The agency discovered that Kohl’s customers often rely on blogs for wardrobe inspiration, however little to no Kohl’s content existed around bras across the earned web (social, blogs). Additionally, the number of external conversations pointing back to the Kohl’s bra department was drastically lower than competitors, at only two mentions. Basically, consumers relied on online conversations and bra recommendations (from real people and fashion influencers), but Kohl’s bras were not currently part of this conversation.

To gain exposure for the bras department, the agency coordinated with 65 key digital influencers to create engaging user-generated content on their blogs and social channels. We encouraged bloggers to convey how 80% of women wear the wrong bra size and how Kohl’s could help.

We developed relationships with influencers, provided content guidelines and worked with Kohl’s to re-share bloggers’ activity and ship bra samples to each blogger. We redesigned Kohl’s “Intimates” page to focus solely on bras. The influencers’ posts resulted in massive off-site user-generated content, social signals and links back to Kohl’s. Signals influenced organic search rankings for search keywords like “bras.” Bloggers created 75 posts, inspiring readers to contribute more content, generating 389 total blogger conversations.

Blogs and social posts resulted in over 1.4M impressions (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+). Google first-page organic visibility improved by 43% for bra-related keywords (e.g. “bra” keyword went from not ranking at all to position #2, surpassing competitors). Organic traffic rose +84% YOY & revenue from organic search rose +109% YOY for the Bras dept. The influencer blog posts received thousands of comments and tens-of-thousands of entries into a Kohl’s bra giveaway.

With this campaign, we proved that user generated content is incredibly valuable in influencing organic rankings for competitive keywords, and ultimately driving incremental traffic and revenue.