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The Situation:
Outside Focus* was a part-time e-commerce website selling specialised outdoor gear. The owner was struggling to transition from part-time to a full-time business. Even with growing sales, the rising costs of online advertising negatively impacted on Outside Focus’ overall profitability.
Marketing Minds marketing services were engaged to holistically review Outside Focus and develop some digital strategies that could help devlop the business into a profitable, full time operation.
What We Did:
Marketing Minds was brought on board by the owner of Outside Focus to coach him on how to conduct an audit of his business that would ultimately help him reach his goals of going full-time and remaining profitable. This included:
- Learning and understanding on how to analyse Google analytics, website conversion path, performance of his Google ads, website ranking, keyword research and more.
- We conducted a competitive analysis. This included researching the competitors, their positioning, trends and potential size of the market in various channels to determine where the growth opportunities were for Outside Focus.
- Then we evaluated his product range performance and pricing. This allowed us to identify how he could adjust these to gain further competitive advantage and increase margins, while retaining customers.
From here, we developed a sound digital marketing strategy, focusing on actions that would deliver the biggest gains. This was done via ongoing coaching with the owner on what and how to implement the best techniques.
The Outcomes:
Overall, Outside Focus increased their revenue by 186% in 6 months thanks to sound digital strategies. More importantly, this was at a higher profitability rate than ever before. The source of online traffic also changed with the focus on ‘free traffic’ achieved through the ranking on Google for the right keywords which allowed the reduction in ad spend. Overall, Outside Focus was also able to command higher prices for their products with the shift in the look and brand message. This has resulted in the average order value being 2.2 times larger than the previous year (120% increase). In addition, the growth has continued into the typically slow, off season period.
The owner has therefore achieved his goal of Outside Focus becoming a full-time business, thanks to good digital strategies. This was all achieved within six months and in the process has learnt key skills that will help him continue to grow the business into the future.
Here are more outcomes we achieved through our digital strategies:
- Developed some immediate USPs (unique selling points) for Outdoor Focus so that they are truly unique from his competitors while identified opportunities for others to be developed over time.
- Curated key messages that resonated with his target audience to better improve his digital marketing through conversion and relevance of the advertisements.
- Introduced price increases and focus on products to change the brand perception of the brand and to appear more valuable and trustworthy.
- Optimised the website conversion path through various digital strategies so that Outside Focus maximised potential returns from every website visit.
- Moved his Adwords Provider to a more effective and experienced provider that delivered better results for less.
- Introduced each change strategically so that it did not isolate the current customers and grew market share accordingly.
* The name of the client has been changed to protect the company privacy.