- Phonetically accurate but an auto-correct nightmare,
thortful is a greeting card marketplace.
So designers and photographers
come up with greeting card designs and thortful sells them.
In this #NoCutTeardown
we're going to be looking at the digital marketing
that has helped thortful to grow.
And in particular,
we're going to be picking out three things
they've done really well
and three areas where there is room for opportunity.
Because this is a #NoCutTeardown it's one take,
so it's either a one-take win or a one-take fail,
and as always, I'll let you be the judge of that.
So what's thortful doing really well,
let's get started with the three things they're doing well.
The first thing that they're doing well
isn't really a digital marketing thing at all,
but it enables the digital marketing,
and that is that they have a great proposition.
Their cards are funny,
the designs are awesome and there is a huge range.
It makes it so much easier to market a great product
than it does to try and convince people
to buy a mediocre or worse product.
Much easier to build a big business
with a great product and above average marketing
than it is to grow a business
using a below average product and incredible marketing.
So that's the first thing,
there is an awesome product here and their marketplace model
where creators are incentivized to make brilliant designs
really helps them in this regard.
The second thing that they're doing well is SEO.
Now the greeting card business
is very, very low cost average order values, obviously,
so this game is all about customer acquisition cost,
and how can you acquire customers as cheaply as possible.
If you can do that, then you can grow.
If it costs you loads of money to acquire a customer
then you run into cashflow issues,
because you have to generate huge amounts of cash
to invest in getting new customers,
which you then have to recoup
over a long period of lifetime value.
So this is all about cheap customer acquisition,
so that means that organic traffic channels
like organic search and organic social
become much more important
because you're not paying per click.
Now thortful is doing a pretty good job of their SEO
and they've got some decent rankings to show for it.
So we're getting around about 700,000 visits
in the UK per month,
and a good number in other territories as well.
Some of the phrases that they're ranking for
include the really, kind of, competitive terms.
So variations on birthday card, top half of the page.
For the phrases around funny,
so funny birthday cards also doing very well
because their products are funny,
so they're really gonna satisfy that audience,
and that might be something
that they want to lean into even more.
But yeah, overall, organic rankings are pretty good.
Now we can see
that they've put some time and energy into this.
For example, if we go through to the Funny category page.
So here we've got the Funny Birthday Card category page,
we've got some text copy here,
we've got a nice headline there.
You know, this all makes sense,
this has been optimised for those sorts of terms,
so this is pretty good.
Okay, the third thing that they are doing really well
is if you think about their model,
the designers and the card creators
are basically that they're creating funny,
relatable, timely designs, memes essentially.
A lot of these are very current,
it's about the stuff that's going on now.
So their social media strategy is awesome,
because they are basically just posting these designs
on their social channels,
which is exactly the sort of stuff
that people go to social media for.
So a lot of businesses struggle
with how to come up with entertaining, interesting stuff
for their social channels,
well thortful's marketplace of designers
is basically giving them this stuff
and they're just getting out of the way and posting it.
So we can see, for example, Facebook posts like this
where they're just posting it
and getting loads of interactions,
there's people tagging each other in the comments,
it's great stuff.
Same sort of angle on Instagram.
They're just posting the designs
and people are having a great time commenting,
tagging their friends,
and there's lots of banter and stuff going on,
so that is awesome.
Okay. (fingers clicking)
One thing I might just do though,
is they don't always do a good job
of telling people what to search for on thortful
in order to find this card.
So say someone saw this and they liked it,
they wanted to buy it.
What do I do now?
Well they could have a link in the description
to the cards featured on their Instagram page,
which is probably the best way of doing it,
or they could just simply tell people what to search for
on thortful in order to find that card.
So that's a little area of opportunity.
What about the three things that they are not doing so well?
Well, there is some product specific SEO stuff
which is a huge opportunity.
So if we think about the business model,
the creators design the cards
and they upload them to thortful,
thortful then approves them and they go live on the site.
So here is an example.
Now this is a Father's Day card.
You could say that this is a Father's Day clone card,
this is a Father's Day sperm joke card
or whatever it might be, right?
But this card, the optimization of this is really poor.
The title is just, Happy Father's Day, Happy Father's Day,
there's no other information about it at all.
The product info is entirely generic
across their entire range.
The page title is junk, Happy Father's Day, thortful.
There is nothing here.
Now, the opportunity here is to optimise each of the cards,
there's loads, so you might just want to choose
the best selling or highest performing ones,
for individual search terms for long-tail searches.
So within the greeting card space,
as in most search environments,
you've got some real, kind of, most competitive head terms.
So Father's Day card, funny Father's Day card, whatever.
And then you've got this huge long-tail
where people are searching for specific terms
because they're trying to find that one perfect card.
And this is an opportunity, optimising these product pages
for those long-tail terms is a real opportunity.
This is something that Google is struggling to do.
For example, if we search for,
shop funny railway birthday cards, right?
That is quite a niche term,
but the greeting card space is made up a huge volume
of these very niche terms.
So what you can do is you can optimise even individual cards
for this term to get them ranked.
If we have a look at the pages that are actually ranking,
so Funny Train Cards on Zazzle,
let's just go and have a look at this.
Well I've searched for funny railway birthday cards,
here's what I've got is funny train cards.
Half of them, or majority of them aren't even about trains
and many of them aren't about birthdays.
So I are not being served by this,
this is something that Google is struggling
to give searchers a good quality result for.
So optimising product pages better to show up for this
would be a help.
Now, how does thortful do this,
because they've got a huge range of products on the site.
Well they've got this Creator's Guide
which helps their creators to make good products
which are going to sell.
And lots of marketplaces will have a version of this, right?
Where you help the creators to come up with something
which is actually gonna sell
because that benefits them and that benefits you.
So I would purely add a section of this
which is about how to make your designs sell well,
tips to make them sell well.
Give a bit of story about how you came up with them,
show your hand drawn, you know,
first versions or whatever in product pictures.
Optimise your page titles,
here are some tips on how to do that.
Get the creators to do this for you
because they are incentivized to make these pages win.
So that's something that could be done.
This actually leads us to opportunity number two.
If you go to this search here, funny railway birthday cards,
you can see that thortful
are actually advertising for this phrase.
But the headline there,
the ad just says, Shop Funny Cards.
Well I've searched for shop funny railway birthday cards,
so at least give me birthday or railway, right?
Don't just give me funny.
So you can do a little bit better than this.
When we click on this we just go through to the Funny page,
this isn't even categorised by birthday.
So I've just searched
for their funny railway birthday cards,
optimise it for funny and birthday,
if you can't do railway, fine,
although I think eventually you might want to,
but at least do funny and birthday,
does that make sense?
So we're not optimising at all,
we're just giving people a really broad category
and saying, go and have at it, dig through,
see if you can find anything relevant here.
Now we can see that they're running quite a lot of ads.
Let me just show you here.
So they're running quite a lot of ads,
although they were driving a lot more
earlier on in the year.
So it looks like they've experimented over April 2021
and then they've really dialled things back.
So what the reason is for that, I'm not too sure,
but actually some of the ad copy is fairly generic as well.
So if we look at some of these,
you know, it's really generic ad description.
So here's one for new home cards,
"outrageously funny cards to perfectly pretty prints,
we've got thousands of designs.
Find a congratulations card they'll adore."
There's actually no reference to new home there,
so they could make this much more compelling.
They could also tie in their key USP's,
which is the creator sort of marketplace side of things,
and the fact that they have genuinely hilarious cards.
So some sort of way of verifying it
in the ad copy to make it stand out
is gonna improve their click through rate,
get them more search traffic
for a lower cost per click as well,
so there's lots of opportunity there.
Lots and lots of opportunity with this ad copy,
and also to target these longer tail searches.
Now, this takes us on to the third thing
that they're not doing particularly well which is this blog.
Now the blog is really a tale of two halves.
On the one half they've got these blog posts,
let me just show you,
they've got blog posts which are ranking for things
like What to Write in a New Job Card,
which is driving them a decent amount of traffic.
Now you could say that ranking a blog post
of what to write in a new job card
is a little bit too late in the buyer journey
because someone's already purchased the card
and they're like, "right, now what do I write?"
So thortful might not get that sale, but you know,
this is someone who at least buys cards we know,
so you can understand the angle that they're taking there.
But then they've got a whole bunch of posts on their site
which are doing nothing, driving very little traffic at all,
and seem to have very, very loose/no relevance at all
to their business.
Top interior design trends for your home, for example,
Autumn decorations for your home.
These are really odd topics to be writing about.
The posts aren't driving much traffic
and I would be very surprised
if they're driving any conversions.
What I might be tempted to do in these sorts of situations
is instead of writing these sorts of posts,
look at these long-tail search terms
that people are searching for,
like railway birthday card for example,
and make a list of the best selling cards
in these categories and make them as static pages
if you can't build more category pages on the site.
So make blog posts, you know,
funniest cards for railway lovers
or whatever this might be, right?
So find these longer tail searches
and make posts around those
rather than go for stuff like, I don't know,
spooky adult Halloween costume ideas,
which seems to have no relevance to their business at all,
and is really a little bit confusing.
So there you have it, three things that they're doing well,
three rooms for improvement, if you like.
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