Hobbycraft: strengthening the digital strategy for the UK's biggest craft retailer

With ambitious sales targets for the year, Hobbycraft had examined the viability of their growth plan through a top-down approach. Looking at product run rates and sales projections and targets, Hobbycraft wanted external guidance to validate their digital marketing strategy and make recommendations that ensured their goals were achievable.

We needed to review and audit Hobbycraft’s SEO, PPC, affiliate and social, considering channel performance, digital marketing trends and external market forces. By delving deeply into these areas, we aimed to uncover valuable insights that would ultimately work to improve Hobbycraft’s strategy.

To help Hobbycraft realise their ambitions, we conducted a comprehensive digital marketing audit. We also reviewed the outcomes of previous audits from internal and external sources to carry out a competitive and market analysis. This work determined which products were seeing growth in the market and how strong competitors were at presenting themselves to generate traffic and sales.

Having access to a wide variety of information meant we could identify valuable trends and areas for traffic growth. Applying our cross-sector industry experience enabled us to take a completely holistic view of the traffic and sales opportunities available which were likely to have been missed in an internal review.

Through the audit, we created a detailed ecommerce traffic strategy with a defined channel mix and dedicated budget recommendations that the in-house team could implement to achieve their sales figures. This was delivered alongside a comprehensive written report diving deeply into the data, highlighting areas of strength and weakness and new channel opportunities. We then delivered a presentation to internal stakeholders to ensure all of our recommendations were clearly understood.

The digital marketing strategy is now being implemented by Hobbycraft. Through the report, we uncovered a growing market of ‘less experienced but regular crafters’ to fuel traffic growth over the next few years. We also helped to improve channel profitability after evaluating that one of the central marketing channels had a negative return.

The insights we delivered will now crucial for Hobbycraft as they develop their ecommerce offering over the next 12 months. We look forward to adding further value to the strategy as their work progresses..