Digital Transformation for a Brick and Mortar Specialty Retailer
Our client is a local specialty retailer that sells tabletop games and a wide selection of puzzles. Operating with a brick and mortar business model, they’ve carefully crafted a wide range of products and developed a community through facilitating weekly events for all customers.
Situation:
The COVID pandemic heavily disrupted our clients normal operations, as they are primarily a brick and mortar retailer who sought to build a community through hosting a multitude of in person physical events.
Forced to shut their doors, the client was able to transition to hosting virtual events and redesign their website, they struggled to facilitate signups for these new events and find a return on their new marketing spend.
In addition, with the holiday season quickly advancing, the client wanted to understand how they could position their business against larger players to best capture new sales.
Challenge:
The core challenge in this project was to understand how we could transform our client’s in person experience to a digital front. As a specialty retailer, the client utilized their staff’s deep knowledge to provide exceptional service and curate engaging events across a wide variety of customer segments. With this, they lacked the need for a built out eCommerce site and had limited experience running advertising campaigns or using social media analytics.
To better understand what drove customers to shop with our client, the team conducted site visits, combed through customer interaction data and dove into the client’s social media analytics.
Approach:
With the team’s focus being driven to provide a comprehensive set of recommendations to allow our client to better foster customer relationships and drive increased eCommerce sales, our team utilized a three pronged approach:
Consumer and Brand Analysis: We initially began with external competitor research, creating a dataset to examine their competitive positioning, then we turned inwards and analyzed their current business model, customer data, and sales data to develop a SWOT analysis and segment their customer base.
Broaden Reach: Having a better understanding of the customer segments, we used excel to conduct a trend analysis of past social media performance, developing content buckets that best build engagement and attract customers. We then conducted external research on social media best practices and packaged our recommendations into a 1-month content calendar & content bucket strategy. Analyzing past advertisement performance and harnessing their customer data, we developed customer profiles for selective targeting & ad copy guidelines to create a comprehensive implementation plan .
Enhance User Experience: We began by diving into the client’s website analytics, identifying how customers flowed through the website and honing down on areas that needed increased visibility and then comparing their website with UX best practices.
Impact:
Bringing our research and analysis together across all prongs, the Rem and Company team was able to provide a core set of actionable deliverables to the client:
(1) A 1-month social media posting calendar with content buckets
(2) A multimedia paid advertisement implementation plan,
(3) A set of website optimization recommendations. Combined, these deliverables provide clear steps to better connect with their customers and to drive new traffic to their website.
Following our engagement, our client will have a completely new strategy to engage customers across all steps in their journey, and the tools to best showcase their value. Through our final presentation and hand off of deliverables, the client expressed excitement over moving into the implementation phase of our recommendations and the opportunity to continue optimizing their digital presence.
Team Breakdown:
Team Lead: Jack Powers
Strategist: Sabrina Hernandez-Lampron
Strategist: Alvin Lee
Junior Strategist: Ryann Kenny
Junior Strategist: Joe Coyne
Relevant Background Information:
Business Type: For-Profit
Industry: Specialty Retailing
Location: Washington, D.C.
At Rem and Company, we're on a mission to keep doors open and dreams alive. Rem and Company started as a social impact initiative offering free consulting services to small businesses impacted by COVID-19. Rem and Company has become an information hub and digital community platform for small businesses in need. At Rem and Company, small businesses stay up to date on trends in their industries, learn new approaches from peers, build a network, and develop the capacity to adapt as the world around them changes. Our consulting teams provide small businesses with the opportunity to identify and prioritize issues facing their business, propose innovative strategies and facilitate execution. If you are a small business owner and want to learn more about how we can help, request a free consultation.