Essay: Developing a Strategic Digital Marketing Plan for Lacoste

Lacoste is a French company that deals in clothing, footwear, perfumes and jewelry among other fashion wears. Most multinational companies operate on the digital platform to undertake their operations, especially in marketing their goods and services. The new technology also allows many businesses to connect with their customers as well as draw more customers to their operations. In this case, companies such as Hello Fresh, Kilimall, Jumia, among others, depend upon the internet to do advertisements and allows customers to place orders through the websites provided by the internet. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the current situation of Lacoste and then, based on the current situation, develop an appropriate digital marketing plan with well-defined objectives, strategies, and tactics. In addition, this paper will identify possible barriers to the implementation of the strategy and therein recommend possible actions to overcome these obstacles.
Situation Analysis
The online fashion retail sector is one of the ongoing digital shopping firms in the contemporary world. This has been instigated by economic globalization that is closely linked to technology. However, statistics indicate that currently, the fashion industry has not been doing quite well (Orendorff & Aaron, 2019). For instance, in 2018, about 2000 fashion retailers are reported to have closed down. Last year, some projections were made by the WWD (WomensWearDaily) that about 10,000 or more of the retailers were likely to shut down, which is about a 53% increase from those that shut down in 2008 due to the tremendous economic downfall (Orendorff & Aaron, 2019). It is projected that this considerable deterioration of the industry has been instigated by an increase of research in digitalization, increased globalization as well as ever-changing consumer expenditure, due to taste and preferences. In this case, retail companies such as Lacoste must seek to upgrade their brands to match with the changing taste of the young people who are their primary target.
In addition, few digital limitations have encouraged more merchants to venture into the online fashion industry. This has created a great opportunity to market, sell as well as make orders successful throughout the globe, (Lacoste Group, 2020). The ecommerce clothing segment is even projected to grow more with increased revenue worldwide. Nevertheless, while the clothing segment is growing higher and higher, the worldwide revenue growth rate is consequently slower, this is estimated to decline from about 15% in 2018 to about 7.6% in the year 2022 The emergence of these fashion businesses is posing stiff competition on the Lacoste company. For instance, the top 10 Lacoste competitors are Ralph Lauren, Fred Perry, GANT, Calvin Klein, Adidas, Abercrombie and Fitch, Jack Wills, Hugo Boss, Sebago, and Tracksmith. To beat its competitors, therefore, Lacoste must employ the best strategic digital marketing plan.
Digital Marketing Plan Objectives
The step in developing a strategic digital marketing plan is first to identify your target customers. The Lacoste company majorly targets young people. The SOSTAC marketing model is a commonly used model for marketing in most online industries. Whether one is generating a marketing platform for a trade or a digital marketing plan, it suggests that the following be put into consideration when developing a marketing strategy for any business:
• Firstly, one should assess the situation of the business in terms of economic wellbeing, sales situation, among others.
• Secondly, the objectives of the business, this means that the focus of the business must be critically stated (Nilsson & Daniel).
• Thirdly, developing the strategy, tactics, actions, and finally, evaluation of the strategy. The final stage of this plan involves evaluating the strategy to identify whether you have achieved the objectives through the strategy.
Strategy
According to the above situation of the online fashion retail sector, it is for the Lacoste Fashion Company to develop an appropriate strategy that will help to achieve economic goals. One of the essential plans is personalization. This implies that several aspects must be reconsidered. More than 40% of online marketing platforms make use of personalized recommendations and promotions. Furthermore, about three-quarters of consumers prefer brands that take into account the aspect of personalization, while most companies prefer to personalize for the success of their business.
Keeping track of consumer behavior, fashion retailers can establish a Netflix-like personalization into their website. However, this strategy must start with the recommended products; this implies that if a customer had bought a particular product, they might wish to buy another different product. Online shoppers might begin to use similar personalization in the fashion industry. For example, Lacoste website visitors who have used the same search engines or bought clothing and shoes will expect to view the same experience on the homepage the next time they see the same page.
Tactics
Use of Social Media
Social media has been the driving force in the fashion industry market. However, different brands advertise their content under a thin layer of information hence capturing very little information about the brand. For this reason, online fashion retailers such as Lacoste Company must ensure that they get their brands advertised and ensure that each advert captures complete information. Every social media platform targets a specified audience. A retail fashion retailer such as Lacoste Fashion Company must focus on a visual platform such as Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. The best option will major on Facebook and Instagram. Moreover, marketing objectives must be SMART. They should major in increasing sales, improve conversion rate, percentage of return visitors, be organic, and finally reduce the bounce rate of products. The social media platform must focus on: Share user-generated content. The firm should increase the material and seek to share more of its adverts through social media. This effort will help to establish strong customer loyalty and make the workload lighter.
Farther, take statistics of social media followers. Critically evaluate your social media demographics. For example, if Lacoste targets young people, both male, and female, their needs and fashion preference is comparatively different from the needs of older people. Similarly, you should create a social calendar for your audience. For example, how many adverts do you post per day? What kind of content do you share? Are you majorly dealing in the shoe segment, or are you dealing with clothing?
SEO
Search engine optimization provides the Lacoste company with an opportunity to compete head-on after the competitor analysis. Also, keyword research is done to increase the visibility of the company’s target market. For affiliate marketing tactics, it ensures that there is maximum utilization of opportunities for generating improved revenue sources through networking with publishers that are active in their program. For email marketing, its implementation ensures that the existing customer is receiving regular updates about the product.
Most online fashion retailers such as Lacoste major on immediate gratification in what relates to establishing online shops and maintaining it successfully. For maintaining the business and increasing sales, SEO is the best. For a company like Lacoste it involves identifying specific keywords for your adverts. SEO focuses on acquiring new traffic as well as sticking to your exact audience. Search engines require that you update your content on your website to make it more useful to your stores. You should also integrate more SEO tools such as Plugin SEO or even the SEO Manager. This enables them to frequently update the content and quality of your content on your online retail, (Henseler et al., 2012).
Flashes and Drops
Moreover, to make use of the new technology and also take advantage of the economic globalization, it is quite essential to apply the Flashes and Drops model of advertisement. Flash sales were mostly used as a method of unloading the outdated fashions by selling at a throwaway price. However, nowadays, this method has been immensely used by most online businesses to increase their sales—however, this method of selling works as long as they integrate exclusivity and anticipation. The most common fashion that can be sold through this method involves apparel, accessories, and shoes. Most online businesses apply this method during what it is called Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
For online stores such as the Lacoste Fashion Company to recover from the great economic recession, they must put forward the best strategy to recover from the recession. As pointed out earlier, more than 2000 fashion retailers closed down during the great recession that took place in 2008 (Orendorff, 2019).The significant slowdown resulted from decreased revenue. For this reason, the online retail sector should partner with other stakeholders to improve the worldwide revenue out of its operations.
Control
For any successful planning, barriers must exist. The most common obstacles are; culture, the existing literature may not be compatible with the digital marketing strategies. Internal politics can also be a barrier. Sometimes even the marketing software may be too complicated. Besides, many companies fail to do digital marketing as they think that it is too expensive. A company such as Lacoste fails to do digital marketing as they consider digital marketing not necessary. Moreover, the online marketing platform is so demanding in terms of time and money it demands that you update your content now and then, and therefore you must be devoted to following the demands of the platform.
Similarly, with the use of SEO, it is quite challenging to test. This implies that a firm such as Lacoste cannot control the amount of traffic that reaches that page. Besides, it not easy to target. This means that if you have an advert for a specific audience, you will, therefore, be forced to use some landing pages and use more expensive ads that propel the advert to reach your target audience. Although SEO is the best model to reach as many customers as possible, it is, however, ineffective in promoting on-time events such as the use of flashes and drops. This is because such sales are made for a specified time, for example, Black Friday. This will mean that if you advertise through the search engine organization, it will only reach the people that visit the page regularly. Also, due to competition from other fashion retailers, the strategy of social media advertisement may not change the perception of the company’s brand. For example, if Lacoste sport shoe brands are similar to that of Adidas and the other competitors, it would be difficult to increase their sales through the internet because of the competition factor.
Solutions to Barriers
Having identified the possible barriers to implementing this digital marketing strategy, it is crucial to seek strategies for addressing the barriers. For example, the cost of using digital marketing must be clear to the sector and, therefore, be prepared to bear the loss. Another possible solution to increase sales is the use of the Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim, Chan & Mauborgne, 2014). This implies that the Lacoste company should seek to explore other markets by offering distinctive brands. This will boost its sales to a great extent because of product differentiation factors.
To conclude, the digital marketing platform implies using an internet platform to connect with customers by creating product awareness. The online fashion industry must apply the best marketing strategy to make its operations successful. The internet, for example, is the appropriate platform that can draw customers to your products and, therefore, must take the most opportunity out of it. Personalization is quite essential in applying the internet. SOSTAC model of marketing suggests that critical analysis of the business situation must be considered when developing a digital marketing strategy. Therefore, for any business, whether online or that deals on the offline platform must follow the steps suggested by the SOSTAC model to identify the most appropriate strategy. The social media platform is a potential online marketing platform that can yield quite significant outcomes. For a company like Lacoste to remain on top of the fashion industry, the strategy must be employed through digital marketing. However, due to competition, some approaches may fail, and therefore, the company should seek to invest in other markets by upgrading their brands as well as coming up with new products