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.
If you want to read earlier articles in this publication, you can subscribe to The Ecomm Challenge here.
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