Bhakti Products
An all-encompassing collaborative marketing project that tackled improving three key areas: website, social media, and visual assets.
Overview
Bhakti Products is a small online business in Melbourne that sells eco-friendly products like magnesium, essential oils and soaps and carefully selects environmentally friendly products available worldwide.
As part of a team of three, we put together a proposal of recommendations and plans of how we would best optimise her business through marketing development. Then, we implemented this plan.
Project Objectives
Optimise Website Performance and Function
Improve Visual Presentation of Bhakti Products Brand.
Create and Run Social Media Campaign.
My Roles
Project Leadership
User Research
Photography
Website UI Design
Research
As part of our research, we conducted a Client / Enterprise needs analysis, user needs analysis (user personas) and a competitor analysis, to observe best practices in the industry.
Key Takeaways included:
Needing to move Bhakti Products over to a hero image focused design, more in-line with modern trends and competitors.
More readable fonts in line with WCAG standards.
Needing more variety in product photos, and brighter, lighter images that better match the Bhakti Products brand.
Utilising hashtags to gain a wider reach.
More frequent and consistent posting.
More call-to-action buttons and methods of directing customers to purchasing products.
Project Planning
Using the research, we put together a proposed scope for the client, as well as a project timeline, a notional budget and split up responsibilities between the three of us. We made sure to account for redundancies and allow for more time than we actually thought things would take.
To summarise the scope, we were:
Creating a multitude of image assets, for the website and social media.
Creating video assets, including one long form video and short form videos for social media.
Conducting a 6 week social media campaign, paired with paid ads, and social media templates for the client to use after project handover.
Updating website design, SEO optimisation and fixing the checkout system process.
Implementation & Challenges
From the get go, the project was off to a rocky start. With our client and her partner being overseas at a different time than anticipated, we had to delay the photoshoot by 1.5 months until our client's partner was back to handover the products for production. This also meant that our social media campaign had to be delayed and shortened, to allow us enough time to produce and refine the assets that would be used for posting. Her longer stay overseas also meant we were unable to film the long form video as intended.
Our client also had difficulty recovering passwords and accounts, leading to delays in acquiring the necessary access required to undertake both the website updates and the social media campaign.
However, the biggest hurdle was yet to reach us. After gaining access to the site, we found the site in need of several updates - before we could even try to fix the store. Without the store functioning (since customers could not complete the checkout process), we would be unable to invest in the paid ads, nor will we be able to point people to the website to create conversions.
Being the group member most familiar with WordPress, I began the process of troubleshooting and liaising with support to get the site back up and running. This took weeks and it meant that, not only was our timeline completely at the wayside, but most of our project was on hold.
It meant that our social media campaign was shortened further, and that our initial KPIs we would have used to track the progress of the project were irrelevant.
Highlights & Learnings
Despite all the challenges. We were still quite proud of what we were able to achieve, and this is further supported by the positive engagement we received from our client the entire way through. We did not reach our initial goals by the predicted end date, but we still managed to update and fix her site, and provide her with quality photos and social media templates to utilise even after our involvement is finished.
Whilst our social media campaign couldn't point to the website and drive traffic as intended, it still helped build a presence and an active profile for the business, that still is good to have, considering that prior to this project, hadn't been used in over 3 years.
Last but not least, it taught me a lot about troubleshooting WordPress and understanding the file structure and functionality of several plugins, and of WordPress itself. I also learnt a lot in the means of client communications, especially when things start going wrong.
Final Outcomes
