Shoe brand Clarks is bolstering its marketing efforts with more influencers to increase brand awareness and generate more digital content, said Mario Protano, Director of Performance Marketing.
In Q2, the U.S. arm of the Clarks brand switched its affiliate marketing provider to Awin, which is the same vendor that its U.K. team has used for the past 17 years.
The move allows Clarks to tap into hundreds of content creators on the platform, in contrast to its previous efforts of only working with 10 to 20 influencers, Protano said. Previously, Clarks focused its affiliate program on couponing sites, instead of content creators.
“We were in a hold pattern,” Protano said. “Our biggest affiliates were those coupon sites.”
Clarks is now focusing on upper-funnel marketing in contrast to a year ago, when the brand was more focused on bottom-funnel performance marketing, he said. The strategy is working as shoppers are increasingly discovering the Clarks brand on social media, Protano said. It’s now the brand’s No. 1 channel for new customer acquisition, he said.
“In May, we more than doubled our new customers coming out of social media,” Protano said.
Clarks Aims To Increase Brand Awareness
Clarks is a 200-year-old brand that is based in the U.K. Across the pond, the brand has history and substantial brand awareness, while in the U.S., unaided brand awareness is in the single digits and aided is still below 40%, Protano said.
The brand’s target is to break into the 50-60% aided brand awareness, from both this program as well as other marketing initiatives, like social media ads, he said.
But the way shoppers want to consume content and thus find brands is changing, and Clarks has to ensure it can target shoppers with the right type of content. This can be a challenge as there is always a need for more content, and with budget cuts, the creative team can only do so much, Protano said. Influencers fill that gap.
Clarks Targets Shoppers Who Want Comfort With ‘Real Life’ Images
Clarks’ target customer is someone who prioritizes comfort first, then style, then quality, Protano said. The brand has to ensure its product and price is there before it goes after those shoppers in marketing, he said.
To acquire this audience, it needs influencer or user generated content that feels more natural, and not something that came from a brand during a photo shoot, he said.
“They don’t want a perfect model in a studio that’s sitting on a ball or something that you would never see in real life,” he said. “They want somebody that is walking to work, walking across a crosswalk, something like that with one of their coworkers.”
Content Matters Now More Than Ever
Influencer content is becoming a more integral part of Clarks’ marketing plan, as it touches many of the channels. Instead of its departments, like SEO, social media and public relations, all operating separately, these departments are working together to ensure they are all aligned on the same message.
“When I’m meeting with our SEO (team), I also have our PR person involved because it’s critical,” Protano said. “Think about press releases alone. You need to make sure they’re optimized, not just for Google and Bing anymore, but they need to be optimized for the LLMs, which is important. We’re finding that we’re coming together from a company standpoint and from a department standpoint and starting to focus on these marketing programs.”
Related to this, Clarks is now using a vendor to help optimize its content for large language models, such as terms it should go after and types of publishers it should focus on for its public relations efforts.
Clarks Sets Up Awin
So far, Clarks is happy with the influencers and creators the brand has access to on the Awin platform. It took Clarks about a month to integrate with the vendor.
Clarks pays Awin an annual fee for using its platform, fees for using its marketing services such as recruiting new affiliates, plus a commission for the influencers it works with. Protano declined to share specific cost details but said it was “very competitive.”
