Footwear Insight

CROWDSOURCE By Jennifer Ernst Beaudry T here are many things brick-and-mortar shops have down cold. Getting consumers the proper fit and recommending the ideal shoe? That's table stakes. Giving great customer service? Naturally. Grassroots involvement? 100 percent. But when it comes to getting the word out to the wider world with advertising and promotion, well for a lot of independents, that's a puzzle without an easy solution. Store owners say it feels like there's no playbook, just too many options and too little data on what's proven to work. "Whether it's social or print or radio, you're not going to get any results with a one and done [campaign], and it's scary to put forth and spend," laments Stephanie Blozy, owner of Fleet Feet Hartford. Committing to spending money and time when both are at a pre- mium — and having to keep spending it — is daunting: "If we knew what was successful, more of us would feel more comfortable doing it," she says. But faced with an ever-increasing number of avenues to reach their cus- tomers — social media? Geo-targeted search engine ads? TV? Billboards? Local newspaper? Direct mail? — retail- ers told us that digital marketing is taking up a larger and larger share of ad spend. "Traditional marketing is not effective for our scale of businesses," says Chris Lampen-Crowell, owner of the five Gazelle Sports locations based in Kalamazoo, MI. "In the last four years, we've made a slow shift from minimal digital to pri- marily digital," agrees Scott Heidrich, director of strategic advertising and mar- keting for the six Lamey-Wellehan stores based in Maine. With that in mind, we asked retailers which digital marketing elements have the greatest ROI. Here, independents sound off on the best ways they've found to connect with customers new and old. Social Media All of social media can get lumped together, but by and large, footwear independents say the two networks with the most engagement and best return on the effort expended are Facebook and Instagram, which serve complementary purposes. "It's two different strategies," Lampen- Crowell says. "Facebook is really about helping us [talk about] events and things we're doing in store, our partnerships and community engagement. Instagram is building the story of who we are." Telling a brand story, he adds, is an effective way to facilitate the most effective kind of advertising of all: word-of-mouth. "Value alignment is important for all customers, but especially for millenni- als," he says. "You need to build brand alignment; then that can become sales oriented. Word-of-mouth of engagement is massive." Christi Beth Adams, owner of the three Fleet Feet Nashville locations, believes in social media so strongly she hired Drive Social Media, a St. Louis and Nashville-based digital marketing firm, to oversee her social efforts on both channels. Adams says that her boosted posts on both channels (it's absolutely essential to be paying to promote your key messages, she notes: "Organic posts are no longer a thing. Everyone needs to understand it's very much pay to play") are essential in getting in front of new customers — almost all social networks have tools you can use to select, by location, demographics, interests and more, exactly who should be seeing your posts and ads. Serving ads to people who resemble the people who already love the shop has been a strategy that she says has paid off. As a channel, she says, "We do a really good job of talking to our existing customers, over and over, with the newsletter, Instagram, training programs, sponsoring a race. But those are people who have already opted in to your communications," she says. "The question we need to ask is, 'How are we talking to people who aren't our existing customers?" Building out Facebook and Instagram "The question we need to ask is, 'How are we talking to people who aren't our existing customers?" Christi Beth Adams, Fleet Feet Nashville Marketing Moves 16 • Footwear Insight ~ March/April 2019 footwearinsight.com The field is crowded, but digital marketing gives independents an unparalleled connection to the consumer.

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