Urban Armor Gear
From an afternoon coffee idea, to the most rugged cases on the market.
Urban Armor Gear came to us as a hungry new brand looking to create their niche in the competitive smart device case and accessories space. Fast forward five years, UAG is one of the six major players in the case industry and is pushing heavily into the retailer space by recently being stocked into every Best Buy in America.
The Ask
Our challenge was to support the brand through each phase of their lifecycle by creating and executing an all encompassing digital strategy.We were asked to help to build the UAG brand through its infancy, into heavy penetration in the case market, and into maturity. We approached each of these cycles differently and changed the way that each of our marketing efforts interacted with with each other and the client each step of the way.
The Solution
With UAG, we used digital strategy to employ a variety of services including AdWords advertising, Facebook / Instagram advertising, SEO, Conversion Optimization, and website design and development. In the first two years, we leveraged combinations of these tools to push adoption rates and revenue. As the brand built to a point at which retail channels began to influence our decision making, we worked with UAG to build the brand presence and reach to push offline revenue. At this point the brand is stronger than ever, and we are continuing to utilize the latest and greatest tools as the brand moves into the next stage of its lifecycle.
SEO. Search positioning within a niche market served to accelerate UAG’s rise in the overall cell phone case market. In creating and building momentum for UAG’s organic traffic, we focused first on establishing and maintain a solid core through on-page optimization. We then turned out focus to the injection of “rugged” based keywords in order to capture a male driven market segment. As we begin to show for more and more rugged keywords, we then turned our focus toward broader keyword in order to pull more search volume away from competitor brands. As a result we have been able to maintain a first page average positioning for all terms related to “rugged” cell phone cases, as well as multiple first page rankings for key devices.
Influencer Marketing. We approached influencer marketing for UAG as a means to build the brand presence and to help maintain search positioning. Over the last three years, we have been able to acquire well over 200 brand placements on prominent blogs and Youtube channels.
AdWords Advertising. The key to AdWords advertising within the cell phone case industry has always been to be first to market with search terms prior to and during device launches. We have consistently created device launch related advertising campaigns and maintained a five times return on advertising during the last three years of our campaigns.
Facebook Advertising. With UAG growing to a power in the marketing with an ever growing digital and retail presence, we use Facebook advertising to drive brand awareness as well as to drive direct revenue. This year alone, we’ve been able to reach 2.5 million users, while maintaining a positive return on ad spend.
The Result
Over the life of the UAG brand, we have been able to foster growth and have seen revenue growth in each of the last five year.
Development
Urban Armor Gear was looking for a development partner that didn't simply install a new theme when a facelift was needed or find a plugin if a desired feature was required. They wanted a development partner that could find creative, scalable, and ultimately sustainable development solutions that allowed them to stand out among the herd while remaining as native to the Shopify platform as much as possible. While using third-party applications are often a good idea, we set out to achieve this challenge and have since made solutions that were leaps and bounds beyond even their wildest imaginations.
Full Canvas Scroll
To emphasize their amazing photography and products within lifestyle environments, Urban Armor Gear wanted to make the first touch point to their customers and potential customers truly count. Using a Javascript library for full page scrolling, we helped implement a user experience on the homepage that would focus and captivate each product in action one at a time by showing only the image at hand and immediately showing the next upon normal scroll. This key user behavior truly locks the users into each unique call to action placed before them.
Best of all, it's entirely controllable using their Shopify Theme Customizer.
Expanded Tiered Mega Menu
Most expanded menus are simply another means of cluttering a site if not done correctly. With Urban Armor Gear, we helped implement a tiered expanded menu system that is not only easily manageable through the Shopify "Navigation" admin, but is also sectioned and organized in a manner that lets the user coherently and effectively drill down to the products they are truly interested in, using as little clicks and maneuvers as possible. To further enhance the site performance, all animations are created using CSS3.
Swatches with Multi-Views
Enhancing the product shopping experience can make or break a user's decision to purchase. Urban Armor Gear left no stone unturned in that regard. At the Collections level, we helped implement the ability to not only see different color swatches of their products, but also the ability to preview both the interested color as well as alternative views of that color. using a mixture of minimal jQuery scripts as well as CSS3 for animations. This strikes just enough intrigue with users to want more, and thus pushing them through the conversion funnel and into making a purchase.
360 Degree Product Views
If color and angles weren't enough to really drive the sale, Urban Armor Gear made sure to give users little reason to walk away. UAG created 3D renderings of their most coveted products and exported them into 360 renderings, where we helped them create specific scripts and conditions that allowed them to pull in and display 360 views of their most popular cases. The scripts allowed them to not just provide one 360 rendering per product, but also the ability to load multiple 360 renderings and loaded depending on the color the user is looking at.
Meaningful Search
Search is one of the most overlooked yet effective features of a successful online experience, and likewise, Urban Armor Gear did not disappoint. In an effort to create a meaningful and full immersive search experience, we helped create a search experience that truly helped the user get to where they needed to go. Everything from AJAX loaded content to instantaneously render search results to product thumbnails for a truly useful search experience.
We Are Slicedbread.