When we met Craft & Guile they already had a website, a few social media accounts, and quite a few great reviews including best boutique in Yorkville.

However the website had poor quality images and filler text that their previous web designer had left for them to fill in but they weren’t sure what to use. And their social media accounts were uncoordinated with different logos, copy, and outdated.

Which was unfortunate because great reviews often bring customers to the website or social media before they go to the store. A positive review but a terrible website can often deter a customer from dropping by.

It’s common for many businesses to get overwhelmed with online marketing with so many accounts to manage these days and it’s often easy to think “maybe this is good enough” but different logos on different social media accounts, inactive accounts or outdated content, and often slightly different names between twitter, facebook, instagram can often give the impression of a chaotic business or an illegitimate business. People are more critical of what they see online these days and often a lack of consistency is the first sign the site is not legit. An @gmail.com email address, different names on social media can often be a sign of an impostor.

“We’d been working with different digital solutions but weren’t totally satisfied with their end result. SustainableMrk was able to cope with our demands and help us find a solution to our social marketing, media with something was very unique to our aesthetic but most important was able to help us set up a system that was simple, easy to use, and very effective.” – Jason Vallysedigh, owner Craft & Guile

Our first task working with Craft & Guile was cleaning up their website. We moved the site to WordPress.com for an easy to manage content management solution that the owner could manage from their phone. We removed all the unnecessary pages and copy and focused on one clear intro message and logo for the business, followed by categories for posting down the road to optimize search.

Search is essential to a business like Craft & Guile, being a niche clothing boutique carrying emerging brands often not available anywhere else in the city, tagging brands on their site can help potential customers searching for those brands find their site easily.

In fact, tagging on a website and optimizing search is one of the main reasons a website is still incredibly important in today’s digital landscape. Facebook, twitter, and instagram posts can help with search when using hashtags but search engines are often not as effective at picking up short posts, especially when combined with location filters.

We used the same message and logo on all the other social media to make it consistent and made sure all the names setup were consistent.

Working at the location we quickly walked through template options and selected a template that fit the owner’s taste and website needs, then proceeded to fill the site with posts and content including referencing reviews, and showcasing new lines and sales.

Within 2 working sessions (6 hours in total), the website was complete. We had redirected the old site to the new one and added social media integration for facebook, twitter and instagram.

We spent the last session on using social media and posting strategy as well as setting up a google business email account.

The benefit of a google business email account is that it uses their business domain, @craftandguile.com, but also automatically syncs to mobile devices and can be accessed from any computer online like an @gmail.com account, instead of being tied to one outlook account on one computer or having to store emails on the server and re-downloading each time you need to search on another device.

And since the owner liked using instagram, we showed him a few photo taking tricks, marketing options, and setup the account to automatically post to the business facebook page (instead of their personal facebook account), their twitter, and we setup a tumblr account to gain additional reach. While tumblr on it’s own may not be worth the additional work, synchronizing to instagram requires no additional work.

Choosing the right social media tools is about return on investment, in time and money, and personal preference. Because an authentic, genuine voice is so important in social media as well as consistent behaviour, it is better to post of the tools you will use regularly than to setup everything. However, if it requires no additional time and no additional costs, it doesn’t hurt to have multiple channels since each tool often has their own niche audience.

The Craft & Guile tumblr, first and foremost houses instagram posts automatically whenever they post on instagram. With consistent content, they can then add or engage when they have time without too much hassle.

In 3 sessions, Craft and Guile had a website, a consistent social media plan that required one post to instagram to populate facebook, twitter, and tumblr. As well as one post on their wordpress website to post to facebook, and twitter. Consistent branding across all social media channels and a new email setup that allowed them to check emails on their mobile or any computer easily with everything synced so if they respond to an email online, their mobile account would show the reply.

Within the first month of the website launch, they had already posted numerous reviews, fun new product images, and 2 great sales. They’ve had over 2,000 views in the first month of launch and with the majority of views coming from their reviews from sites like Toronto Life, they can now further entice customers to the store with new products and sales.

For more information on web and other digital services with SustainableMrk please contact Alice at alice.tu[at]sustainablemrk[dot]com or by phone at +1 (647) 895-4881.