The Senior Vice President for Sephora Direct is Julia Bornstein. The company used to be the largest prestige beauty retailer in the entire world with a specialty focus. As such, the revenue that it accumulated was approximately two billion dollars across its website and several other stores. The Senior Vice President is currently seeking to increase her budget by 200% for digital and social media marketing across the board. It is imperative to note that efforts in digital marketing have undergone an implementation over the past two years. As such, the success in this field has been entirely significant during that period (Grainer et al., 2014) . However, several people in management like Julia see more potential in mobile marketing, online videos, and social media than on this platform. The challenge that Julia is currently facing is one in which she is required to persuade the Board of Directors at her company to provide the department she runs with more funds for the project. It is of the essence to note that she should determine the best ways to use in distributing the funds across several social media platforms. She should also find the best ways to quantify the return on investment on digital expenditure.
The essence of the funding is to ensure that it funds the conventional marketing strategy at the company. Julia should win over the faith of the Board of Directors, and this means she should create a long-range policy that will have a precise definition of the role digital platforms will have as well as the extent to which her company will benefit from the marketing and sale of products and services. The company should also seek to compete with vendors on the online platform such as Shop Socially and Groupon if it wants to maintain its prestigious position among elite beauty products. Julia is determined to ensure that the company’s core strategy should make sure the firm connects with its beauty insiders. Similarly, she holds the belief that the essence of social media marketing in this context is hard to counter considering its propensity to be a tool that the company deploys in communicating and listening to clients while at the same time acquiring new clients who do not have access to the conventional brick and mortar retail store.
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It will be of extreme benefit if the company decides to add a million dollars to its funding venture to ensure that it adds categories to its digital marketing incentives. In this case, it should acknowledge that the market with the best and most spendthrifts is that composed of young people. Demographically, these people are millennials whose ages range between eighteen and thirty-five. Considerably, Sephora has already identified its clients to be women whose age sets are somewhat seven years above the lowest age in this cohort and all the way to thirty-five-year-olds. Consequently, the firm should now begin to understand that girls exist. As such, these look up to the target group with envy and want to be like them, which makes them one of the best targets for the marketing incentives the company deploys (Blitz & Blitz, 2016) . Considering this differentiated approach to marketing, it is wise to pursue the digital trends these would like to use in their daily lives. For instance, Sephora Direct is a mobile application that allows for ubiquitous shopping for all clients in all places and at all times. As such, the growth of mobile application usage across all marketing fronts is staggering and requires input from various sources to ensure its success. Consequently, budget relocation at Sephora is imperative because it will improve the mobile experience at all times. The increase in growth of visitors should imply that the firm ought to seek to maintain this and remain competitive in the market as well as increase its share for long-term benefit. An increased focus on social media channels is imperative because most people access them on smartphones. Hence, the transition from conventional to social media marketing should take advantage of the alternative pathways that should depict the firm’s corporate image at all times.
Advertisement allocation at the company illustrates that most of the money goes to retails, which entails animations at stores, catalogs, and prints. As such, forty-five percent of funds being spent this was might compel an organization to believe this channel is prominent considering the customer loyalty it still has now. However, it is best to reflect on the case of Blockbuster and Netflix. As such, the former sold movies in stores and believed that the plan to rent movies to clients by post mail for as long as they liked was a waste of money. However, as clients began adopting online trends, Netflix quickly became a leader in movie rental services because it seized the opportunity and deployed that to its benefit. Hence, it led to the demise of Blockbuster, and the company became bankrupt while Netflix is still the current leader in renting movies online. As such, Millennials are not interested in old marketing models. On the contrary, they believe the firm should deploy mobile and social media marketing. Since e-commerce is currently dominating world markets, it is crucial to engage in it at the slightest of opportunities to gain not only market share but also increase the propensity to survive in an ever-changing digital space.
Sephora, during the fall of 2010, believed that its marketing image would begin with online and offline store experiences. As such, the original focus was on videos on YouTube, with the firm understanding that potential clients would watch people applying beauty results and see the results, which would then drive sales up significantly. The firm then used part of its one million dollars of the marketing plan in search engine optimization. The company bought several beauty related items, products, and brands in the form of keywords (Young, 2013) . Hence, this became the most significant source of traffic for its website. However, Facebook had 500 million users at that time, and that implies the firm should have used that platform. It created Beauty Talk, which was a Facebook page to allow it to listen to comments from clients. Thus, it got 900,000 likes that year, and this was an excellent step, on which the firm should improve in the future.
The company knows that customers may shop at several stores when they want to purchase products. As such, beauty is a luxury, but most people may afford it. In this case, clients may own several of these because companies inspire them to make more purchases. Julia believed social media marketing assisted the firm to take the time to listen to its clients. In this context, the advent of Facebook was imperative because it allowed for interpersonal communication between the business and its clients. Sephora competes with several companies such as Ulta. It is worth to point out that this is the most significant competitor with over 330 stores in the United States. In this case, Ulta offers cheap beauty staples to its broad client base, and the access to these is easy. Even professional salons use these products. Sephora should seek to learn from this company’s social media strategy. Social media will enable the firm to reach out to several clients and stay ahead of the competition at all times. In this case, social media will allow the company to grow by using feedback from its clients.
The essence of the company’s social and digital marketing incentives should be to increase awareness. As such, several people who visit social media platforms and significant websites should see advertisements from the company. In case a firm is well known, the propensity of gaining more income in the business is imperative in fact the enterprise becomes well established. For instance, Google is a market leader in search functionalities, and people recognize it because they use it for all their search needs. As such, Sephora should emulate this strategy and deploy it in the makeup industry. The company is faring on well because it implements an excellent online plan from responding to clients’ queries and having an online presence. Client engagement is imperative because the firm gains new clients and engages old ones. As such, it will increase market share with time and outcompete Ulta. Consequently, deploying more platforms is more significant than using just one .
References
Blitz, A., & Blitz, A. (2016). Beset by the digital revolution successful retailers embrace technology that enhances customer value. Strategy & Leadership , 44 (6), 16-24.
Grainer, M., Noble, C. H., Bitner, M. J., & Broetzmann, S. M. (2014). What unhappy customers want. MIT Sloan Management Review , 55 (3), 31.
Young, T. (2013). Microdomination: how to leverage social media and content marketing to build a mini-business empire around your personal brand . John Wiley & Sons.
