites we also notice they've got a lot of links from bloggers and often these bloggers will have their own affiliate codes as well giving your customers discount codes in order for them to get benefits and for them to get credit with the products has been something that the hot group brands have used for years they've also got links from high authority magazine type sites here we can see some links from cosmopolitan whether they've pursued these links intentionally or whether they've just picked these up because cosmopolitan has written about particular products and of course look fantastic is one of the most prominent sellers of those products we'll never know but still getting links from these sorts of publications really helps your visibility one thing that you will notice is that links from sites like vo will often have an affiliate referrer on them as well now whether this is actually specific to vogue or whether this one actually looks like it's from a google shopping ad so it looks like that whoever's writing the ad has kind of picked up the uh ppc tracking code instead and used that in their link so i'm not sure whether that's a vogue affiliate code or if they've just picked up the tracking code or having clicked on the site with ppc i'm not too sure they also have brands like redken which i'd guess that they have bought because they've basically turned their entire site into a look fantastic promo i.e whatever product you click on when you click to buy now it takes you through to look fantastic so the takeaway from seo link building is that it's really difficult to say whether they're actually actively engaging in building some links but my guess would be that with eight point six percent of their revenue spent on marketing they're going to be putting some attention onto link acquisition with the volume of links that these sites are getting okay if we move on to paid advertising for a bit we can take a look at the paid acquisition strategy that these sites are using now the first thing is to say they are spending and they are spending big if we stay on look fantastic for a moment and take a look in the u.s we can see that smrush estimates that they're generating 90 000 visitors per month through their ppc spending about 125 grand a month now we've got some pretty aggressive ads going on here not just for brand names so things like uh olaplex delilah isle of paradise bondi sans but also even really broad terms like santra pay now san tropez is a place some americans don't necessarily know that but look fantastic definitely do and bidding on santro pay driving people through to the santro pay product category page is a massive gamble for most of our clients we'd say you don't want to be playing that game because you're going to get so much traffic that's not particularly qualified particularly for text ads you don't want to be doing that shopping ads maybe because then people can see that they're clicking on a product but for text ads to be going on a really broad term like that is a huge risk but remember all they seem to care about is getting that customer the first time because then they can repeat sell to them so it looks like they're seriously overpaying for some of these acquisitions because they know that the back end is going to be worth it for them so we can see that their strategy is not just to target generic terms but actually to target the brand names of the products that they sell for example if you search ghd you're going to see google shopping ads from look fantastic now if you're selling against ghd who by the way also sell their own products who's going to be able to sell those cheaper who's going to get the best margin obviously it's going to be ghd but actually it's look fantastic that they're bidding the most for those terms because they're like fine we don't want to make money on the first purchase we want the customer we're going to get them and of course because the hut group has their own distribution network and the e-commerce platform and everything wired together they're probably able to take these orders and get the product shipped out cheaper than any of the manufacturers that they're selling anyway okay let's take a look at social media now here we are in beauty and health and luxury and fashion so these are areas which are super super focused on social media so how are the heart group doing in this area well if we have a look at my protein which is one of the most established brands we'll see at first things look to be doing pretty well here we are in my protein uk and apparently my protein uk has 2.2 million likes which is like 1 in 30 of the uk population which is frankly absurd so what i suspect is the original my protein used this page and then when they went to the us the uk original page became uk so maybe some of these people are worldwide i just cannot believe that 2.2 million uk people like my protein but there we go but actually things aren't as good as they appear for example we can see that the organic reach of these posts is really low considering 2.2 million people like this page you know here's a post that went out 43 minutes ago it's had three likes right you'd probably get more than this if you posted a picture of your face here's a post from a day ago which has had six reactions so the organic reach of this page is really low and this starts to hint at one of the digital marketing areas that the heart group hasn't been doing particularly well in which is getting engagement on content on social channels their organic reach on facebook is so low you almost think kind of why do they bother to be fair to them very few people get good organic reach on facebook anymore which is why so many businesses are forced to resort to facebook ads and my protein are no different so they've been running quite a lot of ads and we can see that broadly their facebook ads fall into a few different categories we have ads driving to blog content and recipes so this is quite informational content i would guess to get people engaged so they can retarget them and run more commercially focused ads later on we have ads featuring influencers driving to particular workout pages which is kind of interesting and hopefully they're targeting the audiences of those influences but we noticed that a relatively small proportion of the total ads that they're running are actually product focused so either as i say they're pixeling people who've been onto the blog or they've been on to see a recipe or they've been on scene influencers workout and then they're running these product focused ads to them they could just be running the ads for brand awareness or to try and remind people that they've been to the site before and they could be retargeting ads we will never know but either of those would be good options now if we move over to instagram by comparison we've got far fewer followers on instagram so 590 000 but the amount of engagement we're getting with each post is much much greater which is still pretty consistent with instagram you do tend to get much higher organic engagement pretty similar focus here obviously the content is instagram native so it's good looking nice attractive pictures well taken with a consistent style we can see that their posting frequency is pretty high actually they're averaging three new organic posts per day although actually this was down from as many as an average of six new posts per day at the start of 2019 but then it seems like in june they really dropped the amount they half the amount of posts that they were making on instagram and followers have continued to go up so so it looked like there was very little correlation between posting three times a day and six times a day in terms of the number of followers they were picking up and actually interestingly they seemed to have gained more followers as they decreased the number of posts that they were making per day with their high point for new followers being may 2020 which was when they were posting the least with an average of one post every other day now let's take a look at their youtube channel in my previous reverse engineer when we looked at gymshark which by complete coincidence actually serves a pretty similar market to this example that we're looking at from the heart group of my protein they could potentially use a fairly similar youtube strategy and youtube has been very important to gymshark so you might expect it's been very important to my protein but actually when you check out the my protein strategy or any of the hot groups brand strategies on youtube it becomes clear that this really isn't a strength of theirs for example we have very very low follower numbers considering the visibility of the brand on other social channels and considering the awareness of the brand across the population when we start looking into the content we can see why it seems that there's almost no strategy here we've got high production value but we've got these rather odd videos that don't make any sense they don't really tie into my protein at all there's no story whatsoever and really the videos get very few views considering the prominence of the business and considering the profile of some of the people that use these products the video titles are really weak and are very unlikely to either pick up search traffic from youtube or to trigger clicks when they're shown in the discovery panel so i don't really understand what they're doing here look fantastic youtube also extremely weak and underdeveloped for a youtube channel of one of the world's most prominent beauty e-commerce sites to have 8 000 followers is frankly mind-blowing i don't know how they could have so few followers and so little engagement on their videos but then we have a look at the content and it's really no surprise they are not targeting discovery they're not targeting new visitors and they're not targeting unbranded traffic at all they just seem to be focused on this look fantastic beauty box traffic and there's really not much else going on here when they do feature influencers those videos get a lot more view but honestly compared to say jim shark's performance this is woeful some of the videos have such poor sound quality they're almost unwatchable without wanting to sound brutal it appears like there's not that much youtube expertise inside the hot group it clearly hasn't been a strategy for them which for me is like disappointing but also encouraging because they've done so much right by focusing predominantly on search that actually they haven't needed social to be a big driver of traffic for them and of course if you're competing with one of the hut group brands you know exactly which nerve to push okay let's summarize them with some strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats first up the strengths of this business one key strength of their group is the refund rate their declared refund rate is one percent which is absurd for e-commerce with a lot of fashion e-commerce businesses having to deal with and make projections around a 30 return rate to have one percent return rate is phenomenal and speaks to the repeat business that they're generating because people are buying products that they already know they've already tried before so that's fantastic and that allows them to be a lot more aggressive another strength is how aggressive they are with their digital marketing and clearly the back end that allows them to put so much money into new customer acquisition is really well developed their ecommerce and digital marketing expertise seems to be spectacular in most areas most areas and of course owning every step of the process in some cases from manufacturing all the way through to fulfillment and delivery helps them to be very economically aggressive as well it gives them total control and margin that some of their competitors are only going to be able to dream of now if we were to look at overall business weaknesses obviously we could look at things like requiring your team to be in physical office spaces which could potentially limit their growth if habits and patterns change as a result of lockdown really the main weakness is the youtube and social media this just doesn't appear to be a core strength which is really disappointing considering their markets that they're in so for me the biggest weakness is the fact that they're not making the most of these channels whilst brands like gymshark have been built purely on these channels almost like the neglect of things like search and paid search it's kind of the opposite thing so that means that there's a whole bunch of potential growth for them if they get these channels figured out that's really the main opportunity is to get to grips with social and particularly with youtube really getting stuck in with influencers and piggybacking on the massive visibility that influences have in the spaces that look fantastic my protein and all the other brands across the heart group have influence in this is an absolute no-brainer even if they only focus on promoting their own brands because you don't necessarily want to promote ghd and risk someone going to another site to buy them but if you focus on selling my protein or one of the brands that they own then obviously there's only one place to buy them or wherever they buy them they're going to be buying through the hot group anyway so there's a really easy logical argument to be made for going heavier with influencer marketing what about threats if you're the hot group how do you prevent yourself from being attacked and if you're an attacker how do you start to gain some traction against the heart grain well one ever present threat in every e-commerce business's life is obviously amazon now luckily for the huck group amazon doesn't really curate its products in these categories at all so it's a complete free-flow and an absolute nightmare to find the best product for you if you just want to go to a site where amazon's going to give you 20 000 options all rated at 4.5 stars fantastic but if you want to go to a site that's specifically curated and shows you the best products that's actually been chosen for you and that are from recognized brands then obviously the hot group sites are positioned to do very well so if things change at amazon and amazon decides to curate its selection a little bit more then obviously that would move into the threat category at the moment that doesn't seem to be the way they're going which leaves the biggest weakness to any of the hut groups site being this blind spot with youtube and potentially with wider social media as more and more time is spent on social that's a real danger for them the worst case scenario for the huck group would be that people move from search over to social one of the social networks builds in a really great product discovery platform into their network and that becomes the default way that people discover products now the hub group can obviously go through paid advertising to get to those people but if there's a big organic component to that they're really not at the moment set up well to benefit through that sort of initiative so really as long as search continues to be the default way that people are finding the products they sell they're absolutely fine as soon as that stops becoming the way then things get a little bit sticky so if you're going after the hut group go hard on youtube go hard on social follow the gymshark model and you should be able to make some inroads so i hope you found this video interesting i'd be really interested to know what your main takeaways were and what you learned that you're going to apply to your business so feel free to drop your biggest takeaways in the comments below and if you have any requests for businesses that you want us to reverse engineer the digital marketing of in future videos then feel free to drop them in the comments below as well if you enjoyed this check out the exposure ninja podcast on all the major podcast platforms subscribe to our youtube channel just search exposure ninja and don't forget also to request your free website and digital marketing review go to exposureninja.com and click the big fat button and you will be able to fill out a short questionnaire which asks you a bit of information about your business and your goals once you've filled that questionnaire out one of our team will record you a 15 to 20 minute video which shows you on the screen in front of you how to increase the volume of leads and sales that your website generates for you so 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