ABOUT

We're not interested in being just another online shop. So showing how our products come to life in real homes is essential. To do this, we relaunched the MADE Ideas Hub in spring 2019 – transforming it into an editorial content suite, designed around the following principles:

1. Provide value for users. We needed to create a content hub that was people-centric, relatable and inspired new design ideas. Championing MADE advocates from all walks of life, while providing our audience with a useful resource for any interior project.

2. Be mobile minded. Over 60% of visits to our site are made via mobile devices. This needed to be reflected in the design and content on the site. For example, shooting most of our imagery in portrait to improve the user experience, as well as producing video content for with our social channels in mind – uploading longer videos to our YouTube page (which were embedded across the hub) and short and snappy videos to our Instagram profile.

3. Create social-first content. To optimise reach and acquire new followers, all content on the hub had to be easily adaptable across our key platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube.

4. Build content around the MADE audience. We turned audience insights into story ideas, using SEO keywords, onsite surveys, and results from Instagram polls.

Challenges:
When launching the MADE Ideas Hub, we knew we needed to:

Create strong evergreen formats that would resonate with a range of core audiences, from renters to homeowners, all while reflecting the different cultures of home life across Europe
Continuously deliver exceptional content, while relying on a small in-house team of writers and producers

We addressed these challenges by empowering local Editors to adapt global content, as well as creating these five key story formats:

Home Tours. Stories about characterful homes, and the interesting people who live in them.

Home Works. A day in the life of a creative entrepreneur, exploring the blurred lines between home and work spaces.

Dinner With. An evening with a creative tastemaker – a great conversation, over great food, created to push our dinnerware product category.

Style Tips. Authorities on style share their top interior design tips (accompanied by UGC images).

How Tos. SEO-optimised articles, aimed at driving traffic to the site.

Special Features. Every 6 months, we use customer insights to create a one-off content series aimed at speaking to an underserved audience. The first instalment was our Owning It series, which inspired renters to decorate their homes with simple (and non-permanent) tips.

Results:
What we've created is a practical and versatile online resource for anyone that wants to design their very own happy place. By telling stories of the people who've chosen our products for their home, we achieved a substantial increase in exposure of the MADE brand:

- Through the optimisation of social-first content, we've increased purely organic social sessions onsite by 46% and, more specifically, organic Instagram traffic by 120% year-on-year
- The content we published helped grow our combined social following to 2.5 million and one Ideas Hub story (Owning It featuring Zeena Shah) broke the record for our most liked Instagram ever
- 80% of Ideas Hub traffic now comes from mobile. That's a 40% growth year-on-year
Our new approach to SEO content, created in collaboration with the Performance teams, has contributed to a 43% increase in SEO sessions year-on-year
- Sessions landing on content are up by 35% year-on-year
- By introducing easy-to-produce, snackable content such as our Style Tips format, we've increased our annual content output by 25%
- After we distribute the content across our socials, we listen to our audience to find out what content resonated with them the most. This allows us to make even more valuable content that our fans want to see. This has seen an increase in engagement of 27% for content created in response to those audience insights and user comments, compared to our first round of social content