Today I will talk about two young companies, who have based their marketing strategy mostly online and don’t invest in bilboards or print advertisement. They have chosen social media platforms because it is the easiest way to reach the global market and grow fast. The social media platforms are relatively the same, some companies may use one that is more specialized in conecting people with interest towards the certain product they sell or service they offer.
The Blonde Salad
Fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni of The Blonde Salad is a perfect example of a hobby turned extremely successful business with the help of social media. Chiara started her blog back in 2009 on the online interactive blogging platform called BlogSpot, using it to share pictures of her personal style. She used Facebook as a tool to promote new blog posts as well as reach new audience and the number quickly grew, now reaching more than 1 million likes. It gets updated very often, there is a link of every post on the blog shared on this page, as well as other pictures and advertisements.
A social media platform specifically targeted to fashion bloggers is Bloglovin. Its features allow you to quickly browse through blogs and you can easily start ‘following’ them. It requires a registration, which when acquired you get notified every time when your favorite blogger updates their blog. Chiara has almost half a million followers on this platform.
The latest social media she has included in her marketing strategy is Instagram. Currently Chiara has 5.1 million followers and her profile is updated around 5 times every day. Through this social media, she has started a lot of ‘hash tags’, which helps in organizing her pictures in certain categories, as well as starting trends and campaigns.
In her arsenal of social media tools, she has a YouTube profile, where she has more than 50 k followers. Her Twitter account has more than 250k followers and is updated daily, most often with automatic reposts of her Instagram posts, and once in a couple of days a post featuring campaigns. Her Google + profile has more 140 k followers and the page is automatically updated with new posts, whenever there is a new post on the actual blog. And lastly Pinterest, having a little over 40 k followers, her profile features pictures divided into different folders, each with a certain category, which makes searching for certain terms easier on this platform.
The Blonde Salad is now officially called TBS Crew – The Blonde Salad Crew and Chiara Ferragni as art director and founder. She has 11 employees in total, who work on keeping up the website on at all times, all social media being often updated as well as Chiara’s personal shoe brand.
It’s obvious she does not have 10 million fans, when you gather all of them, from different social mediums, because a lot of them probably follow her on more than one medium. However her marketing does strongly rely on her online social media content.
Proof of her success is her becoming a subject of study in the Harvard University as a case study, as well as being the first fashion blogger ever being on the covers of Vogue and many more achievements.
The Fifth Watches
The Fifth is a brand that offers watches with timeless design and quality with an affordable price. They exist since a couple of years and are based in Australia. What makes them very exclusive is that they only sell only online and once a month, every fifth of the month for 5 days. Often the sale doesn’t last 5 days, because they just sell out quicker.
In their online social media arsenal they don’t have as much as The Blonde Salad, however they are doing pretty good. The primary marketing tool they use is Instagram, where they post all the time pictures of clients, who are wearing their watches. For less than 2 years they have gained 345 thousand followers and they seem to get a lot of positive energy for having such a unique selling concept as well as promoting the clients profiles by sharing their pictures. The clients feel appreciated.
The brand is on Facebook as well and there they have almost 120 thousand likes. The page gets updated almost daily, with posts from their Instagram account. Recently they updated their website, because Facebook and followers from other social media thought that they weren’t showing enough detailed pictures of the watches. So the brand took this into consideration and announced on Facebook their new website feature, which was inspired from the public.
The Fifth is active on Pinterest, with 7 thousand followers and their page looks very organized with multiple folders with pictures divided into categories. Their Twitter account is not very well updated, but for the product they are selling, it seems that they have chosen the best social media platform to promote it on – Instagram – so the 8000 followers there are just a plus for the brand.
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