Behind the Scenes
A look at the social media marketing strategy behind refreshing a boutique brand.
All our clients have different needs and it’s one of our favourite things about working in the marketing industry. There is no template and blanket solution for marketing small businesses.
Each business faces its own unique set of marketing dilemmas. While top notch tools and best marketing practice standards are relevant to all businesses, it’s how we apply them that shows results.
In this case, we’re sharing some advice on refreshing social media for retail businesses. The tips included in this article might be helpful for other store owners, as long as you keep in mind that your business is different than every other business.
Client Goals
- brand awareness
- post consistently on brand social media accounts
- ensure all visuals accurately represent the brand and are up to date with products and promotions
- ensure all collaborations have up to date content and media
- drive traffic to e-commerce store
- keep community updated on local store
Marketing Solutions
- create a social media calendar to plan all posts based on strategy
- product photography for website
- product photography for social media
- on-site content creation, including photo and video of store for social media
- design marketing material for use outside of social media, such as catalogs, presentations, and flyers
- coordinate email marketing to accompany business promotions, sales, and social media content
As with all our projects, we tailor our services based on our clients needs. As we begin our work, our goal is to ensure your investment is being used to its highest potential. Sometimes this means adjusting services to better serve short term and long term goals. Perhaps more website help is needed than posts, or more strategy is needed than content itself.
And, like you probably already know, a digital environment changes so quickly and we always need to be ready to adapt.
Setting marketing KPIs and Goal expectations
A few of the challenges we face were the change in type of content, picking up after a long inactive period, transitioning from paid advertising.
Inconsistent posting habits in terms of both frequency and type of content are a common speed bump we run into. This is taken into account when beginning a strategy. After a long period of inactivity, it’s common to see a fluctuation in engagement because of a sudden return to posting and a loss in followers due lack of interest and accounts not recognizing a brand/not remembering why they followed to begin with.
We made sure to outline how we would measure progress while still taking into account all factors contributing to social media marketing success.
This included:
- multiple sets of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to act on new data coming in on old and new audiences
- always working towards the main goals and client priorities of maintaining a consistent, branded feed and bringing people to the website
A Marketing Strategy Come to Life
We focused on creating a clean, consistent visuals that represented the brand appropriately, coordinating social media content with updated website content, and consistent posting on social media.
In the first 6 months during our focus on social media, compared to the previous year, we saw:
- 66% increase in Facebook referrals
- 188% increase in Instagram referrals
- 3,815% increase in Instagram Stories referrals
As efforts shifted to include improving website content, regular email campaigns, and collaborations – in comparison to that first six months, we saw:
- An 53% increase in pageviews on the collections page
- A 170% increase on the all products page
- A 128%, 87%, 74, 93% increases in brand story focused product collections
- A 195% increase on the about page sharing the client’s brand story
- A 171% increase in email referral traffic conversions (purchases)
- A 7% increase in socal media traffic conversions (purchases
On a final note, as we mentioned above, the tactics in our marketing solutions for this project were specifically implemented based on our clients goals and needs.
Interested in seeing what might work for your retail brand? Send us a message or follow along on our social media for small business marketing tips.