Content Marketing Campaign for CALIA by Carrie Underwood
Big Idea: We want to create an accepting platform for moms to get relevant information on how to improve their health and fitness, share their own wellness journeys and in general learn how to look and feel their very best.
Upstream:
Why
Business need:
The fitness clothing market is experiencing large amounts of growth. From traditional companies like Nike or adidas to niche brands like lululemon or prAna, there is a growing market of people beginning their fitness journey. One overall trend that is being seen in the activewear category is keeping it casual. People are wearing their workout leggings to clean their house on a Sunday or picking up their groceries after an evening workout.
People are demanding comfort as well as high-quality technology like moisture-wicking elements in their clothing. Gone are the days of the simple black legging to workout in, instead fitness brands are taking inspiration from streetwear brands to make their clothing trendy and fun. Even the casual wearers, who might workout once a week, don’t want to sacrifice quality or style for price.
● Comfort is king for fitness outfit. Many people buy fitness clothing to replace old t-shirts. There is an increased focus on casualization and comfort is impacting all types of activewear and brands are looking for unique ways to define their comfort.
● Fitness clothing is in the bright spot in the apparel market. Activewear remains popular among American consumers. Success in this area has been underpinned by Americans prioritizing their health and wellness.
● At the same time, casual dress styles have become mainstream, leading the growth of “athleisurewear” styles, because it is a combination of casual, comfort and sporty (Mintel, 2017). Many people think athleisurewear is a good investment because they can wear it both casually and for sport.
● The increased acceptance of casualization in society has been an influencer of the athleisure clothing trend and many people consider it just a lifestyle choice.
● Fitness clothing is also becoming more fashionable (Mintel, 2014). It is considered fashionable now to wear sports apparel outside the gym and Mintel showed more than half of the consumers buy activewear for casual purposes (2016). At the same time, brands are trying to combine sports fashion with health-related activities. They try to market their products by providing actual activities in their retail stores or videos online (Mintel, 2017).
● An opportunity in the market is quality, or technology. Activewear with more technical fabrics, “smart” wear, and designer options are coming to the market.
Since athleisurewear is a fast-growing category, more and more brands want to take advantage of the wellness trends by offering well-designed fitness clothing to niche audience. For example, there are fitness clothing designed specifically to overweight people. Another niche market is new moms, which is the target market for CALIA. One thing reported by most moms after childbirth is a lack of physical strength. Most of them engage in recovery exercise, which drive the need for fitness clothing for this special group.
Most of the women have to buy new clothes for pregnancy and childbirth. Researches show that it usually takes moms at least three months for their bellies to go down after childbirth. Thus, there is an urgent need for maternity workout clothes to ease any discomfort for these new moms. The most important aspect of maternity clothing is to ensure the clothes has an easily expandable, comfy waist that won’t make them feel uncomfortable during workout. At the same time, moms want to be fashion, especially young moms. They don’t want to look fat and lumpish. They want to look nice. As a result, CALIA creates its clothing brand targeting this niche market by providing special oversize, fashionable and comfortable clothing for new moms to workout.
Brand why:
CALIA is a fitness lifestyle apparel brand led by Carrie Underwood. She is a mom with two children leading a hectic lifestyle. She promotes the products on her own social media page and acts as a model for the brand.
Even though the brand was created by an aspirational celebrity, the brand’s messaging is about promoting health over vanity, strength over being skinny and in general work to promote body positivity. They do this by using models that represent middle-age women, or mostly moms, of everybody size. This way, CALIA creates a more inclusive environment that is friendly to new moms, who sometimes have a flabby belly. They can easily see whether the clothes fit their body sizes.
Moreover, having fitness wear that is comfortable and functional will help them to strike the balance between family and work and be able to switch between roles more easily. CALIA is here to provide a solution for these women by providing a brand of clothing that moms can wear on a daily basis without changing and still love the way they look.
CALIA has also carved out a niche with its partnership with DICK’s Sporting Goods. Having a niche in the fitness space is key to differentiate brands since it can be hard to know what will work. CALIA promises fitness clothing for everyday life. CALIA is sold in DICK’s Sporting Goods which makes it more accessible when compared to its competitors like lululemon.
By partnering with DICK’s, our on-the-go target of moms don’t have to go to multiple stores to pick up what they need. She can head into DICK’s to pick up new soccer cleats for her daughter or a new catching mitt for her son, and while she’s there she can head to the yoga section a pick up a new sports bra and leggings that fit her body size. CALIA also qualifies under the sales that DICK’s often has so it is even possible to get these leggings at a discounted price while still having the high-quality mom wants for her families.
There is a current trend of combining technology with the apparel industry. According to Mintel, this trend makes it easy for retailers to lose sight of the human aspect of the brand. Currently, there is a trend where many brands choose to use hashtags to help their consumers share their lifestyle with one another and create a feeling of a brand community. CALIA uses the hashtag #StayThePathTogether and #CALIAwithCarrie to encourage women who wear fitness clothing from CALIA to work out with their kids and stay active with the CALIA community every day.
Connecting to the consumers via social media is also a good way for brands to have real-time interactions and feedback from consumers. CALIA remains active in their consumers lives on social media by posting every week. Almost all the posts have some audience interactions. CALIA also gets over 10,000 followers on Twitter and Pinterest and over 100,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram ensuring a large audience with which to connect.
The social media posts not only show moms’ fitness apparel, but also shows pictures of moms working out with their kids in a fun and engaging ways. For example, every time they do a push-up, they can kiss their babies. The posts show a healthy and balanced lifestyle and ultimately convey the idea that CALIA is a brand that flows seamlessly into women’s lifestyles.
Target Name: The Fit and Fashionable Matriarch
Who:
The fit and fashionable matriarch are the women who starting their journey to become mothers. Their life change dramatically because of pregnancy and childbirth. Before, their bodies are fit and good-looking. However, after childbirth, they bodies, especially their bellies, become flabby. They want to engage in scientific exercise to revert to the nice and fit body shapes they have before pregnancy. They are also looking for professional content about post pregnancy weaknesses and special conditions they may experience with their bodies.
However, having to deal with their families and careers at the same time, the fit and fashionable matriarch barely has time for themselves. In fact, moms usually feel guilty when they have to go out for workout classes and leave their children at home with baby sitters. Especially for the moms who already have to work during the day, they already have to leave their children for work. They wish to spend more time with their kids, so they feel guilty when they make time for themselves to workout. Therefore, they don’t have the money, energy or time to spend going to a boutique workout class.
On one side, they are looking for time-efficient workouts that improve strength and overall fitness. On the other side, they don’t want to sacrifice their time with their families.
Once they put workout in their schedule, they feel stressed most of the time about balancing everything and are confused about how to find a fitness regimen that works for them. Therefore, they are always seeking for professional content designed specifically for them carry them through the stage of pregnancy, childbirth, and taking care of new babies. They need to be able to access fitness right where they are, and they need help on knowing what to do to get a great workout. They know they’d feel better if they made working out part of their routine, but they struggle to know how to fit it into their lives seamlessly, without sacrificing their careers and their time with families.
The fit and fashionable matriarch aren’t looking for boutique fitness classes, they just want the mental and physical benefits of exercising. They want to feel part of the wellness community but are intimidated by the “Lulus” of the world which seems to require 5 am workouts, 6 packs and perfect diets. They want a community of like-minded moms who get the struggle of balancing health with eating their kids’ leftover goldfish. They want some time for themselves to break a sweat without breaking the bank. They feel pressure to feed their families healthier meals, but need help knowing how. They are constantly exhausted and want to have the energy to keep up with their children all day long. They don’t need fancy workout clothes; they just need some yoga pants and a shirt that they can work out in then go pick their kids up and still feel like they look good. All in all, they are just looking to get healthier physically and mentally and seek the confidence of looking the part.
With all the hectic in their life, they don’t have the energy and time anymore to search for fitness clothing for workout. They don’t want to sacrifice quality for price. And they don’t want to deal with the changes between workout and other activities. Most of the time, they are upset about many fitness clothing brands in the market because a majority of them are targeting young, fit people. They feel like they are forgotten by the market after childbirth and hard to go back to their ordinary workout routine. They also struggle to find clothes that fit their body sizes after childbirth. They can’t wear their old clothes until they return back to their original body shapes. Most new moms reported that they need to purchase new workout clothes after childbirth. Therefore, with CALIA, they can find high-quality fitness clothing they need while still able to wear these clothes to other occasions.
○ Behavior/Data
■ “Consumers want technical, highly functional and hyper-relevant performance wear,” Smith said.
■ Exercise is strongly linked to happiness.
■ “Consumers value the functionality and comfort of athleisure, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that the look is dressed down,” Moon says. “Athluxe and femleisure are both trends on the rise, with unexpected pairings such as designer pieces worn with sneakers. The new look is about mixing in athletic-inspired garments for a style that is put together without too much effort.”
■ The on-the-go lifestyle of young adults today also lends a hand to the new casualized style of dress we are seeing impact the workplace.
■ Mothers, however, report less happiness, more stress, and greater fatigue in time with children than do fathers.
■ People like to seek out inspiration to stay motivated. Mintel showed that 15 percent of men and 20 percent of women will buy new fitness apparel to inspire them to exercise. They are also interested in looking for partners that encourage exercise, especially the younger age group. Also, Mintel suggested that elements that keep people exercise long-term are seeing improvements in body composition, experiencing improvements in fitness, having a specific goal, having a workout partner and have a daily plan.
What:
CALIA by Carrie Underwood will create a webpage hosted on their official website, the content will be the blog posts in order to communicate with users about a variety of topics relating to health and wellness. The blog tab will be available on the CALIA site, if the users click on the “blog”, it will directly go to the webpage. We will also allow those who sign up for the website to contribute to the blog posts by sharing their experiences or opinions.
Our blog posts will have content ranging in topics from fitness, to nutrition, to holistic health. And all of this content is designed for moms. Specifically, we will have content about what activewear is best for what workout, daily recipes, or an article on how to stretch after a lower body workout for new moms. Because moms’ bellies are flabbier before pregnancy, their workout routine make change due to this reason. The fit and fashionable matriarch also wants to implement holistic health practices into their lifestyles, so we can create content in the areas of meditation, natural and organic products, and supplementation (Mintel, 2017). We want to keep our content aligned with the fit and fashionable matriarch’s hectic lifestyles, so all of our advice will be easy to implement. For example, we will provide healthy and simple dinner recipes that take under 20 minutes or workout videos to be done at home with minimal equipment. These moms need to cook meals for their families, this is one aspect that is different from before they get marriage. As a result, CALIA will post about how to cook a meal that not only fulfill the nutrition requirement for little children, but also healthy for moms so they can keep fit. Moreover, we will have the function of “filter” for our audiences to choose the topics they like.
There will be a strong focus on content at the beginning of the New Year and right before the summer begins. These are common times when women think about beginning a workout plan to get in shape.
Many New Year’s resolutions are fitness and wellness based, but many people end up breaking their resolutions. Providing content through the CALIA blog to help keep moms on track with their resolutions can help with this. Content can have a focus on quick, easy workouts for beginners and simple and healthy food recipes. It can be a daunting task on where to start on a fitness journey, so having content to make this transition easier will help moms stay committed to fitness without sacrificing time with their families.
Another important time for content will be in the spring. The “ideal summer body” is a trend in many social medias with workouts and diet plans made for moms to get beach body ready. Many moms are pushing back against this idea believing that any body type is beach body ready. This can be a sensitive time for women in general, so we would try to focus our content on staying healthy in the summer, instead of getting slim to look good in a bikini.
Most of the fit and fashionable matriarch are young moms, and many of them have the goal that they want to be able to enjoy their families after giving birth and keep a healthy lifestyle. The webpage we created wants to be a resource for new moms, so the fit and fashionable matriarch with uncomplicated pregnancies can have an active pregnancy. The webpage also wants to be the community for moms to socialize and communicate with others and support each of them in physical activity and health goals. Based on research, 93% of moms enter blog giveaways and 91% of moms comment on blog posts. They like to read about other moms or experts who had faced the same problems as they experienced. Instead of working out by themselves, they will like to have a small group of other moms that they trust and workout with them. Thus, we will create special blog content for those mom, such as topics like exercising for weight loss for new moms, making a healthy and simply recipes, introducing some special types of exercises (special exercises), or recommending suitable activewear for moms while doing a pregnancy workout. This way, the CALIA community can communicate with each other about the content and share their testimony after trying the methods out.
Overall, interactions with consumers play an important role because moms need motivations to work out and to take care of their families or themselves when they are busy. The blog posts on the webpage do not have to be too lengthy, they will be short, relevant posts of images or videos. These images and videos will keep the posts engaging, educational and fresh while the audiences are browsing on the CALIA site. Moreover, the recommendations that other users post can give our audiences opportunities to collaborate and share their ideas, success stories and other motivational interactions. Users can upload pictures and videos, tips and tricks to their fitness journey, or any issues or struggles they might be facing. This part of our content will allow for our users to build a community centered around their journey to achieving their health goals.
Data
● 91 percent of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84 percent trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. And they make that decision quickly. (Inc)
● 77% of Internet users read blog content (Impact).
● 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority. (HubSpot, 2018)
● Using images in your blog posts gets them 94% more views. (Expresswriters)
● Websites with a blog have tend to have 434% more indexed pages (Impact)
Downstream:
Where:
The blog content will be found on the CALIA site as a separate tab. The webpage contents will be recommended activewear, recommended workout & exercises classes (included audios and videos), and shared suggestions or experiences by users. The blog posts can provide opportunity to connect with the existing and potential users, and it is a good way build trust. The blog will be lifestyle content, and it will allow many users to share their experience of fitness, music preferences while working out, daily recipes, or about their fitness clothing reviews. According to the Hub and Spoke model, the website is the hub, the social media promotions and emails are the spokes.
We will send emails to consumers in order to notify them our new contents and new products. Email is a cheap and easy way for CALIA to reach the fit and fashionable matriarch and increase brand recognition. Based on what the fit and fashionable matriarch interested in, the email will send the related content to them once a week. Since the fit and fashionable matriarch have busy lifestyle, the weekly emails can help them to follow the trend our brand and notify them what’s coming up.
Social media plays a vital role in broadening connections with audience. CALIA webpage will need to build awareness and spread the informative content through social media. The CALIA Facebook page has about 413,937 followers, and their Instagram account has about 480,000 followers. Moreover, CALIA by Carrie has over 130,000 followers on Pinterest. With over 480k followers, we will also post information of the website through these social media platforms to promote the webpage and feature our content. On their Twitter account, they retweeted the founder Carrie Underwood’s tweets. With celebrities promoting their website, the brand can increase awareness and familiarity, build credibility. Through social media and celebrity endorsement, the content and the webpage will get most exposure.
● Data:
● 62 percent of people get their news and information from social media, and 18 percent doing so very often. (Simplilearn)
● 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. (Hubspot)
● 79% of people online use Facebook. (Hubspot)
● Instead of subscribing to the notion, “If you build it, they will come,” Vogel recommends utilizing social networking sites to build up your blog and establish your authority as a health and fitness influencer. (Acefitness)
● A recent study by University of Arkansas found that celebrity endorsement resonates more strongly with Generation Z and Millennial audiences. (Guided-Selling)
When:
The blog site will provide posts on a variety of topics like fitness and nutrition that will be posted Monday-Friday. There will be at least one post per day, though we don’t want to overwhelm our already busy users, so we won’t post more than twice a day. These posts will be saved to the blog page and divided into categories so that they are easily accessible for users even after their posting date.
Our email list will go out one time per week on Mondays to help women start their weeks off motivated and on track to reach their goals. Our list will have several headlines and descriptions in each one, along with a wellness tip of the day.
In order to align with seasonal wellness goals, we will curate specialized fitness or nutrition programs for the site. For example, from the months of March-May, we will create a series of posts about how to get your summer body ready. In the winter months we will roll out a program geared towards working out indoors at home and cooking healthy but comforting meals. Our posts will give seasonally relevant advice that users can easily implement into their everyday lives.
Content can be increased in January to apply to women who are looking to accomplish their New Year’s resolution to get in shape. Research has shown that more than half of the people who make New Year’s resolutions think about getting fit, losing weight or eating healthier. Within the first week of January 20 percent of resolutions are broken and 80 percent are broken within the year. Data has also shown that women are much more likely than men to make health related resolutions. Targeting our content around this time of year will help women to continue their fitness journey into the new year. Since so many resolutions are broken, having a community to help keep people on track of their goals will encourage people to keep working to their goals.
Data:
● According to research from Hubspot, companies that produced 16 posts or more every month saw more than four times as much traffic as those who posted between 0 and 4 times.
● Over 30% of what determines the success of a content marketing strategy is attributed to providing enough content and a variety of content. Our strategy will ensure we have a multitude of content in different subject areas that is accessible for our users whenever they seek it.
How:
Who will create content?
We will have a team of content creators to ensure we have valuable, relevant and educational content on the blog page on a regular basis. They will be hired by CALIA and will a team of people educate in different areas of wellness such as fitness, nutrition, and holistic health practices. Specifically, we will have 5 content creators, one in charge of fitness, one in charge of nutrition, one in charge of mental health, one in charge of holistic health and another guest contributor. All of them are moms that have at least one child, meaning they have gone through or at least going through the chaos that most of our target audience is dealing with. Two of them can be younger moms who are at the same life stage as our fit and fashionable matriarch. The other two can be older and have gone through all this chaos and have successfully gotten back to shape. We will have our guest contributors be experts or influencers within the wellness field to submit additional posts for our blog feed. The guest contributors do not have to be a mother. They can be anyone, including doctor, nutritionist or husband etc., so our audience can learn about the wellness from different perspectives. In addition to our content creators, we will have a social media specialist to manage all of our social media pages and to ensure our community of users is maintained while also spreading awareness of our blog page and its content.
The other half of content will be user generated. Our audience will be able to share progress testimonials, advice, or ask questions for one another in the blog page to help foster the inclusive community our audience seeks. They are also encouraged to keep each other motivated and excited about working out.
The blog page will also have comments and share features, which will allow people to share their ideas and experience related to specific posts. There will be filters on the webpage for people select the keywords they are interested in. With filters, our users can only read the content that they want to read. For example, if they are specifically interested in losing weight, they can select the “weight loss” filter, which will allow them to read only the blogs on weight loss. In order to have this feature, CALIA will attach category tags when they post the blogs on website.
When people shop for products, they can have the option to subscribe to CALIA’s weekly email updates about blog content. They will also receive a promotion code as an incentive once they subscribe to the weekly email newsletter. Programmers will group the subscribers based on the products they are interested in and the types of blog post they read the most. Then, content creator at CALIA will craft out message in the weekly email updates and select the blogs that they will be interested in and put them in the email.
What does that look like?
Our content creators will use strategy at all levels of execution to ensure we maintain relevant current and future content. They will keep up with all fitness and wellness trends to make sure our users are consistently engaged. Our guest contributors will be those in the fitness/wellness world who have notoriety and will generate a lot of attention from our users.
In the blog section, the audience can also compare their fitness clothing with other brands. This will make the content more objective and gain trust from the audience because CALIA is open to criticism and does not make the blog webpage just a platform for promoting its own products.
How will we measure?
When the webpage first comes out, the leading KPI can be engagement rate, including likes, sharing, comments, session length, and the time people spent on reading blog posts each day. Measuring likes, sharing and comments allow CALIA to know what content people like to read, how much do people care about the content and identify loyal customers. Measuring session length and the time people spent on reading the blog each day can help CALIA find out how often people read the blog page and what time of a day people use it the most. After having a stable engagement with the audience, CALIA can move on to lagging KPI. The lagging KPIs can include conversion rate and retention rates. Retention rate tells how well the blog is in keeping our readers and conversion rate tells how many people become an active reader or a loyal customer of CALIA after reading the blogs. If both conversion rate and retention rate are high, then it means the content of the blogs are useful to our users and they are successful in increasing sales to the products.
Meanwhile, the weekly email will start when CALIA first launches its blog page on its website. The leading KPI for email marketing is open rate. It measures how many people actually open the email and click on the blog articles. This helps CALIA measure how effective is email marketing in promoting the blogs. Once CALIA gets a relatively large number of subscribers, like over 1,000, then CALIA can use lagging KPI. The lagging KPI is the viewership of the blog posts. If the email marketing is effective, the readership for the blog posts will increase.
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