Welcome back to our website! Today, we will be outlining where we have been and where we plan on going concerning our digital marketing strategy. Starting out, we have no footprint on the internet outside of this blog. We are, however, in the process of creating social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube that will be active and successful once they are up. The other piece of digital marketing we are very excited about is our website; where our product will live and our business will flourish. We plan on creating a site that is not just one that our consumers come to for shoe purchases, but one they come back to for fun or to learn something. We believe that increasing online sales and improving brand sentiment are very important to the success of our company, but the thing we really want to achieve with our digital campaign is increasing brand awareness. We know that we have a great product and the people that have tried our shoes know it to. Getting the word out on our company and products is the biggest hurdle starting out, but if we can do it correctly, we think our brand will spread like wildfire. In order to measure our success on this front, we will be tracking views on our website, the number of mentions of our product and company on social media and search engines, and how many followers our social media accounts have as all of these are indicators of brand awareness. We will still be monitoring how our online sales and brand sentiment will be increasing through tracking the changes in our units sold and using the Social Studio tool in conjunction with reading reviews on various websites. Through all of our digital marketing, we would like to convey the idea of “the only shoe for your whole closet”. This idea challenges the current consumerism that is present in todays society, instead opting for a quality over quantity philosophy. This will resonate with our consumers because they are tired of having to buy different things for every new activity they want to participate in. The general consensus for our target audience is that consumerism is running rampant in todays society, so a brand that offers a remedy to that will receive positive responses to this. Even those that are not in our millennial target audience or are outside of the US can appreciate a product that does it all without any hassle or strings attached.
Both of our consumer champions are people who are online for large amounts of time and even use the same social media and websites. The difference is what they do on the sites. Johnny is more of an observer; he will scroll through social media often, liking things he finds funny or things that he wants to share with his friends. He gets most of his purchasing opinions based on what he sees on these sites and what his friends recommend. This is different from Jessica, who is very active on social media. She posts every day, normally multiple times a day on multiple platforms. She thrives on the attention of her audience, which is good considering she is an influencer by profession. She is consistently trying out and showing off new products on her profile and has even made videos on her YouTube channel of her doing try on hauls from other brands. During this digital marketing campaign, we will be utilizing social media, paid media, organic search engine traffic, email lists, and a website. Social media will play the biggest role in our digital marketing. It is free, can reach virtually all of our target demographic, and can be changed very quickly, allowing us to take advantage of viral trends. Posts will be made frequently which attempt to engage our audience, this will increase the likelihood that our brand is memorable and can increase our favorability in the mind of the consumer. These posts will mainly take the form of polls and contests. Using social media also presents the possibility of the brand going viral, which would all but complete our primary campaign objective. We will only use the most popular websites for our target audience, which would consist of Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, SnapChat, and YouTube. Paid media should play a fairly minimal role in our digital marketing. We are planning to spend around $2 million of our $5 million advertising budget on paid media. While there will be some influencers whom we will pay to promote our product as well as sponsored posts, most of the promotion of our products can be free. The use of influencers will allow us to reach part of our audience that may not have seen us before and may be able to speed up the process of increasing our brand awareness, but its effectiveness will wane with time, favoring the free marketing on our social media pages. Organic search engine traffic will make up a moderate part of our digital marketing. The higher up on the list a search engine places us in a search, the higher the likelihood that the user clicks on our site. By posting often and using keywords related to both our product and things our target audience may be using, we should be placed higher up on that search list and our organic traffic will increase naturally. Our email list will play a minimal part in our digital marketing. It should only be sent out every once in a while, and give some incentive to visit our site or purchase a product in addition to letting the recipient know what our company is up to. This way, our all-in-one philosophy is followed and our audience is not overwhelmed by our emails, possibly even looking forward to receiving them. Our website will be the backbone of our digital marketing. While social media will get everyone’s attention, our website will have to keep it. It is where our product can be purchased, so the experience will be something that the consumer enjoys so much that want to do it again, and tell their friends to do the same! It should be easy to navigate, with everything you would ever need to find about our company or products, and do all of that in a beautiful and entertaining way. Everything should lead back to the site, and the site should lead to our products and story.
In order to properly market in the digital world, it is best to refer to pillar content that refers to your brand’s big idea and can be used for multiple things. The pieces of pillar content that we will be using will be a video, a podcast, and a mini-series. The video would be called “Oh, What a Shoe Can Do” and would be around 30 mins. It would depict a character who has to go on a series of adventures in our shoes. He will have to pass through all different kinds of terrains and climates for an extended period of time. The rest of his clothing should change depending on the environment, but the shoes should stay the exact same to show their versatility. These scenes of him running through different conditions could then be clipped and used in our social media and other marketing areas. This pillar is particularly useful because it allows our consumers to picture themselves in the shoes, and what they may look like when doing certain activities. Our podcast would be called “How To Do It All”. For those in our demographic that would be more interested in exactly how the ideas were thought of that led to the different aspects of the shoe, there will be a podcast featuring our designers and researchers who will be answering questions that our consumers have asked and responding to their feedback. It can be recurring as new features are added to the shoes and more questions are asked by our consumers, and bits from the podcast could be taken out and used in our other advertisements. This creates a good way for our consumers to feel heard and connected to our company and product, and will allow for us to improve our product and selection in the future. Finally, our mini-series would be called “Stories From the Streets”. Anyone can claim that their shoes can do anything and are durable enough to last, they could even doctor a video to make it seem like that is the case. What you can’t fake, is real stories of people who have used them for many things and can attest to their comfort, style, and durability. This mini-series will take stories from real consumers who would like to share what they have done in their shoes. The incentive for sending in videos could be something as simple as a percentage off discount to our website, but the social media plug that they receive in our video is likely to be enough for most. The more people that send in videos, the more people will see the videos, and the more people will recognize our brand and product. This is also a fun way for our consumers to interact with each other through our product, sharing their adventures with friends and strangers alike who may be looking for new things to do after receiving a pair of shoes that allows them to do anything.
Following this strategy, we see our digital business growing exponentially in the next year and on! We are ready to take action, and extremely excited for our future success.
Shabooya Shoes 