Digitas

London

THE CHALLENGE

In 2018, H&M, a global retail giant, faced the urgent need to adapt to the rapidly expanding online fashion market dominated by digital-native competitors like ASOS and Zalando. Despite its historical success in high street retail, H&M's digital presence lagged, threatening its market share. With online sales burgeoning, H&M's reliance on traditional storefronts posed a significant risk.

To thrive in this new landscape, H&M had to prioritise digital transformation, particularly in search engine optimisation (SEO). However, entrenched legacy systems, siloed teams, and a lack of digital agility hindered progress. Digitas recognised the imperative for sweeping changes, driving a comprehensive overhaul of H&M's digital strategy, culture, and processes to secure its future in the digital marketplace.

THE STRATEGY

The strategy for transforming H&M's digital presence centred on harnessing SEO to meet the diverse needs of its broad audience across fashion, homewares, sportswear, and beauty products. Rather than traditional demographic targeting, the focus was on understanding and responding to specific search queries in real-time, delivering relevant products directly to consumers.

Digitas delved deep into H&M's organisational structure and identified bottlenecks, streamlining processes and embedding SEO specialists across teams. This overhaul enabled the creation of thousands of new landing pages tailored to consumer searches, driving increased traffic and sales. Leveraging innovative data-to-text solutions, the strategy achieved both scale and quality in content creation.

Throughout, the approach remained agile, pivoting rapidly to capture emerging trends, such as the shift to loungewear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continuous optimisation ensured sustained performance in a dynamic digital landscape.

THE RESULTS

The results speak for themselves:

£644M: Delivered in Incremental Revenue

16:1: ROI

1,594%: Increase in Page 1 rankings for non-brand keywords

1. Exceeding Revenue Targets:

The initiative aimed to drive £332M incremental revenue from organic search over 5¼ years. Impressively, it surpassed expectations, generating £644M incremental SEO revenue, doubling the initial target.

2. Google Recognition and Increased Visibility:

Google acknowledged the efforts by elevating H&M to the first page for relevant customer searches, resulting in a staggering 1,594% increase in the number of target non-brand terms ranking on page 1 since 2019. H&M's visibility surged ahead of key competitors globally.

3. Exceptional Business Returns:

The estimate of overall profit ROI, including both agency and client costs is deemed to be a remarkable 16:1 ROI, with the ROI for the European portion estimated to surpass this figure.

In summary, this initiative epitomises effectiveness in the modern age, delivering tangible results, and positioning H&M for continued success in the digital realm.

AWARDS

IPA Effectiveness Award (2024) - Global Market

Global Search Award (2024) - Best use of Search - Retail / E-commerce: Large (Winner)

Global Search Awards (2024) - Best use of Search - Fashion: Large

Euro Effies (2023) - Multi-market: Sustained Success

UK Effies (2023) - Sustained Success

H&M - Placing Search at the Heart of Customer Experience

In response to the pandemic’s surge in online shopping, Digitas helped H&M transform its online business by shifting to a digital native strategy, resulting in triple the targeted incremental revenue and a huge increase in non-brand keywords ranking on.