Targeted Marketing
Marketing is a tricky issue, especially when you’re a bootstrapped company, low on capital and with weak cash flow. You have to be especially careful with how you are spending your money and that each cost is justified or that there is a reasonable ROI for everything you do.
We recently spend our largest marketing budget yet. On what? Google Adwords? Display Advertising? Search Engine Optimization?
No.
We pumped a ton of money into a YouTube campaign for Valentine’s Day which came with a lot of lessons learned.
First, we realized we were targeting the wrong audience, which was typically younger women from the ages of 14 – 20. Our biggest mistake was knowing we were targeting women on Valentine’s Day for our product. While there are plenty of lovey-dovey couples out there, they make up a small percentage of a generally marketed audience, so while we did reach a decent demographic of girls that could be able to afford something like a $50 gift card for their boyfriend, not everyone had a boyfriend, and Valentine’s Day was a bit more commercialized for other products, not for girls to buy their guys clothes.
We did do another YouTube experiment in the past, with an image consultant for men, which went extraordinarily well, but this time, working with female gurus in a season as narrow as Valentine’s Day, things just didn’t work out. But we’ll look into trying it out again. It was a worthwhile experience and we’ll just have to see how we can optimize future campaigns.
Danny Wong is the co-founder of BL Group (Blank Label, Thread Tradition and RE:custom), heading up their marketing initiatives and strategies.