a picture is worth… you get it

I wrote an article a few weeks ago, precisely on August 5th, called More Marketing Advice From A Non-Guru Unafraid to Fail. In that article I began discussing PR and marketing as it dealt with my writing and sneaker company. I followed that article up with information added to the ARCH Facebook page. What is all of this about? If you took the time to read the More Marketing article then you know I finally figured out a method to begin getting the brand seen by more people and to begin selling shoes to people outside of the circle of people who typically support me. Well, I am kind of stretching the truth here, people who know you don’t really support you, but they will talk like they will. Sometimes I think people have the best intentions, but maybe life just gets in the way when it comes to actually pulling the trigger on buying something from you (Yep, I’m going to keep telling myself this one).

What I discussed before is that in order for a new company to have any chance at all of being successful, the brand has to sell to people that aren’t familiar with you. The brand has to reach the shopping market, or the people who are looking to buy something similar but haven’t made up their mind yet. I guess the brand can do this locally. I have always said that you conquer your region first, but the funny thing is with clothing or items that are big purchases (meaning over 30 dollars) when people are face to face with you and know you they just don’t tend to take you very seriously. Especially in regard to Memphis where I am based. This is a Nike town and with 2 different Nike stores, people can buy a Nike shoe for the same price as one of my shoes since the stores are discounted so heavily. This makes it almost impossible to sell shoes here. Back to what I was saying, you have to reach the market. I stated that the best way to do this was by attending a trade show. However, I knew that financially this was not a possibility for me, so I had to develop another idea.  I never really specified what I would do exactly, but in short this is what I did. I utilized my online sneaker store as a launch pad and launched my shoes through one of the biggest online shopping sites in the world: Amazon.com.

The steps to getting to this point were not cheap though. I had to first become a a GSN member which allowed me to create my own internationally recognized UPC codes. This allowed me to apply as a brand on Amazon. You can now go to shoes and look under the A section and ARCH shows up as a brand. This is huge considering I do not get enough traffic on my site to actually have an e-commerce presence. After I was able to list my shoes on Amazon and make them able to be searched through keywords and tags in the listing system, I finally settled on utilizing the Ad program through Amazon. The Campaign manager has been an amazing tool and I’ve been posting the stats for the last month. I began running the campaing on July 30th and 31st. The campaign completed on August 30 and 31st. Below is the culmination of the advertising campaing for 1 month. Now if you are business person then you are fully aware that it takes at least 3 months to really see the benefits of a campaign. Well, it used to take that long. Now however, things can go viral overnight and you can actually see growth immediately. This did not happen for me, but the numbers are very inspiring. Enough of that, it’s time to give you what you came for.

Two campaigns: ARCH Casual and ARCH Running from July 30-31 to Aug. 30-31

ARCH Casual featuring The Allen casual shoe in three colors.
Number of ads: 12
Impressions: 354,935
Clicks: 736
CTR: .21%
Total Spend: $21.37
Average CPC: .03 cents
Orders placed through the ads: 1
Product Sales: 60.00
Conversion Rate: .14%

ARCH Running featuring the CG097II running shoe in 4 colors
Number of ads: 24
Impressions: 1,207,254
Clicks: 1767
CTR: .15%
Total Spend: $38.95
Average CPC: .02 cents
Orders placed through the ads: 14
Product Sales: 499.91
Conversion Rate: .74%

Okay so what do all of the numbers up there mean? Consider this, ARCH is an unknown clothing/footwear company. Outside of two really good articles I have never had people give me thousands of dollars or anyone help me to really build this company. I haven’t had any articles in local newspapers and when I post information about ARCH people that know me (except for my man Ant G.!) don’t really share the information with people they know. In general, I was able to implement a marketing plan for August without a budget, without a photo shoot or without real ad copy, and I was able to convert 38.95 and 21.37 for two different campaigns into 560.00 in sales. While this doesn’t pay the rent, as a small company attempting to establish itself, this is an incredible, simply amazing return on investment! What does this mean for you reading this? It means that I am going to keep plugging away with this ad campaign and continue to give you feedback on the growth of the company. It also means that you have a small guide for possibly working on your own dream. I actually think what I am doing will work for writers or clothing companies, or any company looking to sell. I had a lot of fun watching this whole process. Now this does not account for shoes sold outside of the ad program, that is another story and the money for that actually almost matches the total for both campaigns. Very exciting stuff! As always, I hope you enjoyed reading this and I most certainly am interested in getting responses and feedback.

Stay Motivated!

Chris B.