BP12: Online Channels Established! (Plus Pricing Strategies)
20th July 2019
The Future of Marketing is Digital
Because Everyone's daily lifestyle patterns are changing. In the past, print ads and TV ads were the most viral ways to create buzz and get people to buy your products. Fortunately (for start-ups and many companies alike), Digital marketing has become of high importance as almost all of us carry a smartphone and access the internet daily, be it on the go or at home.
For Singapore, there's a trend of less people subscribing to print media. Many customers use Facebook and Instagram to get their news updates and catch up on what's trending among their friends. Thus, Facebook and Instagram have become the main channels that most people are likely to access.
Hence, Flormiere is now available on Facebook and Instagram.
But First Off, Our Logo!
I created the final logo for our company to our right. This Design will be carried across the Social Media Platforms and our Website.
The design features:
✔A Rose: Showing off the nature of our products - We create Designs that incorporate the use of flowers to beautify the world
✔ The Flormiere Font: Specifically chosen to show elegance and class in the designs we release to the market.
✔ Traditionally, The Butterfly represents hope, life and transformation. Thus the butterfly in our logo represents our designs being elegant and classy, transforming your dull office, study or home into a beautiful one akin with nature and it's gift of beautiful flowers
✔ Red and White Contrast: A red rose is pretty, and significance of respect and love. We love flowers and handcraft each design to high design standards, and we hope our customers will love flowers and the products we create too! The Red and White contrast also represents the colours of the Singapore Flag - Showing off the type of works possible from local companies. It happens that August is our Nation's National Day - Bonus for being Patriotic!
As both facebook and Instagram currently crops down all profile photos into circles, This design is also carefully made, such that it makes full use of the space to show off our logo, and is made such that when cropped in a circle, it will still look good
Our Social Media Presence
Our Facebook page can be accessed from the Following Link: https://www.facebook.com/Flormiere/
We Started off initially posting pictures of beautiful flowers to "liven up" our social media accounts while prepping. However that did not seem to help us gather much likes in itself.
Today, Kimmy has carried on to help us post our latest product offerings on Instagram, use appropriate hashtags, and let instagram re-post our images on Facebook. As our Chief Marketing Officer, She will help us with maintaining these social media accounts.
Of course, the rest of us also assist with this piece. Jiacheng, Sindy and I assist by editing up the photos, tidying our photo descriptions to perfection and suggesting new ideas to get more likes and try and convert our customer's interest into real purchases.
Giveaways, Ads and more instagram stories will be created.
In the meantime, the best advocates of our brand would be ourselves. We believe we have a good product, so the best people to introduce the brand to would be our friends and followers on Social Media! While all of us aren't instagram celebrities, the combined reach would approximately be about 1000 Followers, which is still a good base we can reach out to for free. We'll experiment with ads once we finalized our online shopping platforms.
Our Instagram Page can be accessed from the following link: https://www.instagram.com/flormiere.sg/
And Our Online Shopping Platforms!
Based on our Research, We came to a conclusion that the cheapest way to sell was still through online methods. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, Creating a physical pop up store, even for just 2-3 days at a location with enough footfall (E.g. Gardens by the Bay), would cost us about $16 0 for half a booth, and $250 for 1 full booth. We have to factor those margins in when setting the prices too.
However by going online, we get to spend less upfront on a physical channel, while getting some sales in the meantime. This allows us to sell at a more desirable price point. Based on our research (through interviews with friends and acquaintances), most customers will not want to pay more than $40 for such a products.
We plan to experiment with the online shopping platforms advertising mechanisms once we have enough products made to sell.
For Now, we will be available on Carousell. We plan to venture onto other popular online shopping platforms soon.
Our Carousell Webstore can be accessed from the following link: https://sg.carousell.com/flormiere/ (Kimmy and Sindy will be manning this carousell account)
One More thing: A Website to Link Everything together
To Tie Everything together, we wanted a URL link to Gel everything together. A Website where users can be directed to our various online platforms, and see some of our best works.
While we wanted to use a premium account on Wix and Wordpress (which would let us have a dedicated URL Link, e.g. Flormiere.com), we thought it was not-as-neccesary. Why? Because most users tend to scroll through their feed. we thought the best way to get users to buy was to make it easier to go from our facebook/instagram post, directly to an online shopping website for buying our products!
Thus, our company has invested in a web service from Rebrandly that will let us customize URL's for easy access to different products.
Our Products on instagram and facebook will have a flormiere.com/productName Link, which would redirect users to the shopping platform of our choice, for customers to buy the product they would like, fuss free. This also saves us the trouble of setting up a website which handles purchases, as they can not only be tedious to set up, but also have other bugs within the platform which can cause the transaction to bounce.
Here's a diagram for illustration, using a real product we are selling, called "Happy Together". By Accesing the customized https://flormiere.com/HappyTogether link, the customers are immediately directed to the online shopping platform of our choice, while still giving us the professional look of a having our own domain name and link.
I did the domain registration process and figured a way to link the wordpress website to the domain I registered with Rebrandly.
Of course, we will still have a official website, but it will be based on a free Wordpress account since we don't expect most users to land on our website. The company website can be accessed via https://flormiere.wordpress.com/ . Alternatively, the customers get to use this link to get there as well: https://flormiere.com/home
Stay tuned as we create more products, polish our online channels and do our best to make this start-up a success!
However, while the above strategy looks rosy, actually there were hiccups we faced.
Pricing Strategies
As for Pricing Strategies, Our team uses a combination of Value-Based and Competitive pricing techniques, and is a fair price that allows customers to get "more" for the same amount of money (i.e. getting a better product against other products that are priced at the same value".
I will discuss more information about our pricing strategy in the document below.