Social Media Marketing
One of the key factors towards the success of any business these days, especially those in the e-commerce industry, is of course social media. And after 8 years in the industry, this brand has certainly learned this.
The brand has a presence on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. They have 710k likes on their Facebook page, 8.7k followers on Instagram, 3.7k subscribers on YouTube and 3.7k followers on Twitter.
Since Facebook is the main social media platform, it is where they have their highest engagement rate. They often hold frequent contests here and post consistently. They don’t very often repost from other bloggers on their Facebook page.
In order to truly make their presence felt on the social media platform,the brand has adopted a few strategies, like making use of certain campaigns like #ItsAMomsWorld along with offers and other contest posts. Their signature hashtag revolves around mothers dressing up, posing with ‘cool props’ and taking a picture with a ‘Super Mom’ at any one of their stores. By uploading this picture on Facebook along with the hashtag #ItsAMomsWorld, they stand a chance of winning free shopping worth Rs 1,00,000.
At the same time, FirstCry’s Instagram isn’t all that great. They don’t post very often. As of May 2017, their last post was on 24th January the same year. They post only about offers and have very poor engagement.
On YouTube, the brand mainly posts baby game videos and advertisements for new baby products.
On FirstCry’s Twitter, they mainly post festivals. They are also able to manage their customer feedback by responding to complaints quickly and promptly. They post on their Twitter on a daily basis.
#Mompreneur is a social media campaign that our student has suggested for the brand. It involves posting inspiring stories of women entrepreneurs who are also mothers. Since the audience on Facebook consists 54% of women, this could be an effective idea to cater to their following.
#SleepingBeauty is a campaign which targets fathers. It entails the unique sleeping positions fathers have to adopt in order to ensure that both their infant child and wife get a comfortable good night’s sleep. It can involve funny creatives where the baby is in an odd position all over the bed while the father is uncomfortable. This highlights the sacrifice of the father in order to give the best to his child. This really does help with the engagement and brand awareness in general!
Another nifty campaign could be #ParentingTIips. As most customers will be first-time parents, a few tips on raising a baby wouldn’t hurt. This would encourage people to share posts as well, helping with brand awareness. Easy tips like ‘Reading with your child from an early age can help brain development’ and ‘Gently stroke your baby’s faces with a tissue to get them to sleep in 40 seconds’ are fun to read and to share!
Competition
The main competitors are BabyCulture.in, MyBabyCart.com and Hopscotch.in.
BabyCulture is headquartered in Haryana and caters not just to Indian customers but to those in Europe, New Zealand and the United States of America as well. They are the biggest competition at the moment.
MyBabyCart was also founded in 2010. However, they are headquartered in Bengaluru and cater only to Indian customers. Their marketing campaigns are driven only towards moms, instead of towards both parents like FirstCry’s advertisements.
Hopscotch is the newest entrant in the niche and has a good-looking and user-friendly website. Along with this, they also have an app and https certification. However, their merchandise is extremely similar.
In comparison to its competition, FirstCry is doing a fabulous job of commanding all market focus and attention onto itself.
Target Audience
Those who buy these products are all parents between the ages of 25-35. They love to shop online and want to provide the best for their child. They are concerned about the quality of the product. The buyers may be working mothers who do not have time to shop for their children at traditional stores, homemakers who shop online due to the extensive range of products and fathers who want to buy their children high-end items that they trust online.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation refers to the usage of particular keywords in order to ensure the maximum amount of traffic on a brand’s website. These keywords are those that have the highest search rates on Google from their target customers. If a website is able to optimise itself based on the search engine’s keywords, then it is certain that they will be able to reach the maximum amount of relevant people.
Some of the most popular keywords for are clothes for infants, clothes for children, maternity wear, baby walker, feeding bottle and study table for kids. This means that whenever someone searches for these terms online, FirstCry’s results are the first that pop up.
Often, brands bid on certain search terms to ensure that when users search these particular terms on the internet, the particular brand’s page pops up as one of the first results. This may be useful for WOK Express in reference to other words that it could really capitalise on if they were able to be one of the top results.
Some of the suggested bid words are affordable maternity wear, baby clothes, mosquito nets online, baby beds, baby pajamas, clothes for baby girl and cheap baby clothes. This ensures that when someone searches for the said terms online, they are bound to encounter FirsyCry’s website as one of the first results. This makes the website more accessible to people looking to shop for baby care products, which is ultimately the group of people that our brand wants most to reach out to. Developing an SEO Strategy has surely benefited FirstCry Digital Marketing Strategy!
Blog Ideas
Another way to engage your customers and ensure that they stay on your brand’s website for a longer duration of time is to provide them with interesting blogs to browse through.
An example of listicles that they could post on their blog could be This is how your child can be smarter than his/her peers. Listicles are extremely entertaining and captivate the reader’s attention, and at the same time subtly encourage the reader to subscribe. In this case, the readers might want to visit the website to learn some parenting tricks! This would greatly boost the FirstCry Digital Marketing Strategy!
