Behind the Scenes
A look at the marketing strategy behind launching a creative e-commerce brand.
We love creativity and conversations that begin with ‘would it be crazy if we did this…”. Some people have big dreams and tight deadlines – and we happen to think we’re pretty good at handling both.
You probably already have a great understanding how each business is different and has its own needs. For this e-commerce brand, our marketing solutions stuck to some tried and true methods.
Brand Goals
- brand awareness
- launching after only 1 month of marketing on social media
- collaborating with the community
- getting return customers after the 1st new product drop after lauching
- ecouraging user-generated content
Marketing Solutions
- styled brand photography & product photography
- creating and coordinating a brand ambassador program
- consistent community engagement through accounts and stories
- frequent posting strategy
- utilizing video/reels content
E-commerce offers many challenges for small business owners – but there are endless opportunities as well. Heading into this project with a tight deadline meant we needed to eliminate as much guessing as possible in the beginning when developing a strategy.
Generally, one of the first things we do when creating a plan is market research. Depending on a client’s budget and timeline, we do not rush this process and we allow for some flexibility to make adjustments as data comes in.
A customized Approach to Strategy
In the case of this project and budget, we dove into audience research and focused on how best we could reach the target market with the understanding that we would return to the overall marketing strategy after launching.
Our target audience research involved:
- creating profiles of people that engaged on competitor accounts
- documenting content that performed well for competitors on the surface
note: we want to emphasize the ‘on the surface’ comment as it’s impossible to know the real success of business based on surface numbers (like, follows, etc.) – in this case, because brand awareness was a high priority, analyzing popular content was beneficial to determining a strategy to get this brand out there. - outlining the buyer journey our target audience takes
- extending and detailing the buyer journey to see how we could encourage user generated content (UGC) in future marketing, as per the initial goals
With most resources dedicated to an extensive audience profile, we worked on additional marketing strategy as content began to go out.
Using the target audience research, we then:
- established content pillars that reflected the brand’s values and what would be of value to the target audience
- broke down those content pillars to detail content specific to each stage of the buyer journey
- created templates and guidelines for any graphic design required
- created a photo style guide and prop kit for product photography
- established an engagement strategy to drive profile traffic
- determined our key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure how our content performed
We were thrilled to see everything come to life. The e-commerce store launched in the 1 month time frame, five brand ambassadors signed on the next month, and there has been a steady stream of highly engaging user generated content.
We love working with businesses that trust us with sharing their weaknesses as much as their strengths. Short deadlines, lack of people-power, and smaller budgets are not problems that need fixing. They’re simply part of the variables we take into considering when designing marketing strategy.
Interested in seeing what might work for your e-commerce brand or store launch? Send us a message or follow along on our social media for small business marketing tips.