As the largest retailer in America, embracing diversity and fostering a culture of inclusion is at the core of Walmart’s brand philosophy “Live Better.” Making good on that promise begins with reflecting the diverse communities they serve and ensuring that they can offer a better life for all. Walmart briefed us on wanting to support their Women-focused platform, “Celebrate Her,” for International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month.
Though Walmart carries a vast assortment of products, it can be difficult for suppliers and smaller brands to break through. In addition, many customers are unaware of Walmart’s women-owned/diverse-owned product offerings or their annual Open Call event where entrepreneurs can pitch their products to be sold in Walmart stores. Walmart was aiming to build long-term brand affinity with their female customers and create deeper, more emotional relevance with the community, so they tasked PubW to find a never-been-done-before opportunity to amplify women trailblazers. We needed a plan to communicate with Walmart’s female customers as well as an audience of current and future entrepreneurs who could be the future suppliers within Walmart. Our objective:
GET Gen-Z and Millennial women who are burnt out by striving for #girlboss perfection and who are putting themselves first, breaking molds, and defying gendered and cultural norms
TO Feel that Walmart supports women's purpose as much as their play and is deeply committed to helping them thrive every day
BY Generating momentum for women and their platforms to continue to diversify their presence online and on the shelves
How did you bring your project to life? Describe your plan of action, the execution and key features. Tell us about challenges you faced and overcame along the way. This is your opportunity to share how your work is unique.
As we assessed opportunities and partners in the marketplace, one stood out as an excellent new endeavor we could build upon, EBONY SheEO: Business Disrupters, spotlighting diverse talent and empowering women to inspire others. EBONY Media Group is one of the most influential Black-owned media companies in the world, and with this partnership, we’d be teaming up two entities to support each other's commitment to amplifying Black voices and celebrating women through a newly made-for-Walmart content series.
We wanted to take the program further. Where we could have stopped at EBONY telling the stories of only the entrepreneurs and their brands, we expanded to also include Walmart employees to do an Executive Q&A and highlight the disrupters within Walmart who are also paving the way in the corporate world. This allowed our program to engage the customer, the employee, and the supplier all in one campaign.
We shifted our traditional tactics to integrate, for example, leaning into LinkedIn for social posts in addition to other larger platforms like Meta, and making the content available in both video and podcast formats to ensure we’re reaching our target audience groups. To tie the series episodes together we included a trailblazing influencer host, Marsai Martin (an award-winning Actress, CEO, and the youngest person to ever produce a movie). We included Founders who represented an array of different products in Walmart to diversify the stories being told and maybe most impactfully, we extended the program beyond Women’s History Month through to Black Business Month in August to maintain our momentum in supporting women year-round.
Our media strategy included a mix of branded content creation, display banners, editorial articles, newsletter inclusions, influencers, and social. We also established a central SheEO hub on Ebony.com that included a resource center for entrepreneurs and additional information on participating in Walmart’s annual Open Call event.
We started with the production of the interviews for the content series that were accompanied by a series of teasers, ‘In Case You Missed It’ recaps, and traffic drivers via newsletter inclusions and paid social. The founders and the host made posts promoting the series on social and EBONY also created additional editorial articles that featured the Founders’ products for additional visibility. We had to work across various teams in Walmart to coordinate across creative, media, and corporate affairs for execution of the various program components, continuing to evaluate results for optimizations along the way.
With the SheEO Business Disrupters program, we succeeded in driving greater awareness for 6 SheEOs and their products within Walmart and 2 Walmart Executives achieving over 27M Impressions across content and traffic driver elements with over 200K engagements to date.
Throughout the course of the campaign, we made some of the following optimizations as we evaluated content data performance:
Added LinkedIn posts given the subject matter and to be able to engage directly with the founders and business community on a rising creator platform
Extended the campaign beyond Women’s History Month and into Black Business Month: this gave us continued relevancy and momentum to promote the content. This was also when we conducted our Executive Q&A program extension.
EBONY pitched the SheEOs’ stories and content to additional press outlets once the Business Disrupters series was released: this led to additional press pickup and PR opportunities for the featured SheEOs as well as mentions of the program online and on TV
Added the episodes to YouTube to reach audiences searching for business content on all major platforms
Leveraged paid social amplification and additional creative assets to drive viewership across different platforms
