Social Media Strategy: Impala Skate

Background

An upcoming brand name in the skating scene, Impala Skate is an Australia-based retail brand known for its fashionable roller skates and social media presence among roller skating influencers. It sprang to mainstream attention during the COVID-19 pandemic as a brand supplying one of the multitude new hobbies people picked up while sheltering at home before making headlines again with Impala Skate rollerblades featuring prominently in the viral "Barbie" movie in 2023.

As a roller skating enthusiast myself, I chose Impala Skate as a client to focus on throughout the duration of my first class in social media marketing at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I developed a mock social media strategy for the brand by creating a(n)...

• SWOT Analysis of Impala Skate's social media presence.

• audience analysis and target personas.

• mock social media campaign posts.

• social media strategy presentation.

Audience Research and Strategy

Because of the type of person/lifestyle typically depicted in its advertisements, I assumed that Impala Skate’s target audience is primarily young women (late teens, early 20s) living in urban areas who are interested in fashion or social media.

With this campaign, I am hoping to target young women that have little to no experience roller skating (because Impala Skate is primarily a beginner roller skate brand) but admire alternative and retro fashion styles. Because Impala Skate's products are designed with fashion in mind, fashion has to be a core value of the group that I want to target. I included an interest in liberal political content because a lot of Impala Skate's product descriptions mentions that they are ethically produced and vegan (not to mention the company is female-owned and operated).

The psychographics of this group is that they care about their personal appearance and fashion, not just for themselves, but also to show off to others online via social media. They may live in more affluent areas, but are not necessarily extremely wealthy themselves. Because roller skating is primarily an outdoor activity, those interested in it would have to live in a safe and well-maintained area in order to participate in the activity. They are most likely interested in alternative subcultures and fashion styles. It would be important for this group of people to be fashionable in a very unique, original, and maybe even eccentric way. They may also be vegan or just generally eco-conscious

Target audience persona

Jessica was born and raised on the West Coast. After graduating high school, she moved away from her suburban hometown to the big city of Long Beach to become a student at a Long Beach university.

As a small fish in a now much bigger pond, Jessica is struggling with her personal identity. To reinvent herself she has mainly turned to making changes to her day-to-day look. She has taken an interest in the more niche areas of modern fashion, favoring more retro aesthetics as a way to stand out from her peers. Much of Jessica’s fashion inspiration comes from the people that she follows on Instagram and TikTok. An influencer that she follows recently posted a TikTok of herself roller skating, inspiring Jessica to take up a new hobby.

Goal A:

Jessica’s goal for Impala Skate’s products is to help her cultivate the new and unique identity that she is looking for. The brand needs to provide something that is fashionable and trendy without being generic. Jessica is also looking for a product that won’t break the bank. Even though her parents cover her living expenses, she doesn’t have enough money for designer and luxury products. She wants to find the happy medium between products that are cute but also cheap.

Goal B:

Impala Skate wants to become Jessica’s go-to brand for all of her roller skating and possibly even clothing needs. It wants to provide a pair of roller skates for Jessica that is so stylish and affordable that she is willing to come back for a second pair in the future and even more pairs after that, with matching accessories to boot.

Challenges:

One challenge that Impala Skate may face in trying to convert Jessica is their price point. While Impala Skate roller skates are one of the cheapest name brand roller skating products out there, they still aren’t necessarily cheap. Roller skating is an expensive hobby when just starting out, so moving from interest/evaluation to conversion could be a challenge.

Mock social media campaign

Impala Skate recently launched their newest product category: Impala Footwear. My campaign is about the first product of the new line, the Bubble Soft Mule. My goal is to convert Impala Skate’s existing skating accessories customer-base to also become customers of Impala Skate’s new footwear line.

For the design, I wanted to make a departure from the posts that Impala Skate already has advertising the Bubble Soft Mule, which vary drastically from its other content advertising roller skates. My goal for these posts was to use the same style as some of Impala Skate’s roller skate marketing (bright colors, retro filters, etc.), and apply it to the Bubble Soft Mule. I did this in the hopes that having similar visual effects as Impala’s roller skates applied to the bubble soft mule might attract some initial interest from the brand's existing roller skate customers.

I also aimed to emphasize what the intended use of the Bubble Soft Mule is. ImpalaSkate wrote in the caption of one of its posts that the Bubble Soft Mule is “designed to wear to and from skating.” I thought that this fact would be perfect to share in a more obvious way (visually instead of in a caption) so that it could catch the attention of Impala Skate’s roller skating audience.

Final strategy presentation

To finish off the semester, I revised all previous work and combined it into a slide deck of my final mock social media strategy for Impala Skate. View the final presentation here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bOjJcpcXbJTDluf6xq0jYZBCUzKdB1hS/view?usp=sharing