We had many speakers come to our eMarketing class and share valuable insights recently. One of the recent visits was from Indochino. Lenny Goh, Social Media Manager, and Christopher Baird, Marketing Coordinator came back from launching a pop-up store event in New York not long ago. There were some hardships related to the catastrophic hurricane Sandy, but the bulk of their event took place right before the hurricane hit the city. In order to generate buzz and awareness for the brand and more specifically, the pop-up store event, Chris had to put in around 100 hours contacting appropriate media sources such as fashion bloggers, community portals, and independent writers. They were able to make much more efficient use of their marketing expense by targeting those viewership, since the majority of the traffic those websites attract are already interested in fashion and what goes on in the city.

After sharing their stories about the event, they went on to tell us about their digital marketing campaign in general. They showed us their Google Analytics and Facebook campaigns. Since their audience is moderately well defined by age & gender, Facebook was a very cost effective method for them to reach their potential customers. What took me by surprise was how systematic and elaborate their digital campaigns were set up. Each ad groups and campaign components were thought out previously, and it allowed them to do preliminary testing before deciding to allocate a larger budget on the ones that yielded better results. I think this is what fascinates me most about digital marketing-the fact that you can measure the reach of a campaign, apply a conversion value, and gauge the effectiveness in relatively concrete metrics. But the presentation was certainly an eye-opener showing us the strategic effort and diligence required to apply the principles in such scale.