Esteban Echeverry

Tempo's Social Media Marketing

Introduction

Today's world is more interconnected than ever. Not only we have access to real time information from all around the world but also the effects of transnational commerce have led us to live in a "global village" (thomas, 2017). In their road to success, companies must now understand the different idiosyncrasies of their target customer bases, and the mechanisms they use to establish a relationship with the brands of their preference. In this document, we will outline the digital and social media strategy that Tempos, a new UK based Software as a Service (SaaS) company operating in the Ecommerce Platform Industry, should apply to win a place in its customers minds and hearts. First, we will describe the current situation of the business, outline its competitive landscape, and describe its communication objectives. Then, we will propose a digital & social media strategy implementation plan that is aligned with the brand value proposition and with its envisioned growth intentions (levie, 2013).

Ecommerce Platforms: Understanding the Business

What is the Company's Value Proposition?

Tempos is an Ecommerce Platform solution. The system is currently under development but it doesn't mean that a sound digital and social media strategy cannot be elaborated. On the contrary, as part of its broader marketing plan, counting with concrete guidelines on how to manage the relationship of its brand with its stakeholders might facilitate its launch in the UK market, significantly influencing its subsequent growth roadmap. As exposed by (li, 2020), our aim should be to build valuable and long-term relationships with our customers by engaging with them in meaningful social interactions.

The platform's unique value proposition is to provide an streamlined user experience for makers, so that they can sell, produce and deliver their products and services in an integrated way. As ecommerce becomes more pervasive in the UK, representing 38% of retail sales during 2021 (emarketer, 2021), it is important to foster the inclusion of all the sectors of society in the new digital market. Tempo's mission is to become the best ally of those who "make" and that claim more participation in the national economy (thomas, 2020). Its goal is to ease the commercialization of locally produced solutions and propitiate a more equitable and sustainable economic landscape.

Tempos's Competitors

Tempos's Business Model Canvas

Which are the Incumbent Competitors?

In the UK, the ecommerce platform industry is moderately concentrated with 3 firms sharing 61% of the market, albeit none of them with more than 25% (statista, 2022a). However, British consumers can still choose from more than a hundred ecommerce solutions (ep, 2021), which reveals there is appetite for differentiation. In fact, the big players, despite having similar offerings that cover basic ecommerce functionality at their lower service tiers, also start to specialize at premium levels. While WooCommerce exalts convenience by capitalizing on its enhanced integration with Wordpress, which is the world's most popular website builder, Wix tries to reach out to those users who are more interested in simplicity and good design.

When it comes to depth of functionality, however, Shopify's offering is the most complete, having vertically integrated features to easily manage payments, deliveries and financing. Still, the platform is only concentrated in online sales, leaving up to the user the responsibility of managing every order's fulfillment. For instance, manufacturers using Shopify as their ecommerce platform would have to complement their toolset with fully-fledged material resource planning (MRP) solutions like Katana (katana, 2022), incurring in additional costs and data integration complexities. Conventional retailers might be satisfied with the capabilities offered by the incumbent ecommerce platforms, but those carrying out transformative activities probably don't feel the same way.

Standing on its value proposition of being an ecommerce platform for makers, Tempos will differentiate by streamlining make-to-order workflows and by creating strong partnerships with the makers community. The product will boost the application of best practices in production planing, job scheduling and inventory management in those businesses generating incremental value through the transformation of resources collected from multiple origins. Moreover, end users will perceive that they are buying from a "maker" when they use Tempos. For instance, a feature called "Tempos Places" will use virtual reality to provide every kind of business with a 3D "landing place" [^2] to showcase their product and services on sale.

Tempos Places Concept

NOTE

*Images taken for reference from https://sketchfab.com/

**In a similar fashion to what Mozilla does with its *"hubs"* platform. (mozilla, 2022) In recent years, the web has evolved strong capabilities in virtual and augmented reality AR/VR through the hands of Google, Microsoft and Meta, making it easier than ever to create 3D environments with the use of traditional development tools. That trend is expected to continue in the years to come.

Which are the Company's Strategic Objectives?

Considering that Tempos is still a product under development, one of its management main objectives is to create the necessary awareness in the UK market to start gaining adoption and sales traction. According to (felix, 2017), companies can define proactive social objectives such as improving brand image or incrementing user relatedness with the firm, or reactive objectives such as boosting their understanding about their customers by monitoring and analyzing their conversations. In the case of Tempos, both of such objectives should be pursued, the former to spread brand recognition and the latter to gather valuable feedback for product improvement.

To asses the strategy's creation of value, correlating the revenues generated in one period with its corresponding expenditures in social media marketing is not only desirable, but required, as the company might be initially operating on a tight budget. Hence, monitoring the company's customer acquisition and retention costs (CAC, CRC) and its customer lifetime value (CLV) is very significant, because they could have a direct impact on the company's valuation (livne, 2011). But the ultimate objective to generate long-term value, albeit difficult to quantify, should be to establish strong reciprocity bonds with all the company's stakeholders, to find a place not only in their minds, but also in their hearts.

The Social Media Plan: In Search of Long-term Value

What are the Customer's Needs and Wants?

In the United Kingdom, there are currently 5.6 million businesses in operation (statista, 2021a), almost 10% of them pertaining to the wholesale and retail sector (statista, 2021b). Certainly, as an ecommerce platform, those are some of the companies Tempos is interested in serving. As previously outlined, however, competition in that sector is already mature, so it would be a wiser decision for Tempos to approach first the currently underrepresented industries on the ecommerce landscape. If we consider the businesses that perform transformative operations and require low capital investments (e.g. Professional Services, Food Service Activities, Small Manufacturing), there are potentially 2.5 million companies [^3] that could be interested in a tool like Tempos.

UK businesses by sector - 2021

Makers addressable market in the UK

Note

This metric includes the industries of Professional, Scientific and Technical Activities; Administrative and Support Service Activities; Other Service Activities; Transportation and Storage; Manufacturing; Accommodation and Food Service Activities; and Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing.

As a preliminary step of building our social media strategy, we must develop a adequate understanding about the counterparts of our interventions. Throughout this document we have used the term "makers" several times. Almost a decade ago, in his "Maker Movement Manifesto", (hatch, 2013) stated that "There is something unique about making physical things. These things are like little pieces of us and seem to embody portions of our souls." to describe the ethos of such community. However, Tempos aims to generalize such definition and extend it to all those people that relate to the "maker" attitude, disregarding if the outcome of their work is a service, document or digital asset. Its goal is to encourage everybody to be driven by their passion, make with dexterity, and share with the world.

Our strategy then will be directed to those "maker" organizations who are ready to trade their creations with their customers through integrated tooling to coordinate their operations and deliver their products. These will be companies exploring their Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) (marr, 2022) opportunities, and Tempos will be there to facilitate their transformation. Moreover, strong community bonds should be created with other stakeholders participating in the value generation process, such as the 3D "places" designers (which are "makers" themselves) or potential financial investors who might resonate with Tempos's value proposition of lowering the bar for commercializing original creations.

The Social Media Strategy Channels: Influence, Community & Content

According to (li, 2020), businesses wanting to involve their customers in their value generation process should look for tools that allow them to implement a social monitoring strategy to listen to them and respond to their needs. Thus, besides the conventional one-way channels such as email campaigns or web publications, channels that allow for frictionless Customer-initiated two-way interactions should also be deployed. Commenting systems like Disqus (spilka, 2020) could be used to enable interaction about what the company publishes, and forum platforms like Discourse (woods, 2020) could be used to foster the consolidation of a collaborative community and welcome feedback to keep on improving the product.

To quickly create brand and product awareness, advertising through social media platforms should be carried out. To pick among them, understanding their demographics and matching them to our audience's interests must be our guiding star (forbes, 2019). In the United Kingdom, Facebook and Instagram are the most used social networks, with 73.5% and 56.3% of the people, respectively, claiming to use them at least on a monthly basis (statista, 2022b). Meanwhile, YouTube is virtually used by everybody in the country over the same period (statista, 2022c). Their strong adoption make them the most suitable for our social media campaigns, especially because they target a more mature audience with up to 41% of their users being older than 35 years (statista, 2022d) (statista, 2022e) [^4].

Tempos Digital & Social Media Strategy Channels

Note

In contrast to platforms like TikTok where only 24.1% of their users are older than 35 years (statista, 2022f). As only 9% of the business owners in the UK are younger than 35 years old (startups, 2022), social networks who serve mainly younger audiences are not very attractive for companies with SaaS offerings.

The content of Tempo's communication assets ought to be aligned with the strategic objective of differentiating from the competition by being an ecommerce platform tailored for "makers". To accomplish that, it would be useful to count with the aid of influencers covering areas like manufacturing, cooking, art, electronics, robotics, carpentry, fashion, and in general any activity that represents the "maker" identity and culture (oxman, 2015). Those having a follower count ranging from 10,000 to 50,000 people (i.e. micro-influencers), should be preferred, as the closeness to their audience make them 60% more effective at creating user engagement (ehlers, 2022). Albeit from different perspectives, all of them should replicate the common underlying message of Tempos being the best tool to commercialize their creations.

Evaluating Success: Monitoring & Learning Mechanisms

It is outside the scope of this document to display a fully detailed financial plan for our marketing campaigns and social media interventions. However, it is important to at least keep in check the per user economics [^5] of the costs needed to acquire and retain a customer, versus how much value we might expect from her. Likewise, the key performance indicators of our strategy should be monitored at a channel and even campaign basis, with some of them prioritizing reach and brand awareness, while for instance others focusing on growth, engagement and conversion (dashthis, 2020).

Tempos's Social Media ROI Schematic

Tempos Social Media ROI Schematic

Note

As a matter of example, if we consider a monthly subscription price of $15 (which is lower than the competition's), over 5 years each customer will yield $900 in revenue for the company. If we subtract the customer acquisition costs, that on average ascend to approximately $200 for SaaS companies (cavdar, 2022), and deduct as well the retention costs which more or less are a fifth of those incurred on the acquisition (i.e. $40) (wertz, 2022), we arrive to a return on investment (ROI) of our social media interventions of $640 or 267%. Again, these values are only stated here for reference and the financial viability of every campaign should be monitored individually.

In terms of organization, the exact size and shape of the team will vary as the company matures and grow. However, management should pay special attention to, alongside the execution of its advertising plans, nurture a reciprocal relationship with its user communities and external advocates (legault, 2016) (lua, 2022). In case of the latter, it is crucial to identify those influential individuals or institutions in the social network that are highly related to the makers audience Tempos aims to captivate. That, to make efficient use of the resources available to invest in influencers, by capitalizing on the "majority illusion" created by their shared connections (lerman, 2016).

Tempos Social Media Organization

Finally, it should be taken into account that a well managed social media strategy is an iterative process that requires continuous learning and experimentation. Hence, no matter how thoroughly our plans have been designed, there are always risks of not achieving the expected results or the appearance of totally unexpected events (keenan, 2020). Thus, it is crucial to establish a formal risk management policy describing the evaluation criteria, security controls and audit mechanisms that should be used by the company to ensure the fulfillment of its digital and social media strategic objectives (khoros, 2018).

Conclusion

We went through the value proposition and competitive landscape of a new ecommerce platform solution that is currently under development, and that aims to give special coverage to the makers community. Based on the understanding of the company's future objectives of generating incremental brand awareness and business growth, a social media strategy plan was created. Instead of being overly specific on the set of actions that should be undertaken at an operational level, the proposed plan defines a long-term social vision, a group of communication mechanisms, and an organizational structure that should be adopted by the company to fulfill its business and social goals. This upon the premise that managing social media is an exercise of continuous learning, risk mitigation and permanent transformation.

References