When was the last time you supported a small business? Perhaps you stopped to pick up your morning latte at your local café, you bought a jumper from that vintage store your friend recommended, or you grabbed a bag of dog treats from that new boutique pet shop.
Small businesses, or SMEs, are quickly becoming the lifeblood of communities around the world, but it’s definitely not easy. SMEs are creating local jobs and opportunities for people to connect, but they also face competition from the mega corporations and big box stores. This is especially true online, where consumers are likely to go to Amazon first to search for products.
In this spotlight article, we wanted to shine a light on SMEs in the retail category to discover how they’re making an impact online and where they could make things even better. Before we do, let’s take a moment to understand the state of play for retail SMEs:
As we discussed in a recent spotlight, digital marketing allows brands to collect important data that can help you deliver more effective campaigns. For retail SMEs, this can make a huge difference to your marketing strategy and drive revenue from surprising new places.
Grab your cup of local coffee and let’s dig into how retail SMEs can become a modern-day David in a world of retail Goliaths, featuring inspirational examples from Gymshark and Chewy.
To help us dig deeper into the potential audiences for retail SMEs looking to grow their sales and reach more customers online, we decided to analyze people using the #shopsmall hashtag – the official hashtag of Small Business Saturday used worldwide – and break them down into bite-size segments. You can view the full report here. Before we look at the most relevant segments in more detail, let’s take a step back and look at the whole audience to see what general insights we can extract.
Looking at the audience as a whole, we can see that there is interest in shopping small from both men and women, but it skews slightly more toward men (55% men vs. 45% women). Given that the #shopsmall and Small Business Saturday initiative was originally launched in the US by American Express, it makes sense that 44% of the total audience is based in the US, but we see growing engagement from the UK (26% of the total audience) and Canada (8% of the total audience). In fact, London appears as the most prominent city for our audience, accounting for 6%, closely followed by Chicago, LA, Toronto and Washington.
If you want to deliver amazing SME digital marketing campaigns, you need to have a deeper understanding of what your audience looks like. After all, your audience is not a monolith. Our affinity report delivered six segments of people talking about Small Business Saturday and we’ve decided to focus on the three most relevant:
We’ve spent a lot of time carefully sifting through the data to gain actionable insights about various consumers who are committed to shopping small. Now, it’s time to translate those insights into actions, or at least, understand how some of the savviest retail SMEs are making their mark in an online environment. To do this, we’re going to look at three very different brands: Gymshark and Chewy.
First launched in 2012, over the last decade Gymshark has evolved from a small start-up to a global powerhouse with just under 1,000 employees. While they’re no longer technically an SME, once upon a time they were a small business trying to make waves against the likes of Nike and Adidas. How? Influencer marketing.
Starting out on Instagram, Gymshark quickly realized the power of influencers, and since then have transitioned into platforms such as TikTok, YouTube and even Spotify. There’s a lot more to it than just sending out free clothes to the biggest influencers, what Gymshark intuitively understood was the need to build a community. Thankfully, among fitness enthusiasts, there is already a strong sense of community that centers around support, wellbeing and aiming to be the best version of yourself.
We particularly love Gymshark’s Instagram account dedicated to women, celebrating ‘muscle mommies’ of the world, which challenges perceptions around women and fitness such as lifting weights will make you look manly, and empowers women to feel good in their own bodies, championing self-love.
A brilliant example of this comes from a recent social media campaign called Gymshark66, which was first launched in 2021 as a social media campaign and has continued to run as a major pillar in Gymshark’s marketing strategy each January. Centered around the belief that it takes 66 days to form a habit, each year the brand encourages people to tackle their fitness goals and commit to sharing their journey for 66 days.
This challenge helps Gymshark tap into the community spirit that drives their core customers and brings them together under one cause, putting the brand at the heart of their customer’s journeys. This goes beyond the standard marketing ideology of presenting yourself as a solution to your customer’s problem, it makes Gymshark – and their products – an essential part of their customer’s everyday lives. Plus, the inclusion of a clear goal gives each and every customer something clear to work toward.
This campaign, and Gymshark’s overall marketing strategy, is all about strategic partnerships and authentic collaboration. This puts them in a great position to partner with other brands, who share the same kind of ethos, in a way that feels totally natural for their audiences. Using Affinio, we were able to identify three brands that have shown high affinity with Gymshark’s existing customer base, the most interesting of which were Fitbit and LA Fitness.
For example, a partnership with Fitbit could expand Gymshark’s potential customer base to people with a more casual interest in fitness looking to build a habit, or even newbies looking for guidance. Combining high performance athletic wear with one of the most established fitness trackers on the market is a match-made in heaven for expanding their customer base. Similarly, Gymshark could work with LA fitness to bring the Gymshark66 challenge into their branches during the month of January.
Pet care spending has been forecast to reach nearly $188 billion in the next five years, making pet parents a lucrative revenue stream for pet-focused SMEs hoping to flourish. These days, pet owners care an awful lot more about what their four-legged friends are eating. This has opened up the industry to disruption, in the form of food subscription boxes and healthier treats. Chewy, an online pet food retailer, has been able to stand out in a hyper-competitive market through digital marketing alone.
With no brick-and-mortar stores, it’s been incredibly important for them to stand out in digital environments – particularly when they’re going up against the likes of Amazon. Fortunately, in 2021, they recruited CEO Mark Eamer who spent almost two decades working for Amazon, giving him a deep understanding of what makes online retail Goliaths tick.
According to Eamer, what makes Chewy stand out is their exceptional customer service, even in a digital-only environment. In an interview with Retail Brew, he shared a heart-warming exchange with a customer service rep. “In the early days, we had a CS rep who was chatting with a pet parent, and just felt like, ‘Hey, we need to do more than wish them Happy Birthday on the phone’,” said Eamer. “And so, when the call ended, they had the idea of, ‘Let’s write a card and send the card.’ And the customer was so over the moon, we thought, ‘Well, why not try to do this programmatically? Why not try to bring that joy to all of our customers whenever we can?’ And so, we actually funded a team out of our customer service group—we call it The Wow Team.”
One standout campaign was their ‘Pets bring us together’ campaign, which aimed to appeal to the sense of community and kinship often felt by pet owners with both their furry friends and other pet parents. The marketing line for the campaign was very simple: Pets connect people. It’s their superpower.
Chewy wanted to recognise and celebrate the way pets keep us sane and grounded, which particularly resonated at the time the campaign was launched post-pandemic. They invited their customers, and pet owners in general, to share their stories, photos and videos on social media using the hashtag #PetsBringUsTogether, and they were proactive about sharing and engaging with posts.
It sounds simple, but it gives their customers an opportunity to connect with the brand in a truly authentic way. It also clearly signaled to their customers that Chewy is so much more than just an online retailer, they truly care about animals, and they want the very best for them, in a way that other mega corporations struggle to achieve. This appeals to the Gen Z and millennial desire for brands with purpose.
How can Chewy continue to show their customers they care? Using Affinio, we sniffed out some potential brands and organizations that could work well for partnerships. For example, Chewy has previously posted around raising funds for animal charities in the US. This is clearly close to their customer’s hearts, with ASPCA appearing as a top brand for Chewy’s followers. Another interesting partnership could be with Ben & Jerry’s, perhaps creating an interesting summer campaign featuring dog-safe frozen treats and ice cream, to be shipped as free samples in orders placed between June and August.
So, what have we learned from these two brilliant brands? Let’s take a moment to recap.
Ready to take the next step in audience intelligence for your marketing? With tools like Audiense and Affinio, conducting in-depth audience analysis and discovering actionable takeaways makes creating tailored marketing strategies easier than ever.