Herbal Care
Skin care products
Introduction
Herbal Care is an Irish healthcare company which promotes natural active skin and body care products. Herbal Care’s products are all sustainable manufactured and use natural active ingredients. Their products are tailored towards active Men & Women for repairing and refreshing the body, muscles, and skin. This sustainable ethos company created a brand that puts the environment first, giving 10% of all profits to climate change groups. The planet is dying with rapid growths in climate change & global warming, which is why sustainable business-like Herbal Care whose goal is to be carbon neutral by 2022. COVID -19 has unfortunately brought world health and global economic crisis. It is having a growing impact on the global economy with companies having to evolve every day to the changing environment. For Herbal Care, cancelation of PR, sports and outdoor events is having a big impact on the brand’s development as events such as these can generate brand awareness, boost credibility, and enhance customer relationships. The primary focus/object for Herbal Care is to intensify their social and digital channels to promote their Active Skin Care Kit. This Kit contains Active Body Wash, Active Body Wipes, Moisturizing Cream, and Microfiber Sports Towel.
Requirement
- Understand Herbal Care’s business and target audiences
- Audit website and make recommendations with necessary amendments
- Suggest the ways of growing organic traffic and user’s engagement
- Review social media presence and recommend appropriate networks
- Plan social media content strategy including tools to use for posting
- Do Business SWOT analysis
- Define goals/objectives, KPIs and performance metrics
- Layout the optimum and cost effective overall digital marketing strategy
Herbal Care’s Business, Current Website and Customer Persona
Herbal care is a healthcare start-up which deals in skin care herbal products predominantly. It is registered in Ireland and want to target the Irish market only meanwhile due to bandwidth. Its emphasis is to promote consumer awareness towards the skin care products which are manufactured with organically grown herbs. Their current website (www.herbalcare.ie) is hosted in The UK region on AWS Cloud which provides quick accessibility to their end users. Page layout style including the infographics and page navigation requires some immediate attention in order to make it visitor friendly and to improve the Bounce Rate.
Currently Herbal Care wants to target the people who are majorly from sports background, health and fitness enthusiasts, yoga instructors, swimming coaches etc. Their aim is to tag such fitness professionals with their brand and create a tribe to promote the virtues of herbal products. Below is the snapshot of what a customer persona typically looks like for Herbal Care and their buying journey.
Website Audit, Recommendations
Customer experience is an extremely component to consider while creating an intuitive and user-friendly website. Industry suggests that a new visitor typically spends around 15 seconds on a website to look for relevant and qualitative information. The detailed audit report of Herbal Care’s website represents that website’s searchability, navigability and visual appeal which is directly linked with customer experience (CX) has a lot of room for improvement.
Remedies of Findings
Page navigation will be quick fix to start with and I will work on that part first by creating more hyperlinks on the images for further reading. Backlinks to specific pages for detailed information should be connected and validated to ensure that a visitor will get redirected to desired pages. This will in turn enhance the CX and bounce rate including positive impact on searchability with search engines such as Google, Bing etc.
SEO Strategy
Search Engine Optimization or SEO plays a major role in generating organic traffic to a website but could be a time-consuming activity. SEO requires an overall improvement in social media marketing plan, content strategy, website credibility & search volumes, sitelinks inn blogs, articles etc. This is a continuous activity which delivers qualitative and quantitative results if KPIs are appropriately defined and measured.
Below is a snapshot of activities which contribute to improving the overall SEO strategy.
Social Media Audit
Currently Herbal Care has a small social media presence and don’t have a consistent strategy of content posting of social platforms. Their engagement and interaction with potential customers is quite low due to not being pro active on social networks. There is a clear requirement of constant follow-up and active social listening in their business as per the competitive analysis of beauty industry suggest.
Social Media Recommendation and Content Posting Strategy
Based on the target persona and the type of industry Herbal Care operates in, majority of its potential customers use the social media platforms e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter, for both personal and professional networking. They like to connect with people with same interests, passions and who love to lead a healthy lifestyle. It makes a real sense for Herbal Care to expand and maintain a consistent presence on all upper mentioned social media platforms and share informative and educational content in the forms of pictures, short inspiring videos, write blogs/articles related to herbal skin care & beauty products and ensure to respond quickly to any of the queries or questions from the viewers.
Moreover, they should create groups/communities on social networks for like minded people and encourage their active participation by empowering them to share reviews, opinions, comments etc. about the products and overall market. Online polls, surveys and quizzes are another very effective way to collect people’s impressions and gauge the market trend which helps for a product launch, event planning and rolling out promotions as well.
Below is the infographics of social media networks and content posting strategy.
Business SWOT Analysis
To measure the efficacy of your efforts, review the business direction, understanding of market dynamics and to do industrial competitor evaluation, SWOT analysis is an extremely important method to follow. It is a simple but useful framework for analysing your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It helps you to build on what you do well, to address what you’re lacking, to minimize risks, and to take the greatest possible advantage of chances for success.
This can be used to kick off strategy formulation informally, or in a more sophisticated way as a serious strategy tool. It can further be used to get an understanding of your competitors as well, which may provide you the insights you need to craft a coherent and successful competitive position.
When carrying out your analysis, be realistic and rigorous. Apply it at the right level, and supplement it with other tools where appropriate.
Below is a brief explanation of SWOT Analysis framework which can easily be applied to the business to measure the progress.
Defining SMART Goals/Objective, KPIs and Metrics
In any business strategy, it is crucial to clearly define the purpose, aims and objectives on running a particular business or following a mission. Objectives help define goals, identify conflicting activities, guide elements of the decision-making process, and ensure accountability of personnel within an organization. Without clearly defined goals and supporting objectives, goal displacement often occurs. Smart Goals and objective-setting are influenced by values. Values are personal standards as to what is good or bad, fair or unfair, and hence influence business decisions.
KPIs set the expectations on macro level and ensure that Marketing goals are aligned with the overall Business goals whereas performance metrics help to track the progress at micro level and provide indication to do the course correction wherever required. For example, in social media marketing, impressions such as views, clicks, likes, comments, shares, rewets etc. are the metrics which provides the insights about how the content in trending on social platforms. With an in-depth data mining, it can further provide the insights about the information particular time, region, geography to engage with the potential customers and convert them into leads with a Flywheel Strategy with the process of (Attract – Engage – Delight).
Furthermore, KPIs help to control the expenditure of marketing budget and support in the allocation of funds for various marketing activities. It is important in digital marketing that funds disbursement should be done rationally in order to gain the optimum output. For example, email campaigns and social media campaigns may require as much funding as it is needed for paid adverts or search ads. Therefore, overall budget planning play a vital role in terms of making a marketing plan work based on the allocated funds for marketing activities.
Conclusion
Planning a digital marketing strategy for a start-up business requires enormous amount of rationale and well thought marketing plan. While working with limited capital/funds is nit the only challenge which a start-up has to face but has to deal with cutting edge technology and cut-throat competition as well. Business has to ensure that it has to connect and engage with its potential new customers in timely manner as well as maintain & expand its market presence too. Always need to be watchful about the developments happening in & around the industry and steadily improve the velocity of reaching to target audiences to keep the flywheel spinning. There are multiple ways in digital marketing to reach and connect with the target audiences but each and every marketing strategy does not suit to all the business. So understanding the bandwidth crunch and working with limited resources could be intense sometimes but it provides a massive learning and path to grow a start-up successfully on the way.
Below is snapshot of different types of digital marketing plans which we could offer and help you to work it out for your business, based on the requirements and business objectives.
