MBA-FPX5012Digit Marketing Plan: Walmart SnackiesCapella Uni, Lecture notes of Accounting

Download MBA-FPX5012Digit Marketing Plan: Walmart SnackiesCapella Uni and more Lecture notes Accounting in PDF only on Docsity! MBA-FPX5012 Digit Marketing Plan: Walmart Snackies Capella University MBA-FPX5012- Marketing Management Business Context Walmart is one of those most recognizable brands across the world, specifically in the United States. It is the largest retailer in the world with over 2.2 million employees across 27 countries (Walmart 2021). Walmart’s 2020’s fiscal year brought in more than $500 billion in revenue. With its “everyday low prices” motto and cost-leadership strategy, Walmart provides a variety of products at low cost without losing value. In 2020, Walmart’s e-commerce division grew 37% from the previous year bringing attention to an opportunity to compete with its biggest competitor Amazon (Walmart 2021). In 2012 Walmart Lab’s launched a snack subscription services called Goodies.co, which sends members themed boxes of 5-8 healthy sample snacks monthly for the flat fee of $7 (Lawler, 2013). Walmart wanted to encourage customers return to the Goodies site to rate the items and buy the full-sized versions. Customers can gain enough points through reviews to redeem for a free box. The boxes are developed by Walmart’s internal tasting lab, which reviews and provides feedback for featured items. After about a year in the beta-testing phase, Walmart Labs shutdown Goodies.co in 2013 citing the launch was merely a test and the customer feedback would be used for future launches (Lawler, 2013). Now relaunched as Snackies, this subscription box will still be priced at $7, less than 4 times of competitors. However, a need to develop and implement a digital marketing strategy as it is strongly recommended that Walmart continues to invest in its e- commerce technologies to further strengthen Snackie’s promotional, pricing and distribution strategies. Situational Analysis Within this situational analysis, we will use a competitive analysis breakdown and SWOT analysis to take a deeper look into Snackies biggest competitors Snacknation/Love with Food. Competitive Analysis Competitors Love with Food- prices start at $7.99-9.99 for 7-9 healthy snack items for their “Tasting” box. Love with Food uses a tiered-pricing strategy as the company features options of more items for a higher price point. Love with Food offers a 3-month, 6-month or annual plans (Nazish, 2020). The company’s differentiation is the partnership with Feeding America to donate 1 meal for every box sold. In 2014, Love with Food’s annual revenue was over $3million (Bokat-Lindell, 2015). Snacknation- offers a 15-item snack box for $26.95 and has also partnered with Feeding America to donate 1 meal for every box sold. The company’s differentiation focuses on giving more items per box thus justifying its higher price point. its most popular competitor Snacknation’s standard box of 15 healthy snacks for $32.95 (Watson, 2016). Products Both companies feature over 5000+ premium and “better-for-you” brands of healthy snacks. Products use real ingredients, organically produced, preservative-free and must pass their 73 Banned Ingredients lists before being sold. Products are packaged in themed-packages depending on the subscription or current promotion. Snack boxes typically include: Chips, crackers, and popcorn Savory jerky, nuts and granola mixes Nutrition bars Healthier sweets Coffee Mugs/ Wine tumblers (themed box) Puzzles/ Cards/ Stress balls (themed box) Competitive Advantage SnackNation’s acquiring of Love with Food in June 2018 has expanded the company’s reach to over 500,000 consumers across 5,000 businesses nationwide. With the acquisition, a combination of SnackNation’s business-to-business (B2B) sales model and Love with Food’s business-to-consumer (B2C) sales model was adapted (YPO, 2020). While SnackNation targets businesses and now remote employees, Love with Food targets individual consumers. Additional advantages include more snack selection, non-snack consumer packaged goods, and enhanced consumer insight capabilities through data collection. Pricing Both companies use a 4-tier pricing strategy in different ways. First, both companies provide different themed boxes with each box varying in number of snacks or items. The consumer has the option of paying a subscription for 1 month, 3-month, 6 month or 12-month order. Love with Food most affordable price package starts at &7.99, while Snackation’s begins at $32.95 and up. This allows the customer to choose which option works best for them. Additionally, both companies provide free shipping. Target Market SnackNation targets small (less than 100 employees) and medium-sized businesses (up to 1000 employees) using their B2B sales method. Specifically, management or personnel in charge of office budgets are targeted. However, after the adaptation of Love with Food’s B2C method, the target market has extended to health-conscious millennials (b. 1981-1996) who want to “snack without the guilt”. With its affordable pricing, Love with Food provides healthier snack options directly to the individual rather than business (Watson, 2016). price guilt-free way of snacking at your own convenience. With groceries accounting for more than 56% of Walmart’s total US sales revenues and a reach of 265 million customers a week, creating a standout digital strategy is key to reach its diverse customers. Snackies Digital Marketing plan will focus on 2 main concerns: 1. Brand Awareness 2. Technology-Data Collection: Consumer Insights In building its brand awareness, Snackies is already backed by the largest retailer in the world, Walmart. However, it must also establish itself outside Walmart to just be known by “Snackies” alone. Social media is the main avenue for creating and establishing brands, especially subscription-box brands. Snackies intends on creating a community of followers among snackers to share their feel-good stories about snacks and their relationship with food, to become more than just another subscription but a lifestyle. Snackies will monitor brand awareness growth by the amount of “likes” and followers across various social media avenues. Like Snacknation and Love with Food’s consumer data collection, Snackies will invest in advanced data collection technology. It will use Walmart’s electronically backed vendor managed inventory (VMI) system, which will allow healthy snack suppliers to be responsible for managing their own inventory by getting real-time feedback as consumers purchase full-size versions of snack samples (Rubin, 2020). The retail link system implemented by Walmart, also allows suppliers to forecast consumer demands by using real-time POS data. Strategy Short-term Snackies marketing and advertising team will focus on promoting healthy snack brands by using social media to build a following across Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. Snacks tend to be associated with happiness and uplifting emotions, so it is important to advertise with this factor in mind. Short video ads and post with hashtags such as “#whatsinthebox?” create buzz and can be shared throughout social media platforms, thus building a snackies community. The marketing team will also focus on using search engine optimization (SEO) words such as organic, healthy snacks, healthy sweets and preservative-free (Muhammad, 2021). These words increase traffic towards a site or brand when people use them while searching. This will be monitored by click-through-rate (CTR) that determines whether keywords are likely to get a user to click your ad. Medium-term “Social media + comments + mentions + respond now (not later) = a relationship.” The marketing team will continue with the short-term tactics in hopes of gaining 100,000 followers on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube within 3 years. For its midterm strategy, Snackies will create emotional content and engage with their consumers across all sites. By using methods such as:  Likes @Mentions  Comments  Click-throughs  Hashtags The combination these methods create conversation between the consumer and the brand. Engagement could be further explored by speedy responses to likes, mentions and comments. The snackies marketing must ensure that the brand responds with positive emotions such as humor. It is extremely important that the consumer be acknowledge in creating a B2C relationship, while growing brand awareness. Usage of email and incentivized surveys will also create opportunities for dialogue. Long-term DATA. As Snackies continues to gain traction with snackers, vendors will be interested in seeing how their products are performing. Engagement methods such as surveys and customer feedback are particularly important for vendors who use the information to improve, discontinue or predict products that consumers will use. Snackies will continue to use VMI for inventory purposes. Transparency with data collection methods will be key as more and more consumers grow increasingly wary of sharing their personal information. A vendor-only business website such be created displaying dashboards that feature product ranking and rating, units ordered per transaction, amongst other valuable metrics. Furthermore, the snackies marketing team should continue to study and learn from competitors, while staying in the loop with upcoming digital trends and changes in e-commerce technologies. A customer-engagement team or appointed engagement service should be established to ensure prompt responses to customer needs including questions, comments and feedback. Tactics The first tactic the marketing team will focus on expanding the reach of posts and content across all social media sites. Reach refers to the number of people who saw a post or content (Muhammad, 2021). This is especially important as Snackies will primarily be promoted through Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in-part with Walmart.com’s website. As the brand gains followers, the team’s reach goal is 25% (25,000) within 1 year of launch across all 3 sites. Viral reach which is “spread of mouth” awareness, is likely to be the major push for the brand. Snackies will look to partner with the Board of Education to further reach students across the US who need healthy snack alternatives when studying. Sponsoring and partnering on a national level will convert into sales and a household name. The second tactic is the classic door-to-door sales with a twist. Snackies marketing team will have several pop-events with a snack truck, popping up at locations such as universities, city parks, festivals and local neighborhood around the county. Not only does this promote brand awareness but health awareness which is Snackies mission. Snackies is all about creating a community of healthy snackers, bringing health awareness and encouraging guilt-free snacking. Pop-events give consumers a sneak-peek at the brand and its products while taking the opportunity to promote it as well. Customers will get discounts, “swag gear” featuring logos, pins, stickers, school supplies and get to sample some healthy snacks. Actions Reach ● brand following 25K in year 1 ● Conversion rate of 10% by year 3 ● Usage of hashtags “Whatsinthebox?” and SEO words ● different content and ads across sites to see what people respond to ● social media engagement team responds to comments within 24-48hrs ● building influencer relationships ● find collaborators Pop-Up Events ● Branded Snackies Food Truck ● Events located around schools, corporations, festivals ● Field Marketing team promotion: flyers, word-of-mouth, posts/ videos ● Swag bags- snacks and food supplies ● Snackies Ambassadors who promote healthy snacking ● 21% first box promo code at event giveaway Data Collection Develop website just for vendors to monitor sales and feedback Upgrade Walmart’s VMI technology to provide real-time product data Controls The following metrics will be monitored by the marketing team and ensure Snackies meets objectives. The metrics also create an opportunity to see what is and isn’t beneficial in terms of the digital marketing strategies and tactics (Muhammad, 2021). ● Google Search- using Total Site Traffic metric to measure site visits totaling from social media, SEO searches, site or ad referrals. Goal is to increase site traffic by 5% 3rd quarter of year 1. ● Cost-per-conversion (CPC) rate measures the total cost of digital marketing campaign vs sales conversion. Annual marketing budget set at $5 million. Conversion is set for 10% by year 3. ● Click-through-rate measures the amount of people that watch the ad and click through to view the website. Monitored monthly, goal is 10%. ● Engagement rate-monthly increase of 2-4% across platforms ● Growth- measure how many followers/subscribers you currently have or have lost during a time frame. Goal is to reach 25k followers/subscribers in year 1 across all 3 platforms.