Lululemon's Innovative use of Online Advertising

Lululemon’s online advertising has been extremely successful and have used a lot of innovative online marketing methods to further their awareness and sales. Advertising campaigns now-a-days should be using all methods of online advertising in order to become more successful. At this point in today's world, online activity has only been increasing and all social media platforms should be used by a brand to target their audience. Because of this turn towards social media platforms, I would advise against spending too much money and effort into display advertising. Social media advertising has proven to be more successful at better targeting audiences to show relevant ads in comparison to websites. Another reason is that there are a plethora of softwares that online users can download like AdBlock that can block such ads on third party websites. A campaigns money can be better spent on search engine marketing and social media marketing and will be more effective and successful than using display advertising.

Search engine marketing is a highly effective tool that brands can use to create more consumers and brand awareness. There are many factors that go into a successful campaign using search engine marketing, but when done right can be highly effective. In “An introduction to AdWords” Google describes the difference of AdWords ads and organic search results. When a brand uses Google Adwords they are paying to have their advertisement of a specific campaign show up on a Google search of any keyword related to that campaign. Google makes the distinction that your advertisement can appear when the keyword is hit but also you general website can appear in the organic search results which are unpaid hits that are relevant to what he user is searching. It would be more effective if Lululemon not only uses keywords to attract to a specific ad campaign but also applies is to generate more visits to their website. 

Choosing keywords can be very important and have to be selected and crafted carefully. In the video: "Basic tips for builidng a keyword list", Google explains the difference of creating keywords to generate buzz, and creating keywords that will actually generate sales. By using very general words, for Lululemon’s case, like “yoga” or “yoga mats” may provide a lot of user buzz and will generate a lot of page visits, but it may not generate sales. By using more advanced phrases instead of words like, “men’s yoga shorts”, Lululemon’s website will show up as the first result. What is also very effective is the landing page that it takes you to.  Instead of going to Lululemon’s website home page, it takes you directly to not only the men's page but the men’s shorts page so users do not have to search even further.

Facebook provides the most advertising methods and is the one social media platform that would be recommended to spend most of a brand’s time and effort. Facebook allows for your brand to make your targeting research not only easier but very specific in relation to general targeting from traditional forms of media. Advertisements on Facebook could use both images and text, as long as the text isn’t too lengthy. Lululemon does use most of Facebook’s advertising methods but one I would strongly encourage is the “Event Response” method. As I have mentioned before Lululemon stores hold yoga classes in the store that is open to everyone. A good way to spread awareness of this is by using Facebook and creating events for local stores and targeting people on Facebook that live in the area of the store to come join a free yoga lesson. The event page can be one on Facebook itself including a link to the local store’s website.

Lululemon has a prevalent Twitter presence as well. Their advertisements on Twitter and Instagram are fairly similar. They promote tweets and videos to anyone that follows fitness accounts or yoga accounts itself. Lululemon has the ability to reach out to new audiences that don’t even follow their twitter page because of Twitter’s advertising methods. Most Twitter and Instagram ads will be short videos that allow you to go directly to the website, if they are promoting a new yoga line, or directly to their social media profile page. Both uses are extremely effective in generating sales and increasing engagement on their sites.

On YouTube, Lululemon can improve their YouTube engagement by using video overlays or pre-roll advertisements when YouTube users click on any videos that are related to yoga. YouTube allows for the brand to target users through not only keywords but remarketing. This gives Lululemon a YouTube presence when users aren’t even looking at content regarding yoga or any of the keywords. This remarketing tool will target any users that have interacted with Lululemon’s website and ads.

The metrics that would best determine an advertising campaign’s success would probably be conversion and conversion attributes. Google Analytics segments actions into macro and micro conversions. Macro being when someone completes an action that is important like purchasing or subscribing to something, while a micro conversion is not immediately contributing to your bottom line, people are still on the purchasing journey and have not quite committed. By using this metric you are able to see what caused your user to purchase a particular item and see if the campaign was the cause for that switch.