#selfmade: Thinking Community First For Commerce
In our first 6 months of setting up Shop on LBB, we focussed heavily on brass-tacks- TAT improvements, PDP improvements, delivery, customer support, merchant support etc etc. Without all of this in place, investments in acquisition and marketing are of no use. Once we got a handle of performance marketing, we started thinking through what ‘Brand Shop On LBB’ is about- how do we create a distinction from the ‘explore’ experience on LBB, all the while retaining our ethos of empowering SMBs.
4 months of trial and error, testing, iterating and re-testing (over and over) again, and we landed on one, simple unified message- being ‘Selfmade’.
No matter how many players you have, everyone’s gotta play for the same team. And while finding a common ground in messaging for two- sometimes opposite- sides of a marketplace isn’t easy. ‘Selfmade’ however struck a chord with our users, merchant partners (brands who sell on LBB), and creative entrepreneurs who resonated with being selfmade. This brand and community first campaign lead to awesome results (given at the end of the post, incase you want to jump to that :))
The Messenger and The Message
In LBB’s eco-system, there’s 2 key players- merchants and consumers. Given that we operate as a pure-play marketplace, both are equally important for us to engage with.
For our Brand Partners, we created LBB’s #selfmade Maker Meet- an opportunity of our partner brands to meet us, get a heads-up on new feature launches, ask a ton of questions, and belong to a community of brands and entrepreneurs who embody the ‘Selfmade’ spirit.
This meet up was a tremendous success! Find out more here.
For all the emailers and Social Media in the world, nothing quite beats meeting people, exchanging ideas, and thinking about collective success. The resounding feedback we got from our merchant partners was how they were made to feel like they’re a part of something bigger- a movement of sorts. Running your own business can be lonely; and meeting other entrepreneurs gave our brand partners a sense of community. We had partners fly down from all parts of India for this- and as cliched as it sounds, the room was electric!
On the consumer side, we launched a campaign across our web, app and social media called #selfmade: people we love, for the things they do. Each campaign featured a selection of 6 entrepreneurs and professionals from a city, who run their own ventures or are a part of incredible brand stories; All (of course) dressed in apparel made by ‘selfmade’ brands from Shop on LBB, shot at ‘selfmade’ spots in the city.
The response to our campaign has been- you guessed it- awesome. When you involve people in something bigger than themselves, and give them an opportunity to find a. belonging b. align with an overall message, and c. express their own interests… magic happens.
This campaign wasn’t restricted only to Social Media- though it did help in generate awareness for brands who retail on LBB.
We:
> Created a lot of video content from the shoots- all of which is shoppable on LBB! Example:
> Created shoppable lists from the content: https://lbb.in/delhi/buy-awesome-summer-dresses-on-lbb/
> Got our #selfmade entrepreneurs to become our value ambassadors. Team LBB can keep harping about shopping from local businesses, but it makes a world of a difference when people come together to resound a message.
> Created a ‘selfmade’ store, where all products featured in the selfmade campaign can be shopped. AND updated PDPs to reflect ‘real people’ pictures: https://lbb.in/shop/c/promo/shop-selfmade-brands
And many many more integrations across our platforms (stay tuned for December. Hint? ‘IRL’)
We’ve done 10x more than documented in this post, and our biggest learnings have been:
- It IS possible to make everyone happy: marketplaces usually pick sides- and it’s usually about #customersfirst (because Bezos, for all the right reasons, said so). But for us at LBB, nurturing and growing brand partners is as critical as marketing to consumers. Think of concepts that scale across all your stakeholders- it’s possible!
- Community First: while we worked with ‘influencers’ for this campaign (more thoughts here > https://www.afaqs.com/news/guest-article/55374_everyone-is-an-influencer-everything-is-influenced), we didn’t just work with any ‘influencers’. We aligned our campaign with people who truly embody what it means to be selfmade. Words and identities can’t be loosely thrown around- and being selective has worked for us.
- Measure what matters:
Brand marketing must tie in with performance marketing. For our Makers Meetup, the metric of success was of course attendance and time-spent, but more importantly, it was pace of new feature and innovation adoption which we were measuring (fun fact, we’ve seen a 75% brand partner participation in new feature launches and marketing campaigns since. Simply put, our brand partners are taking our feedback and improving their product lines on Shop on LBB).
Secondly, the number of views on videos and content for the consumer facing promotions for selfmade were 2–3x that on standardised commerce shots. Conversion to purchase has been 20–30% higher on ‘real people’ posts and videos on LBB (from content viewing to checkout), and marketing ads we’ve run using imagery from our #selfmade shoot have given us higher clicks than our standard ads. We’ve seen a 40% growth in brand awareness (measured by organic traffic, following on social media platforms, and brand mentions) and search queries for specific brands- which are otherwise totally unheard of.
Long story short: more than ever, it’s imperative to think community first when thinking of how to create differentiated offerings for brands and consumers, especially if you’re in ecomm. In a cluttered, crowded space, where deals and discounts and 100% cashback is king, if merchants and brands are really to make any money, they need to stand for something.
Same applies to platforms and marketplaces.
We stand for selfmade.
