Lu's blog is the blog of Magazine Luiza , which is in fact one of the most famous Brazilian e-commerce blogs. It's a medium that serves primarily to present technological innovations to consumers, according to the retail chain itself.
One of the first mentions of this media on the web occurred in 2010. In that year, Rita Gallo published an article on the Centro Empresarial website entitled " A Trajectory of Success ," in which she explained that the blog in question brought together news, trends, and content about products.
Later, in 2011, Camila Renaux published the article " Magazine Luiza structures social commerce on Orkut and Facebook ," where she mentions the blog. "It's a perfect SAC 2.0 model, created to provide content about products," she writes.
Today, Lu's blog is part of a larger context of the company's Content Marketing called “Missão Digital”. This, in turn, has four distinct content categories, which I will point out below:
1 - Digital Culture
2 - Applications
3 - Videos
4 - Lu's Blog
In short, all these means of information have the strong presence of Lu. Before you ask me, Lu is a digital character (see image that opens this post). It undoubtedly humanizes the content and generates greater integration and interaction with the audience.
Brief history of Magazine Luiza
Before analyzing Lu's blog, I will briefly introduce Magazine Luiza. The birth of this Brazilian chain of stores takes place in 1957. In that year, the couple Pelegrino and Luiza Trajano buy a store called Cristaleira. This store is headquartered in the city of Franca, in the interior of São Paulo.
The enterprise grows and, in 1976, the partners increase and so does the number of stores. The group then had branches in the São Paulo cities of Barretos and Igarapava. Later, in 1981, a computer system would be implemented in these stores.
• To learn how to set up an online store from a blog, access and read the article " How to set up an e-commerce store " available here on the e-Plus agency blog.
Over the years, the number of physical stores has only increased. The network spread to cities in other Brazilian states. In 1992, the company's e-commerce began, which worked on a terminal without an internet connection. The web would be released for commercial purposes in Brazil only in 1995.
Growth continued steadily in the following years. Until, in 2011, the company went public, becoming one of the most popular on the Brazilian Stock Exchange. And in 2014, Magazine Luiza launched a smartphone app, which complemented its e-commerce strategy.
To conclude, Magazine Luiza's e-commerce website, with its virtual store and blogs, is currently listed in the 2.680th global and 64th national positions in the Alexa ranking (with data from April 2019).
Features of Lu's blog
Further on, I will analyze (based on data from early April 2019) Lu's blog with regard to Design, content, internal links, authors, periodicity, banners, mobile, Organizational Culture, Google search, audience content, social networks and subscriptions. Check out:
• Design:
First, I submitted Lu's blog to the " Responsive Design Checker " application, which demonstrated that the media is responsive. That is, in the test it adapted to all screen formats and sizes, from smartphones to desktops, including tablets.
The blog home has the “Digital Mission” logo at the top. Next to it there is a field for searches and a button to “enter with Facebook”. Just below there is a menu with buttons for other content channels, such as Instagram and Twitter, for example. There is also a category menu and a button for a forum.
Next, before the page is folded, there is the blog's logo integrated with its digital character, Lu, with the inscription “Here I tell you all the news about technology”. Further down, there are calls for two featured stories, which are enclosed in lilac frames.
After the page is folded, the calls for the other articles are exposed in order from the most current to the least current. All calls have photographs.
Finally, in the footer, the “Missão Digital” logo and the icons for Magazine Luiza’s other content media are presented again. Lu's blog is thus visually simple.
• Content:
The texts published on Lu's blog have between 300 and 900 words. Each of them is accompanied by 3 to 5 photographs. These posts have buttons for sharing on Facebook and Twitter. There is also a button for the G+, but this social network is now extinct.
Right off the bat, you can see that this content doesn’t strictly follow SEO rules, so much so that there doesn’t seem to be a concern with the repetition of a focus keyword in titles, subtitles, images, urls, etc. I see this as a problem, because without SEO optimization posts are floating around in search engines like Google.
The blog doesn't capture emails either. Capturing emails, in my view, is fundamental for a blog, because a good email marketing list for e-commerce is gold in online retail.
At the end of posts, there is no recommendation system for other posts. A recommender system can reduce the bounce rate, also called the Bounce Rate.
• Links:
Here, Lu's blog differs drastically from the Ponto Frio blog , the Casas Bahia blog , and the Extra blog . While those three media outlets include numerous links to product pages and product categories from their online stores in their posts, Lu's blog does without them.
On Lu's blog there are practically no links to other pages, except for the links to the Android and iOS stores inserted in the posts about applications. Magazine Luiza managers seem to bet on the influence that the company has on consumers. In other words, they seem to believe that after consumers read the blog's content, they will type the URL of Magazine Luiza's virtual store into their browser and make a purchase.
Well, this influence thing sounds like a good strategy. However, I would do it differently. I would insert links between the articles on the blog itself. In addition, it would send links from the posts to the sales pages of the online store. That way, I think, the content strategy would be much more cohesive and interesting.
• Brands:
Lu's blog posts are not signed by real authors, but only by the digital character Lu. On the blogs of Extra, Ponto Frio and Casas Bahia there are real authors, but their biographies are not published.
I think authors with biographies humanize the blog. And if these authors are digital influencers, then the e-commerce brand can gain more authority and credibility in the market.
• Periodicity:
Another point that diverges from the Extra, Ponto Frio and Casas Bahia blogs is that Lu's blog inserts the publication date in its posts. With this, the public can check the frequency, which in my opinion is a positive point. This prevents the consumer from reading a post that is already out of date.
The frequency of publications on Lu's blog is practically one post per day. The oldest posts date from 2014. The newest posts date from January 2019. This means that there have been no updates for two months.
This absence of publications in the last two months aroused my curiosity. So I check the Alexa rankings to see if this could be causing viewership to drop.
In fact, the Alexa chart shows that since January the Magazine Luiza website has suffered from a drop in ranking (see image).
I can't say exactly if it has something to do with Lu's blog not being updated, but this is curious to say the least.
• Banner:
There are no ad banners or sponsored links on Magazine Luiza's blog.
• Mobile:
After testing Magazine Luiza's blog on “PageSpeed Insights”, I found that it scores 80 (considered average speed) on mobile devices; and score 99 (considered high speed) on desktops.
In this way, those who read the analyzes I did on the blogs of Extra, Casas Bahia and Ponto Frio know that these speeds of Lu's blog are surprisingly good, mainly because the latter seems to have more content than the others.
To further improve this speed, “PageSpeed Insights” recommended deferring off-screen images, making images available in state-of-the-art formats, eliminating features that impede rendering, among other measures.
• Organizational culture:
Organizational culture is a concept that encompasses a company's name, brand, colors, philosophy, mission, vision, values, and symbols, among other things. It allows for the integration and unification of sales channels, for example.
In the case of Lu's blog, Organizational Culture is well applied. The colors and symbols are practically the same used in the virtual store and in the company's physical stores. Not to mention the digital character Lu, which has become a visual brand.
• Search Google:
The keyword “Lu's blog” is searched between 100 and 1.000 times on Google. This is more than the other blogs I have analyzed here on the e-Plus blog.
• Audience content:
To comment on Lu's blog, an Internet user first needs to log in to Facebook. However, I couldn't do this from the computer I'm using at the moment.
As I used two different browsers to try to "log in with Facebook" and even then I couldn't, so this leads me to believe that for some reason the system is disabled and, therefore, there is no way to comment on the posts.
Conclusion about the Magazine Luiza blog
The Magazine Luiza blog, popularly called Lu's blog, has a simple but effective design for reading. It is fast on both mobile and desktop technologies, compared to the blogs of Extra, Casas Bahia and Ponto Frio.
In addition, Lu's blog fulfills its mission of helping people get to know technologies better. However, it doesn't have a good internal linking system and the SEO leaves a little to be desired.
Regardless, considering both positive aspects and areas for improvement, Lu's blog is an important content marketing channel for e-commerce . Undoubtedly, it has helped promote Magazine Luiza and simultaneously influenced many online consumers in recent years.
