Altar'd State is a women's fashion retailer with 80+ stores in the United States and an eCommerce website. The brand constantly strives to contribute to the world around them, whether it's with charitable donations, positive messages in their stores or enabling store associates to volunteer in their community. The brand's mission to "Stand Out for Good" is their strongest point of differentiation among their competitors in the fashion space.
Altar'd State came to us looking to build a social media strategy that aligned to their overall business and marketing goals. Their mission is to build a strategic and effective presence on digital and traditional networks, centered around the target consumer and their shopping habits. To support this mission, we developed three social media objectives 1) Build awareness among our target audience 2) Grow affinity for Altar'd State by creating deep connections with our audience and 3) Activate ambassadors, which includes both the target audience and employees, to advocate on behalf of the brand.
Altar'd State came to us looking to build a social media strategy that aligned to their overall business and marketing goals. Their mission is to build a strategic and effective presence on digital and traditional networks, centered around the target consumer and their shopping habits. To support this mission, we developed three social media objectives 1) Build awareness among our target audience 2) Grow affinity for Altar'd State by creating deep connections with our audience and 3) Activate ambassadors, which includes both the target audience and employees, to advocate on behalf of the brand.
AUDIENCE TARGETING
We take a 'people' first approach with our social strategies. We built a detailed persona, based on the demographics and psycho-graphics of our audience (female early 20's to early 30's). Based on data from our research partners, we were able to identify the channels where she is most engaged: Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
CONTENT CREATION
To grow affinity for Altar'd State, we needed to develop content that created a shared connection between the brand and our audience. Our content aligned to three pillars: 1) Charity & Faith 2) People & Culture 3) Store Experience & Fashion. We created 40+ pieces of social content per week. In addition to the ongoing content, we created series focused around holidays and promotions, such as Christmas, Semi-Annual Sale and National Day of Prayer. We created Canvas ads to support Christmas and Spring, their biggest seasons. We utilized Facebook and Instagram Live throughout Cyber Monday with five video segments promoting the season. Each Live video was followed by product tagged photo albums, so our fans could easily shop what they just previewed.
COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
To foster a relationship with our fans we were in the channels throughout the day engaging with comments. We helped them find products, be their fashion consultant and listened to their prayer requests. We relayed the feedback from our audience to the larger internal team to give them insight into what was and wasn't working to help inform overall marketing and business decisions.
ACTIVATING AMBASSADORS
Altar'd State has passionate fans and employees. We knew it was important to leverage them to further gain awareness of the brand and attract new customers. Given this insight, we encouraged user-generated content through social programs and integrated UGC into our content mix regularly. The second piece of our strategy was to implement influencer programs. During key seasons, we worked with influencers who aligned with the Altar'd State brand to support our messages and drive sales.
AD UNITS & PLACEMENTS
Our paid media strategy supported our primary channels and evergreen ad units included link posts, dynamic ads and shoppable posts that integrate the product catalog. In addition to these units, we tested new ad units as they launched. We noticed that our Instagram Stories were gaining significant traction, so we started promoting Stories. Driving foot traffic was a high priority so we geo-targeted in-store traffic ads and implemented offline conversion tracking to help quantify the ROI.
Utilizing this strategy, we were successful in driving a significant amount of socially-attributed sales between January 2018 – December 2018:
In addition to driving revenue-based objectives, the social strategy was effective in garnering impressions and broadening awareness of the brand 11% year-over-year. The community also became heavily engaged with social content generating millions of interactions with the brand.
content, including Live videos during peak sale times,
