peachy keen — fall 2019, adaptive media & analytics

CLIENT: PEACHY KEEN SWIMWEAR // focus: strategy, PAID SEARCH

PROMPT

Run a successful paid search campaign for Peachy Keen, a sustainable & ethically produced swimwear brand based in Los Angeles. With a “one-swimsuit-fits-all” approach, the company heavily emphasizes body positivity and self-confidence.

PROBLEM

Our client had never run paid search, and it was not ideal to be marketing a niche swimwear brand in the Autumn/Winter months.

INSIGHT

Peachy Keen Swimwear has two unique selling points:

ACTION

Using funding secured through the Center of Business Administration at LMU, we launched a successful search campaign!

We had the following strategy for picking keywords:

• Brand: What are different variations of phrases people would search with Peachy Keen? Since this is a fairly small startup company, brand keywords would be most appropriate for customers who are familiar with Peachy Keen.

• Non-brand: What are the key selling points of Peachy Keen’s products? (Ex: Body positive, ethically made, cute, size inclusive.) This would target customers who were looking for a breadth of companies. Despite casting a larger net with non-brand, we still wanted to be specific with our keywords. Any swimwear brand can tout “cute” or “size inclusive”... can’t say the same for “body positive” or “ethically made.”

Round 1

The first round was kind of a miss for us, not going to lie. Our keywords within Ad Groups were not specific to brand and non-brand campaigns, leading us to get search activity centered around terms not related to Peachy Keen as a brand (ex: “Sexy Bikini,” “Brazillian Bikini,” and other terms not relevant to swimwear). Lastly, our ad copy did not vary between our ad groups! Looking back, I wonder how we let any of that pass by.

Round 2

We made a lot of optimizations in preparation for Round 2. For our keywords, we finally separated the brand and non-brand campaigns, also adding a lot of negative and positive keywords to get more specificity. We also adjusted copy between the different ad groups, and made the copy more relevant for various search queries.

RESULTS

After our second round of optimization, we got better results! Our search results became more tailored to “Plus Size Swim,” which was our best performing Ad Groups. Other ad groups that did well were “Ethically Made” and “Slimming.” The other search terms were focused around Peachy Keen’s plus-size designer swim queries, such as “Koa Swim”, “Icon Swim”, and “Designer Swim”.

Personal Focus

I was an instrumental part in managing the relationship with our client and developing strategies for both paid search and social. I assisted in writing copy and setting up the campaigns with my team. Alongside this, I was able to discover the “seasonality problem” we encountered, and made recommendations as such.

Learnings

• Spending on non-brand targeting is much more effective for a startup due to little brand recognition.

• Planning & allocating budget and successfully implementing bidding strategies will facilitate amazing results.

• Being transparent in communication with clients will help to manage expectations and help them understand where we’re coming from, too!

• Seasonality matters! If I had the opportunity to continue this campaign, I would have transitioned the search and social campaigns into highlighting winter vacations, targeting people that are traveling to tropical destinations for the holidays.