Keen Footwear drives business, digital traffic with storytelling, shared values

Keen Newport H2 Sandals

In addition to appealing customers’ sense of functionality and desire for quality, Keen Footwear is appealing to their lifestyle and personal values. It’s been a successful strategy since the company was founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2003, as a wholesale manufacturer offering men’s, women’s and kid’s footwear for work and play.

In just 3 months, sales reached $1.5 million and $15 million by the end of the second year! The fast growing ugly-shoes-with-a-bumper-toe sold in stores and online by Amazon, Zappos, etc., but, customer behavior changed with time to a trend of consumers purchasing directly from the manufacturer. Soon, about 10% of Keen’s business – shoes, apparel and accessories – was selling directly to the consumer (Taylor, 2018). Today, sales are more than $200 million (Morell, 2013).

To continue meeting goals as consumer behavior changed globally, Keen marketers focused on a new digital presence and strategy for their websites and social media.

KeenFootwear.com relaunched in May 2017, followed by Keen Canada in October 2017 and Keen Europe and Japan in March 2018.

“All sites have translated and localized content experiences and are compatible with local currencies and local payment integrations. The retailer takes an 80/20 approach to operating these sites: build 80% of the overall KEEN experience to be a global experience, and take 20% of localization to home in on the factors that differentiate shopper needs in each market (Taylor, 2018).

In addition to improving the customer’s experience, the redesign sites feature a “storytelling” theme, a digital style guide, and a goal to appeal to varied consumer audiences.

Keen’s VP Global Direct-to-Consumer John Evons, shared the following insights to Retail TouchPoints:

“We built the web site as a whole series of modular patterns that we could apply across the different page templates that we were designing for. We didn’t just design one incarnation of a home page or category page. We actually built a rich system of modules that essentially give us 30 different ways to tell a story on a home page, or 45 different ways that we could tell a product story on product detail pages. We not only have the tools that we can use to tell richer stories on our own web site, but now these become accelerators that we can use to make the content experience consistent across the entire landscape that our consumers are engaging with our brand on. As you start to exhibit the implicit behaviors of navigating our web site or coming through from different channels of acquisition strategy within our marketing landscape, we have to be able to tailor that experience to be much more focused once you do come onto the web site. The needs of that construction worker are very different than the needs of that new mom and dad having their first child” (Taylor, 2018).

Keen website screenshot from August 2018

The site as Evons described can be seen in the screenshot above from Summer 2018, but as I view it today, it has been updated for the holiday shopping season. It’s clear they want to highlight products and focus on sales goals and KPIs, rather than non-holiday goals/KPIs of developing relationships with customers through storytelling and shared values.

Keen website screenshot from November 2018

Now, the site features “buckets” of gifts for her, him, kids, stocking stuffers, and gifts under $200, as well as “trending products.” These seasonal changes show me 2 things: 1) they are in tune with a user’s intent of shopping for others during this season and 2) consumer’s preference for lists and suggestions. The site’s main navigation didn’t change so users can still find information on products through their traditional paths.

This change for the holiday shopping season brings some interesting analytical analysis opportunities. Keen’s team would be interested in the differences for buyer flow of holiday buckets vs typical navigation, and if that affects user behavior and spend level. Does a certain gender, demographic or country have a preference? Also, an analysis of individual product pages could reveal which format got each product the most visibility. And, is it the right product to have as a gift idea? Honestly, it appears like every product is featured as gift so the analytics could help prioritize the products in each list.

This holiday season data could help make decisions on how Keen’s website will promote other holiday gift seasons, such as Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

Looking ahead to other iterations of the site, VP John Evons says, “The next focus for KEEN is hyper-personalizing the content and product storytelling to its various consumer audiences, which Evons anticipates is a six- to 12-month undertaking.” The holiday behavior data could even assist in hyper-personalization to tell adventure stories happening in parts of the country where they bought specific shoes?

On-page Optimization 

When reviewing the SERP for Keen and competitor Chaco for “hiking sandals”, Keen was significantly behind in rank (18 vs 3) and many metrics including keywords in Head tag title (1 vs 3), Meta description and keywords (both 0 vs 5) (source: Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool). The lack of this many keywords could be hurting their rank, as well as the site’s speed. Both actually have a poor grade: 63 and 65.

Off-page Optimization

In contrast to on-page optimization, a strong brand and reputation has earned Keen several “best in class” off-page optimizations.

Keen is included on two “Top Hiking Sandal” lists on page one of SEPR for this keyword “hiking sandals; its product was even the image featured. The lists link to Zappos, REI and Amazon to purchase and for more information. While, this third-party credibility is a significant win for the brand, I would recommend for marketers to ask list authors to add or change the link to Keen’s site. Inbound links like this could help their SEPR rank. Furthermore, a robust Wikipedia page links to their site, which is really good. Wikipedia is a “broad authority site” and their links are valued by search engines, as are .gov and .edu site, but I’m not sure how they would fit in with the brand. Acquiring as many inbound links as possible from mass retailers like Amazon, REI, Cabela’s, Zappos, etc. is certain a key part of the web strategy. The results are certainly closely monitored by the analytics team to take action, e.g. A/B test product photos or descriptions. 

In the social space, one report says the company wanted a better way to measure, analyze, and understand metrics that mattered and provided meaningful insight, so Keen hired SwellPath, a Web Analytics consultant, to build a framework around their social media campaigns. Over 10 months they saw growth on Facebook and Twitter, as follows: (Ramteke, 2014).

Image source: Ramteke, 2014

My analysis of Keen’s social presence was favorable, too. Social is so important to educate, entertain, inspire and connect. This engagement will lead to sales for trusted brand. Across platforms and handles (@Keen, @KeenUtility, @KeenKids), the company has a singular brand identity that ties strategically to the website. Using professional photos and user submissions, Keen has a nice balance of product features and storytelling. The latter consistently outperformed other pieces; however, I understand and support this necessary balance – after all, Keen is a retailer with strict sales goals in addition to customer loyalty. Unique scenic and lifestyle photos seemed to drive the most engagement. Analysts should take note of this social content to carefully model future blog posts and web features after it. Currently, Keen posts an average of 8 blog articles a month, which could be easily doubled or so to help with SEO and spiders/bots activity. The more a site posts the more frequent the SE bots come.  This would definitely help the product pages improve rank too, because the site has a URL folder structure, e.g. keenfootwear.com; keenfootwear.com/blog; keenfootwear.com/mens-boots, and keenfootwear.com/guides-and-reviews/blog-article-18725.html

Another off-page optimization idea is to increase views on the Keen YouTube channel. In comparison, competitor Chaco has a similar number of subscribers and videos, but twice as many views: 971,000 vs more than 2 million. It’s clear Chaco did a significant Google ad campaign to achieve those results. This would be a great way to target and increase customer loyalty which can all be tracked through Google Analytics’ Audience cohorts and unique users.

It appears that Keen is testing the “Shop” function on Facebook. I noticed just 3 items in this store – all women’s winter boots – which is perfect for me (a female) and for where I live (Ohio). Typical social media functions were there – like, save and share – but a “Need some advice? Ask Friends for Feedback” button caught my eye. I tried it. It posted a photo of the boot to my Facebook page as a ‘Story’ that’s seen as a top priority on the top of my followers’ feed. And, it had a poll for my friends to share their feedback! Nearly 30 people saw it, 5 responded to the poll, and 1 person asked me in-person the next day if I bought the boots! If there’s a cost to feature the items on Facebook Shop, this would be a great ROI analysis. It’s unclear to me how much of the user experience is tracked on Facebook for marketers to analyze.

4 screenshots of Facebook's Shop featuring Keen boots; then being shared on my page

In summary, I have been quite impressed with Keen’s digital presence and ability to appeal to my need for adventure and our shared values. I’ve never purchased a Keen product but have tried them on several times. I want them to be comfortable, but it’s just not a perfect fit. I wonder if their analysts could figure that out about me and suggest other apparel and accessories? That’s my challenge to them for 2019. I’ll be watching closely!


Reference
Morell, K. (2013, April 17). Martin Keen of KEEN Footwear: How stubbed toes and bad posture led to two booming businesses. American Express. [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/building-an-empire-martin-keen-of-keen-footwear/

Petersen, R. (2015, September 7). 10 case studies show how web analytics prove ROI. Retrieved from https://biznology.com/2015/09/10-case-studies-show-web-analytics-prove-roi/

Ramteke, A. (2014, June 5). Keen Footwear leveraged web analytics tool to increase its active users social media platform by 213%. Digital Vidya. [Blog]. Retrieved from https://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/keen-footwear-leveraged-web-analytics-tool-to-increase-its-active-users-social-media-platform-by-213/

Side-by-Side SEO Comparison Tool. (n.d.). Internet Marketing Ninjas. Retrieved from https://www.internetmarketingninjas.com/seo-tools/seo-compare/

Taylor, G. (2018, September 7). KEEN Footwear steps up e-commerce game with story-driven content strategy. Retrieved from https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/e-commerce/keen-footwear-steps-up-e-commerce-game-with-story-driven-content-strategy