An Analysis of Love Donuts’s Marketing Strategy

Introduction

Love Donuts' goal is to boost sales of its new range of pink, heart-shaped donuts in time for Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is not just for partners; it’s a day that many celebrate their loved ones and friendships. Love Donuts needs to broaden its target audience to include males and females aged 18-35. According to Schlossberg (2016), “40% of men ages 18-34 would ideally buy everything online.” This statement indicates that some men would prefer their products delivered to their door. For females, it would be ideal to target ages 18-35, as many would probably have the donuts delivered to their sisters, parents, or friends’ houses.

An Analysis of Love Donuts’s Marketing Strategy

To achieve a measurable outcome for the campaign, Love Donuts should utilize the following Google Analytics metrics. Brand awareness metrics can help Love Donuts track their performance on social media. This will enable the company to see the number of people who searched for their brand, providing insights into brand awareness. Understanding these metrics can help identify which areas of social media they should focus on. Additionally, the online conversion metric should be used to evaluate if the company is turning any of the audience into paying customers. It also indicates the number of people showing intent to purchase. If a customer does not make a purchase, the company can remarket to them on their social feed with a discount barcode, encouraging the customer to return to complete their purchase.

Moreover, Love Donuts should use keyword ranking performance to establish if their strategy is driving organic search traffic to the website. If the keywords are not driving any traffic, the company can identify which words are effective and add them to the list. Keyword lists should always be revisited and updated, as search trends are constantly changing.

Current Challenges and Recommendations

Love Donuts currently has a high bounce rate and a low click-through rate (CTR) on display ads according to Google Analytics and Google AdWords. This could be due to the content not matching the URL. The URL has "heart-shaped-box" as the path field, which doesn’t align with what they are trying to sell: pink heart-shaped donuts. This discrepancy gives customers the wrong impression, leading those seeking a heart-shaped box to leave the website without finding what they were looking for. Another reason for the high bounce rate is that the webpage is a single-page site. Users cannot navigate further than the landing page, resulting in them exiting after viewing that one page. The website needs to be optimized with a better layout to engage users more effectively.

The low CTR is due to display ads appearing on websites related to beauty and fashion, which are completely irrelevant to food. This indicates that the keywords need to be revisited to include more relevant terms and add negative keywords such as "beauty" and "fashion" to prevent ads from appearing on such websites. This adjustment should help improve CTR, quality score, and save money by avoiding payment for ineffective clicks. With the data provided, Love Donuts had 300 impressions from the display ad, costing $2400 just for those clicks.

The website performance is directly related to ad performance because the ads showed 300 impressions on websites related to beauty and fashion, which have nothing to do with food. Consequently, the web performance was suboptimal, as evidenced by a 68% bounce rate, due to attracting the wrong or smaller target audience.

Market Research and Future Strategies

To gain a better understanding from the users’ perspective, I recommend using a market research tool. This can help establish your position in the market and identify potential problems by soliciting customer feedback through a short survey. This feedback can inform future decisions on the product, potentially leading to increased sales. Additionally, conducting focus groups or in-depth interviews with target audience segments can provide qualitative insights into customer preferences and behaviors, further refining marketing strategies.

References

Schlossberg, M. (2016). [Title of the Source]. [Publication Details].