Breaking Brands: How East Coast Lifestyle Could Do Better
How the iconic Wolfville Startup could crush even harder.
How to do you sell anchors, tartans, and lobster logos to hip, urban students? You make a bad-ass brand that combines home-town pride with hip-hop and pop trends, throw in a solid back-story, and #RepYourCoast.
East Coast Lifestyle, a brand founded in a small but mighty Nova Scotian town by Alex Maclean, seemed to have taken over the planet . In this article I outline how one of my favourite business success stories could fill in the gaps to help them skyrocket past their goals.
Find out more about ECL Here ←
While I did research ECL for this post, it should be noted I have no insider information which would allow me to give contextual insights into the strategies I’ll outline. I’m just a guy who wrote this article and then 3 years later came back to link to my company which built the best influencer marketing platform.
Instagram: A Clothing Brand’s Potential Paradise
In a day and age where the internet is a massive social platform, it is imperative that brands are using the social web to catch as many customers as possible. Instagram is a solid chunk of that web.
East Coast Lifestyle currently has around 725k Followers, but rack up an engagement rate of around only 1.8% on average. For context, my personal account has an engagement rate of around 30%, Nike is known to hit up to 35% but most Fashion brands do seem to fall around .5–2% on average.
With a staggeringly large crowd behind them, the east coast startup can do more to engage their eager fans. That by the way, means selling more anchor swag.
#Hashtags: ECL rocks between 0–5 hashtags per post. They could stand to use at LEAST 6 more on average. While Instagram allows for 30 hashtags, Sprout Social and Social Media Today claim that 11 seems to be the sweet spot.
That being said, it is imperative to use hashtags strategically. By comparing the average engagement, to the necessary average engagement to “trend” for that tag, you can dominate the top spot on strategic, niche hashtags long-term.
Location-Specific: While ECL often uses location, they don’t do so with a Captain Jack Sparrow level of determination. A fantastic study by Simply Measured shows that posts tagged with a purposeful location could see up to 79 % more engagement than those that didn’t.
As made obvious from their recent activity, ECL is trying to move into new markets. Strategically using location could give a massive boost to their success in locations they hope to expand into.
Stories: ECL has a very intimate relationship with its customers, who seem to be willing to eat up every ounce of intimate content the company puts out. Enter; Instagram stories. The most major recent update by Instagram is a massive opportunity to connect with audiences of all sorts (as demonstrated by brands like Huffington Post & GoPro).
Show the inner workings. On the ECL Youtube Channel, videos with interviews of employees, stories behind the brand have racked up millions of views. If that isn’t the customer equivalent of a psychic medium giving you all the answers, I’m not sure what is.
As a content consumer, and an aspiring entrepreneur, i’d love to hear about the day to day of a clothing brand. The ins and outs of what its like to be Nova Scotia’s favourite brand would be interesting and potentially even educational.
Influencers: The team at East Coast Lifestyle is ever-growing. But when you search by location to see the top posts from Halifax (a large percentage of their customers are presumably here), there isn’t a single ECL hoodie or hat to be seen.
Ad-Week recently put out an entire article about the benefits of Influencer marketing. While they do say that it’s difficult to determine the exact ROI of influencers, they also say that nearly 100% of all marketers who used Influencer marketing campaigns were happy with the results.
Let influencers take over the account, send your photographers with them to do photoshoots for their feed. Allow them to make content for you. (its a-lot easier than doing it yourself)
If you want Bees to make honey, you have to invest the time and energy into building a Bee farm.
Timing, Frequency & Consistency: I don’t think we should get all twitter-iffic on Instagram and post 20–30 times per day, but the evolution of social platforms seems to always evolve into consistency being key. If you put out regular, effective content your content will grow in engagement. One of my favourite brands, Buffer, confirms that for the most engagement you should post once a day (twice on special occasions).
By the way, ECL sometimes goes days, and even weeks without posting.
Timing is also key, ECL should work hard to measure when they get the most engagement. Likely in the evenings, but most definitely on those off-work hours.
Facebook: a country of consumers.
Context: Oh no… They forgot that Instagram and Facebook are two different websites. Here’s the thing, in order to maximize the effectiveness of individual platforms, it is important to respect WHY people are there.
ECL almost exclusively cross-posts from Instagram. Some of these posts are not necessarily a bad idea, garnering them many shares (mostly from contests). However, there are some massive gains that can come from a strategy that is unique to each platform.
For example, hundreds of millions of hours of video are watched on Facebook every day, while Instagram users prefer shorter videos, and primarily in the stories function.
That being said, cross platform strategic campaigns can and do work. But simply splattering the same poster in a grocery store and an Emo-Punk Rock electronic dance club might not be the smartest way to do things.
Strategic Page Layout: While I can’t say for sure that ECL hasn’t done this, it seems they could put some effort into re-organizing their page layout. Little things like being specifically selective about their “Pages liked”, or adding an “Invite your friends button”
They may seem small and un-impactful, but in the long term a strategically designed layout has a real effect on your community engagement.
Non-Contest Campaigns: Running campaigns on Facebook can be incredibly effective. While ECL runs contests for free swag nearly constantly, I believe the masterminds behind the branding and design of the company could be more creative with their digital campaigns. Whether it be reaching out to local filmographers and students to use the #MyEastCoast showing why they love their home city have the opportunity to be featured on their facebook (or even hired, if they make amazing films) or doing some Biz-deving with local hair-dressers. There is plenty of opportunity to expand past “Share this post for a free hat”.
Non-Promotional Posts: I will admit that many brands crossing many platforms and many niches post photos exclusively outlining their new products, sales and offers. But imagine the impact of a brand which posts intriguing, interesting, educational and entertaining content seventy percent of the time, and promotional thirty percent of the time. I am far more likely to click a buy now button from ECL, if I only see it once a week, rather than in every post.
Curating content from other sources, promoting other businesses, sharing blog posts relevant to your companies culture. Having a unique voice as a company. These things matter. Especially in the long-run.
Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, ect.:
I’m not trying to write the bible here. So I’ll start to wrap up.
Most of what I have written applies to other platforms, keeping their respective context in mind. But there is a few more things I should mention;
Creating a content engine: Social Platforms (LinkedIn in particular) offer the opportunity to support employees, while promoting the company, by creating a content engine. ECL isn’t even properly listed on LinkedIn, let alone creating content on the platform.
Paid Advertising: I have visited the East Coast Lifestyle website from many links, hoping to get hit with a re-targeting ad from Facebook. Unfortunately it didn’t happen. As a person who should be the perfect fit for their customer profile (19, Nova Scotia local, visiting their site, liking pages), I should definitely be subject to retargeting ads.
Having seen billboards for ECL in Halifax, I can be sure they are coughing up some cash for marketing. Facebook ads and online influencers are cheap and effective, but not for long. I expect that Influencers will increase in cost exponentially year over year, but once you create advocates for your brand, the rising cost of advertising slows substantially.
Building Relationships is good for business
Halifax, the safety net of low competition: Halifax is a relatively small city, with 6 universities filled with people double tapping, sharing and buying merch with their student loans. There is no better environment to nurture hundreds of people to become advocates, and effectively building a collective voice of young people yelling “East Coast Lifestyle” from the rooftops.
Halifax isn’t known for its modern approaches to business and marketing either, making it a place to stand out. Take advantage ECL, use the lack of competition to your advantage.
Billboard note: Chronicle herald reports billboards cost around 1500–2000 per month in Halifax, and the company typically expects rental of 8 billboards per contract, for a total of 16 000 per month.
A final note, I have the upmost respect for Alex Maclean, East Coast Lifestyle and their entire operation. I hope to meet the crew one day, and maybe even work together on creating some killer social campaigns.
Until then, you can support me by sharing this post on Facebook, Twitter, sending it to friends (or Alex Maclean). You can also give me a clap to help me get a feel for whether or not you enjoy this kind of post.
You can buy ECL gear and support them by clicking here.
Oh, and please critique me thoroughly.
If you read this, smash that 👏 button. (Did you know you can hit it more than once ?)
