The Cheek of it! Is a prestigious and well reputed Burlesque & Cabaret School based in central London. They are well known for their empowering ethos and changing lives through body-confidence, self-esteem building and coaching (whilst having a load of fun at the same time).

The Cheek of it! are now approaching their 11th year and during this time, you may have seen them featured on the BBC, Channel 4, Sky 1, Channel 5 & TedX as well numerous publications such as the Huffington Post, The Londonist, Cosmopolitan, The Evening Standard and the Daily Express too. The list goes on...

It was clear they were putting the work in from the start, but they were struggling with their digital marketing efforts and knew there were plenty of opportunities they weren’t grasping.

With so much media coverage, success with their courses and a growing team of teachers, it was clear that their web presence needed to represent this too.

Seizing The Opportunities

The Cheek of it! Website had some strong media coverage, great content and quality assets such as videos and imagery that really helped to tell their story, but the user experience and functionality was holding them back in several key areas.

Their website was lacking a mobile responsive experience and only had a rudimentary booking system for their courses which involved a lot of manual work and emailing back and forth.

We knew that if they were to scale their business, we’d need to significantly improve the e-commerce functionality, user experience, technical SEO and content to create a cohesive and unified website experience that focused on the user journey first.

Open, honest & transparent digital marketing that always tells it how it is.

Over the years they had some strong campaigns that really got people talking about their brand and message.

When we looked into the data and confirmed this with the client, it was clear that the actual measurable impact on the business’s bottom-line was frustratingly underwhelming.

There were distinct opportunities to drive better results, where their audience could take more action and also measure their campaigns with more accuracy. In short, they needed a strategy.

The Cheek of it! Had been featured in many reputable publications and media outlets over the years. This media coverage meant they had lots of great features, links and mentions across the web (which search engines love to see).

Their existing site wasn't helping them make the best use of these quality signals. Their content had a lack of consistent focus, the site had a poor mobile experience and there were technical issues that were causing issues with how Google and other search engines understood and indexed the site.

The website was getting a consistent flow of traffic from Google, but our analysis uncovered many areas where traffic was dropping off, engagement could be improved and other ways the site could better serve the variety of users in their different buying cycles.

Technical, Creative, Meticulous

Measuring the ROI of any campaign is important, so we ensured that conversion tracking, attribution and segmentation was in place from the start. This helped to define the ongoing strategy and gave us clear insight into what was working and what was under-performing quickly.

When we combined these high performing content pieces with targeted, ad campaigns, the results skyrocketed.

This approach helped to provide a more stable foundation to build from where results were more reliable and predictable.

We found that particular formulas and types of content had a significantly higher performance against our benchmarks and this helped to shape the long-term content strategy for the brand.

Because the paid social campaigns were highly relevant to the brands target audience, we were heavily rewarded with lower costs per conversion.

This helped to improve cash flow and revenue earlier. This extra cash flow enabled the client to invest more heavily into SEO and web development without having to pull funds out of their existing revenue streams.

We got to work on defining their brand voice, the style guides, types of content and networks we would focus on for the best results.

We created schedules for daily, weekly and monthly plans that incorporated branding, engagement, interactive, entertaining and newsworthy pieces that aligned with the clients core messages.

Having clear data to act on enabled us to run paid social ad campaigns that were targeted, effective and contributed to the key goals of the business.

A web development plan was established to create a more effective website design. Improved e-commerce functionality, addressing the key technical SEO issues and significantly improving on the sites user experience were the main goals for the project.

It was important that the development strategy involved data analysis, content refinement and user feedback at every stage. This approach ensured the redesign was based on insight and not just costly assumptions.

The project took months of planning and development to complete. The work included technical audits, traffic analysis, wire-framing, content creation and user experience work too.

During this development phase we collected heatmaps, analytics, conversion data and feedback from their existing site. This ensured that all of the new design and development choices were informed by data and not just assumptions,

The SEO strategy was baked into every step of the development and planning process. Every key consideration within the marketing strategy was referred back to the SEO plan at every to ensure a consistent and methodical approach was followed.

SEO undoubtedly provides the best long-term growth for any business. We knew that by ensuring SEO was considered at every stage of the marketing and development process, the client would see the best long-term results.

We ran extensive off-site campaigns that included PR, guest blogging, news features, link building, reputation management and content creation too. This strategy helped to build authority, improve the visibility of the site in search engines and increase the traffic to the site for relevant search queries too.

What It Means To The client

The new website launched towards the very end of the year (a particularly busy time for the client). Through careful planning and attention to detail the new site was published without any hiccups a week before the next sales cycle was due to start. Success.

The traffic started to flow, the sales started to climb and climb. Over the course of the next 6 weeks, revenue increased by 7% on the previous period last year. Time on site, page views, transactions, bounce rates, engagement rates and purchase value all improved significantly too.

Over the coming months, these improved metrics, combined with an effective SEO campaign saw organic search traffic grow significantly too. By the end of the 1st full year, website traffic from search had increased by 27%.

The increased search engine traffic and improved user experience created a compound effect that saw end of year revenue improve by just over 21%.

Social media played a solid supporting role in helping to build trust, engage with the right audience and create a sense of community that supported the growth of the business.

Thanks to continued efforts with content creation, social media and search marketing, by the end of the 2nd year, organic traffic volume had increased by a further 43%, social traffic had grown by 22% and revenue growth hand improved by 34% on the previous year.

Pleasant side effects from this business growth have included more media coverage, improved customer loyalty and new, exciting business opportunities for the brand too.

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