By Chris Lee

New Look is one of the UK’s leading high street clothing retailers, boasting more than 1,000 stores worldwide and last year alone 355 million customers visited New Look either online or in one of its stores.

Conscious of the need to continue to innovate in its marketing and look at digital channels to engage with its customers, the company brought in Internet marketing experts. This in turn led to its successful YouTube channel, New Look TV, where the store’s own customers are given the opportunity to present on all things fashion.

NMK caught up with Internet marketing specialist, Annabel Hodges, who was part of the team behind the New Look TV project.

What was the background to the New Look TV project?

Due to the sheer size of the company, it is not easy to implement new ideas through the main New Look site. New Look knew they wanted to increase interactivity with their brand but were struggling to figure out the best way to do this. It wasn’t about increasing direct sales or footfall but about promoting the fact that it is a young brand in touch with its audience and actively using the same media as them. This would in turn lead to customer loyalty and a sense of ‘belonging’ between customers and brand.

What were the key tenets of the campaign?

This was quite open and flexible during the initial pitching process. It was only after a lot of research and discussions between New Look and us that it became clear that we needed to consider our options carefully. Technical needs were battling against creativity and efficacy within the budget constraints and the last thing we wanted to do was produce a micro site that didn’t actually do what we wanted it to do because we didn’t invest enough time into it.

This is where the idea of the YouTube channel came into play. It seemed implausible to start but working across the company from technical to design to production to SEO (search engine optimisation), we started to realise it made a lot of sense. Once the decision was made, it was full steam ahead. The budget could be focused on producing a great piece of work with minimal being spent on the tech or back end systems.

How did you get the word to spread? What is a combination of YouTube plus PR, or just pure word of mouth?

To be honest, this is very much still being worked on even as we speak. There are so many ways of promoting the channel across the Web.

New Look has a number of different sites and agencies working together so New Look TV is just one part of this. There is a lot of internal communication to ensure that the teams looking after the Twitter account, the blog and their social media campaigns are on board and working alongside us. This includes working with the wider PR strategy and promoting New Look TV through them.

We also spent a lot of time working on the SEO side of things – small things such as actively cross-linking to your most popular videos (with strong anchor text) across your channel do make a big difference. In many respects we are lucky as the topic of our channel naturally encourages comments and ratings – and this is something we have found to have huge impact on rankings.

How did you measure success and what were the results?

We were clear that this was a branding exercise and not a direct conversion to sale campaign. I think this is important with this kind of campaign we use both YouTube insights (channel views, individual video views etc.) and analytics to the other sites as well as Twitter followers and Facebook fans as some key metrics. We also use some social media monitoring. We also learnt a lot about the kind of videos that people want to watch and interact with by focusing on comments, ratings and uploads as our absolute key day-to-day targets.

For example, at the start of the campaign we made a lot of more polished, professional style videos that we uploaded ourselves. However we realised that what the predominately teenage audience really love is watching and commenting on their peers. So we changed the ratio of the kinds of videos being uploaded to allow for a lot more user-generated content. We focus our professionally produced ones on celebrities, trends and new season styles because monitoring audience interaction how shown us that people will come back to these time and again. Importantly they will also actually pro-actively search on these terms and find our channel.

What are your top tips for anyone looking to implement a video-based social media campaign?

Without a doubt, first and foremost – know your audience! We’ve learned a lot along the way and we know that the New Look TV audience uses video channels like YouTube on a daily basis but also a wide range of other social media that integrate together with the channel. You need to conduct in-depth research and fully understand what the likelihood of uptake and interest will be from your targeted audience. Without this, the greatest produced videos in the world will still fail.

Be prepared to continuously learn and adapt – as you are producing new video content regularly, ensure you actually learn from each upload. It’s an easy medium to work with, alter and improve on so make sure you’re doing it.

Use your video metadata wisely; consider your keywords and tagging. It does make a difference!

Although our campaign is predominately YouTube focused, don’t be restricted by this. Use something like TubeMogul to make it easier to increase the reach of your video across the online space.