The challenge

The Works saw a boom throughout lockdown and the COVID year. They had loads of natural demand for their products, which enabled them to massively grow their SKU count and online presence with limited risk. 

As that demand started to decline, their strategy had to change. 

They approached us with the challenge of still driving growth to the site when demand was declining across product categories and SKU counts had been slashed.

Through our analysis, we identified that books were one of the strongest performing categories online with plenty of room for growth. We just needed to increase awareness and coax users through the funnel.

The Broadplace approach

Our strategy centred on maximising the potential of The Works’ blog as a growth driver for awareness and traffic for The Works range of books. We broke it down into two key phases:

• Audience Research & Market Analysis
• Content Strategy Implementation

As part of the audience research, we identified high-volume, low-competition search opportunities around  “Which book in [book series] should I read first?” and “What’s the best book in [book series]?” queries after extensive research.

These searches had significant overlap with the titles and the authors that the works were selling, had good purchasing intent and allowed us to cross-sell other titles from the authors.

We then set about implementing the strategy, testing these formats. We quickly found that the “What order” posts were the most successful, so we doubled down on that format and merchandised every page to drive traffic back to books collections, box sets and product pages.

The results

The strategy delivered significant uplifts across both traffic and engagement metrics, proving the value of the blog as a performance driver:

📚 +18% YOY traffic to book collection pages
🛒 +94% YOY increase in add-to-carts from organic sessions
📈 +346% YOY uplift in overall blog sessions

By aligning content to real audience search behaviour and linking it seamlessly to product journeys, we turned The Works’ blog into a powerful acquisition channel — one that not only increased awareness but also translated directly into sales.