Social Media Ad Strategy: The Rise of Princess Polly: Social Media Marketing

A social media ad strategy is the practice of using social media channels to sell or promote a brand, product, or service. Whether you own a large or small business, social media advertising is essential if you want to stand out from the crowd, gain content views, and increase sales. We live in a time where all businesses, no matter the size, can reach and influence an audience effectively if they are using the right social media ad strategy so it’s time for brands to begin putting their money where their consumers are. Paid social advertising is the most certain way to drive traffic and sales from the start. Social media ad spends in the United States in annually billions of dollars and only increase as the years go on. Millennials are being influenced by social media ads and then deciding on their purchasing decisions, specifically as of 2021, 75% of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials.

Now more than ever is the perfect time to create a social media ad strategy for your business. 

Here is a 7 step checklist to follow:

1. Set goals that make sense for your business
2. Take time to research your target audience
3. Establish your most important metrics and KPIs
4. Create (and curate) engaging social content
5. Make your social presence as timely as possible
6. Assess what’s working, what isn’t and how to keep improving
7. Bring other departments into the mix

Every business’s social media ad strategy goal is to generate traffic, drive engagement, build brand loyalty, and then channel everything into successful conversions. Both consumer engagement and conversion are critical components of any business, but it is crucial to create a primary goal and prioritize one over the other. It’s important to choose one of these components to focus on so businesses can spend time, resources, and efforts efficiently. Raising the conversion rate means increasing revenue and traffic per visitor, which works more as a short-term strategy. Customer engagement means your audience is increasing exponentially, which works well as a long-term strategy. If you keep a consistent conversion rate while increasing engagement at the same time it will still lead to more revenue. Therefore engagement should be the focus, despite the fact it demands a lot more effort but in terms of execution it will pay off.

4 ways to boost customer engagement:

• Creating a seamless experience
• Develop community bond
• Reward repeat buyers
• Build a personal connection

Princess Polly, an Australian-based online fashion boutique was founded in 2005 and opened online in the US in 2019. The rise of social media coincided with the rise of the brand. Princess Polly’s rise to success came mostly from their expansion of leaning into social media. In 2010 the owners decided to focus on their online strategy because their online sales were higher than their physical store sales. Before they blew up their online strategy was completely different as well as the brand. In 2010 they put a lot of money into reconstructing their entire website. 

Princess Polly then expanded to numerous communication channels. They continued to develop consumer-driven marketing strategies in order to reach their customers, they used a separate solution provider for each channel. The fast-growing brand paired with their need to accommodate their target audience (Gen Z) prompted their pursuit of strategic eCommerce technology capable of unifying the customer journey.

• Princess Polly puts money into paying influencers to promote their brand. Influencer marketing is still cheaper for a brand than traditional marketing. They also have partnerships with style savvy content creators. 

• Princess Polly also allows people to sign up for “Polly mail” where they can sign up and receive 10% off their first offer and from there on subscribers will receive an email every morning that are attention grabbing and include a clear call to action. These emails can become more targeted for each person the more you look on the site and click on items, for example sending product recommendations.

•  Princess Polly also pays to be featured on Google when people search specific words correlated to their brand.

• Princess Polly is assisted by Simplr to provide a 24/7 human-staffed live chat. By having a fully-staffed chat channel the brand is able to reach for customers at a faster pace.

• Princess Polly launched SMS marketing with the platform Yotpo, which is an integrated e-commerce marketing platform that assists businesses in developing connected marketing strategies. The Yotpo platform allowed the brand to integrate reviews and visual user-generated content into its e-commerce site.

All of these help Princess Polly deliver an experience that drives their engagement and conversion.