Online Ad Campaign for Only Green Bags. to retailers across Canada. With excellent customer service, seemingly infinite product

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1 1 CCT356 Mike Jones Gary Li, Patrick Navel, Justyna Paszkiewicz, Bethany Read Due March 29, 2011 Online Ad Campaign for Only Green Bags The Company Only Green Bags (OGB) is a company that supplies reusable shopping and garment bags to retailers across Canada. With excellent customer service, seemingly infinite product customization options and a 10% price guarantee, they are Canada s number one reusable shopping bag supplier. OGB s target demographics are primarily store owners and clothing retailers. Other clients include marketing companies, event planning agencies and tradeshows. The Product After researching the negative environmental effects of manufacturing bags from recycled plastic, OGB realized that the process of recycling plastic is very inefficient and highly toxic to the environment. For this reason, OGB makes its products from polyethylene rather than plastic. The use of polyethylene produces less waste during manufacture and results in a much more durable, reusable product. OGB offers both shopping and garment bags a combination that caters particularly well to clothing retailers. Each type of bag has several size and shape templates to choose from. The most popular sizes and colours are stocked locally and can be printed quickly in small amounts. Less popular, custom, and large orders are outsourced to China and produced within a 3 month timeframe. Clients are able to customize every element of their product. These elements include the size, shape and texture of the bag; the dimensions and locations of the gussets, handles, pockets, compartments, zippers and snaps; as well as the

2 2 colours of the fabric, ink, piping and stitching. These bags are not only intended to be functional for the customer, they are also designed to provide advertising for the retailer each time the bag is reused. For this reason, OGB includes the price of printing in the base cost of its bags as a way of encouraging the client to think of this purchase as an advertising investment. The Goal For our proposal we have two main objectives: improve brand awareness among the target demographic and to improve search engine optimization (SEO). We have developed an online advertising campaign to fit the needs of both of these objectives to ensure that OGB captures the attention of a few people in a way that will encourage them to disseminate the brand s image among their peers. With a B2B business model, OGB needs to raise its brand awareness within the industry in order to gain new clients and establish itself as Canada s goto for reusable shopping and garment bags. The Proposal Brand awareness has always been a defining factor for the product and the companies in the market. With the latest advancements in technology and the changing environment of social media, branding has changed significantly. In particular, the conventional print advertisement and TV spots have grown obsolete in the twenty-first century. Online marketing is in the frontier of this movement and understanding the dynamics of brand awareness based on this new landscape is not only beneficial, but also necessary. With this in mind, OGB must abide by the following guidelines in order to overcome the potential problems involved in their marketing and branding strategy:

3 3 Clarity/Consistency: Be simple and consistent! OGB's two brand organization imposes several implications with regards to their brand identity. It can lead to confusion and loss of clients.ogb should establish their identity as an organization committed to reusability (OGB). Our proposal involves creating a consistent brand identity to fix this problem and OGB will remain consistent with this new identity. Understand the Competition: Other reusable bags in the market don't have a specific identity. People don't necessarily care what kind of reusable bags they use. OGB will take advantage of this and create a logo that people can immediately recognize (figure 1). OGB will therefore focus on creating and marketing this logo. Essentially, the goal is to create a bag that stands out. Engage: OGB will utilize social media not only to acquire publicity but also to increase brand awareness and become more visible in the online community. Rather than bombarding members with ads and promotions, OGB will utilize social media to entice their audience and make them become fans. How? This can be done by building a community. An example would be OGB's design contest that we are proposing. Through this, OGB will be able to spread brand awareness without using explicit advertisements. One important aspect of the successfulness of a company is the ability to brand and promote their key features. The use of social media greatly enhances the way information is spread, causing instant exchange of information with a single line of text. Social media tools like Facebook (figure 2) and Twitter are very useful tools for OGB to update their news and events, as well as excellent ways to let others know about their company. Twitter allows users to type a message within 140 characters and spread it to anyone who is following them. OGB can use Twitter to notify others of new products and other interesting facts about their bag designs. This

4 4 will generate greater brand awareness and will increase potential clients. Promotions and contests are very important in building OGB's brand, as they create incentive for people to participate and bring traffic to the website. By encouraging people to retweet (repost a message from OGB), the followers of these participants will also see OGB's message and join in to the contests, improving the company's brand awareness. Our second objective involves improving SEO. To improve SEO, OGB needs to condense their two websites into one. OGB currently has two different websites for each product line they sell. The first website (figure 3) provides information about customizable reusable green bags and the second website (figure 4) provides information about customizable garment bags. This is a huge disadvantage for the client because having two different websites splits up the client s traffic to each website, and therefore decreases not only SEO but also brand awareness. Potential clients need to be able to find the company in search engines, and they need to know everything that OGB can provide for them. By combining the two websites into one website, we will increase SEO, increase brand awareness, and potentially sell more products. If a customer is currently in the market of buying garment bags, they may find the onlygarmentbags.com website, but they would never see the green reusable bags that OGB also sells. This could potentially mean a loss of sales for the company. If both websites are combined into one, OGB has the opportunity to increase sales because clients will see both products. To fix this problem we will propose a new website layout that will incorporate both products under the URL: since the garment bags are also sustainable. The design of the website, like social media, is a very important way of providing information to the audience and engages people to come back to the company and build

5 5 confidence within the brand. The initial viewing of the onlygreenbags.com website was quite shocking, as the colour scheme, layout of the navigation, and the placement of images and tables, were not positioned fluidly with the overall theme of the company. The two websites also did not have a common logo to distinguish a brand identity for OGB. The modern consumers and clients alike all look to an online presence to retrieve information about a company, and by having a website that is difficult to navigate, it may put potential businesses off, resulting in a loss of revenue. In our online marketing assignment, we have rebuilt the onlygreenbags website design (figure 5) to have a more beautiful, eco-friendly design. With a better navigation system, improved meta-tags and the implementation of social media within the website, we feel that this will certainly improve traffic to the company and increase its online presence. Another way, we believe OGB can increase SEO is by changing their current list of keywords. We checked the meta-tags on both websites and there are many keywords present that don t need to be there, and many keywords we think should be there. For example, polypropylene is currently on the keyword list. We believe this keyword is unnecessary because people searching for environmentally-friendly bags or garment bags will not be searching for polypropylene. We suggest that the keywords should focus more on the sustainable, eco-friendly, and the customizability of the bags. Both website keyword lists do not contain the words customizable or customized bags. This is a problem since the company sells customizable bags. Another useful keyword may be unique bags or unique garment bags since customizable bags are also unique. The keywords lists will also have to be changed since we are condensing the two websites into one. To improve both SEO and brand awareness we propose that OGB should create an online Shopping Bag Contest. The contest will be aimed at local small businesses and start-up

6 6 companies that cannot yet afford their own advertising but would greatly benefit from it. Contestants will be asked to design a shopping bag for their store according to the customization options outlined in the contest guidelines. The incentive for the contestants is the chance to win a free order of their shopping bag design courtesy of OGB. The designs will be posted on the OGB website where the designs will collect votes from visitors. This will generate web traffic as each contestant will undoubtedly direct their friends and family to vote for their designs. The contest will also increase SEO because the contest will generate a lot of traffic to the website when people are voting for their favorite bag. It will also generate a lot of links to the website because contestants will want their bags to win and therefore, will post a link on social media outlets as a way to generate votes for their bag. This contest will serve as advertising for OGB among several demographics: Phase 1: The contest will not only generate interest among the target demographic, it will engage them in the first step of placing an order. After these contestants create their design, they will likely be set on following through on their orders rather than letting their designs go to waste. To motivate these first-time customers, OGB may consider offering a percentage discount on the production of all (or perhaps the highest ranked) contest submissions. Phase 2: In order for any contestant to win, they must generate votes for their designs on the OGB website. This will increase brand awareness among the communities whose members visit the OGB site to support their friends. In their midst there are likely to be other business owners who may wish to join the contest and generate additional web traffic. Along with creating brand awareness, this contest also serves as a showcase of all the customization options available through OGB.

7 7 Phase 3: The winning design will be stamped with the OGB logo and a tag reading Reusable shopping bag courtesy of OGB. As the retailer distributes its bags to customers, the logo will be disseminated into the community. And because the bags are reusable and the retailer s particular design is highly rated, people are likely to use the bags over and over, thus increasing OGB brand awareness throughout their daily lives. This advertising campaign is well-suited for OGB because of its ease of execution. It does not require OGB to affiliate itself with a partner, nor does it require the company to produce a large amount of promotional material. To launch this campaign, OGB needs only to post a handful of online ads, upgrade its website (which it plans to do anyway) and monitor its content. The give-away at the end of the contest will be an order of 1000 custom bags which will not exceed $2500 to produce. As the contest is online, it has the potential to recruit new clients nationwide at no extra cost to its local campaign. Contest Guidelines 1. Contestant must be a small business owner, or an affiliate functioning on behalf of a small business with written permission. 2. Design must be based on the dimensions of the Industry or Legz shopping bag template posted on 3. May use up to 2 fabric colours (any colour). 4. May use up to 4 ink colours (any colour including Pantone). 5. May alter texture of the bag (laminate), the dimensions of the handles and the colours of the piping and stitching. May add pockets, compartments, zippers and snaps. 6. May NOT alter the size and shape of the bag. 7. Design must be posted to before July 15th 2011

8 8 We have also created a set of online advertisements (figure 6, 7) that OGB should incorporate into their marketing strategy. These advertisements are specifically created to advertise the contest, but in doing so, the advertisements will also increase brand awareness and SEO for OGB. In order to access our target market OGB will post these advertisements on very specific websites. Since OBG will be a vendor at various tradeshows we think it would be beneficial to advertise on the tradeshows website. Some tradeshows that we think are of interest include the Luggage Leathergoods Handbags and Accessories Show held in Toronto from April 10-12, 2011 ( the Graphics Canada tradeshow from November 10-12, 2011 ( OGB could also advertise on the website that connects businesses to trade shows. Figure 8 provides an example of how our advertisements will appear on a website. The Search Marketing Expo in Toronto from April 28-29, 2011 would be interesting for our client to attend, and learn more about SEO, online advertising and social media ( OGB would also benefit from advertising on LinkedIn, any business to business website, business newspaper, or sustainable, environmentally-friendly website. An example of one business to business website is the Global B2B Marketplace: and an environment website example is the Ecology Fund website

9 9 Appendix Figure 1: Logo design Figure 2: OGB Facebook page

10 10 Figure 3: Current website homepage Figure 4: Current website homepage:

11 11 Figure 5: Proposed redesign of current two websites into one: Figure 6: Skyscraper Advertisement

12 12 Figure 7: Button Advertisement Figure 8: Advertisement in Biz trade shows website