Watch Out PetBarn! – BCM114 DA Final Update (Contextual Essay)

For BCM114, I wanted to focus upon my career ventures with my digital artifact as I felt it beneficial to spend more time in an area in which I’m passionate about. I’ve been working as a graphic designer for iPetStore, a small business posted in the heart of the Sutherland Shire, for almost 2 years which has provided me with a overwhelmingly positive learning experience for me. We had not had much focus on social media prior to this DA as we focused more on outdated advertisement avenues such as email and mailed catalogues. While these methods did work to an extent, it was time to focus more on the future of the business and the direction in which it wanted to go in the social media age.

While we may not have had as much focus, we did have a base audience through the occasional meme and promotional post, however there was no ‘method to the madness’. So the intent of this DA was to build up this base into our main source of communication and interaction outside of instore conversation. This was to be achieved through reflecting the same affable, small-business feel of our warehouse within our online communities through consistent posting, a balance of promotional and candid content and a flowing aesthetic through posts to appeal to the eyes of our target audience, focusing on Shire locals.

I had initially started with a look into some other local businesses within the area to see how they’ve tackled similar issues, mainly taking inspiration from @sociallysquared on Instagram. While her social media techniques are not immediate reflections of that of a pet store, the balance of differing formats of content as well as consistent visuals across posts is what inspired me to translate such devices into our own circumstances. My first step was creating a colour scheme that would be recognised across our feed, and then from there developing a promotional post format that was eye-catching and easy to read. I was then that I took time to research into the content we had posted within the first half of this year to get a baseline for what our current audience was interested in seeing. Taking these needs and insights into consideration, I set to work posting our first prototypes to research the interactions and feedback to align the following posts with what our community wanted to see.

Our social medias are still quite young; however we have seen a noticeable change within analytics as the amount of new walk in customers since the onset of this digital artifact. Compared to the first half of this year to now, we have seen a 146% increase in likes and a 90% increase in comments across our Instagram feed with the majority of new customers coming into store and ordering online stating that they found us through our social medias. This feedback recieved has shown that our audience is most interested in our candid content, which while not an apparent advertisement for our store, documents the kind of environment we uphold within our store environment.

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pie-chart-3.png

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pie-chart-4.png

Through this DA I have learnt the importance of consistancy as well as the importance of feedback/interaction in terms of crafting new ideas for content to further our horizons on a digital platform. As this DA will continue post-submission (as it is my job), it is worth noting that since the posting of the Beta, I have been further working on refinement of our promotional posts, changing the format of our memes to increase customer interaction, developing and prototyping new forms of content such as flatlay images and product reviews and mapping out future Christmas related content and competitions. I’m hoping that even beyond this DA that I will continue to learn and grow the capabilities of our social medias and to continue aiming for the ultimate goal of taking over PetBarn, but until then we will florish in the baby steps.

drawoncedrawtwice

learning through experience

Watch Out PetBarn! – BCM114 DA Final Update (Contextual Essay)

Leave a comment Cancel reply

Share this:

Related

Leave a comment Cancel reply