Just like in many small companies where people wear many hats, I found myself doing just that at The Sports Zone. During my time working there my responsibilities included, but were not limited to: designing promotional materials, managing social media, managing e-commerce site, and photographing products. There were a lot of moving pieces I had to manage but I saw every new venture as an opportunity to add to my repertoire. As the go to person for all things digital from 2013 until departure in 2017, my primary focus was to create and manage content for the newly launched e-commerce site and then share all that content through email marketing and social media.
E-COMMERCE SITE
In the early stages the team worked extensively to photograph and edit product hero images to be uploaded and ready for launch. After working through glitches with the web agency, it was time to get people to the site. This part was the most challenging since this was all new to me. To kick things off I began to research how other online retailers did their graphics, the way they displayed products, how they use fonts, in the end I bookmarked sites, subscribed to rss feeds and newsletters from an array of retailers that had a similar target audience. With many places to draw inspiration from I began to create eye catching content with a clear call-to-action featuring the latest products and promotions. To my luck there was already an existing customer e-mail database and social media following to broadcast all content to begin a steady flow of traffic.
E-NEWSLETTER
I quickly had to get familiar with the ins and outs of Bronto, an email marketing platform. At that time, with a reach of 64k email addresses, I started sending out one email per week. Soon after, it increased to two weekly emails with the exception of holidays sales events. The emails were broken down into two versions. The first one was a new releases email which featured the shoes of that week with color coordinated apparel and accessories for the upsale. The second one was a combination of the new releases as a reminder and all the current hero banners created for the e-commerce site for that week.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook played a big part in spreading the word and driving traffic to the site. As one of the FB page’s managers I was tasked with posting all the content that I created for the ecommerce site onto FB. All the graphics were adapted to a 1:1 format to be easily shared on Instagram as well. With the help of the new graphic content and targeted ads our audience grew overtime from 47k to a total reach of 142k fans.
CONTENT CREATION
The process of creating content from product to product varied a lot. While a few brands provided access to promotional material and some showcased it on their websites others did not have any. With big brands that had promotional materials, my approach was to work off of those existing graphics to maintain aesthetic true to each brand. With the small private labels I had a lot of freedom since they did not have promotional graphics for their products. So my approach was to find a common theme, use basic design elements or graphical elements found in the product itself. My graphics can be broken down into three main components backdrop, product hero, and text + logo.
This is an example of using elements found in the product itself. After taking flat lay photos of the t-shirt, I cut out the diamond at the bottom and used it as the background, placed the product hero image over the diamond allowing shining rays to show, and then used the text to bring it all together.
