The original sweatshirt was invented by football player Benjamin Russell Jr. in 1926, the namesake of Russell Athletic.

This iconic crew neck sweatshirt has taken off in popularity since then, but unfortunately, queries related to this topic were inaccurately showing other brands as the sweatshirt inventor.

Russell Athletic needed to take ownership of relevant search terms to be properly recognized as the Inventors of the Sweatshirt in the digital age.

Services include:

  • SEO
  • Film & animation
  • Creative content production
  • Paid social amplification
  • Strategy
  • Analytics

The challenge

Identifying Russell Athletic as inventor of the sweatshirt

This was a high priority for the brand to correct. We had to ensure people everywhere were able to identify Russell Athletic as the inventors, thereby allowing the brand to own a proportionate share of the online conversation regarding the sweatshirt. Various PR efforts were undertaken to seed this information to the media, and Investis Digital was challenged to help Russell Athletic own “the inventor of the sweatshirt” search term and all related queries through performance marketing tactics.

“Working with Investis Digital is like working with an extension of our own marketing team. For this specific project and throughout our partnership, they have provided creative solutions and data-driven insights to drive our business forward. Bringing the content hub to life and achieving these impactful results in the amount of time that it’s been live has surpassed expectations, and it’s a valuable resource that we’ve continued to lean on.”

Ryan Lester, Manager, Digital Marketing & eCommerce

The outcome

Content hub means increased visibility

We earned our target rankings earlier than expected. We tracked keyword rankings and quickly observed that Russell Athletic dominated search results for queries related to the inventor of the sweatshirt. Additionally, the related content that offered an in-depth guide to caring for sweatshirts earned RussellAthletic.com the featured snippet for “how to wash a sweatshirt” and similar queries. The content hub now created the opportunity for increased visibility of awareness and consideration content. The initial pages resulted in 592,308 organic impressions and 9,351 organic clicks in the first 5.5 months of blog publication.

These accelerated rankings were supported by the traffic we earned from paid social advertising and resulted in a reach of 499,584 unique users on Facebook and Instagram, 29,202 sessions (at $0.40 cost per session), and 1.14 pages/session.

Prior to publishing these top of funnel educational pieces, the site predominantly ranked for bottom of funnel keywords. Not only did a full-funnel keyword strategy mean more visibility in the SERPs, it also built a larger Connected Audience to retarget across various paid media tactics. Across all channels’ 40,488 sessions to our newly written content, 94% of those were from first-time visitors, thereby increasing brand awareness among a new audience for future purchase consideration.

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page 1 rankings from Google

organic impressions

unique users reached on Facebook and Instagram