Project Summary
My Communication Senior Showcase project was for my client, Kayla Root and her new business, Lily Leathercraft. I decided to pursue something that I had experience in while also trying to challenge myself a bit. I was a website editing intern for my internship and I know that I enjoy updating and implementing websites on WordPress. So, for my client I put together an ecommerce WordPress website from start to finish. Our goal was to expand her business by making the website capable of handling a sale of products. I also wanted to make sure that the website was appealing to customers.
At the start, Kayla Root was using Squarespace, as this didn’t suit our needs or my editing experience, I encouraged her to move into a WordPress editor with a different hosting server. After some research and analysis we both decided that Bluehost was going to be best for our needs. In the process of making the switch, the domain name required 60 days to be transferred to Bluehost instead of Squarespace. Instead of waiting 60 days for the domain to be transferred to Bluehost and the allotted campaign time to be over, Bluehost assigned us a temporary domain that we used to build and edit the website.
Kayla and I spend a long time trying to sort out all of the issues. Including something wrong with our original shop page, that no matter how hard we tried, could not be fixed. So we scrapped it and tried again from the start and that worked!
I built out the homepage, the about page, the contact page, the shoppe page, the blog page and the location page.
I designed her brand board style guide, an infographic about leather, and the poster for the display table.
I also helped her and her husband write their own blog posts to help share their story and some of their history of why they got involved in their respective craft businesses.
Time Accounting
Below is a record of how I spent my time completing this project.
Campaign Plan
Situation Analysis
Kayla Root has a new business Lily Leathercraft. She sells handmade leather goods. She is new to running her own business and wanted to start an E-Commerce website. Lily Leathercraft “hired” me to put together and design her website so she can start selling her goods online. Prior to my offer to help her, Kayla’s only previous experience with her business was being a vendor at a renaissance faire. So she’s pretty new to both the industry of leather crafting, and the industry of marketing. Her goal is to expand her business by increasing her online presence.
S.W.O.T Analysis
- Strengths:
- Lily Leathercraft has a very niche audience. This simplifies the strategies we will use to target this audience and it simplifies the messaging that those strategies will focus on. Also Kayla Root has experience as a photographer which means creating content for Instagram is already something she’s familiar with and it’s one of her strong suits.
- Weaknesses:
- The greatest weakness Lily Leathercraft has so far is the fact that it is a brand new company. Kayla doesn’t know a lot about being a business owner.
- Opportunities:
- The plus side about being a brand new company is that for Lily Leathercraft, the opportunities are endless. With experience, Kayla can learn to become a better business owner and leathercrafter. However the focus of new opportunities we have so far is social media. Particularly TikTok, because our target audience doesn’t usually spend a lot of time on Facebook.
- Threats
- The largest threat that Lily leathercraft has is that it’s too small and can’t compete with larger, more experienced leathercrafters or leather companies
Goal:
Increase awareness of Lily leathercraft. Improve ease of doing business
Objectives:
Creating an e-commerce website capable of selling leather goods online without a storefront.
Audience:
Meet Renaissance Rose, a 26 year old woman who enjoys going to Renaissance faires. She’s a few years out of college, but doesn’t like her job so she enjoys escapism with fantasy worlds. She lives in St Louis, Missouri, but she idealizes rural life and culture, something called cottagecore. Rose is unmarried, but she has a boyfriend, and they go to Renaissance fairs together. She passes the vendor booth and Isn’t exactly on the lookout for leather items but she is looking for accessories for her future renaissance faire outfits
Stewardship:
In an effort to be a good steward to my client, I will now list recommendations for my client, Kayla Root, to continue her success by herself, without the help of a communication specialist.
Recommendations list:
- Create an Overstock of product
- Expand your product list
- Tell stories about your experiences in a blog post format
I have put together a list of resources relating to these next items:
- Build an email list with a form and start an email marketing campaign
- Start an email newsletter using MailChimp
- Build a business plan
- Add features to website as growth increases
Time commitment pledge from me:
As a part of my stewardship due diligence to ensure the success of my client and her company, I pledge a time commitment of at least 2 hours a week for 3 months following the end of this campaign. I will continue to volunteer for Lily Leathercraft as a PR and Marketing Specialist or consultant. This way I can personally guarantee that the momentum from this campaign will not be wasted, and that Lily Leathercraft can continue to grow.
Future Employee Job description:
https://www.byui.edu/communication/internships/requirements
https://www.byui.edu/employers-and-schools/internships
Seeing as Lily Leathercraft is a brand new business consisting of only the owner, Kayla Root, using the sources above, an official Communications intern from BYU-Idaho would not be possible, as Lily Leathercraft as a business does not have a supervisor trained in communications available. However, if Kayla were to hire someone to replace me and continue to add to the work I’ve done and plan to do, the job description for that is below:
Job title: Digital Media Administrator
Role: Part-Time/ Contractor, 5-10 hours/week
Location: Remote
Pay: $9 an hour
Description:
Are you interested in becoming a digital media administrator? It’s a new position that combines the responsibilities and duties of a digital marketing specialist and a web administrator. Lily Leathercraft is expanding their team to include a one-person marketing department.
Looking for upperclassman-level communications, marketing. or business student and/ or entry-level professional with experience in editing websites on WordPress and building and implementing marketing strategies.
Responsibilities:
- Develop marketing strategies using competitor research, industry best practices, and trend analysis
- Creating and maintaining email marketing campaigns through Mail Chimp.
- Monitor activity and analytics on social media channels
- Create and maintain social media content calendar for all relevant channels
- Create, update and publish blog content on the website
- Design, develop, maintain and troubleshoot the website
- Implement changes on the website while keeping to branding guidelines
- Identify problems on the website and analyze web site usage data.
- Develop systems and procedures for future team members
Requirements:
- Good communication skills, able to keep supervisor updated on tasks, projects and problems.
- Good problem-solving skills
- Proficient in Google Analytics
- Project management expertise, able to work within deadlines ad
- Proficient in WordPress editing and plugins.
- A year of experience in developing strategies and implementing web changes on WordPress. (possibly waived after portfolio analysis)
- Optional: Submit 2 Portfolio project pieces so Lily Leathercraft can evaluate your experience level.
Benefits:
- Remote work
- Experience in a small company
- Full creative control over marketing strategies
- Opportunity to build portfolio
Research methods:
I used secondary research to gain information relevant to my campaign. Specifically including what elements to include on the website, facts about leather for the infographic, and information relevant to my stewardship recommendations and job description.
Strategies:
Our strategies for this campaign are:
- Create a website that is capable of selling a product to a customer
- Start the first few steps of the marketing funnel
Tactics for #1:
- Build-out homepage, include features to get customers to stay on the site
- Build out about page, including customer policies
- Build out contact page, including a form fill for commission requests
- Build out a shop page, including WooCommerce plugin
- Solve all back-end problems to make the site usable
- Build out location page (to be updated when she has her next faire)
Tactics for #2 :
- Build out a blog post page
- Assist Kayla in writing a blog post, then edit.
- Write a secondary blog post about Kayla’s husband.
- Research create and design an infographic about leather/ leatherwork.
Budget:
Seeing as this is a senior project on a volunteer basis with the client, my work so far has been free. The only things the client or I has had to account for cost are buying the domain, a Bluehost hosting subscription, and shipping, printing, and purchasing of the materials used on the display table.
Using the job description included above, I would expect my client, Kayla Root, to be able to afford a digital media administrator at $9 an hour. With work towards a 50-hour project that would be $450 over the course of about 10 weeks, or $45 dollars per week, or $193.50 per month for my services to be replicated.
Then including what Kayla paid for the domain name at $25.68, and with Bluehost hosting at $13 per month with the annual plan, $26 so far. and shipping her products to me, so I could have something to display at $21.78 and what I paid for the faux leather tablecloth for the display table at $40 and printing the poster, style guide and infographics at $20. The total amount required to replicate this campaign, using a paid employee, would be $583.46. Without using a paid employee the total would be $133.56.
Collateral Material
Before: Squarespace
After: WordPress
Homepage:
About Page:
Contact Page:
Shoppe Page:
Blog Page + Blog Posts
Location Page:
Designed Materials
Display Table Images
Measurement/ Evaluation plan /
Plan for “Moving the Needle”
The goal for the campaign was to get the site up and running to increase Lily Leathercraft as a business and increase awareness. We have accomplished that goal in that the site now has the capability to handle a sale of product.
However, we don’t have any data to corroborate success. In other words we may have accomplished the goal, but did we accomplish it successfully is the question we have not yet been able to answer. To measure the success of our campaign we hope to have 5 paying customers by the end of July. Below, where you see 0 orders, we hope to have 5 by July 31st. Following that, the plan or goal for steady growth would be to increase orders by 50% each month. Meaning by August 31st we would have seven orders. By the end of September we would have 10 orders and so on. Kayla and I will continue to optimize and update the website to achieve this growth.
A Note of Thanks
I’d like to start off by first thanking my client and my friend Kayla Root. Without her business, I would not have had a project. Her friendship means so much to me.
I’d also like to thank Dr. Susan Walton, my faculty mentor and Public Relations professor, for all she has done to help me throughout this project and throughout my college career.
I’d also like to thank some of my other previous professors, namely, Joel Judkins, for teaching me what it means to listen, Brett Sampson, for teaching me what PR is all about, and Perry Rockwood, for teaching me how fun PR can be.
Thank you all so much for being there for me.