Footwear advertising - ideas and tips for promoting this type of product

Reklamy footwear accompanies web users at every turn. Promoting oneself on websites and social media is simply necessary in order to survive among the numerous competitors. However, simply getting your message out to customers is not enough. Their interest can only be gained by standing out from the crowd. How do you do this? With these few ways.

Footwear advertising in a world of huge competition - the challenges

Large, on top of often wealthy competitors with multi-million pound budgets for promotional campaigns is in itself a challenge for any retailer. In the last quarter of a century, this business, like any other, has begun to face another - the Internet. While the World Wide Web has undoubtedly provided and continually sustains the opportunity to showcase its products, it has also contributed to certain habits in customers that are not easily exploited for sales success.

Reverse ROPO effect

ROPO, or Research Online, Purchase Offline, is the phenomenon of looking for a product online but buying it in a stationary shop. As you can easily guess, the inverted variant of this customer behaviour is a huge problem for retailers with shoe stores. Many customers come to them just to look at the range or the model of shoes they have already chosen.

As a result of reverse ROPO, the company loses the money it needs to spend on renting space for the shoe showroom, paying electricity bills and paying staff salaries. Does this mean that stationary sales should be abandoned? No, but the challenge is undoubtedly to come up with ways to convince customers to buy locally. Discounts not available online or products added to shoes, such as protective polishes, can help.

Meeting customer expectations

The footwear industry, just like clothing, requires online retailers to organise a lightning-fast returns system. This is a key requirement, as there are bound to be some customers who will return shoes that do not fit in size. Unfortunately, this parameter is not always indicative of the fit and, after all, matching the model to the equally important foot structure is only possible in stationary shops.

Many people also return the footwear for the most obvious reason - they didn't like it as much as they thought they would. Part of this problem can be remedied with photographs. In addition to presenting the shoes themselves, it is better to add photographs in which the models show them in juxtaposition with the proposed clothing items. Attention should also be paid to the colour scheme of the photos. They should be as natural as possible.

Almost unlimited choice

Only a fraction of those in the industry choose to have a stationary shop or even a whole chain of them. This is understandable, as in this way they are able to limit their business costs to stocking items in warehouses, promotional activities and website maintenance. Although lower business expenses are a fact, it should not be forgotten that in the virtual world, competition is incomparably greater than offline.

Just a phrase such as "shoe shop" is enough to immediately access the offers of thousands of companies from all over Poland and beyond. Outside the Internet, no one can afford such a wealth of choice. For this reason, e-commerce retailers cannot overlook the issue of their website's online visibility. Importantly, the attention of potential and existing consumers must be sought at all times.

How do you advertise footwear online? SEO and UX

One of the cornerstones of business success is to write yourself in the minds of potential (and not only) customers. For this reason, after all, companies in all industries have been investing in posters, large-format banners and media advertising spots for decades. When it comes to the internet, getting out with a brand's marketing message is all about visibility. In other words, in order to show yourself to your audience, you need to take care of your website positioning.

The first step to standing out from the numerous competitors is to prepare the shop's website from a technical point of view. After all, even the best promotional campaign will come to nothing if the website is slow. There is a risk that a customer, bored with waiting to be connected or discouraged by a shopping experience that takes too long, will simply leave. It will also be necessary to prepare merchandise and category descriptions with key phrases in mind.

Importantly, even if an internet user starts browsing the range, he or she may not purchase anything. Why? A common reason for abandoning a transaction is that the website interface is difficult to use. For this reason, search engine optimisation (SEO) should go hand in hand with UX, i.e. user experience. An easy-to-use website menu, clear categorisation (e.g. children's footwear, women's footwear, men's footwear, trekking footwear, athletic footwear, etc.) and the shortest possible purchase path are a simple way to increase sales. Our new one-button delivery service, InPost Pay, will help with the latter task.

Online shoe advertising, or how and where to promote yourself

Once the foundations have been laid for successful sales, it is time to move on to additional but indispensable promotional methods. A good way to do this is to buy space on websites to display banner adverts. Sponsored articles and the use of Google Ads will also help to increase product sales.

Banner advertising for shoes

Advertising banners have been used for years as an effective form of promoting all types of goods and services. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that it is not only the number of banners that matters, but also where they are published. For example, sports shoe advertising will work well on portals with articles about a particular sport and news websites. For this reason, advertisements for basketball shoes, for example, are most common on related websites.

However, themed websites are only one of two places where it is worthwhile to show yourself to customers. Popular news portals and service websites, which are used by thousands of people every day, also have very high potential. These include the InPost website. We offer our business customers the placement of an advertising banner on the homepage, among other things. In addition, we can send push notifications with shop offers to users of the InPost Mobile app.

Footwear advertising in sponsored articles

Many people like to read guides and trivia related to their hobbies. For shoe retailers, this gives them the opportunity to showcase their range on themed blogs. In sponsored articles published on them, information about the models available in the shop can be woven in. How? For example, a guide to choosing shoes for a suit or summer dress, running or mountain hiking provides space for recommending a shop or specific shoe models.

Such a text advertisement for sports shoes, trekking shoes, evening shoes or any other shoes should also contain links to the shop's homepage or subpages with individual products. This gives the retailer a double benefit. Firstly, it shortens the customer's path to purchase, as they can go straight to the website with the respective shoe model. Secondly, by link building, i.e. building a network of links to the site, it increases its authority. In other words, search engine indexing bots, primarily Google, start to rank it higher because other sites recommend it.

Advertising a shoe shop in Google's advertising network

Another way of presenting your offer, in a way, supports the positioning of your shop page in the browser. In this case, the reaction of Google bots to the key phrase typed in by the Internet user is to show the products he is looking for. Such an ad appears above the search results, which makes it perfectly visible.

Picture and price is a popular, but fortunately only one of several methods of advertising. Shoes sold by a particular shop can also be advertised by text. This type of promotion consists of inserting a sponsored link bearing the wording Advertising above the other, organic search results. Like other marketing activities in Google's ad network, this one is also time-limited. In other words, the length of the campaign depends on the budget the merchant can allocate to it.

Google offers other equally effective ways to reach customers. Footwear advertising can appear in the Google Play app shop and as an interlude during YouTube videos. In the latter case, the sponsored content will only be displayed to users who have not purchased a monthly subscription. It is also worth taking care of promotion in Maps. Google offers business customers special location signage in the form of large squares. This solution is useful for companies with stationary showrooms.

Advertising footwear on social media. Encourage your audience with carousels of images

The potential of social media is invaluable, as evidenced by the Social Media Working Group's 2023 report, among others. [1] According to it, Facebook is used by more than 26 million Polish residents, which translates into 81% of the medium's reach among domestic internet users. Another popular platform, Instagram, has over 16 million Polish users, i.e. 50% of all domestic web and mobile app users. Using these figures as an example, it is clear to see the inexhaustible advertising possibilities that lie dormant in social networks.

The Facebook and Instagram management company Meta, like Google, offers a number of advertising formats to business customers. One of the most eye-catching is image carousels, i.e. sliding tiles on which images of the products being sold can be placed. For a shoe shop, this is an excellent way to show up to 10 pairs of shoes at once. Importantly, carousels can be created by any user of these portals. Business accounts, however, offer additional possibilities such as targeting audiences by age, gender, location, etc.

Advertising footwear with InPost - find out about our proposals and their possibilities

When it comes to advertising, it is not worth stopping at just the content displayed online. Street campaigns are also highly effective. In order to make it easier for our business customers, we have launched another of our services involving the use of the potential offered by Paczkomat. Known to millions of Polish residents, Paczkomat is a great advertising medium. On a selected number of the already over 22 thousand devices we can:

• create an advertising veneer on the caches of the machine;
• place advertising on machine displays.

The network of Paczkomat machines set up both in the centres of large centres and in small villages will make it possible to reach a huge number of customers. However, our offer does not end there. For retailers operating on the Internet, we offer comprehensive services such as Subscriptions for companies, Fulfillment and much more!