15 Oct Luxury Marketing By Example With Tacori

Once in a while, I like to take a peek under the hood of some of the world’s leading luxury brands and showcase mainly what they’re doing right, and sometimes what they’re doing oh-so-wrong. Today, we’re going to be looking at a well-known jewelry brand that has managed to keep afloat during these tough times and even thrive on the web. We have no relationship with this brand other than that I admire the way they conduct themselves online.

So today we’ll be looking at luxury jewelry brand Tacori. While they’re mainly known for an impressive wedding jewelry lineup, they have all sorts of goodies that make the ladies go wild… But not too wild.

A Name That Means Something

Tacori is a brand, not just some online shop that popped up and offers that same old thing as one thousand other sites. The name resonates with quality and that upstanding feeling is heavily influenced by the family behind the brand. When Haig Tacorian moved to California in 1969 from Europe he set out to bring luxury jewelry with a European flair to North America, and that dream is still alive today.

The Tacorian family’s proud tradition of passion is expressed in everything they create. Spanning four decades, Tacori designs have fused classic elegance with modern inspiration, creating some of the world’s most highly regarded and exquisite jewelry.

This is an important aspect in my mind as it brings the brand to life and puts meaning behind its name. I highly recommend reading their full story and seeing how they put together the Tacori story right here.

Why Do They Kick Ass Online?

Anyone in any industry – not just jewelry – should take note of how they’re doing everything from attracting organic links right down to their Pinterest setup. The marketing team over at Tacori has their heads screwed on straight and I hope their company recognizes this. We come across a lot of downright awful marketing implementations and execution, so it was their freshness that made me want to write this post.

We do a lot of inbound and viral marketing within the jewelry industry and when it comes down to getting attention to wedding gear, that’s the most difficult. The playing field is ridiculously competitive and you truly need to stand out from the pack in order to get any attention, or even rank for a long tail keyword in the organic search results.

While I won’t talk about everything in detail, I will break down their link profile, social media presence and executions, as well as how they’re melding the real world in with the digital.

Let’s Talk Links

With all the hoopla lately in regards to how Google treats links and penalizes companies for them, this is where I’d like to start first. Being so heavily invested in the luxury jewelry industry, we’ve seen our fair share of companies get slaughtered in the organic search results. The major reason for this has always been because of the links, and sadly a lot of companies go out and build then when you should be earning them.

The biggest problem for a lot of companies is that their marketing team is out there picking what anchor text in relation to which keywords they want to rank for. This is manipulation and has always been against Google’s TOS and is defined as a link scheme according to them. This is why it is so important to earn links instead of build them in this day and age, and here’s what a proper link profile structure should look like.

If you’re not ranking well, it is always good to look at your links because they’re still a huge part of Google’s ranking algorithm. Anyone who says otherwise hasn’t worked anywhere near a competitive keyword.

Attracting real natural links is possible despite what silly SEO’s and link spammers might tell you. Tacori has managed to contrive hundreds of high quality links from various sources over the years. Since they’re a jewelry company you’d expect links from sites in this vertical, and that’s exactly what’s been going on here.

The types of links they’re attracting –>

-> Jewelry and wedding resource pages
-> Links from national news and blog sites
-> Links from the best luxury, fashion and wedding blogs in the industry
-> Industry conference, event and meetup website links by the dozens
-> Social fashion sites like Fancy, Pinterest and Polyvore
-> Viral links from TV exposure, incredible products and from just being plain awesome

Not only are these links great for the SEO help, they will also send legit traffic that will turn into sales… The benefits of getting real links.

Making The Competition Look Socially Inept

Tacori is on the other end of the marketing spectrum. They’re a big brand, and with that comes an audience that is ready to love and share your content. They’ve managed to accumulate huge amounts of social followers and this is something a lot of companies cannot seem to do right. Perhaps the biggest benefit from this is that you don’t have to rely on Google so much, something we try and push for all of our clients here in house.

While they have a large number of social followers, it’s the fact that they’re so targeted that makes it truly count. Either way, at the time of writing this, across all the social networks mentioned below they have 692,485 followers in total.

// Facebook Is Front & Center

The world’s largest social network is front and center and that should come as no surprise. They’re on their way to 250,000 likes and their audience is definitely listening. Facebook lets you keep in touch with your brand fans on a daily basis, which goes a long way in keeping the lust for your products on the minds of many.

Tacori has made good use of creating highly targeted social contests that involve user participation. Those who have run a few social campaigns in their day know that it’s easy to attract the wrong type of follower. Give away a big enough prize, and you’ll find no shortage of targeted consumers you’re going to want hooked into your social follower base.

Require new and current Facebook fans to participate by creating/submitting content in order to be entered. Not only will this attract a more appropriate audience, but it will give you an abundance of marketing material to play with. I really liked what they did with their Valentine’s Day contest back in February.

The added action for users to go and collect votes on their picture will push the viral reach beyond measure. When you already have a decently large follower base, this can really make things a lot easier for your marketing team.

Kudos to their team for engaging their audience with a lot more than just random links to products. Head on over to their Facebook page and see how they’re keeping the magic of marriage alive and well on a daily basis.

// Tweet Tweet

Twitter can either be a huge waste of time or a tool for building relationships with influencers in your industry. The more targeted followers you have, the better you can use that follower base.

There’s not much to touch on other than I like how they interact with a good amount of fun and business in their tweets. They have nearly 20,000 followers and that’s enough to push your content in front of a large set of eyes. I’d expect to see nothing less from an industry leader, so definitely take note of how they do what they do.

If you’d like to follow them on Twitter you can do so here @Tacori.

// Pinterest

Pinterest is most likely going to be their second most productive social network in terms of traffic and followers. The crowd over there is perfect for what Tacori has to offer. When it comes to visual content websites, you cannot go wrong with beautiful shots of luxury wedding jewelry.

Big, bold and beautiful pictures are working for Tacori.

Tacori has done a good job of being very active on here, and their Pinboards are a good mix of business and pleasure. Having well done, highly focused Pinboards not only will attract brand fans but also stand a good chance of ranking well in Google’s search results.

// Instagram

Instagram is another social network that should be like shooting fish in a barrel for Tacori. Their products attached to the right hashtags are going to easily attract a lot of followers.

They’re only doing one picture a day with an average of 1500 likes on each added image… Not too shabby! I find Instagram is great for getting the small attention spans focused on your product and hopefully they click on through to your website.

They seem to have a good content groove going on and with one update a day, they’re not really doing much at this point yet reaping the rewards of brand exposure.

// Their Blog Seems To Be Their Only Fault

I don’t know if their web designer was high or just downright lazy when it came to working on their blog but hey, at least they have one. As I first mentioned in the start of this article, we will report on the bad as well as the good, so let’s talk about what could be done to turn their blog around.

While they have perfected their branding image across all of their website and social profiles, the blog’s homepage just seems a little out of whack. Take a look at what you come to after clicking on that blog link in their header navigation.

I can see they’ve gone for somewhat of a gallery look on the homepage, but re-using the same image for events and other categories looks sloppy. Your company’s blog is a great place to keep people on your site longer as well as keeping them coming back, so make sure it’s a pleasant experience or it will fall flat.

Your blog is all about content marketing, as well as being a good place to encourage people to follow you socially. Chances are if they’re coming to the blog then that’s a person you want to capture into your brand’s follower base.

Their on-site content marketing seems to be falling flat…. Big time.

The majority of the content here is repurposed from their event catalogue, press release regurgitation and thin posts about products. This is the kind of thing the Google Panda algorithm update will sniff out and sadly make their blog a wasteland of marketing despair.

With the amount of social followers they have, they could really be utilizing their blog to get amazing content to a huge number of people all over. With a company like Tacori, they could really put a focus on a behind-the-scenes life through their blog as well score a lot of social traffic with celebrity posts. They tend to have a lot of famous people buying their rings, and this could be used to their advantage more.

Their blog also isn’t quite setup to capture new users into their social follower base or newsletter very well. They obviously are running WordPress and they’re not making good use of the sidebar widgets. Hopefully if someone from their marketing team sees this, they can get on adding something cool and useful in that spot (or give us call).

We Love Tacori!

I would love to hear our user’s comments and thoughts about their marketing efforts after taking a look at this. We will happily be shooting (with a camera) some of the Tacori jewelry this Friday the 18th so be on the lookout for our coverage of that in the coming weeks.

If you’d like to learn more about Tacori you can reach them online through the web via www.Tacori.com, follow them on twitter @Tacori, as well as head on over to their awesome Facebook page at /Tacori.