Marketing Plan
Positioning Strategy
The target audience of Zappos is women and men of young adult age with an average income. To not lose current customers and attract new ones, it is necessary to connect them with the brand philosophy and inform them about the convenience of the Zappos service. Potential buyers should appreciate Zappos’ ethics of helping the customer and providing the best possible online shopping experience. Comfort and customer focus should be factors that help overcome the most common buyer persona challenges.
The most critical challenges of the brand’s buyer persona are the lack of a convenient and diversified search, difficulty placing and paying for an order, an extended stay, and difficulties processing a return. The goal is to buy fashionable shoes and accessories that stand out from the crowd and fit the budget of the middle class. The website can address potential customers’ concerns by providing a comfortable return policy and fast shipping. In addition, the site should have a convenient system for searching and filtering products by various parameters – size, color, style, season, heel height, etc. The registration system on the site should be simple and fast, with a minimum number of required fields to fill out. On any site page, there should be access to the brand-based customer support service, which works around the clock. This can be offered via phone line or live messenger service.
Acquisition Channels
Since Zappos is an online platform, interactive social networks are the essential acquisition channels. Moreover, interactive platforms are more effective in attracting customers than other marketing methods (Majid, 2020). It is convenient to advertise shoes, accessories, and clothes through visual channels and use networks such as Instagram, Pinterest, and the brand’s blog. Clients aged 20 to 35 actively use these sites and appreciate the opportunity to communicate directly with their favorite company. In turn, the business receives quick feedback on customers’ needs and challenges (Visser & Kloos, 2021). Blogging can connect with a brand’s older audience, who like to get more in-depth information in article format.
Social networks that communicate with customers and their support should become a priority. Social media content marketing is the most efficient way to spend marketing resources. It combines a relatively low cost with the best results in attracting new customers (Majid, 2020). Furthermore, the data obtained in interactive marketing helps to develop a different advertising strategy. It will allow Zappos to create a more effective development plan for the coming year.
Tools and Technology
A marketing information system uses three essential elements: people, machines, and methods. These fundamental elements have the following qualities: People: for there to be data, there must be people to provide it. This is especially useful when artificial intelligence systems make advertising decisions based on your requirements or needs. The sales and marketing software that best suits the needs of our team is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation software with features for email marketing, lead scoring, web analytics, a CRM platform, and a live chat messaging platform called Conversations (ActiveCampaign, 2022).
Nowadays, any marketing team should use marketing automation tools. Services such as Hubspot or Marketo collect information about potential customers and the communication channels they operate. The software will help you understand what links people from the target group follow, what keywords they are looking for, and what social media profiles they interact with. Zappos is a highly customer-focused brand and must communicate with audiences across multiple platforms (Aggarwal et al., 2022). Therefore, using a CMS for the marketing team is necessary to adhere to a unified marketing strategy (Aggarwal et al., 2022). Zappos can use WordPress.org as the platform is highly flexible and gives marketers the freedom to be creative. Such a system will allow content managers and copywriters to work simultaneously but in different directions. There is no need to use CMS additional blogging software because the service will enable marketers to fill various sites with content at once, including a website, blog, and social networks.
References
ActiveCampaign. (2022). Platform. Web.
Aggarwal, V., Deeksha, S. S., Sharma, K., & Vaishali. (2022). Fashion e-commerce using CMS. In AIP Conference Proceedings, 2393 (1), 020031. AIP Publishing LLC. Web.
Majid, K. A. (2020). Effect of interactive marketing channels on service customer acquisition. Journal of Services Marketing, 35(3), 299-311. Web.
Visser, M., & Kloos, M. (2021). Digital Marketing Fundamentals. Routledge.