Feb 22, 2020

18 min read

JOY Leggings — A Digital Marketing Case Study

1. Introduction

A Brief

From September to December 2019, I was a student on the Digital Marketing Professional Program at RED Academy, Toronto. This was the first of the four projects we undertook.

Our class was teamed up as a marketing agency, named RED Brick, based in the Entertainment District of Downtown Toronto. The first task for us was to create a Niche Lifestyle Brand targeting US-based markets from scratch. The below case study presents a step-by-step process in creating, executing, and optimizing the digital marketing strategy for the brand.

Joy Leggings

Joy Leggings is a new lifestyle fashion brand that sells colorful and stylish leggings primarily targeting young female healthcare professionals who value comfort and convenience that suits their busy schedules, also desire joyful elements to their daily lives and work settings.

We used below Business Model Canvas (BMC), a strategic entrepreneurial tool to design, document and visualize the business model. This visual chart consists of nine components describing Joy Legging’s value proposition, infrastructure, customer segment, and finances. It describes how Joy Leggings creates business value while delivering products and services for customers.

Infrastructure: Joy Leggings is a niche B2C eCommerce store and its website is hosted by Shopify where all the back-end settings take place. Printful will be the fulfillment partner that takes care of all the printing, packaging, and shipping processes. The print-on-demand model is agile and less capital intensive and spares us time and resources to focus on creating eye-catching designs and growing business — reaching new audiences and gaining trust and advocacy by providing the first-class experience

Finances: The revenue will mainly be generated from online sales. The major costs incurred will be setting up the website and payments for market research and various kinds of promotion and customer retention programs.

As digital marketers, we focused on helping Joy Leggings identify Customers (Target Audience) and Offerings (Value Proposition).

2. Customers Always Come First

Since Joy Leggings is a small starter, our first task was to identify the Niche, to understand for whom exactly we are building the business, and to identify and address their pain points and/or needs. This approach helps to establish the product-market fit and ensure Joy Leggings will survive in the highly competitive eCommerce landscape and be able to move onto the following stages of the business lifecycle smoothly.

Understand Your Audience

We conducted comprehensive secondary market research utilizing three tools (Google Trends, Facebook Audience Insights, American FactFinder (US Census Data)) to identify a target customer segment.

We used Google Trends to explore historical search trends for the clothing category. It was noted that Web Search for leggings surged in winter seasons commencing in late October for the past five years. With Halloween is rapidly approaching, we compared the search trends in “leggings” and “Halloween”, spikes were spotted in searches for both terms at the same times of the year.

As shown in Facebook Audience Insights, there would be 15M-20M new audience in the U.S. interested in leggings, 92% of which are women and 32% of them are aged 25–34. Based on the self-reported data on Facebook, the majority of potential audiences would be coming from the Sales, Admin Services, and Healthcare sectors. Leggings are in general affordable products, a large potential customer base would help secure a tangible market size and is essential for revenue generation.

According to the median annual income data reported in 2017 (US Census Data), female working in Sales and Admin sectors generated $34,278 and $35,680 annual income respectively, while those Healthcare Practitioners and Technical professionals reported an annual income of $59,241, which indicates a stronger purchasing power.

Competitor Analysis and Positioning map

We created a competitive matrix by comparing five existing market players among 12 factors and identified that a new legging brand with holiday-themed offerings in the mid-to-high price range might fill a white space in the current market landscape and would be profitable.

Some competition in the high-end validates that there’s money to be made in this niche and helps push new brands to improve the quality of products and services. Offering themed products would be Joy Legging’s competitive advantage to stand out in the market (currently only one of the five competitors, Goldsheep is offering Halloween-themed collections).

Based on the market size, the growth potential of the market, and economic status of potential target customers, we saw a great opportunity to launch high-end designed leggings targeting young female healthcare professionals, and Halloween could be a good time window to bring the new collection to market.

Target Personas

Based on assumptions and research on the lifestyles of healthcare professionals, we created below two personas to summarize and communicate the key characteristics of our target customers.

Persona 1 (Pediatric Diane)

Persona 2 (Plastic Surgeon Ashley)

Pediatric Diane and Plastic Surgeon Ashley, although represent medical professionals working in different positions and are currently in different relationship status, share below common characteristics:

Aged 25–34, well-educated, high household income;
Working in a fast-paced, high volume environment;
Facing extremely stressful workloads and lacking work-life balance;
Desire comfort and convenience to relieve stress and easier, and less time-consuming online shopping experience;
Caregivers, and wishing to create a cheerful and friendly atmosphere;
Practicing self-care, seeking ways to unwind and stay true, and pursuing uniqueness and self-expression through wearing colorful clothes.

Creating and documenting personas helps us to better resonate with target audiences and deliver tailored communications while developing marketing strategies, also can get all functions in our client’s business on the same page when thinking about the customers.

3. Know Your Business

Value Proposition

Now since we’ve defined our target audience, we wanted to create the value proposition for Joy Leggings — the promise of value to customers. Marketing guru, Geoffrey Moore provided a template that can help crystalize a company’s value proposition as follows:

Based on the above analyses, Joy Leggings’ value proposition might read:

SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis was conducted as follows to evaluate Joy Legging’s current business position and future potential.

Strengths & Weakness

As shown on Printful’s website, the price for the fulfillment of a piece of leggings is around $25-$30, if the retail price was set at around $75, a 150%-200% price mark-up would be realized. This mark-up indicates a remarkable profit margin after taking into account all the costs of goods sold (COGS). Also, Printful offers an option to include shipping costs in our product base price and offer free shipping for the end consumer, which can be perceived as an extra selling point.

However, as a new market player, Joy Leggings is still an unknown brand due to the lack of digital and social media presence. Considerable effort and financial resources will be needed to generate acquisitions and sales.

Opportunists and Threats

In order to survive and grow, it is crucial to keep continuous improvement in mind. We may increase the customer base by launching various collections with different features. For instance, we can provide multiple sizes so that the themed products can serve as a gift choice for kids in holiday seasons. Considering that activewear is and will be trendy, we can add pockets or sweat-wicking functions, etc. We may also partner with influencers or voucher and cashback sites for promotion in exchange for paying a commission or fee on click-throughs or other actions.

As mentioned in Porter’s five forces model, competition comes in multiple aspects. Some customers may show strong loyalty towards existing brands. If our model soon proved to be successful, the big guys also have the resources to exploit the niche and compete with us. The switching cost is relatively low, and there are successful online marketplaces like Zazzle that allows designers and customers to create their own products and Zazzle partners with major brands such as Walt Disney and Harry Potter and so customers can use their collection of images to create any items they want.

Next, in order to ensure Joy Leggings stand out in the fiercely competitive environment, we started to brainstorm the branding strategy to communicate our values to target audiences effectively and to ensure every element of marketing strategy aligns with the brand value proposition.

Branding

Brand Archetype

We took a brand personality quiz at Kaye Putnam together in order to establish the brand name, logo, and imagery that will help voice the unique and authentic brand values:

Invoking Happiness

The quiz results matched the brand personality we’d like to convey to customers. After evaluating domain availability from a technical perspective, we reached a consensus on the brand name — Joy Leggings — which portrays happiness, enthusiasm, a sense of comfort, and capabilities of encouraging others to enjoy and live their lives to the fullest.

Logo and Style Tile

Thanks to the talented designers in our team, we created the logo for Joy Leggings within hours and chosen vibrant eye-catching colors to assist with depicting the value proposition “self-expression through brand products”.

Below Style Tile consists of colors, fonts, and interface elements that are meant to reflect the visual brand value promise and communicate the essence of it. It was created to establish a common visual language among various levels of stakeholders and to maintain brand consistency while developing on-going marketing and business strategies.

4. Marketing Objectives & KPIs

Digital Marketing Measurement Model (DMMM)

Now since we defined the target audiences, business, and brand, we wanted to get our products and services into the hands of our customers. A potential customer normally goes through a journey from awareness to purchase, it is important for us to get the right message through the right channel to the right people across each stage of the journey.

Before embarking on any marketing activities, we devised business objectives and the corresponding KPIs in order to establish, track, and optimize marketing strategies. As an eCommerce, the ultimate goal would be to increase sales. The micro-conversions along the customer journey leading up to sales would be to increase the awareness around their brand and to carry out effective engagement with existing and new customers.

Below Digital Marketing Measurement Model (DMMM) was created to help us identify and stay on track to achieve the SMART objectives and to set expectations for our client to understand how success will be measured. Since we didn’t have any previous data to work with, all numerical targets were decided based on assumptions, previous experiences and competitor analysis.

Create Awareness — It is agreed that, Joy Leggings will currently be focusing on building and continually increasing brand awareness. Keeping the customer journey in mind, at the awareness stage, customers don’t know who we are and what they want, so we need to find opportunities to get our brand in front of them. We may use Display Ads on a website or social media channels to try and attract attention or entice a target customer with an offer, by doing that, we hope to drive as many potential customers to our website as possible to educate them about our brand and products.

We chose “number of users” as the KPI to measure our goal of increasing website traffic, and we believed “200 users” would be a realistic target to achieve. Moreover, we will track the key traffic sources (Source/Medium) that people are coming from, and their age (Demographics) and locations (Geographic) to better target potential customers.

Generate Engagement — When the customer has known or shown interest in our products, we want to solidify that interest by reinforcing our product benefits and differentiators, and ultimately, translate that interest into a desire for our product. Driving engagement and gaining quality traffic will be helpful in achieving that. Therefore, we wanted to ensure that we are on the SEO front, provide seamless user experiences on our website, and engage interactive two-way conversations with customers on social media channels.

The goal set at this stage was “stickier visits” as we wish to encourage lengthier visits and that users went through more pages on our site. The KPIs that determined to gauge our performance were “session duration”, “bounce rate”, and “pages/session”, and our targets were set to be “2 minutes average session duration”, “50% bounce rate”, and “3 pages per session”. Again, Source/Medium, Age and Location will be used as the segments to track on-site behaviors and aid further marketing tactics.

Increase Conversion — Once the customer is ready to take action, we want to make sure that the purchase experience is smooth. For instance, we will make sure the price is clear, and there are no roadblocks in the checkout process. Also, using a Thank You email will help improve user experience implicitly and establish a line of communication with new customers. Therefore, combining the previous efforts that we’ve well-positioned Joy Leggings as a niche brand in the market, we should be able to generate 2 new sales with an average order value (AOV) of $35. Segmenting data using the same characteristics would give us a more accurate picture of converted customers.

Google Analytics Implementation

Google Analytics (GA) is a powerful platform that can help us understand and track how users interact with our website and evaluate whether that aligns with our business goals. By collecting and analyzing data using GA, we can make informed decisions to tweak marketing strategies.

Thus, right after we have the Joy Legging website launched with the help of contract developers, we set up a GA account for Joy Leggings, and started to work on account settings and configurations.

Views — We kept the Raw Data (All Web Site View) intact as a back-up, created a Master View to apply filters to data for reporting purposes, and a Test View to test new designs and settings before applying to the master view (filters cannot be undone).

Filters — We’ve already set up three commonly used filters (shown in below screenshot) in the master view: 1) Excluding Internal IP Addresses to avoid skewed data on sessions taken by ourselves; 2) Force URL to Lowercase and 3) Lowercase Search Term to help consolidate analytics data.

Goals — We also set up below goals in GA to track and measure the targets established in DMMM. The Destination Goal (“Thank you”) represents the confirmation page that shown in response to the completion of a purchase. The Duration Goal and the Page per session Goal were set to measure the engagement efforts.

Google Tag Manager (GTM) — GTM comes in handy to create GA tags and specify when the tags fire with the help of triggers. It serves as a container to consolidate all of the website tracking codes (tags, pixels) that simplifies and speeds up the process of tag deployment, which can streamline tag loading for faster website performance. We have started to deploy tags and triggers in GTM to track page scroll depths, and event goals, for instance, when someone subscribes to our newsletter or clicks a button to check out our products.

Custom Report — We created below custom report with metrics and dimensions related to the targets set in the measurement model. The three tabs on the top reflected the pre-defined segments: Source/Medium, Location, and Age. Custom reports are a very handy tool as they can be saved, exported into a PDF or CSV and easily shared with essential stakeholders at the frequency that suits us best. GA also allows us to create Custom Dashboards with custom-designed widgets to view all core metrics in one place and present and visualize reporting in an automated way.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of search engine results”, a joke that’s often said among people in SEO. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of refining the content, design, and link structure of your website to improve the site’s ranking and thus visibility in search engines’ organic results. Getting a high position on the first page of the search engine results page (SERPs) is an effective way to increase website traffic, which is a stepping-stone to reach and engage with customers and ultimately drive overall conversion rate (the business objectives).

Keyword Research

Keyword research was our first step while conducting SEO for Joy Leggings. We used “Answer the Public” to get a picture of the suggested queries, also looked back at our target personas’ daily needs, pain points, and lifestyles to predict the terms our potential customers may search for. Then we brainstormed and finalized our keyword list using Moz Keyword Explorer.

Moz Keyword Explorer uses three metrics to evaluate each individual keyword we search — Monthly Volume, Difficulty and Organic CTR (click-through rate). Another metric Priority combines volume, difficult, CTR and a custom My Score metric if you specify.

We created our keyword list by including a combination of head and tail keywords. Head keywords tend to be generic and attract high search volume. Since they’re popular and searched so much, they’re competitive to rank in the search results page. Customers also use long-tail keywords which are more specific, and they will receive more accurate and relevant search results. As for us website owners, tail keywords can bring much higher qualified traffic to our site, and they have lower competition, which means less difficult for us to rank higher than current competitors on the first page of search results.

Joy Leggings Keyword List sort by Priority (exported from Moz)

Since customers and their environment, and the industry may change over time, we will re-evaluate our keyword list to see whether there may be better or new interesting niche keywords to use.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO techniques deal with optimization of the granular on-site elements including tags and metadata, URL structure, links and anchor text, use of keywords, content and social sharing. The keywords chosen should be naturally incorporated into website content and metadata. It helps search engines better read and interpret the site, and be able to deliver relevant and useful search results to users.

While creating the website, our developers and content creators made efforts to ensure all on-site elements were covered and optimized. We built a SEO-friendly URL and a compelling title tag with our brand at the front to help search engines understand what our site is about which contributes to CTR. We’ve also created blog posts with fun and engaging content, and images and videos embedded to increase dwell time, an important Google ranking signal. The meta description is unique but the 254 characters may need to be shortened (best practice: 155–160 characters to avoid truncation).

*Screenshot of source code view of title tag and meta description*

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is focused on behind-the-scenes technical aspects of building and modifying webpages to help search engine spiders crawl and index the content effectively, as well as to enhance user experience. Technical SEO components include site speed, security, mobile-friendliness, Silos, HTML and XML sitemaps, Robots.txt, etc.

We conducted site performance testing using Google Page Speed Insights and GT Metrix. Joy Leggings scored pretty well for site speed, although there are some opportunities for developers to improve load speed on mobile.

Shopify provided an SSL certificate to our store to improve security. It has been tested on both desktop and mobile that Joy Leggings’ pages have been encrypted to protect customer account and payment information.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO refers to all the activities done outside the site to increase the ranking of a page with search engines. Simply put, it tells Google what others think about our site. Off-Page SEO tactics include linking building, social networking, document sharing, and reviews. It’s a long-term process aiming to build a digital footprint and earn page authority, domain authority, and credibility. For Joy Leggings, we hope to have high authority pages linking back to us naturally and try to get as many relevant and high-quality inbound links as possible to help search engines and users trust our website more.

We used Moz Link Explorer to research link-building strategies and noted that our competitor GoldSheepClothing was mentioned in several posts on some prominent newspapers and magazines. They also partnered with celebrities wearing their products as shown in the Dailymail article to earn backlinks.

LA Times:

People.com: New Fashion Finds Our Editors Are Obsessing Over

Dailymail.co.uk: Fabulous figure! Kaley Cuoco shows off toned arms and legs in workout gear as she grabs lunch after yoga class

As for Joy Leggings, we can partner with influencers to try and review our products, as well as leverage social platforms to post high quality and engaging content to attract users and earn backlinks. We can also partner with similar prominent websites once we’ve gained higher awareness.

6. Social Media and Content Strategy

We set up Facebook, Twitter, Instagram accounts for Joy Leggings with the aim of leveraging these three social media channels to reach target audiences, build relationships with and gain feedback from customers. It is hoped that these activities and efforts will help to gain traffic, brand exposure, and interaction with customers in order to achieve the business objectives and goals defined in the DMMM.

Profile Optimization

The Joy Leggings’ Facebook Page (image below) has been optimized for search engines and user experience by incorporating below engaging elements:

Description: contact details (email and website address) as well as information about the industry, business, and products;
Profile & Cover Photo: in line with the Joy Leggings brand and show customers what they can expect from the business;
“Shop Now” CTA (Call to Action) button: to let visitors take action directly on the Facebook page;
Username: to make it easy for customers to find the page;
Pinned Posts: a post has been pinned on the Home page to let customers know the latest about Joy Leggings.

The Joy Legging Twitter and Instagram profiles have also been optimized based on the requirements of each platform, also can easily show customers what the brand and products are all about to increase awareness and encourage engagement.

Content Planning

Engaging in social media conversations enables Joy Leggings to build solid relationships with customers, and bring traffic to the website. The key is to create sharable content that is unique and timely and addresses the customers’ needs and media habits. This means that the content may not directly relate to the Joy Leggings products but resonates with the target audiences’, i.e. the young female medical professionals’ interests or the trending topics that they care about and will most likely interact with on social media platforms.

To be specific, we decided to share the nursing lifestyle-related blog posts (e.g. surviving nightshift) we published on the Joy Leggings website to the social media channels. We will also create seasonal, funny, and relatable posts to drive the target audiences’ attention. For instance, we crafted an Instagram post with hashtags of “GreysAnatomy” and “Throwback Thursday” to attract fans of this medical TV show who might also be a potential customer. Another example is a “Joyvember” post on Facebook to encourage ladies not to shave their legs in November to relate to the “Movember” event in the month while also embodies the brand.

By implementing the above content strategy, we hope to interact with potential customers on the Joy Leggings’ social media platforms as well as to drive them to the website to educate them on the Joy Leggings brand and products. Also, since the prospects or customers are reading the blog posts, the number of pageviews on the website and the dwell time will be increased, and the internal links embedded in the posts will direct them to the product pages and hopefully convert them by making one or more purchases.