Fleet Feet joined the Digital Position family in 2017 with arguably no digital marketing strategy at all, despite being a major national brand with over 175 retail locations. We began by understanding incredibly limiting business model quirks that make digital growth difficult. As Jason mentions in his video review of us here, Fleet Feet had made a number of terrible mistakes in digital marketing.
We flew to Fleet Feet and had multiple pitches to the executive board to completely rethink digital marketing, while letting them know that someday they will very much regret it if they did not pursue this channel now (read on re: COVID).
Overall, we moved aggressively to get all of the local stores involved in the digital marketing game. Due to Fleet Feet's restrictions, we needed local involvement across the board. Thus, we executed what we called the “One Website” project.
On the SEO side, this meant rolling up every single store's separate website into the Fleet Feet domain and allowing geotargeting to show a local store if a customer was close to a physical location. We also built out educational content, including an extensive buyer's guide to running shoes to rank for the head term “running shoes” and others to target specific shoe brands.
On the PPC side, we began tracking in-store visits and have rolled out digital marketing campaigns for the majority of Fleet Feet's stores, driving explosive growth there alongside our SEO efforts.
Fleet Feet x Digital Position Case Study // Updated October 2022
The Journey
The Results
When COVID hit, the physical stores got hit VERY hard despite the running shoes market taking off and experiencing explosive growth. Our channels, especially SEO, gave the entire business the shot in the arm it needed to sustain the lockdowns. Our little agency propped up a business that employs thousands of Americans through their hardest time. Good thing Fleet Feet bought into Digital!
Since rolling out the local store program, we've driven over 400,000 store visits between Fleet Feet's 250+ stores! In addition, we now rank in the top 5 for “best running shoes” and searches for multiple name-brand shoe manufacturers, like HOKA®, On Cloud, Brooks, Saucony, and more.
#2
Position for "best running shoes"
#4
Position for "hoka shoes"
429%
Increase in SEO revenue
400,000+
Store visits
