Running eCommerce Digital Marketing Like a Defense
A Case Study on WENDELL AUGUST FORGE
We’re well into the NFL season, and I’ve been looking at eCommerce digital marketing through the lens of a defensive coordinator. Do you run a man-to-man strategy, where you target specific customers directly, or a zone defense, where you ensure coverage across key areas so that customers naturally find you? Many merchants assume marketing should be man-to-man—identify the ideal customer and chase them. But a smarter, more effective approach is playing zone. Your ideal customers are already out there; your job is to ensure your digital marketing covers every key zone so that when they step into your space, you’re ready to engage.
For the past six months, we’ve been working with Wendell August Forge, a Pennsylvania-based retailer of handmade gifts with nearly a century of craftsmanship behind them. Specializing in ornaments, wedding gifts, and high-quality functional art, they were preparing for a major digital marketing push ahead of their holiday season—when suddenly, they received incredible news.
Wendell August secured a license to sell NFL team-branded products! This was a game-changing opportunity, so we took a zone defense approach, positioning Wendell August across multiple digital marketing channels—SEO, PPC, and Pinterest—to capture every type of customer they wanted to reach.
Search Engine Optimization
On the SEO front, our timeline sped up dramatically. We still needed to push holiday gift keywords up the rankings in time for peak shopping season, but now we also had to generate momentum for NFL-related keywords before football season kicked into high gear. Every keyword on our list had a corresponding target page—the page we wanted to rank for that term. To move these keywords up, we optimized their target pages with fresh content and built backlinks to strengthen their authority. Since the NFL pages were brand new, we prioritized them, frontloading content and backlink efforts to compensate for their lack of age and authority compared to the site’s more established pages.
Since launching our SEO campaign, revenue from organic search has climbed by over 40%, while transactions from organic search have surged by more than 50% compared to the same period last year. The once brand-new NFL target pages now rank on pages 1 and 2 for 14 of our tracked keywords. In the past two months, as football season kicked off, the number of visitors landing on the site via the NFL category page from Google has more than tripled.
Pay Per Click
To cover the Pay Per Click zone, we took a similar approach, allocating our budget between holiday gift and NFL merchandise-related bids. We divided our PPC budget into 13 distinct campaigns—some targeting specific teams, others focusing on holidays or events. This allowed our PPC strategists to fine-tune their approach with greater precision. It also enabled us to track, in real-time, which product categories were generating the highest impressions, clicks, and sales at any given moment.
Over the past six months, compared to the same period last year, paid search traffic to the site has more than doubled. Transactions from paid search have also seen a rise of over 25%. Our year-to-date data reveals that while Wendell August’s average cost per click has decreased, impressions, clicks, and conversions have all shown significant growth during the same timeframe.
Social Media Marketing
Our third defensive zone is social media, with a focus on Pinterest. Unlike other major platforms, Pinterest’s algorithm functions similarly to Google’s, building authority for content over time. Since there was no NFL-related content on the site before this campaign, we strategically “aged” the content to increase its credibility on Pinterest. We created plenty of NFL-themed content and distributed it across the web, linking back to the Pinterest account to diversify the backlink profile. We also set up dedicated Pinterest boards for NFL products and separate boards for holiday and event gifts.
Pinterest also supports our Pay Per Click retargeting efforts. If a product gains traction through likes and shares on Pinterest, we earmark it as a strong candidate for retargeting on Facebook and other social media platforms. By leveraging Pinterest’s organic reach and integrating it with our paid ad strategy, we ensured that high-interest products received maximum exposure across multiple digital channels.
Our Pinterest campaign has built an engaged audience of 175,000, generating over 3,000 clicks back to the site each month on average. With an audience engagement rate of just over 4%, Wendell August’s motivational content performs exceptionally well—so well, in fact, that it even caught the attention of Lindsay Lohan, who reshared one of our posts!
Playing digital marketing like a zone defense means positioning your brand where your customers already are. Instead of chasing fleeting online trends, it’s about establishing a strong, lasting presence with proven strategies. When your brand is effectively placed in the right digital spaces, the right customers—the ones ready to make a purchase—will find you, rather than the other way around.