Business project

1.Executive Summary

The Mearth Technology is startup firm. The firm is established as a small size since there are no more than ten employees at present. Their mission is aiming at create values on the high-tech perspective and deliver the values to the end-users. For instance, Mearth’s main products, electric scooter, are developed by upgrading the attributes of normal scooter. The value of the high-tech scooter is greater than normal scooters, such as riding e-scooter instead of walk and car, convenience and efficiency and entertainment and excise. In order to deliver the values to right customers who are in need, the firm has primarily differentiate their target segments in terms of commuters and students.

In order to better understand the current operation, vision and expectation of the firm, our group conducted a in-depth interview with the firm’s CEO - Mr.Ye. We had a very pleasant conversation with Ye in his office (See Group Appendix.1). During the interview, Ye has kindly introduced the current situation of their operation in Australia. It has been known that the firm faces a problem that they have very low brand awareness, compared with other brands such as Ninebot-Segway and Xiaomi. These two firm are the main competitors of Mearth in Australia. They are selling similar products with different price. Another problem is that Mearth currently has a small profits which due to a relatively high costs of production and low revenue. In short, it can be said that the low brand awareness causes a small purchases.

In order to assist the growth of this startup firm, this project is aiming at developing a systematic digital marketing campaign. Our group try to use the ROI and the conversion rate to predict the result of who campaign in 3 months. In the meantime, the click rate and view rate also be a variable that be considered in whole evaluation and measurement part.

2.Understand customers, company and competitors

2.1 Company profile

NAME	Mearth Technology pty. ltd.
LOCATION	114A Pyrmont Bridge Road, Camperdown 2050
SIZE OF COMPANY	1 CEO & 1 Manager & 6 Employees & 3 Interns
AGE OF COMPANY	3 Years
GOODS	Electric Scooters & Electric Bike
URL	https://www.mearth.com.au/
WEBSITE AGE	2 Years
WEBSITE MANAGEMENT	20K / Week (Website Traffic)
ONLINE & OFFLINE CHANNELS	Online: Official website & Third-party Sales website Facebook, Instagram, Wechat. Offline: Branch office (Melbourne and Brisbane etc.)

MEARTH Technology Pty. Ltd. was founded in 2016 and has established three years, which is still a start-up company in Australia. The company's location is 114A Pyrmont Bridge Road, Camperdown 2050 (The Mearth Company 2019a). At present, the company has a total of eleven employees, mainly consisting of one CEO, one manager, six employees and three interns（Interview 2019). Regarding the company’s products, MEARTH currently specialized in producing high-quality electric scooters and electric bicycles. For interviews with the CEO, it is learned that the sales of electric scooters in the Australian market are higher than those of electric bicycles. The MEARTH electric scooter is currently available in two models which are the Electric scooter-MEARTH X and the Electric scooter-lite II (The Mearth Company 2019b). The MEARTH electric bike just one model is Electric bike – Zero (The Mearth Company 2019c).

The company's website is https://www.mearth.com.au/, which was created in 2017 and had been running for two years（Interview 2019). The main function of the website is to promote products, communicate with the customers and provide services. There are special staffs to manage and maintain the website. According to the interview information, current website traffic is 20k/week. The official website can provide the customer consultation services, product information browsing services and the direct purchase of the products. The company's product sales channels are both online and offline. The online channels are mainly based on the official website, and other third-party online websites are also available for sales, such as Amazon and eBay. There also have some social media channels，such as Facebook and Instgram. Offline channels are mostly sold in the form of branch stores across Australia.

2.2 Competitors and Market Analysis

Current and potential competitors

From the interview, MEARTH has two major competitors in the Australian market, one is Ninebot-Segway and the other is Xiaomi（Interview 2019). The biggest competitor is the Segway, which is very similar with MEARTH in terms of product functions and services. Ninebot has completed the purchase agreement with the Segway, currently Segway is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ninebot. The second biggest competitor is Xiaomi, a Chinese technology company brand. Mearth is currently ranked third in terms of market sales（Interview 2019). Compared with the other two products, the unique selling point of Mearth is that the product is updated faster. In addition to the above major competitors, the scooter-sharing has emerged in recent years and has gradually become a potential competitors in the market, such as LIME, BIRD etc. Especially Bird and Lime became the fastest-valued company in the United States to 1 billion. When the shared electric scooters enter the Australian market in large quantities, it is worth considering whether customers are willing to pay more to buy an electric scooter by themselves if they can solve the problem of short distance commute with less money.

Overview of industry

Mearth company is generally belongs to the technology industry. But its products can be subdivided into electric scooter industry and electric bicycle industry.

From the perspective of the global market, due to the advantages of environmental protection and easy operation, electric scooters are in great demand. The current market size is estimated at 17.43 billion dollars in 2018, and it is still growing (Grand View Research 2019).

The Global electric vehicle market has a size of $163.4 trillion in 2017 and is expected to reach $23.83 billion by 2025. The Asia-Pacific region dominates the global market (Allied Market Research 2019).

Firm’s unique selling points

Mearth Company USP: Because Mearth is a startup company and its vision is to committed to the development of cutting-edge technology, the integration of superior technology into its products. Therefore compared with other mature competitors, it has the advantage of fast product upgrading and iteration (Interview 2019).

2.3 Customers

2.3.1 Current Buyers

According to the sales information, the current main buyer are students and commuters that belong to young generation（age 16-35）, and the vast majority are men. For most students and commuters to buy the product because it can effectively reduce the commuting time. The young generation are interested in new tech because some new technology products can bring convenience to life, and young people are willing to try new things.

According to decision making processes, customers can recognize about the product in many ways, such as internet information, social media or friend’s recommendation, which will attract those who are interested in this product to search for more information about electric motorcycles to build knowledge. Then customer could find, compare and evaluate our products. Although many products have similar functions, our products are high-tech, high quality, medium price and fast updating rate. These can attract customers to make decisions to buy our products, and customers will continue to buy our products based on better product experience after actual use.

Company has a variety of media channels, to let customers know our product, at this stage, you can through them and Facebook some bloggers to use our products to attract the attention of their fans, and can let more audience attention to our products, in the future we can set up YouTube advertising can increase more traffic to attract more potential customers. Can then search engine search inside these keywords such as e - scooter and enter our website, our website provides a rich product information and details of the classification can attract all the needs of different customers, customers can through our website to buy goods and our these products can be in Amazon and eBay, customers can choose their own way of purchase to buy goods.

2.3.2 Prospective Customers (Non-buyers）

The prospective buyers for Mearth could be authenticated users who have registered on Mearth official website but did not act on purchasing the products. Furthermore, outdoor activity enthusiasts could also be the prospective buyers. Outdoor activity enables people to having enjoyable trip and experience more sights (Sustrans n.d.). An e-scooter as an outdoor recreational product can make people to enjoy these activities without worrying about leg injuries (Sustrans n.d.). These prospective buyers always tend to be attracted by cost-effective products because they are sensitive with the high price, they usually buy products which from well-known brand.

However, there are two reasons why authenticated users and outdoor activity enthusiasts have not purchased the Mearth’s products. Firstly, the relatively high price makes people to highly involved in the decision making the process. They would compare Mearth with other brands regarding price and quality and then finding a best alternative. According to Hiro (2019), Consumers are generally more sensitive to the price of more than AU$700. It is basically the high price that some customers cannot accept since the average Australian consumers spend $590.22 on outdoor recreational products in a year (Synergies Economic Consulting 2012). Secondly, Meatth as a start-up firm has low brand awareness in the Australian market. In this case, during the decision-making process, customers who have purchase intention on e-scooter may be able to search rarely information about Mearth. Therefore, they could unaware of Mearth and choose other more famous brands.

In order to analyze their preferences, we also learned about their online trajectories. Those who have not yet placed orders are more likely to browse the websites of other e-scooter brands on the Internet. Besides, in this Internet age, consumers are also more accustomed to see advertising on the web, bloggers and from celebrities on some websites. These network elements are imperceptibly changing consumer shopping pattern.

These buyers are easier attracted by special offer, such as emailing them a discount coupon and some promotional activities in online ads. For the authenticated users, send promotional email to them that is most useful medium to capture their attention. On the other hand, Display Ads could capture outdoor activity enthusiasts attention. when they aware of the brand, they may search information through social media platform to build knowledge. If they use the discount coupon, they will found the cost-effective product.

3.Marketing goal

Since Mearth is currently unsatisfied with their consumer flow and expect to improve their position in the market, this digital marketing plan will aiming at developing promotional activity and delivering the values to customers. The goal of this digital marketing campaign can be determined as increasing the brand awareness in Australia by enhancing the brand exposure towards customers and simultaneously improve the sales.

4.Recommended Digital Marketing Mix1: Overview

In order to achieve the company’s vision, a digital market mix is suggested to be implemented because the internet becomes an essential channel that both consumer and trades would engage in. Furthermore, Mearth as a emerging company is interested in digital marketing, and they are willing to invest a fair amount in digital market.

This project would figure out a complete digital marketing mix in terms of internet marketing, social media and mobile marketing. These three approaches would be interrelated and their effect on the ultimate marketing goal is a layer upon layer progressive.

First of all, the internet marketing will be adopted to achieve the objective of strengthening customer relationship and getting potential customer’s attention on the brand. For instance, email marketing would be adopted to maintain the relationship with existing customers. Meanwhile, Display Ads will be developed in order to attract new customers and provide a pathway for potential customers to visit our official website and engage in Mearth’s social media activity. There are two forms of our social media activity in terms of Youtube channel and Facebook community. The objective of social media is to make people more interested in Mearth products and thus generating the desire to buy.

Finally, it recommends to use mobile marketing aming to increase the advertising coverage and generalize the brand touchpoint. Specifically, a wechat mini program and QR code will be created for customers to engage in some campaigns such as register membership account and link to the social media activity. Also, the management can communicate with each single customer through Wechat directly and instantly.

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