Ecomm Challenge Day 11 - Marketing tactics
Argh!! I don’t really have time to be writing this, I need to be ‘spamming and jamming’ as my colleagues used to say in a previous life! I feel every minute I spend writing these updates, is a moment that I could have been spent hustling for a sale or two before the end of this challenge.
However, I did say I was going to document this journey, while I was doing it, so here I am. Here’s a little status update from the beginning of the challenge:
Day 1 — Insights and Market Research — “Valuable and still using it to guide me”.
Day 2— Strategy — “All good, I think it holds true.”
Day 3 — Finding a Niche- “A bit wholly and probably could have been combined with day 4"
Day 4 — Validating a Niche- “Super useful!”
Day 5 — Confidence. One Sale — “Waste of a day as I didn’t make one”
Day 6 — Planning & Tech — “Probably needed two days ideally”
Day 7 — Selecting Products to Test — “Logical, and good to have an initial focus”
Day 8-Budget Allocation-“Half a day really”
Day 9 — Design & Visuals-“Still needs work TBH”
Day 10-Site building and Integrations-“Argh!! Three days comfortably. I’ve still got so much to do!”
Do I sound panicked?
Niches
As previously covered I want to test the following niches:
- Reuse Water Bottles
- Backpacks
- DSLR Backpacks
- Outdoor Accessories
- Outdoor Cooking Equipment
- Tea & Coffee Equipment
I don’t have the resources to tackle all of them at the same time, so to start I’m going to test Water Bottles during the Challenge, but if I can get any traction, I will quickly move on to the others.
What am I going to do?
I want to build out a programme across these channels:
Social — I’m now going to limit this to just Facebook and Instagram (covered tomorrow)
Influencers — I want to build a value exchange with influencers in my niche, and although I have done some outreach I need to do a lot more
Email — I am going to attempt this, but having something operational that will have an impact in the challenge timescale might be optimistic
Messaging — I think this might be a really good opportunity if I can get people to engage.
Content Proposition
I previously outlined I’m going to try and curate as much as possible. I don’t have the time or budgets to commission, but I will need to hustle to get people to let me use their content. I am going to contact brands to see what assets I can get from them, influencers for reviews, and anyone else for imagery. I am holding two very small aces on the original content front. I have one friend who has promised me a video of an outdoor cooking stove that he owns, and another colleague who recently bought a Stanley vacuum flask, who has promised me some words and pictures.
Each week I want to have 1 key standout piece of content to work with, whether that is curated, or donated in this case! All content that I post needs to do one of the following:
- Entertain — This might be hard to curate
- Surprise — A bit easier to find
- Inform — Has to have a practical value (what can we learn)
- Emotion — I’d like to think that this is the key to social content
- Social Currency — I will consider content that makes people look good, but I am not a massive fan
If I can find more comprehensive pillars of content each week, I can then atomise each element and create a content schedule that can work. I recently found this article on the Guardian about 1 million plastic bottles being discarded a minute globally. This is quite a compelling stat for my reuse water bottles, and could provide a whole host of ideas for content for the rest of this week.
I will then use these assets to increase followers and drive engagement. Once I have users regularly engaging with content I can then start pointing them towards the website and start driving sales. I haven’t left myself much time to do this, so I had better get on with it!
The site is due to go live later today, so check out the coming soon page.
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