How Plain Lazy uses social media to build customer relationships

Plain Lazy is a lifestyle brand that’s building relationships with its customers through innovative social media marketing. Larry Jarrett-Kerr, marketing multi-tasker at Plain Lazy explains the company’s strategy

How would you describe the Plain Lazy brand and products?

Plain Lazy is a tongue-in-cheek clothing label and lifestyle brand, appealing to people who don’t take themselves too seriously. We have a growing product range that started originally with T-shirts and other clothing but has expanded to include skateboards, bean-bags, bedding, greetings cards and more. We sell online, via our mail order catalogue, in our four shops and through retailers like Free Spirit, Cotswold Outdoor and Blacks. Our customers typically range from kids to men and women in their twenties. They’re usually involved in active sports like boarding and surfing, or the music scene perhaps, but they all like the Plain Lazy ethos of “work less, play more!”

What’s the history behind the business?

Mark Hagley started Plain Lazy back in 1993 after he dropped out of university at 19. After only a few months Mark proved that his idea had the potential to be a success by winning the Shell LiveWIRE award for up and coming entrepreneurs. He toured the whole country persuading independent shops to stock his T-shirts and in 1998 opened the first high street shop. Now we have shops in Newquay, Bath and Brighton and Lewes.

The e-commerce site was first set up in 1999 and initially was a very small fraction of our turnover. The website is now 20 per cent of our revenue and currently turns over slightly more than our largest store. However, we expect the e-commerce site to start turning over more than all our bricks and mortar stores in the near future.

Which systems and technology are used to operate your ecommerce?

Plain Lazy’s website is built with Actinic business e-commerce software which has been heavily customised by website design specialist, Green Jersey. Actinic provides the website’s shopping cart, content management, order processing and dispatch. We also use i.level’s back office software for stock control across the business.

How do you use your website to engage with your customers?

This year we decided to really focus on online PR. We’ve used social media in the past, but we wanted to push it and get our name out there more. We asked online PR specialists, Content & Motion to advise us, and the campaign we call LazyWeb was the first result of this.

Plain Lazy uses social media and online PR to drive sales and brand awareness, to give our customers influence, and to stimulate talk about purchasing in a way that the brand itself doesn’t try to control.

The two key actions we want to drive are simple: gaining quality email sign-ups, and making online sales. At the same time, we want to increase the volume of tweets, retweets, photo uploads, photo comments, video uploads, blog discussion, and so on - which all create a relationship with us. These all enhance our website visibility and have search engine benefits such as keyword content and creating back-links from other sites linking into ours. All this helps drive traffic to our website.

How does LazyWeb create a customer community?

We use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr in particular. For example, we ran a Flickr-based photo competition and the winners all got to shoot photos for our next catalogue. Another competition was YouTube-based - the person submitting the best lazy video won lots of our products.

What value do you get from LazyWeb?

So far the campaign has been a great success in terms of branding and increasing traffic. Email sign-ups are key to driving revenue and half way through the project we had 668 new followers. Visits to the LazyWeb page totalled over 3500 hits in a month, and on Twitter we now have more than 700 followers, generating lots of click-throughs. Plus we are getting a lot of interest in our Flickr and YouTube pages as well.

What are the key metrics, and how do you track online performance?

We use Google Analytics and Actinic’s sales reports to measure site performance. Ultimately, our key metrics are email capture and online purchases. We’re also tracking volumes or tweets, back-links to our website, blog coverage and YouTube views. This way we’re measuring both actions and brand awareness.

What other marketing methods do you use to reach your target audience?

We sponsor a number of sports people: skateboarders, mountain bikers, and free runners, for example. Each person has their own page on our website with their own Twitter feed, photo stream and videos. They come along to events such as Glastonbury Festival, and we use them in our photo shoots, videos and catalogues. In exchange, they get press coverage and products from us.

How do you see Plain Lazy’s online activities developing in the future?

With LazyWeb we now have a campaign platform that can be adapted and developed for whatever we need in the future – to support festivals, sponsorship, events, who knows? We’ll continue to increase the links between the social media side of our website and the product side.

You can see Plain Lazy on the Actinic website.