How small boutiques have the opportunity to level the playing field with Social Media. Being small means that you can leverage free social media tools just like the big brands and designers without hurting your marketing budget. D’babetta started working with Zaraz Collection Chicago on a campaign to build brand awareness within the great shopping corridor of Wicker Park, more specifically Division Street.

Identify which tools will work for you
Our plan was to start with Facebook, clean up the boutiques website, and lead to a more consistant message from the store. Terez of D’Babetta worked directly with the owner Heidy to gain traction and build a community with the current Facebook fan base. Terez would also tweet the updates from facebook to her already vast fashion network to further push the brand name within the city. The idea of using twitter for the boutique itself would be a very time consuming task. Twitter is a great amplification tool for a brand with a built in network/customer base.

Twitter is a tool that has great potential to build engagement with a brand, but would not work for this project. So we decided to focus on Facebook. The store had enough fan page likes and customers who commented pretty frequently on new items. The boutique was not using this powerful tool to the best of its ability. So D’Babetta took over the fan page and started updating and engaging with fans. We posted pictures of new products and included some short blog posts on how to best to utilize the boutiques’ products for the season.

There was video created from Photos taken at the Boutique leading up to our Bridal 101 event. The better updated photography grabbed more attention on the fan page. Customers were commenting and liking the new photo albums going up each week. This increased impressions 300% over previous months.

Why your website matters
We also cleaned up their boutiques splash page website. A large part of your boutique is its online presence. It often times becomes just as important as your in store presence. You may believe that no one is watching, but the truth is there may people who just see you sign driving or walking by and they will want investigate more on who and what you do. The splash page had out of date information and needed some clarity. While building your brand if you aren’t using your website to create constant updates then using Facebook is a good place to start building a community around your products/services. You don’t want to declare something is “coming soon” on your site when you don’t have a clearly defined date of delivery. Customers will understand you are a small brand, but are not be understanding if they feel you are being dishonest about what you can offer.

Why offline tools should extend online themes
The owner Heidy was also using a plugger to advertise to customers who made purchases as a bag stuffer. The insert needed a rework. It didn’t have clarity. Heidy is the owner of two vastly different boutiques. The other store was for a completely different crowd. It was suburban, it trended younger, and it already had a very distinct voice and target customer. When spending money on a tangible printed items you need to make sure you are using the prime real estate of that printed material wisely. The information has to be instantly relevant to the reader and reflective of your brand perfectly. The information for both stores was on the insert. D’Babetta explained that the customer wanted only the information regarding the store they were buying from. The crowd in Wicker Park would not travel to the other store in the Southern Suburbs. So the information for this customer was irrelevant.

The Promotional video for Zaraz Collection Chicago

All Photography taken by Terez Baskin