Our client Geminique sells glass gems and water beads as decorative accents for crafts, floral arrangements, and home décor. Over the last two years, Marstudio has helped the company with rebranding, redesigning their packaging, and redesigning their website. Gemnique sells their products through various online outlets, but recently they wanted to focus their attention on the website sales. To drive shoppers specifically to the website, we recommended a social media strategy that was tailor-made for their customer base.

The Challenge

Gemnique sells products online from their website, Amazon, and limited retail stores. While most online sales come through Amazon, they wanted to increase sales from their website where customers have the potential to browse all products and purchase additional items. Gemnique asked Marstudio to help them drive traffic directly to their website.

The Approach

We recommended a tiered social media strategy that would put Gemnique directly in front of their customer base.

Our first step in the social media strategy was a Pinterest campaign. The Pinterest campaign illustrated the power of using a platform where Gemnique’s customers already spend their time. Nearly half of online women use Pinterest (45%), which is more than double the share of online men (17%) who do so (Pew Research Center, 2016). This slant towards women was great for Gemnique, whose target audience is women 22 – 55 years old. In just two weeks, Gemnique’s Pinterest pin received 103,373 Impressions, 256 Clicks, and 114 Repins. The Pinterest campaign had great success in driving customers directly to the website; 38.2% of website visits came directly from Pinterest during the campaign. This success whet Gemnique’s appetite for more social media marketing.

The next step in our social media strategy was connecting with bloggers prominent in the craft décor space to promote Gemnique products. These online influencers have earned the trust of their audiences, so any products they promote gain the benefit of that trust, too. Additionally, craft bloggers typically include videos or photos on their sites of how they make crafts, so the audience would be inspired to use Gemnique products.

Marstudio researched craft bloggers with audience demographics that matched Gemnique’s customer base of females ages 22 – 55. Then we engaged a few of the bloggers from the resulting list, providing them with Gemnique products to feature.

A couple of the craft bloggers wrote blog posts and produced videos available on their sites as well as YouTube. Another, a bridal blog, included how-to instructions and photos of the crafts she made. All bloggers pushed out the information with “shares” on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media platforms, increasing the number of potential customers engaging with the information. All featured the Gemnique name, products, and links to the company’s website.

The Results

The blog posts launched in early October 2016. During October, Gemnique’s site visitors increased 135% over the previous month, and revenue from purchases on their site increased 162% during the same period. Though we can’t attribute all the revenue increase to the increase in social media presence, we were able to measure click-throughs from the three sponsored blog sites and can attribute a number of purchases to those blog posts. We also can make some assumptions about visitors coming to the Gemnique site from other social media sites where blogger information was shared.

Buying into the Power of Social Media

Gemnique is now very enthusiastic about the marketing possibilities of social media marketing, and we’ve begun to increase their presence on select social media platforms that will reach the target audience. Across these platforms, Marstudio will help Gemnique strategically engage the followers they have recently acquired and concentrate on getting new followers.

Increased visibility on social media starts with a smart social media strategy. If your company is interested in connecting with consumers online, contact Marstudio. We will create a custom social media strategy based on your company’s goals.