Are you on top of your footwear category with consumers? That’s the question every leading footwear brand should be asking themselves. And if you’re not, you should be constantly striving towards that goal.

How can you pick up the pace and understand your footwear brand’s positioning in the market? It’s simple – Revuze’s online review analytics powered by generative AI, which is based on the voice of verified buyers. In short, all the data is post-purchase and can provide you with another dimension of insights into the competitive landscape.

This blog will focus on the power of category-level data in helping to strengthen marketing strategies for the Footwear category. Let’s dive in!

The Key to Success

Like most strategies, research is crucial, and in this case, it’s understanding which brands have the largest share of discussion. This is where Revuze’s category-level data comes into play. The screenshot below displays the top eight brands and breaks down their reviews by organic and incentivized. Plus, you can really view the consumer sentiment for each brand.

Incentivized review data is helpful for marketing professionals to understand the success of both your and your competitors’ marketing campaigns. In this case, we see that most brands, except Skechers, are over 80% in terms of consumer sentiment for incentivized reviews. How do the brands measure up to the category average? In the view below, the average consumer sentiment for incentivized reviews (organic reviews have been filtered out) across the category is 82%. We see that both Reebok and Skechers are below average.

This illustrates that most footwear brands are indeed successful with their marketing campaigns. Think about your own brand, is it above or below the industry average?

Obviously, Footwear is a broad category and can be further divided into subcategories like running shoes, trainers, boots, sandals, and more. The filters will auto-populate the data to ensure you can overtake your competitors.

Upgrade Your Marketing Messaging

Footwear consumers aren’t shy about sharing exactly what they think about your brand. This is a unique opportunity to leverage post-purchase data to fine tune marketing messaging.

First and foremost, we see the topics with the highest discussion volume, and “Comfort” is leading the way! Other topics that are important to consumers include “Looks & Design”, “Size”, and “Fit” to name a few. 

Just delve into one of the topics to get a sense of what consumers are saying about your brand. Use their own words to update brand marketing messaging. This is the term cloud for the entire footwear category where we can see words like stylish, comfy, nice, emerge. Although this is on the brand level, you can then compare it to the term cloud for your own brand and products for even more precision.

Another way to prioritize marketing efforts is by focusing on positive star drivers. This highlights the brand qualities that are driving five-star reviews. Once again, “Comfort” is on top, leading to a whopping 27% increase in five-star reviews. Other key drivers include: “Fit”, “Looks & Design”, “Color”, and “Weight”. Most of these topics also appeared in our initial visualization. This can help you prioritize or weight your messaging.

Accentuate the Positive

Make your brand shine by accentuating its most positive qualities! This SWOT analysis highlights the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for the top footwear brands. We have such topics as: “Comfort”, “Foot Support”, “Cushioning”, “Feel”, and “Color”. While this is for top brands, you can once again pinpoint the strengths for your own.

However, the category data positions you to capitalize on opportunities across the entire footwear industry. These topics can be integrated into your marketing messaging and can help topple your competitors. How can you integrate such topics as “Durability”, “Weight”, “Looks and Design”, “Size”, and “Quality” to gain on and surpass long-time rivals?

Conclusion

We highlighted many different ways that marketing professionals can leverage online review analytics from verified buyers to monitor promotional campaigns and craft precision messaging. The Revuze advantage is really the ability to tap into category-level data to understand overall consumer behavior for the footwear industry and then refine it for your own brand. From competitive position, topics, drivers, and SWOT, you have the tools you need to take your marketing to the next level and eclipse competitors. Learn more about how Revuze’s data can make a substantial impact on your marketing by clicking here.

Florence Broder