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Your first steps: how to have a great start on a new project
8 min read
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Welcome to the next stage of your life. You just joined a new project — or started in a new company, the details don’t really matter. What matters is that you need to dive deep into something brand new — and speaking about brands, you may even be unfamiliar with the fashion industry, which adds to your already overwhelming situation. But don’t worry.
As you join a new project, there’s always a lot to take in, and it may be hard to concentrate and figure out what to do first. Fortunately, we’ve been there, too — and we’ll help you set everything up and get comfy. We’ll go through the process step by step and make sure you’re at home in your new position.
Week #1
So, it’s your first week in the new position. As we said, you’re supposed to learn what’s been done before and how the processes are built. There are some core aspects you need to study on the first days of the project.
Customer Journey Map
A Customer Journey Map — or a CJM — is a visual representation of the way a potential client has while making a way from a stranger to a customer. It should highlight all the main steps in this way, allowing you to understand what moves and motivates a client and how to boost their buyer’s experience in all stages to achieve higher conversion rates.
If the brand already has any Customer Journey Maps, you need to study them first thing. They will give you a solid understanding of the overall marketing situation in the company as well as the client experience it currently offers. With your experience, you can even start to notice flaws in the older CJMs right off the bat — that’ll help you adjust them later.
If there’s no CJM to be found, you should move on to the next steps and use the info you gather to begin mapping out your own map as you go. It doesn’t have to be perfect, so don’t focus on polishing it at first: for now, it’s just notes and general outlines you’ll develop and build upon later.
Helpful tools
Considering the brand’s been running for some time now, it likely already has some marketing tools and solutions it’s using. Whether you’re familiar with them or not depends on your personal experience, but you’re always better off prepared — so spend some time figuring out the programs at hand.
The programs you’re likely to encounter are pretty much the same in the fashion industry as in any other: email marketing solutions, CRMs, Drag & Drop builders, analytics, live chat and widget tools, or even big all-in-one platforms. Learn about the solutions the brand has — and take notes of what’s lacking. Keep in mind that sometimes the optimal programs in the fashion industry are not the same as in other industries.
In some scenarios, finding the right tools is completely up to you. If the brand just launched and you’re the first marketer to work there; if its solutions are blatantly insufficient and replacing them is a must; if the management told you to find the alternative right from the start. Then, it’s your call — and we have a couple of articles to help you with choosing new platforms (1, 2).
Previous campaigns
Another key aspect for you to dig into is the brand’s previous campaigns — both email and social media. If the brand’s been active for a long time now, you don’t have to turn every stone and analyze every campaign since 2022 or anything, but you need to know what’s been going on for the past half a year, at least. Educating yourself about what came before is also useful, but that’s not the top priority during the first week.
You should do that in order to — once again — better understand the brand and its marketing strategy. Pay attention to how the brand interacts with its clients online. Consider checking its Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms if they’re present there; and, obviously, check out the email campaigns they’ve launched in the last six months.
Your brand might have done some collaborations with bloggers and influencers, too. Many of those are situational, but by paying attention to who they’ve collaborated with and what for, you get a yet better understanding of the brand’s Tone of Voice, image, and priorities.
Week #2
In your second week, you continue gathering information, but you can already start acting based on what you already know. Now is the time to begin planning out your future activities. Let’s see what you have to do here.
Weak spots
Remember the Customer Journey Map you found — or jotted down yourself if there was none? Now’s the time to make use of it. Together with the store’s analytics, it should give you a pretty full picture of the current state of affairs.
Based on the CJM and the analytics, you should locate the weak spots of the store. Maybe it’s lacking quality promotions emails and fails to attract customers during sales? Or doesn’t have the right scenario to prevent people from abandoning carts or do they just quit on the checkout page since it’s overcomplicated and scary?
Find these flaws and figure out what scenarios you’ll have to implement in order to fix them. Those will be your hypotheses: for instance, you can see a few ways to increase conversion, retention, or average cheque. By running tests you’ll see what yields the desired results and what doesn’t, and will be able to implement the best-performing scenarios in the future.
Audience origins
Since you already have all the analytics on your screen, use it for a different purpose, too. You need to learn more about your actual and target audiences.
It’s highly likely that the brand’s mailing list is already segmented (otherwise, we have no clue what your predecessors were doing). If it isn’t, make sure to segment it, as usual, using the platform’s built-in options or by manually creating segments that you find most suitable.
It’s highly likely that the brand’s mailing list is already segmented (otherwise, we have no clue what your predecessors were doing). If it isn’t, make sure to segment it, as usual, using the platform’s built-in options or by manually creating segments that you find most suitable.
But what are the analytics for, though? Well, in order to plan your marketing strategy correctly, you need to know your traffic’s origins. Learn what drives the most traffic to your store, and do it for all the major segments. This will allow you to properly target each segment and make sure you search for potential customers in all the right places.
Planning time
Talk to your management and learn what they want to do in the next six months. Any plans on their side — anything that the store’s supposed to do — will help you build your marketing strategy. If possible, get the exact dates for major events and gather as many specific details about them as possible.
You’ll have to make three plans at this point: for one, three, and six months into the future. One general plan for each period isn’t going to cut it, so you’ll have to prepare separate plans for each of the brand marketing aspects. They may vary, but the most obvious are:
- Website
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Online advertising
- Collaborations
The ideas you had previously while working with the data might come in handy here — make sure to include the additional scenarios you came up with in the plans.
Week #3
You’ve spent two weeks analyzing the data, studying what you have to work with, and generating ideas. Now’s the time to begin implementing the changes you’ve come up with.
The changes
Start putting the new customer communication scenarios to work. Launch and test them to see how they perform, and prove or disprove your hypotheses.
The basic scenarios you might want to focus on are:
- New leads — email collection, subscription offers, live chats, engagement;
- Purchase incentives — recommendations, special offers, bestsellers, bonuses;
- Abandoned carts — follow-ups, discounts, promo codes;
- Repeat order incentives — upselling, accumulative discounts, personalized offers, etc.
Other than that
Implementing new scenarios and other changes is a long process, so it can take most of your week. In the meantime, you proceed with studying the company and dealing with the routine tasks at hand as they appear.
Week #4
At this point, you keep going with what you’ve been doing… but also, your superiors want to know what’s up. Don’t worry — by this time, you’re likely on the right track.
Time to report
Well, it’s been almost a month since you joined the project, and the management is eager to see the results of these first four weeks. Once again, you still keep going with everything you’ve been doing up to this point — just bear in mind that you will also need to present that to your superiors.
At the end of the month, you have:
- collected and analyzed a lot of data;
- made some conclusions and hypotheses, and started testing them;
- researched or developed a CJM;
- found the weak spots in the brand’s marketing strategy;
- implemented some new scenarios to improve the metrics;
- planned marketing activities for up to six months ahead;
- and much more.
If you wish to learn more about marketing reports and make the best first report ever, feel free to check out our article.
End of the month
You’ve done a great job and had a very productive first month at your new job. As the weekend arrives, make sure to give yourself some time to rest… After all, this was just the beginning of a new chapter in your life, and there’s so much more to do!
To help with your new marketing journey, we’ve written dozens of articles. Writing an email text, setting up web forms, developing email communication plans, launching a new collection campaign, designing emails, or even dealing with the notorious HTML code — whatever you need help with, we got you covered. Check out our blog to find the answers.
And… Good job. Really.
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