Patagonia’s Digital Marketing Strategy

Outdoor clothing brand, Patagonia, puts its values and its ethics front and centre in its digital marketing. But it does seem to be leaving plenty of growth on the table by not covering some of the real fundamentals of digital marketing. The question of course is, is this impacting them? And of course the bigger question is what can fellow eCommerce store owners, ethical brand owners and the rest of us marketers learn from Patagonia’s digital. Today, we find out.

Before we get into the specifics of Patagonia’s digital marketing, I want to touch a little bit on the ethical side. Now, the world has never been so focused on the ethics and the values behind the products that we buy.

And this is seen at every level, from the large number of eco-friendly startups, which are being founded, to the pressure on hedge funds and investment firms, to make sure that their investments obey environmental, societal or governance, ESG, standards. Just look at the Google trend for ESG. That’s not a trend you wanna be on the wrong side of.

Well, this is fantastic because businesses of all shapes and sizes are becoming aware that the impact we can have on the world and its inhabitants can either be positive or negative. Obviously this is fantastic. Businesses are becoming aware that the impact we can have on the world and its inhabitants is either positive or negative. And it’s absolutely right, that more businesses are making the most sustainable choices here. But let’s not kid ourselves.

Patagonia has done very well from positioning themselves at the start of this movement. So lesson number one is to make sure that you are on the right side of a movement like this. Whereas ethics and values used to be seen as a benefit, which was only somewhat useful in marketing, now, it’s becoming an absolute fundamental, but you obviously don’t want to just greenwash, do the same old things and just slap an ESG logo on it. This has to run core to your business. Now, if you read through the story section on Patagonia’s website, it’s clear that this isn’t a business that necessarily prioritises product in its marketing, as much as it used to.

So in the very early days of the business, the story here was all about the products and the materials that they were using. But over time, the narrative becomes increasingly dominated by their causes and the mission component. And in fact, we can get a sense of their priorities today, by just looking at the homepage of their website. Now, we’ve got a bit of information about background, and then we’ve got some sort of product categories, but they’re not actually obviously product categories.

We can see some products here, but on the whole, these product category buckets, actually don’t imply that this is a clothing company at all.

The fact that they don’t say shop until you hover them also, it’s almost like Patagonia is not trying to drive people into these product categories. Now, the overall feeling from this is almost like the products seem to be a kind of afterthought. This becomes even more extreme on mobile where the only product a category that’s visible is men’s. So if we were to judge this as a typical eCommerce homepage, we would say, it feels absolutely nothing like an eCommerce homepage. Now, I was going to say that this actually feels a bit more like a charity and that the causes are so prominent.

But actually if you go on a charity website, you’ll see that it’s packed full of calls to action, asking you to donate. So if anything, maybe Patagonia feels a little bit more like a charity, but one that’s not open for donations. Anyway, we’re gonna come back to their website later on. But before we do, I just wanted to show you how their mission is conveyed across other channels, namely their social media.

Now, here we see exactly the same thing being played out as on their website, namely, this is not social media for eCommerce businesses 101.

In fact, you are very hard pressed to find many products featured at all. What they’re not doing is sharing the features and benefits of their products. There doesn’t seem to be any attempt to make people buy from these posts. So just like at the website, this is a completely non-traditional eCommerce approach. Normally an Instagram for a clothing brand would be linking to the product, showing the products in action.

Patagonia don’t link to the products. In fact, they barely even show the products. When they do have people talking about clothing, it’s these sorts of posts where they’re actually talking about having less clothing in their wardrobe, The Patagonia products aren’t featured prominently at all. There is no promotion. There’s no talk about features and benefits.

Now, I understand why they would do this. And for a hardcore group of Patagonia’s audience, this is going to resonate the sort of anti-consumerism angle. And this is an interesting and bold strategy. But my question is, do they really need to sacrifice so much product focus to get the message across? I’m not sure that they do.

All right, so let’s have a look at how they’re actually generating sales online then and whether other ethically driven brands are having to make the same sacrifices or not. So let’s start with their website. This is the core of any eCommerce business or any brand that sells direct to consumer. Now, I wanted to understand how the Patagonia site was perceived amongst Patagonia’s audiences and whether the non-traditional layout was as much of a conversion blocker to other people buying as I thought it seems to be.

Apparently I’m not alone.

People complaining about their website on their social media. Have any of you hippies tried buying from the website? It’s so finicky sends you back to the main page if hit back after looking at product. Your website sucks. Agree 30 year customer and I kind of understand why the website experience is weak.

Yes, okay, so what are they really talking about? Now, one of the first things that we’ll analyse when we’re looking at an eCommerce store is the menu system and how easy it is to find the right products and product category for you. Now, on Patagonia, we have this rather extra ordinarily long list of all of the different product categories. It’s great that we’ve got everything subcategorized by gender and different product types.

But then underneath this, we have these huge lists of subcategories.

It’ll be much easier for visitors if this was broken down and chunked into easy options. So for example, if we look on the ASOS website, which is a very traditional, but very high performing eCommerce site, we see that the whole product range is broken into women and men. And then underneath each of these, every different product category has a limited number of choices to make. So you are asked to choose between all of these different products category options, which are very simple choices to make. If I want shoes, I know definitely that it’s going to be shoes, right?

So that’s a very easy choice for me to make.

And then I can then make a very simple choice after that, about which type of shoes. Whereas on the Patagonia site, let’s say, I want to buy a sweatshirt, well, we’ve got, we’ve got used, we’ve got sweatshirts, but we’ve also got sweaters. Like this becomes much more confusing for me. You do not want to flood your users round with 22 different options for women’s wear.

Now, Patagonia’s product category pages are also suboptimal.

Product category pages are a key battle ground for eCommerce businesses. These are the pages that you’d want to get ranked, you’re gonna get a lot of cold traffic coming through these pages, if they are ranking. And you might also want to drive paid traffic to these product category pages as well. In Patagonia’s case, there is a lot to be desired here.

Firstly, there is no introductory text. There’s no background to the company at all. All of that ethics and that mission stuff has just totally disappeared if I’m coming through on this page. There is no benefits bar summarising why I want to buy from Patagonia rather than the competitor or why I want to buy direct. If we scroll down, we have product subcategories here, but there’s no image on them at all.

So, I’m left to kind of find the one that’s right for me by just reading the text, which again, isn’t ideal. We’ve also got this really nontraditional layout where we have to go sideways to see more product categories.

Well, the downside of this is I can’t actually see all in one place, the options that are available and scrolling sideways on a desktop site is really counterintuitive. In fact, most apps or mobiles only ever get you to scroll in one direction. If you’re having to scroll in two directions, that’s when things become confusing because you don’t know whether you should be scrolling left to right or up or down.

Then we have their products. Now most of the time products category pages will be ordered by the best selling or most relevant products in that category. Not so here. We have a random smattering of insulated jackets to begin with. We then have you may also like, well based on what, and not on a particular product page.

So what are they judging this recommendation on? Then finally, we have some kind of filtering system, but it kind of sits next to these. So is this filter just for these products? Or is it for all of the products on this page? So you would rarely find many of these things on any eCommerce category page, meaning that this page is what we in the marketing world would call innovative.

Let’s take a look at the product page. Obviously, if your product page is good, you’re gonna convert, you’re gonna make sales. If they’re not good, you’re not gonna convert, you’re not gonna make as many sales. You’re getting the hang of this. So let’s have a look at this product page for the Women’s Nano Puff Jacket.

Now again, all of the mission stuff, all of the values and the ethics of the brand are gone from above the fold on this page. You don’t see a benefits bar, which neatly describes what Patagonia is about and gives you any indication of their values at all.

You are left to hunt much further down the page for that. We then have some product images. Now, these are good product images.

They are large, they are good quality. We can scroll through to see the different colours, but they take up the entire screen. There’s absolutely no reason to have this amount of space when it forces the buy button, the entire point of this whole page forces it below the fold. Now, there’s no information about the product yet. We’re we are forced to scroll even further for that.

Now, it’s good that they’ve got other product images.

We’ve even got a product video, which is fantastic. But where is the rest of the information about this product? Where’s the information about the material and how it works and how waterproof it is? And how durable it is?

Well, I have to keep scrolling all the way down until I find this. So, this is what, one, two, three, four five, five-page scrolls until I get any product description at all, that is crazy. So, their category pages are innovative, and their product pages are innovative. If you love this sort of SEO stuff and you winna improve your website’s ranking, we actually have a book called How to Get to the Top of Google, which shows you how to get to the top of Google, of course.

This book is one of the most popular and well-reviewed SEO books ever.

So, you can either go to Amazon and buy a copy, or you can click the link in the description to download a copy, totally free of charge, How to Get to the Top of Google. Okay, let’s have a chat about innovation in marketing. Innovate with a product offering that blows your competitors away. Innovate with an incredible call to action, one that people find it irresistible to convert on your website. Innovate with a mind blowing returns policy or innovate as Patagonia have with a massive focus on impact, but across all of the websites that we’ve worked with, both lead generation and eCommerce over the last 10 years, it’s gonna be tens of thousands of websites.

We’ve found that innovation and creativity when it comes to conversion rate optimization and web design are usually a bad thing. Because think about it, innovation means breaking the norm, breaking the norm means surprising people, catching them off guard. That’s the point with innovation. Yeah, you’re a expecting this ha ha, well have this instead. But think about someone trying to become a lead or trying to buy from a website.

Actually surprising them and catching off guard is exactly what we do not want them to do. We want them to keep moving down a well-trodden path. We don’t want to get in their way. We don’t want to block their conversion at all. We don’t want them to have to hunt, we want to give them the button exactly where they are expecting to see it.

We want to put them in a checkout which feels entirely familiar so that they can progress, lemming like with minimal resistance.

We want them to go through a boringly undifferent and uninnovative checkout process that feels entirely familiar and has zero friction whatsoever. We want them to proceed zombie like without a grain of resistance or a shred of surprise. Now, if we compare the Patagonia site with this site for Pangaia, Pangaia, let me know in the comments, their mission is clear. They put organic and recycled material into their clothing.

And that is obvious as soon as you land on the site. But they haven’t had to forego traditional eCommerce conversion principles in order to do this. If we take a look at their product category page, it is much more standardised, which means that it is less surprising and it’s easier to find the products that you want.

We have a filter right up at the top, exactly where you’d expect it. We have the best sellers shown first, perfect.

And we have a sticky menu on the site. So if you do end up in the wrong place, you can quickly get to the right place without having to scroll. Their product pages are exactly what you would expect. Product images on the left, conversion on the right. On mobile, product image, conversion.

So does Patagonia have to sacrifice conversions on their website to get the ethical message across? I’m not convinced. Okay, let’s take a look now at how they’re driving traffic to their website then. So, we’re first going to look at SEO.

Now we can see that Patagonia has the makings of some decent ranking.

They’re getting a reasonable amount of traffic. Here we are looking at their US traffic and estimated 283,000 visits per month. Now I’ve put some filters on here just to take away some of the Patagonia spellings, misspellings so that we can see the non-branded traffic. Even so, there is some stuff here like wornwear, which is a kind of Patagonia branded term, which means there’s second hand clothing. And we’ve still got plenty of Patagonia misspellings.

It turns out there’s a long tail of about a thousand different ways to spell Patagonia. Now we can see from this, that there is some potential with some non-branded commercial intent terms, things like fleece jacket, where they’re position four, hiking pants, position five, baggies, top of Google. But really the vast majority of this traffic is branded traffic and they have nowhere near as much visibility for these key category terms as I suspect they would like.

In the UK, things seem to be going slightly better. Yes, there is much lower search volume over here than in the US, but still we’re ranking top of Google for fleece.

And we’ve got some decent visibility for men’s fleece. So we’ve got the makings of some good ranking for some of these key product categories. Now, there is a bit of a location issue going on with their site where in the UK, if you search for fleece, the Patagonia page that shows up is actually a US page, rather than a UK page, so clearly they’ve got some localization stuff going on here that needs to be addressed.

But really, it’s not massively surprising that the site in either country isn’t ranking as well as it potentially could do because these product category pages from an SEO perspective are nowhere near as good as they could be. So, let’s get some category page copy added to each of these pages and let’s do some link building.

Yes, we have some links pointed to these pages, but they are trash. Whether they’ve been doing this intentionally or they’ve just picked it up accidentally. I can’t find any good quality links pointing to these product category pages, which is really going to impact their ranking.

Now, there are loads of different ways for eCommerce brands to get category page links, whether it’s running influencer campaigns or whether it’s pulling some sort of publicity stunt like Ikea did were it renamed its products to be quirky on trend things and then it got loads of attention. Of course, that gets picked up in the media, these newspaper and magazine sites then linked to the product category pages when Ikea changes the names back later on, they’ve still got the links, so those pages enjoy a boost in ranking.

So, with SEO, as with the website, we’re left to say, eh, really could be doing better. If you’re watching this and you want some help with your digital marketing, the team here at Exposure Ninja has something free, which is designed to help you.

It’s called the free website and marketing review. Now one of the ninjas here at Exposure Ninja, we’ll take a look at your digital marketing, your competitors and the space that you are in. They’ll then put together a prioritised action plan that you can follow over the next six to 12 months to significantly increase the volume of leads and sales that you generate from your website.

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So go to exposureninja.com/review to request your free website and marketing review today. So what about their socials? Obviously social media free commerce is massive. And particularly for a very community built brand like Patagonia, which has a really loyal army of followers.

We would expect social media to be a huge driver of traffic.

We saw earlier that their Instagram has 4.7 million followers at the time of making video, which is fantastic and shows how much passion there is for the brand. You know, this is coming. However, that same level of success and energy is not seen everywhere else. For example, on their TikTok account, we have 57,000 followers.

Their TikTok posts are, they are vibes.

I’m honestly struggling to work out what you would even call these posts. They’re basically snapshots of video either from the seventies or the sixties, or with some sort of filter that makes them look like they’re from that era. There is nothing about Patagonia’s mission about its values or its ethics, which is mind blowing, considering the demographics on TikTok and how well that would likely resonate. So this is really odd for the platform which in many cases would have the most resonance with the cause and the mission of Patagonia, there is nothing about that at all here.

There’s no product featuring at all. There’s no focus on any of that stuff. And really there is very little traction. Now, if we look at Patagonia’s compare to Arc’teryx, Arc’teryx is all over TikTok. There’s this trend where people going stand in their showers and wear their Arc’teryx clothing to see the water beating off.

And someone’s even recorded a song about Arc’teryx which they use and the Arc’teryx song says, I don’t need no Patagonia.

So Patagonia is on TikTok. It’s just the enemy that doesn’t know it’s the enemy being slayed by all this used generated content where people are professing their love for Arc’teryx. And there’s loads of this. So I would love to see Patagonia jump on TikTok and use the platform in the way that everybody else does by finding some awesome product feature, which is very easy to demonstrate.

Now, they could do this quite easily. They could fight back directly against Arc’teryx and get some influences to show themselves in the shower, wearing their Patagonia clothing or whatever.

Or they could take one particular feature of their products. For example, this entire jacket folds into this tiny little bag. Well, that would be a really cool demonstration to do on TikTok.

And it’s the sort of stuff that could get some traction. They could share a little known fact about Patagonia. They could share bits of story from Patagonia’s history, which would really resonate with the audience. It could be anything, but what’s this? Okay, let’s go over to Facebook and see what’s happening here.

So, like any brands, Patagonia has a bit of an on-off relationship with Facebook where they’ll go through a phase of posting maybe once a week and then they’ll leave it for a month and then they’ll come back and post a few times over a week.

So it seems to be really inconsistent posting schedule. Now, just like any other brand, their organic reach is really, really low. So we’ve got 1.7 million likes, and we’re getting like a handful of organic engagements with each piece.

Now, what I’d really like to see them doing here is they’re putting together this decent content, which represents the brand. Yes, of course there is no call to action.

Yes, of course there is no product featuring here that doesn’t seem to be their style, but if you’re gonna put your energy into this, we may as well put a little bit of budget behind these posts to get them some traction. Otherwise it is entirely pointless doing this activity at all. It could be that they’re unwilling to give money to Facebook in which case fair enough.

But in which case don’t use the platform at all, right? What about Facebook and Instagram ads? Well, we can see, they haven’t really run anything since May, 2020. And when they did, they weren’t actually Patagonia focus posts. They were posts about these different causes.

Now, that’s awesome that they’re doing this. It’s great they’re using their platform to promote these causes, but the time period was so small and the budget was so minuscule that it’s unlikely that these posts did very much at all for the causes that they’re promoting.

So again, we’re kind of left questioning what’s going on here? What is the strategy behind this? So, when it comes to website, when it comes to SEO, when it comes to social media, it looks like they’re leaving a tonne of money on the table, either intentionally or unintentionally.

In fact, the only area of their digital marketing, which I could find, which brings us a sort of copyable lesson anywhere was their search ads and not their search ads worldwide, their search ads in one particular territory, they’re doing something quite neat here.

So if we have a look at their search ads in the US on mobile, we can see they’re spending very little on their mobile traffic. And mostly they’re just targeting branded search terms. Now this is fair enough. I probably wouldn’t be spending a huge amount of search ad budget on promoting that website on mobile either.

But if we look at how this compares to on desktop, actually on desktop, they’re spending considerably more and they’re even happy target some non-branded terms. Now, this to me is smart. I would imagine that what’s happened here is they’ve run their ads on desktop and mobile, noticed that the ROI on desktop is much higher because one, it almost always is. Mobile visitors are much more fickle. And two, the mobile experience on their website is a little bit tricky to say the least.

It’s tricky on desktop too, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a bit tricky on mobile. So what it looks like they’ve done is hold back on their budget on mobile in order to put more budget behind desktop, either by just segmenting those audiences in Google ads or running negative bit adjustments on the mobile traffic so that they’re paying more for the desktop traffic than they are for mobile.

Now, it’s not unusual to see a split between how much a brand is willing to invest on a desktop searcher versus a mobile searcher. But what is unusual is to see the split being so pronounced. They really do not want that mobile traffic.

Now, of course, if I was gonna be picky, I’d say, well, if it’s working in the US, why aren’t they doing it in other country around the world? Of course they’re not, but hey, nobody’s perfect. So Patagonia confuses me. The cause and the mission in their digital marketing seem to be everything. And when I mean everything, I mean everything.

There really doesn’t seem to be much respect for the basics of digital marketing. And it appears from the outside, like they’re leaving a lot of money on the table by not covering these bases. And aside from their search ad strategy, which does appear to be sensible, at least in the US, there’s not a whole lot going on. Now, whether this is intentional in an effort to appear non-commercial or not to salesy, I don’t know.

But guess what?

Patagonia is still a clothing company and people buy clothing all the time, even eco conscious people, they’re gonna be buying someone else’s clothing, if Patagonia isn’t doing a good job of advertising and marketing to those people. I can’t understand why Patagonia doesn’t go harder with this digital marketing. They’ve got a great story, they’re well loved and they support some fantastic causes. So if any brand in this space was going to win, I don’t understand why Patagonia wouldn’t want it to be them. So over to you, what’s your take?

What do you think is going on here? Is this an intentional play by Patagonia to appear non-commercial or is this just that they have their attention focused elsewhere and the marketing has become a bit of an afterthought? Let us know in the comments. Until next time, see you soon. (air whooshing).

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