Tree Tagz — Digital Marketing Case Study (part 1)

Project Background

For my first project as a digital marketing student at Red Academy, we were tasked with putting together a lifestyle brand built around a niche interest audience that we selected as a team. The business that we develop from our research will be constructed in the form of a Shopify store which will actually be live for about 4 months, and shoppable using the name, logo and branding we created.

Project Goals

• Use market research tools effectively
• Visualize the information generated by market research tools
• Create digital marketing strategies for business development

Business Introduction

TreeTagz is an ecommerce store selling greeting cards made from eco-friendly materials embedded with plant seeds. These custom greeting cards can be planted into soil, and grow into plants.

illustration of how the plantable cards work

Website

https://treetagz.com/

Slogan

Grow the wishes.

Products

Customizable greeting cards

Pricing

• Single → 4.0 CAD /card
• 10 → 3.5 CAD /card
• 20 → 3.0 CAD / card
• Bulk → contact for pricing

Target Market

The target market for TreeTagz is relatively wide ranging. We are generally targeting people who are willing to pay for environmentally friendly products.

• Age: No specific age range
• Gender: Female & Male
• Geographic Location: US

Research

Competitor Matrix

• Tentree
  Tentree is a Canadian brand which sells simple apparel that's sustainably made and plants 10 trees for every item purchased.
• Seedlings
  Seedlings is boutique line of greeting cards, coasters and notebooks. All the products are made from handmade paper embedded with wildflower seeds.
• Tree Tribe
  Tree Tribe is an outdoor lifestyle brand that gives back to the earth by planting 10 trees on every sale. Products include eco-friendly clothing and accessories.
• Botanical PaperWorks
  Botanical PaperWorks is a producer of eco-friendly seed-paper products. Manufacture and design a variety of products including wedding invitations, wedding favors, event stationery, memorial pieces, and corporate promotional products.
• FlowerInk
  FlowrInk offer plantable paper goods that are embedded with seeds and herbs.
• Sow Easy
  Sow Easy are a promotional products supplier specialising in creating custom-printed promotional materials and gardening girts for brand and marketing agencies, retail wholesale & distributors.
• Green Field Paper
  Green Field Paper offer a large selection of plantable hemp paper and seed paper products including greeting cards, journals, fine art papers and stationery.
• Bloomin
  Bloomin sell various shaped weeding invitations and greeting cares made with handmade plantable seed paper.

Among the 8 competitors listed above, TenTree and Tree Tribe share a different selling point (plant trees for every product sold) than TreeTagz, and they carry a lot more than paper products. While the rest of the competitors all feature plantable seed paper and specialized in paper products. In terms of forms of commercial transactions, Sow Easy is the only B2B eCommerce.

The matrix shows the difference between high/low price products and the variety of products.

competitor matrix

Positioning Table

As shown in the competitor matrix, there is a huge market gap in low-cost plantable paper products. As none of the said competitors were active in that space, it could be potential for positioning. However, we should try to bring our brand into the orange area as we only sell one type of products — greeting cards.

brand positioning

Personas

Facebook Insights were used to get the initial data needed to zoom in further on individual personas. In the interests field, I used “sustainable products” to find the target group as it is closely aligned with our products.

The initial search gives us some pretty broad options that aren’t that useful. However, they do indicate that of those interested in sustainable products, most of audience is in the 25–54 age group, 80% of the audience are women.

A further look at the Family, Education and Job title section shows that our selected audience are mostly married, college educated and work in sales, administrative services as well as healthcare and medical services.

Based on this, a few information was gathered:

• Our target customers are mostly professionals working in sales, administrative services as well as healthcare and medical services
• Most of them are at least in their late twenties and went to college
• A large portion of our potential customers are women

2 personas were developed to characterise the key traits of our target market.

Persona 1 — Alice

Persona 2 — Mark

Filter Guidelines

brand filters

• Behaviours
  Strong customer service
  Advertises frequently
  Association with cultural events
• Personality
  Outgoing, comfortable, friendly, culturally aware, reliable
• Values
  We are sustainable, ethical and environmental friendly.
• Purpose
  By taking a stand for sustainability, we are dedicated to making the world a “greener”.
• Motivations
  To be able to inspire and help our customers switch to a more eco-friendly lifestyle by creating delighted moments.

• Messages make customers feel positive about the products.
• Customizable options to satisfy personal needs.
• Use strong verbs
• Use high-resolution imageries only

• Fail to respond
• Express uncertainty
• Speak passively
• Use marketing jargon
• Over sell the product’s capabilities

Business Model Canvas

SWOT Analysis

S

• Aggressive and focused marketing campaign with clear goals and strategies
• Innovative ways to display products to customers and interactive ways to shop

W

• High start-up research and development cost
• Business reputation hasn’t been established

O

• Targeted traffic
• Increasing demand for eco-friendly products in the market
• Customers are willing to spend more money on unique products
• Look into a partnership with other business

T

• Customers might not return
• Increasingly popular brand names in the competition