As part of our series of interviews in the MSME Digitalization plan in Jamaica, we would like to hear more about Develop Digitally Limited as our featured MSME company of the week.  

Develop Digitally is focused on assisting the agricultural sector through the use of blockchain technology and providing access to loans for Jamaican farmers.  The company`s core value is to assist farmers to become more productive and solve agricultural issues.

The company`s marketing strategy is fully on-line and it has a clear understanding of the added value of projecting the company through the web site despite the fact that they have a very particular customer base.

It was our pleasure to interview the company’s owner, Varun Baker and to learn how he has successfully applied his knowledge of technology to create new opportunities for farmers to become more productive through access to financial support with his project, Farm Credibly.  

QUESTION: How was the idea of your company born?

ANSWER: I do general IT consulting.  At the moment we are focused on a very specific platform, and we are building on which is technology applied to the agriculture sector.  It is called Farm Credibly. We are focused on access to finance in agriculture and farmers especially. We basically do alternative credit scoring for farmers so they can have access to loans, micro-investments to help them become more productive.

Q: How does Farm Credibly work? 

A: While we do have a signup process on line the truth is most of our good performing farmers come to us via reference.  We reach out within the agricultural ecosystem here and we try to find out who are the productive farmers.

For instance, now we are looking at hot pepper farmers. So, we speak to agro-processors who create pepper mash and they have challenges every year because they can`t get enough hot peppers.  We ask them who their top farmers are, who are the most productive farmers. We ask different stakeholders; some give out awards every year to farmers. We use them as reference points to know who is productive and who would be more productive with access to capital.

At the moment, I know it is very hard for farmers to get a loan.  About 90% of farmers don`t have access to credits and loans. This is where we assist.

Q: Why is it hard for the agricultural sector to get loans?

A: Formal financial institutions consider the agricultural sector as a high risk. They don`t understand enough about the sector to be able to decide and make decisions so they just ignore the whole thing.

This is where we come in with a level of expertise so that loans can be processed and people who are doing the lending don`t have to have the expertise and knowledge about agriculture and farming. They can lean on our credit scoring which is based on validated points that the farmer already does business with.

Q: Is Farm Credibly open to all farmers?

A: This business is not about everyone and all the farmers.  There are 200.000 registered farmers in Jamaica and most of them don`t have access to loans and this is where we come in and can assist. 

Many of them are very productive and have very successful businesses but it is mostly cashed based. It is very difficult for them to access credit.

So we use technology to make this process easier.  Farmers can continue to do what they love which is farming and we have to build up a profile for them.

Q: How important are the farmers for the Jamaican economy?

A: Agriculture contributes to Jamaica in 7% of the GPD. That`s about 14-15% when you include the manufacturing that also depends on this.  It is a significant part of our economy. This is even bigger in other countries so I know that this is a challenge on a global level.

Q: How long have you been doing this particular business?

A: This project really got started in 2017 but I have been working in agriculture with technology that is my background for over the last 10 years.  So, I have had a lot of experience speaking to farmers. My skill set is really technology and software engineering.

Q: So how did you go from software engineering to agriculture? Did you have some type of interest or was it by accident?

A: Yes, it was interest. I co-founded a non-profit organization called Slashroots Foundation. It was a group of us and one of the first areas we decided to tackle on was agriculture and the use of data in agriculture so at this time we ran a very specific programme which was the theft of crops and livestock which is very common in Jamaica, unfortunately.

So, it is a very big problem to solve but it was a very good entry point for me and helped me to understand what our farmers really wanted and needed.  They would say that it was good that we are working on something but that was not their priority.

They told me that they needed access to markets and to finance. So here I am a long time later focused on these things.

Q: Tell us a bit about your business and your collaborators.

A: I am the founder and we have a team of about 5 who are mainly part-time consultants who work with us on a project basis. There is an administrative assistant who works with me and a project manager, a part-time designer and about 3-part time developers and we all work on projects together.

Q: Where is your office based?

A: We have one office in Kingston. Of course, we work in many different places. Agriculture is mainly outside of the city so we do a lot of travelling and we work from a few different locations when necessary. But our head office is in the heart of Kingston.

Q: Do you have any competition in this particular area or you are the only one doing that?

A: It`s a recognised challenge to tackle on an international level. In countries like Kenya, there are companies like Farm Drive that are doing it.  Specifically, with the type of technology we use, there are sometimes really big companies that are working on similar credit score algorithms and blockchain technology. IBM is a very strong contender when it comes to providing blockchain solutions and services.

Q: And in Jamaica, you are the number one?

A: In this very special category, yes I would say we are. There are other companies doing lending and offer fin-tech solutions to the agricultural sector.  

Q: Why would someone recommend you? Do you have something different that gives you an edge on the competition?

A: We have experience in this area and we have been building this product for some time now. So our credit scores are gaining interest in the ecosystem and people have really gotten on board with what we are doing.

Q: What marketing strategies have you used since you started the business?

A: We are usually online in terms of reaching an audience and informing people about what we do. It`s a bit different than perhaps other companies you work within the sense that you are not offering a product to the entire world publicly. We have a very specific customer base that we are looking at.

So we aren`t really pushed out in terms of Google ad words doing online advertising. But, it is entirely online. If we end up in the newspaper here and there, it wasn`t because we wanted to advertise there, it was because of journalism.

Q: Based on your experience, what would be your top three tips you would give to maybe a new generation who wants to become a business owner, start their own business, or is in the process of a startup.

A: Definitely, get online, establish a web presence and get your products out there. Reach out to your customers. That is really what is going to matter, whatever you do.   If anyone would like help during this process, they can contact us and we would be more than willing to assist. 

But definitely get on line. Kolau is a great service in that sense. It is very straight forward and is a really easy way to get a web site established.

Q: What do you feel is the best way to build customer loyalty?

A: I think that it is closely related to value. You have your own brand identity that customers are attracted to. If you want customers to be loyal, you need to show this by giving real value and that you have a level of credibility to yourself as well. 

I think you gain their trust in some way.  I think these are the strongest ways of having a good track record.

Q: What do you most enjoy about your business?

A: Well, I like that even though it is tech-based, it also involves a lot of going out into the field and being in contact and communicating with real people rather than just being attached to a computer.

It is also about learning and rewarding to see how productive the food sector really can be. It is great from that perspective too.

Q: Where do you see your business in the next 5 years?

A: We would like to go beyond the Jamaica shores and grow the market.  I have travelled a bit and I have recognised that there are markets with similar challenges and that are much bigger than Jamaica.

I look forward to improving our own track record and gaining the loyalty of our customers firstly in Jamaica but expanding beyond too.

Q: Do you have even motto that you live by?

A: We are making productive farms more productive.  This is one of our core values. That sums up the main driver behind our business. 

Every week, we highlight a company from Jamaica, within the framework of the MSME Digitalization Plan, whose trajectory, achievements and experience are an inspiration to all of us. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring these great stories together and learn from them.

The post Interview with Develop Digitally Limited – MSME Digitalization plan in Jamaica appeared first on Kolau Blog.

As part of our series of interviews in the MSME Digitalization plan in Jamaica, we would like to showcase Camaria School of Locs, Brads and Barbering Technology as our featured MSME company of the week.  This Beauty School offers specialized courses in a number of beauty based techniques preparing students to professionalise in an ever-growing market for expert beauty services.

It was our pleasure to interview Camaria Thomas and to delve into the exciting world of a beauty school and the fields of specialization that the Camaria School offers to its students. What certainly stood out during our interview was Camaria’s passion for teaching and learning and creating opportunities for future beauty professionals.

When asked what her company’s motto is, Camaria stated: “Every teacher is a student and every student is a teacher.”  Her beauty school is a space where sharing knowledge is dear to Camaria’s heart and a core feature of her business.

QUESTION: In general terms, what does your company do?

ANSWER: The Camaria School has a management philosophy built on commitment and mutual agreement in maintaining a highly professional environment for all students.

The Camaria School of Locs, Braids and Barbering Technology is a registered beauty school that opened its doors in 2017.  We provide education in beauty care with specialized courses in barbering, wig making, braiding, nails, locs and make-up artistry.

Our series of short courses are designed to empower students and prepare them to meet and exceed the high-level pressures from an entrepreneurial standpoint and to achieve industry recognition.

Q: When did you start your business and how long have you been in the field?

A: I am Camaria Thomas, the founder, and general manager of Camaria School of Locs, Braids and Barbering Technology.  With more than 20 years of experience, I began my house-call business in 1997 and then in 2016 gave my first braid workshop.

I consider myself an industry leader who is dreaming beyond the Jamaican shorelines! I would like to expand my school to include distance learning on a global scale and give my business international exposure.

Q: Why did you decide to start your own business? What were your motivations?

A: My business was born from my love for hairdressing, sharing my knowledge and as a solution to the high demand for hairdressing services and classes. 

Thanks to the positive support from my clients who would ask me to teach them braiding in their homes, I decided to take the initiative with courage and belief in myself to start the business.

Opening up my beauty school also meant that I could focus my passion for teaching in one place instead of seeking employment wherever the opportunity arose and the financial uncertainty that this caused.

Q: When you decided to start, how did you start? What has changed since your inception?

A: My business began by visiting clients’ homes to teach them different beauty techniques.  I then began to offer workshops soon after.

Presently, we have courses that are certified and accepted by Kingston and St Andrew Municipal Corporation after having met a number of the regulatory requirements to function as a school.   

Q: How important do you think it is for small businesses to have a website and why?

A: A website is very valuable for a business especially because technology is in a constant state of change.   

A week after creating Camaria Beauty School Locs, Braids and Barbering Technology website with Kolau, there was a significant increase in business. 

This means that the website is a multifunctional tool to create product and service awareness and provide market exposure.

Q: Do you think it is important to have your business on the internet? Why?

A: The Internet is the easiest way for businesses to connect with customers and clients and interface with other businesses. It is also an affordable way to achieve brand awareness.

When a business is on the internet, the capacity to gain vital customer data and their purchasing habits by doing digital market research is important.  You then can use this valuable data to create marketing strategies to increase business profits.

For me, the internet has positively impacted my business by consistently reaching my audience at an affordable cost.  Furthermore, it allows the distribution of the market share among competitors

Q: How do you advertise your products? Do you use social networks or other methods to publicize your products?

A: Active social media presence builds relationships and networks across the globe. Networking is about creating a profit-making business, sharing ideas and knowledge, interaction and learning. 

My business, Camaria Beauty School of Locs, Braids and Barbering Technology also uses traditional marketing methods including promotions, flyers, online directories to complement our social media marketing and branding strategies.

Q: How do you see your business in the next 5 years?

A: The business long term goals for the next 5 years include a variety of initiatives to continue to grow and share knowledge about beauty techniques.  These are providing the most experienced and knowledgeable staff to the schools’ students, providing on-line classes and career development advice with the use of technology.

I would also like to add courses to the Beauty School’s portfolio to include tattoo, body piercing, body waxing (skincare).

My plans also include the creation of a magazine or a book that specialises in African specific beauty needs including dark pigment beauty care, products, and lifestyle as there is little access to this information at present.

I am not only a teacher of locs, braids and barbering technology, but I am also a coach and an advisor for my students in their continued education as professionals to reach long-term success as beauty technicians and as entrepreneurs.  The willingness to take risks, to unlearn and learn and to have the gift of patience are my key tips for future business owners.

Every week, we highlight a company from Jamaica, within the framework of the MSME Digitalization Plan, whose trajectory, achievements and experience are an inspiration to all of us. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring these great stories together and learn from them.

The post Interview with Camaria School – MSME Digitalization Plan in Jamaica appeared first on Kolau Blog.

As part of our series of interviews in the MSME Digitalization Plan in Jamaica, we would like you to hear more about Health and Wellness Consultant to Travelers as our featured MSME company of the week.  

Health Travel Companion offers integrated primary care service for its clients that look to restore optimal wellness and empowerment through the use of counseling and medicine from a sustainable standpoint. The service’s motto is: 

Coaching happens when someone hands you their trust and you hand them back their greatness.

The company offers a wide range of health services for its clients that are attended by the on-site staff and a network of specialized professionals that guarantees the high-level service the business maintains. Another aspect that Health Travel has understood is the importance of technology in building the business and strengthening its professional and client base!

It was our pleasure to interview the company’s owner, Dr. Susan Lowe and to see how her medical degree and many years of experience in the health field as a counsellor and coach has transformed into a wellness coaching and counselling business.

QUESTION:  In general, what does your company do?

ANSWER: I am a completely integrated primary care service including traditional and alternative medicine, wellness coaching and counselling including nutrition, sexuality, pain management, mental and emotional work.

The services are offered online, office-based or in non-traditional settings ranging from the beach, elegant night spots to mountainside getaways.

I also enjoy public speaking and presenting on health, wellness and other subject matter and I’m developing a special niche market for business travellers on their downtime. 

Q:  Why did you decide to start your own business? What were the reasons, what motivated you?

A: It was clear to me that half the work of curing or enabling people to manage their conditions/issues was their mindset and that the internet wave was going to play an enormous part in the story.

I also figured that since men use health services far less than women, if presented with convenience and anonymity via a gadget (their numerous IT devices) there was likely an extra untapped market that could be served – men.

Q: When you decided to start, how did you start? What has changed since your inception?

A: The website has been scaled down to one of attractive simplicity and now via the Government of Jamaica’s initiative, I’m taking advantage of the Kolau/Google partnership.

I have also added public speaking engagements, consultancies and upgraded to a more comfortable office minutes from the main business travel centre of Kingston.

I now want to increase the community I serve to visitors and guests to Jamaica. There is something I’ve noticed about the responsiveness of clients who are time-capsuled outside the milieu of their regular lives back home. They are more relaxed and open to their own intuition and any help I offer.

Q: What do you think your company does differently from your competition? What distinguishes you?

A: Complete integration with training and certification in the gamut of health provision – medical degree, masters in coaching/counselling, basic assessment in alternative medicine, nutrition, and paralegal training, long years of experience (30) and amazing networking within and outside the sector.

My personality means I use techniques so the coaching or counselling process is lighter, gets to the point and frees or cures the clients to be able to manage themselves.  I’m more like a muse.

Q: How do you see your business in the next 5 years?

A: I will have built up my public speaking engagements including sessions abroad, the health tourism niche of wellness coach to visitors and travellers and added the service of being a consultant health travel companion while the client is on tour via air, sea or land.

The company’s name; Health and Wellness Consultant to Travellers is named after this favourite niche.

Q: What inspired you to enter this industry? Do you have any favourite activities related to your work?

A: I had been a degreed counsellor for years and found the process was more powerful when supplementing it with medicine. But I remain convinced that half of what it takes to get a client back into action is in their minds.

I have a gift for getting clients to realise their own power in creating optimal wellness of any kind; mental, social, emotional, sexual, pain management and nutrition.

Travel was also an inspiration to enter the industry. I love moderately paced business travel and the cultural exchange that goes with it. I have functional Spanish to this end.

Q: How important do you think it is for small businesses to have a website? Why?

A: It can’t be escaped anymore, it’s like your phone number and land address. Initially, you can get more of your word out at a fraction of the effort and cost of the older ways of doing business.

Q: How do you advertise your products? Do you use social networks or some other method to publicise your products?

A: I have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and as often as possible engage in ‘guerilla marketing’. I’ve done the latter twice quite successfully once with our top car rental agency Island Car Rentals and once with Kingston’s top bistro for a session during Restaurant Week called ‘Wine & a Little Sex’.

Q: What advice would you give to other business owners who are starting or are in the process of starting their business? Give us 3 tips.

A: Do not waste money on grandiose web schemes at first. Make sure whoever helps you at startup has the same or a clear understanding of your vision. Stick to your vision and don’t work on more than 3 branches of it at one time.

Q: What do you do for customers to return to your business? Do you use any strategy to build customer loyalty?

A: I approach this in complete reverse to most private health providers. I love to ‘get rid’ of you. By that I mean I’ve either cured you or taught you to manage yourself. I teach that I do half the work and the client does the other half. There is full transparency of all my work and once my work is done I expect it is done well enough that the client will not have to keep coming back and will refer new clients to me. If I can’t help a client in two years, I refer him or her or release them so I don’t waste their time and money. 

Every week, we highlight a company from Jamaica, within the framework of the MSME Digitalization Plan, whose trajectory, achievements and experience are an inspiration to all of us. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring these great stories together and learn from them.

The post Interview with Health and Wellness Consultant to Travelers – MSME Digitalization Plan in Jamaica appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Do you remember the scene in Alice in Wonderland where Alice asks the Cheshire Cat which way she ought to go?

“Well, that depends on where you want to get to,” the cat responds.
“Oh, it really doesn’t matter,” Alice replies.
“Then, it really doesn’t matter which way you go,” the cat concludes.

This passage teaches us a valuable lesson: Knowing where we want to go is important in order to get there. Therefore, knowing how to write a marketing plan allows you to draw your road map and discover what path to take to achieve your goals (to attract and retain customers).

A marketing plan doesn’t have to be extensive or complicated. Rather, the best marketing plans are short and simple. However, the key to writing an effective marketing plan lies in a great paradox: the difficulty of achieving simplicity.

In the words of Leonardo Da Vinci: 

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  

Similarly, Steve Jobs discussed the idea when he said, “Simple can be more difficult than complex.” Even Albert Einstein himself said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” However, it might be aeronautical engineer Kelly Johnson who alluded to this concept the best using four simple letters: KISS—“Keep It Simple Stupid.” 

This guide will help you discover how to make a marketing plan in a simple way, based on the KISS concept and the extended model known as the “1 Page Marketing Plan.” This model has been defended by numerous marketing academics including Philip Kotler but was spread widely by entrepreneur Allan Dib through his best-seller of the same name. 

Is it Essential to Have a Marketing Plan?

Marketing plans are a tried and true method that are continuously used all over the world for companies big and small. However, in the SME universe, it seems that the concept or, at least its implementation, is not as widespread as it should be. 

According to a recent study carried out by Outbound Engine, 50 percent of SMEs don’t have an established marketing plan. The lack of this piece of the business puzzle can result in a stagnation or even a reduction of sales for a company.

While no one is sure why SMEs typically lack a sound marketing plan, it may be due to the fact that marketing plans—traditionally speaking—are perceived to be complex documents more than 100 pages in length. This is seen as a great waste of time and resources to most business owners who are more focused on meeting customer demands and staying within their set budgets. 

However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Marketing plans should always be simple. As Allan Dib says in his book, the 64/4 rule should always be applied to any marketing plan:

The 1 page marketing plan is 4% of the effort generated by 64% (or more) of the results in your business.  

So, it can be assumed that SMEs choose to shy away from marketing plans for their perceived complexity, but it doesn’t prove whether or not a marketing plan is essential for the long-term operation of a company.

Taking into account that a report by the Press and Communication agency found that 87 percent of SMEs that closed in 2018 didn’t have a professional marketing plan, it’s safe to say that marketing plans are essential for a business’s long-term success.

What is the Purpose of a Marketing Plan?

A marketing plan can help you organize your marketing strategies and focus on achieving your goals for your company. 

As defined by Sally Dibb and Lyndon Simkin in their book, Marketing: Concepts and Strategies, “marketing planning is a systematic process involving the assessment of marketing opportunities and resources, the determination of marketing objectives and the development of a plan for implementation and control.“

To give you a clearer idea, your one-page strategic marketing plan should allow you to organize your marketing strategies into three phases precisely related to your customers’ purchase cycle:

• Before your potential customer makes a purchase.

• During the purchase.

• After your potential customer has bought and officially become a customer.

At the same time, it should allow you to answer the following questions about your business:

• Who do you want to reach (your target audience)?

• What do you mean (your message for your target audience)?

• How are you going to reach  them (the means you will use to reach your target audience)?

• How are you going to capture their interest (your lead capture system)?

• How are you going to establish a relationship with them (your lead nurturing system)?

• How are you going to turn them into customers (your conversion strategy)?

• How will you do it to offer a world-class experience?

• How will you increase the value of your customers?

• How will you do it to be recommended (your referral program)?

These nine questions are the starting point and the backbone of everything your marketing plan should contain and this is how the one-page marketing plan proposed by Allan Dib is structured.

To build your own one-page marketing plan, follow this step-by-step guide based on the nine questions above.

Step 1: Find and analyze your target audience

The key to the success of any business often lies in what it knows about its potential customers. A business needs to know their clients perfectly including demographics, location and spending habits in order to offer them a product or service completely suited to their needs.

Today, mass marketing is no longer meaningful and directing your products or services to “everyone” for fear of losing potential customers is the main mistake many small businesses make. It is impossible to do something that suits everybody’s needs and, at the end of the day, you’ll have a better chance of getting noticed when addressing a smaller audience than you would trying to capture the attention of a large pool of customers.

You may be thinking that limiting your audience will limit the growth of your business, but this simply isn’t true. You can always create new products or services aimed at new “small pools” that together can exceed the size of the large pool you initially wanted to address.

Therefore, start by finding a market niche and dominating it by creating a product or service along with a well-written message that responds to the needs of this segmented group.

Think about it this way, when you break a bone, you’d rather see a specialist than a general practitioner. The same idea can be applied when choosing between similar businesses. By establishing yourself as a specialist and not a general practitioner, you can grow your business by attracting people who need your product or service instead of attracting people who just have an interest in what you’re offering.  

More so, mastering a niche allows you to set a higher price since those who need your product or service know that you are offering exactly what they are looking for and trust that the quality will be better due to the fact that you are a specialist in your field.

Analyzing your potential customers (either through surveys or through the definition of your ideal client), you will be able to figure out how to achieve your business goals by optimizing your resources and knowing what trends to look for.

In the era of 1-to-1 communication, you need to personalize your communications and your actions based on what you know about your potential customers. According to a Salesforce Research survey of more than 6,700 consumers worldwide, it is estimated that 75 percent of consumers will want to find a personalized shopping experience by 2020. 

For example, the website of the online fashion store Zalando shows a subscription form for its newsletter that asks its potential customers to indicate if they are interested in fashion for men or women.

This detail allows them to determine the person’s gender so they can personalize the emails they’ll send to them to show only what fits their interests. 

You can have more than one client profile, so analyze and define each profile to know exactly who your audience is, where you can find them and what message you want to deliver to them. 

To do this, you can rely on the popular 5W + 1H model widely used in journalism and research:

• Who is your client?: Are they a private individual, a company, a man, a woman, a child, a teenager? How old are they?

• What does our client want?: Are they looking for an expensive or cheap product? Do they prefer quality? Are they looking for personalized attention?

• When do they buy?: Do they do it frequently? Do they make planned purchases or are they more spontaneous?

• Where is our client?: Where do they live or stay? What sites do they visit (both in the real world and online)?

• Why do they buy?: What needs do they have and why would they want to buy your products or services? 

• How do they buy your product or service?: Do they buy in large quantities or individually? Do they do it online or do they prefer to go to a physical store? What payment methods do they use?

By answering these questions, you can develop multiple client profiles that will serve as the first step in your marketing plan. 

Step 2: Build your marketing message

Once you determine your target audience and create client profiles based on that audience, it’s time to create a message to get their attention. This has to be done properly since it can be the difference between reaching your audience and talking to a wall.

A message with a purpose

Every marketing message you add to your plan needs to exist to achieve a single goal. This can be anything from your potential customers contacting you, visiting your physical store, filling out a form, remembering your brand or buying a specific product or service. 

In the same way that you have selected a specific target audience to focus all your efforts on, you must also select a specific goal for your message and focus on it.

Base your message on a unique sales proposition

A Unique Sales Proposition (USP), is a concept that is used to refer to the factor that differentiates your product from that of your competition when it comes to selling it. 

To define your unique sales proposition, you must be clear about why your business exists (your mission) and why people should buy from you and not from your competition. For example, the mission of Microsoft, as the company itself explains on its website, is “to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.”

As you can see, its purpose is not only to sell operating systems, programs or devices like any other software company. Microsoft sells “productivity” just as Coca-Cola sells “happiness.” What are you selling? 

Do an experiment. Do you think that if you remove the logo and name of your company from your website, your customers could still recognize you? If yes, it means that you have defined your unique sales proposition well. If not, and your website looks like that of any other company in the sector, you need to work on it. 

Keep in mind that selling “quality” or a “good service” will not allow you to stand out, since it is something that your audience already expects from you.

Create your unique sales proposition based on what your potential customers want to achieve. People don’t want your product or service, they want what your product or service will allow them to achieve. Think about it.

Keep the medium in mind when creating the message

In his book Kotler on Marketing, Philip Kotler, with good reason, states:

The decision on the design of the message interacts with the decision of the medium [through which it will be transmitted]. 

Your message and its purpose must be defined with the characteristics of the medium you choose to transmit it in order for the message to be effective. 

For example, imagine that you own a sushi restaurant and your goal is to get your potential customers to make a reservation through your ad. You are considering creating ads on Instagram and buying a space in a local magazine. The nature of these two platforms is very different so your message should be presented in different ways.

The magazine’s ad format is more limited consisting of text and an image. The most effective option will probably be to focus your message on getting the potential customer to call your business. Therefore, highlighting, above all, your phone number is one of the most important factors.

Instead, on Instagram you can use photos or videos, add emojis in the text to get attention and direct your potential customers directly to your website to make an online reservation.

In this example, the goal is the same and the message is the same but the way the message is delivered varies based on where the advertisement is placed. 

Don’t talk only about your company and your product

Obviously, you have to present your product or service to the public to sell it, but don’t fall into the mistake of talking only about its characteristics and how good your company is. Focus on talking about the benefits it provides and how it can offer a solution to a problem or concern your potential customers face.

For example, Domino’s Pizza launched an effective marketing message with an excellent single sale proposal highlighting a benefit that differentiated themselves from their competitors. The message read: “Receive a hot and fresh pizza at your door in 30 minutes or less or it’s free.”

If they had only highlighted that they offered “Pizzas delivered to your home,” no matter how good their pizza was, they would not have stood out among the competition. Therefore, it is important to find something different and remarkable that makes you stand out to beat your competition.

Step 3: Select the media or channels you will use to reach your potential customers

Based on the objectives you have defined above and the information you have gathered about your customers, including their location and behavior, choose the marketing channels that you think will best allow you to reach them. Take into account your resources and then define the strategies and actions that you will use in each channel. 

For this, you must also take into account the 4Ps of the marketing mix – price, product, place (distribution) and promotion Philip Kotler created the theory and defines it as “the mix of controllable marketing variables that the company uses to achieve the desired level of sales in the target market.”

For example, suppose your company is dedicated to the sale of top-brand appliances nationwide sold through an online store with a goal to increase the sales of high-end LG smart TVs. Since you’re selling an expensive product,  you can invest more into promoting the devices with less risk of a negative return. 

In this same example, you know that your potential customers tend to search for your products through Google so you define Google Ads as one of your marketing channels. Here, you create Google search ads to promote this product nationwide.

To define the channels and strategies to use in your marketing plan, you can classify them as follows:

Online marketing channels and strategies

According to the 2019 Small Business Marketing Trends Report carried out by Keap, the three online channels and tactics that more SMEs plan to use this year are social networks (48 percent), digital advertising (23 percent) and email marketing (23 percent). Here are the main channels and tactics to consider:

• Blog: Content marketing

• Search engines: SEO and search engine advertising

• Other websites and apps: Display marketing, affiliate marketing

• E-mail: E-mail marketing

• Social media: Content marketing and social media advertising

Offline marketing channels and strategies

Another survey carried out by OutboundEngine reveals that for 11.67 percent of SMEs the most successful marketing channel has been traditional advertising while 13.61 percent of SMEs say their success came from events. Here are the main offline channels and tactics to consider:

• Traditional media: Advertising or press, television and local radio appearances

• Stationery: Creation of flyers, brochures, guides and other publications

• Traditional advertising supports: Billboards, etc.

• Fairs and events: Participation in fairs and organization of events 

Defining your marketing budget

It’s time to make one of the most difficult decisions, especially for SMEs: setting your marketing budget. Among small businesses, there is a general tendency to see marketing as an expense instead of an investment and this is why, according to the aforementioned OutboundEngine study, more than half of SMEs tend to spend less than 5% of their total budget on marketing. 

If you look at the data provided by the OutboundEngine study, there is no doubt that investing more in marketing usually means gaining more. Specifically, 81 percent of SMEs that invested between 5 percent and 10 percent of their annual budget on marketing actions during 2018, saw their sales increase. On the other hand, those that invested less than 5 percent of their budget, experienced a decrease in their sales.

Try to find out the advertising cost of each channel you want to use to advertise your products or services and the cost of the staff you need to carry out the strategy. Then, distribute your budget based on the cost and your marketing objectives.

Once you launch your campaigns, you will know if the return you get is positive and if it would be profitable to invest more money in the channel. At this point, you may see that you’re spending more than you earn which means you must stop using that specific marketing channel. 

You can find free budget templates to make this task easier on Smartsheet:

Step 4: Define your lead capture system

A lead is a potential customer that has shown interest in your product or service.

Getting a lead’s contact details and storing them in a database is key to generating more sales. Why? As an analysis by Kissmetrics demonstrates, 96 percent of visitors who come to your website are not ready to buy immediately. They may be ready in a month or a year, but if they never hear from you again, you lose them.

If you have a direct communication channel with them, you can continue sending them messages and cultivate a relationship that will eventually end up in a sale. For this reason, Allan Dib argues that you should not try to sell something directly through your ads. Instead, you should create a direct contact road with your potential customers.

To do this, you have to legally get your leads’ contact information. This is done through a lead magnet (a hook to attract potential customers). 

Imagine that you are the owner of a real estate agency that sells residential houses. Your target audience is young couples looking for their first home. Instead of creating an ad that says, “buy your first home,” you decide to offer an eBook on your website with useful information about everything you need to consider before buying your first home. Your potential clients can download it for free if, in exchange, they fill out a form with their name and email.

This eBook acts as a hook and will allow you to continue communicating through email with potential clients who you know are interested in buying their first home.

There are many types of lead magnets that you can use to gather contact details from potential customers. Other examples to choose from are: 

• Free trials for a limited time in the case of software or applications 

• Free advice or a consultation for a service 

• Participation in surveys to generate individual reports 

• eBooks, guides, or video series 

• Coupons and/or discounts 

• Opportunities for social media contests

Be sure to pick the incentive that will work best for your type of business and resources.

Step 5: Define your lead nurturing system

Once you have a database with your leads and their contact information, you have to supply them with valuable content in order to build a relationship with them that will grow into sales. 

Lead nurturing is the process of ensuring that people who are vaguely interested in your product or service end up wanting it and willing to buy it. 

That doesn’t mean presenting your product and asking or demanding them to buy it. If you do this, chances are your leads run out and your emails go straight to the trash or spam folder. 

Send them relevant information about your industry, information on how to get the most out of what you offer or a discounted offer from time to time. Whatever you do, don’t make the traditional sales pitch.

For example, Trello, a company that designed an application to facilitate the administration and organization of projects for companies, sends its subscribers a newsletter with links to blog posts with valuable content related to their business.

In this case, Trello invites its subscribers to discover a Japanese routine to increase productivity. This shows that they know their potential customers and that they take into account their needs and concerns in order to provide them with valuable information that doesn’t turn into a sales pitch. In this way, they can cultivate their relationship with their potential customers until they are ready to purchase their service naturally. 

To have greater control of your lead nurturing system and manage it easily, it’s best to use a marketing automation software called a CRM (Client Relationship Manager). This will let you know which potential customers have taken action after reading your messages and which have not, and will automate communication with them. 

There are several tools you can use to feed your leads from a blog, a newsletter, SMS and email auto responders, your social channels and sending free reports to podcasts, online videos, direct mail sequences or even handwritten notes. Each one has its advantages, so choose the ones you think best fit your customer profile.

Step 6: Define your conversion strategy

While maintaining a relationship with potential customers through valuable content is important, you have to turn to converting those potential customers into actual buyers. You can do this by building trust and showing them that your company brings them enough value to be worth buying from you and not the competition.

This is made easier by setting up a good lead nurturing system since that can help establish trust and show your value as a company. These two characteristics of a business is what helps people decide to buy a product or service from one company instead of their competition. The perception of your online business plays an important role; if this is not favorable, the conversions will not take place.

Here are some tips for you to build a credible image and an environment suitable for conversion: 

• Buy a domain for your website: Do not use free domains for your website or for your email. Otherwise, your company won’t present a professional image and you will lose credibility.

• Add your company’s contact information on your website: Your phone, email and the address of your office or store must be included on your website even if you don’t sell or offer services in a physical way. Otherwise, your potential customers won’t be able to contact you or they may think that your company is fictitious or does not offer customer support.

• Avoid showing too many options or pricing plans: Two pricing plans (standard and premium) are enough, since, as a famous study by Professor Iyengar of Columbia University demonstrates, offering too many options causes a mental block in the consumer preventing them from making a purchase decision easily.

• Offer a specific guarantee to avoid uncertainty: Do not limit yourself by adding vague phrases like “guaranteed satisfaction” or “quality service” in your messages. Explain it precisely to convey more confidence. For example, “Our certified technicians with more than 10 years of experience will effectively solve any type of breakdown in your appliance and will call you back in 15 minutes. If we don’t fulfill any of these promises, we will refund twice the billable amount of the consultation.”

• Offer your customers a free trial: By doing this, you can break the sales barrier and show your potential customers that buying your product or hiring your service is worth it. This is a strategy that can dramatically increase your conversion rate. According to a study conducted by Zendesk, this can increase your conversion rate up to 30 percent.

Step 7: Define how you’ll offer a top-notch experience

Already entering the third phase (“after the purchase”) and having successfully converted potential customers into actual buyers, you have to make sure that your customers become fans of your brand so they become loyal customers who will return to buy more products or use your service again (or continuously).

Look at Apple, one of the benchmarks in this type of marketing. When they launch a new product or a simple variation of a product, their tribe of fans flood the streets to line up in front of their nearest Apple Stores to get the latest product.

So, what has Apple done and what can you do to make this phenomenon happen? The key is in selling what your customers need and being innovative.

Sell what your customers want but also what they need

You can offer the strongest anti-theft backpack in the world, but your clients also need it to be beautiful and easy to open and close. Your clients may want the most complete online software to create web pages but they need it to be easy to use or come with an effective and accessible support service.

Come up with an innovative way you sell your product or service

Innovation does not always have to be in the product or service itself. You can sell an ordinary product but come up with an innovative way to set its price, distribute it, package it or promote it.

For example, Ikea launched their Catalog application in 2013. This not only allows its customers to see the furniture catalog (ordinary product) but they can also see how each piece would fit in their domestic spaces thanks to augmented reality (innovation).

Step 8: Define how to increase the lifetime value of your customers

A marketing guide from Custora University defines the customer’s lifetime value (CLV) as a prediction of all the value that a business will obtain throughout a relationship with a consumer. 

If you apply the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, to this concept you could say that 80 percent of your income comes from 20 percent of your customers. Although these percentages are not exactly like that, it is about identifying the customers that bring more value to your business either because they are willing to pay more, buy more frequently, recommend your services, contribute ideas or consume less resources. Once you identify them, you have to figure out how to increase their value. 

There are several tactics you can use to “filter” your customers and identify which ones are the most valuable in order to increase their value.  

Increase your prices

How long has it been since you increased the prices of your products or services? As previously stated, if you are able to offer a value to your customers that goes beyond the price, increasing it slightly shouldn’t be a problem for many of your customers, provided you give them a valid reason for doing so.

Explain to them the benefits they’ll get with your products or services and how this price increase will allow them to enjoy your future innovations. Inevitably, some of your clients will leave, but those who remain will be the most valuable and you will have managed to increase their value even more by raising the prices.

Use upselling strategies

Upselling is a sales technique that involves inducing a consumer to buy a more expensive item. Many times it also involves promoting more advantageous services, product packs or offers when buying complementary products.

Surely more than once you’ve gone to a fast food restaurant and they have asked you if you wanted to add fries or a larger drink to your meal for an additional charge. Better yet, if you use Spotify to listen to music, you have encountered this type of message when you signed up for the free plan:

These are nothing more than upselling techniques. You can apply upselling to your business to increase the lifetime value of your customers. A formula that usually works (and one that you have surely seen on Amazon) is to add a section to your website that says: “Users who bought (X) also bought (Y).” 

Give your customers a reason to come back

Increasing how often your customers usually buy from you is also a solid marketing strategy that you can apply to increase value. Offering them a subscription option so that each month they can receive your products or services at a more advantageous price is one way to do this. 

There are several types of business that, by nature, already lend themselves to a subscription service. Utility contracts come to mind first but it is also possible to apply it to other types of business or products that involve a recurring purchase.

Look at Harry’s or The Dollar Shave Club, for example. These brands of razors have created a subscription service for recurring products thus eliminating the need to make an individual purchase decision whenever a customer needs to purchase new blades, foam or shaving lotions.

Another way to get your customers back is through a reactivation campaign. To do this, check your database to find old customers who have not made a purchase for a long time and send them a message in which you tell them that you miss them. Include a tempting offer like a coupon or a gratuity to persuade them to make another purchase.

Measure the performance of your strategies

A marketing plan is not a static document; you have to leave room for change and adapt it constantly. From all the strategies and channels you define, there will be some that will work better and others that will work worse so it’s important to know how to measure the success of your actions to identify which ones you should keep, improve or eliminate in order to get more valuable customers. 

The key performance indicators that you should look at (and analyze periodically, either monthly or weekly) are mainly the following:

• The number of leads

• Your conversion rate

• The average transaction value

• Your break-even point

Step 9: Define your referral program

Word of mouth marketing is one of the most powerful strategies to improve the positioning of a business and increase sales exponentially. According to a study by Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers believe more in the recommendations of friends and family than in advertising. 

However, many entrepreneurs are waiting for this phenomenon to happen naturally as a result of the great quality of their product or service. The fact is that if you wait for positive reviews to come in on their own, it can take a long time to get results, so it’s better to take action.

Ask your customers to recommend your product or service in exchange for an incentive. For example, an upgrade in their current service plan or a discount on future purchases. 

One of the most famous recommendation programs has undoubtedly been that of Dropbox, the popular cloud storage company. Dropbox offered more free space (specifically, 500 MB) for both the new customer and the recommender. This simple strategy allowed them to increase the number of registered users by 60 percent.

Now you know how to make a strategic marketing plan for your company and how to optimize the efforts and resources you allocate to marketing to grow your business. Remember that your marketing plan must continually adapt to the market and that your success can multiply if you optimize and renew your strategies based on the results of your key performance indicators.

The post How to Write a Marketing Plan in 9 Steps appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Jewelry businesses represent a unique market. They are not aimed at catering to a need, or a comfort. Rather, selling jewelry is based more on promoting emotions using symbolism that can go back to the traditions of hundreds of years ago. That’s where a good jewelry marketing strategy can make a difference.

The industry is dynamic and doesn’t stop growing. Edahn Golan’s US State of the Jewelry Market report indicates that the United States is the world’s leading jewelry consumer with total sales of fine jewelry reaching $68.8 billion. There are different types of jewelry aimed at different types of audiences and consumers. Based on that, creating a marketing strategy that focuses on a specific target audience is important.

Selling jewelry is an art. There may be an innate talent for creating it, but without the right skills and strategies, it can be difficult to get your business ahead and dominate the market. Here, you’ll find some ideas and marketing strategies to boost your jewelry business and reach the right consumers that will support you.

Establish a Target Audience

As stated before, jewelry businesses have different consumers depending on the products they offer. To tackle this, start by considering who your products are aimed toward when creating your complete marketing plan. In this step, you will have to establish your target audience as well as your marketing goals and what makes your potential clients special.

In establishing your audience, you also have to segment the audience to properly implement an effective marketing plan. By analyzing the target audience to identify key segments, you select groups of specific people within your larger audience to specifically target through your marketing efforts.

For your business, it is not about being seen by as many people as possible, but more about attracting the right audience with the right message. 

What differentiates segmentation marketing from another type of marketing is that within the group of potential consumers there will always be someone more important. This means that you’ll need to exclude certain people to achieve effective results. While this may seem counterproductive, it is effective because not only will you sell your products, but you will also create a relationship with a satisfied public that will value your products and likely share their satisfaction with like-minded people thus growing your customer base.

Jay Conrad Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing (1994) once said:

Segmentation is saying something to someone, instead of saying nothing to everyone.  

To send the correct message, you must know to whom it is addressed. The curious thing about this step, as many studies claim, is that by grouping people together you can discover factors that connect them and make them different from the rest. Overall, the purpose of segmentation is to appeal to the interests and needs of your smaller target audience just as you would if they were face to face. 

In the case of jewelry, segmentation is much more than basic demographic data such as age and income. They are clearly part of the process, but the purchase of jewelry is an emotional purchase. To define the details of your audience, you can use a segmentation method called market psychography which will allow you to define target details including interests, tastes, image projection, etc.

For example, a specific group of potential buyers may be “the modern mother who works from home” and could be defined in this way:

• She is married and has young children

• Lives in the suburbs, near large cities

• She likes to focus on her family

• Seeks to socialize in different groups such as reading clubs, social dates with other moms, etc.

• She likes gardening and crafts

• Shops at stores like Gap and JC Penney

• She hires a nanny to go to dinner with her partner

The ads focused on that group should be shown in the places that they usually visit and use a language specifically aimed at them. However, the most important thing is that the message evokes a significant emotion. 

According to Nancy Lowman LaBadie, the executive vice president of the public relations firm Marina Maher Communications, “Businesses that learn [their] language, understand it and connect with it, will reap the rewards.”

This ad by Mejuri is a great example of how to create a successful campaign by segmenting your audience. A modern woman does not expect gifts to rain on her but works to earn everything. The slogan and the message resonate with the audience and without a doubt achieves results.

Finally, you must determine what makes your product or your brand stand out from the competition. Do you sell fine jewelry for modern mothers? Unique, handmade jewelry? Are you producing environmentally-friendly pieces and promoting the materials’ origins? Once you have determined these aspects, it will be necessary to establish your content around that distinction.

Create an Emotive Story

Emotions are the main force behind a successful marketing campaign. In fact, Capgemini Digital Transformation Institute’s survey states that consumers who are emotionally involved with a company spend twice as much as non-committed customers. This could not be closer to the truth for jewelry businesses. 

The purchase of jewelry is an emotional one instead of a purposeful one. For many, it means a significant gift for occasions like Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. For others, it symbolizes the most special purchase of their lives—an engagement ring meant to profess their love for their partner. This is why your marketing campaigns need to create emotional responses in customers.

For example, one of the most successful jewelry campaigns known throughout the industry is De Beers’s Diamonds are Forever campaigns. The iconic phrase came about during a tumultuous moment for the company following the Great Depression. More than 70 years later, the phrase of only four words is loaded with feeling and has become one of the most recognized slogans in marketing.

Today, we can credit De Beers for creating the concept of the diamond wedding ring; before that campaign launched, they were not the standard. With a simple slogan full of symbolism, they managed to completely mold the behavior of an entire culture. That proves what a great emotional campaign can achieve. 

A story rich in feelings is the perfect way to present your brand or your business and show what it represents. You can take advantage of the situation and use it as an opportunity to discuss why you decided to create jewelry. You can convey your passion for art or tell your clients that you work to create unforgettable moments in their lives.  

Become the business that your potential customers choose to mark a significant moment in their lives. A good emotional campaign for a jewelry store should be:

• Inspiring: to do this, you must understand your customers’ motivations. After you segment your audience, this won’t be difficult for you to do. When people feel inspired, they act differently. Finding a model for an inspiring campaign will also help you achieve an unparalleled connection with your audience.

• Persuasive: this type of emotional campaign plays with your audience’s dreams and their desire to achieve a coveted lifestyle within society. The CEO of Tiffany & Co, Alessandro Bogliolo, created a campaign aimed at millennials despite numerous studies claiming that they do not buy diamonds. His reasoning came from cellphone emojis. Diamonds and other forms of expressing status are frequently used by this group which means there is a sense of personal projection.

• One that expresses love: in the jewelry business, this is one of the most important emotions to express in advertising campaigns. You can use the tried and true story of a couple beginning their marriage and focus your campaign on this key moment in everyone’s lives or you can take advantage of another segment of the population: single people. You can angle the campaign with a message about there being no better way to celebrate than to treat oneself or something similar.

• One that commemorates special events: many people choose to commemorate an event with jewelry making that a perfect opportunity to strengthen relationships with your customers. You can focus on stories that resonate with your audience and let them know that they are as important to your business as they are to themselves. A good way to do it could be by using their personal stories that they share on social media.

This Pandora commercial is a great example of a creative ad full of emotion. Jewelry is not the center of attention in this case. Instead, the special connection mothers have with their children is showcased and subtly linked to the jewelry. It is brilliant since Pandora wants to express that a mother, or a woman, is not defined by her jewelry. Instead, their custom bracelets are defined by the special people in their lives. 

Remember that you don’t have to be a marketing giant or a multi-million dollar company to create great campaigns. For SMEs, the most important requirement is creativity. To achieve this, you must be authentic and know your audience to give them what they want. Next, you’ll need to tell these stories through the platforms they use the most so they see the ads you’ve worked hard on.

Use Online Platforms to Reach Your Audience

According to a survey conducted by McKinsey, two-thirds of consumers of jewelry brands start their search online before completing a purchase while one – to two – thirds use social media for information and general help. This means that jewelers should be using digital media as a communication platform between them and their potential customers to grow their business.

Although the same survey states that most consumers prefer to buy higher-priced items physically for security, SMEs can take the opportunity to use digital media to boost themselves and reach a larger audience. 

Modern consumers consider having trust and a good relationship with their preferred jewelry business essential in order to close a sale. To build a relationship with the business, consumers trust online reviews more than anything else. The co-founder of poshpawn.com indicates that they feel confident asking their satisfied customers to leave reviews of their experience and purchase.

If you have a solid and positive reputation online, your potential customers will feel more confident when choosing between you and your competitors. Some digital media platforms are better for jewelry businesses than others. More so, you need to know how to use them properly.

Instagram and Facebook

After 9 years from the launch of Instagram, it is clear that it is no longer just for personal use or to share photos of your lunch with your followers. It has become a global platform that has given millions of brands the opportunity to strengthen relationships and gain visibility while at the same time using images to inspire their followers to do business with them.

According to a Hubspot study, 70 percent of Instagram users use the platform to search for information about a business or brand. So, using this visual platform to show your products and promote your campaigns is an ideal way to reach your audience and show them who you are.

In this example, you can see an attractive and classic “feed” from a local jewelry store in Portland called Betsy & Iya. Its clean and tidy aesthetics are visually pleasing and it encourages users to get involved with their brand. In addition, the business has an impressive 23.8k followers so they must be doing something right.

As seen in the example, the store (Betsy & Iya) invites its satisfied customers to share photos and special moments using their products and asks them to tag the brand. It is a word of mouth marketing strategy brought to the digital terrain that creates a huge sense of trust among users who are unfamiliar with the business. You can encourage your customers to do this by offering discounts or gifts in return for their promotional post. 

Instagram recently added an additional feature for businesses: Instagram Shopping available in Latin America, the United States and Europe. With this function, businesses have an immersive channel so that people can explore their products and buy them online instantly. It has become the most popular tool among stores.

Betsy & Iya uses this function to redirect potential buyers to their online catalog. On Instagram, when someone clicks on the designated label in the publication, they are taken to the product’s description page where they will find the product image, a description, the price and a link that will take them directly to the website where they can buy the product.

There are several options to set up this function, but creating a catalog through Facebook, since both companies are connected is recommended. You can do this only if you have already created a catalog on your website or on platforms such as Shopify or Etsy. 

Creating a business page on Facebook will also allow you to reach a huge audience. By creating a catalog in the Facebook Business Manager section you can link it to your Instagram profile, too. Here’s how to create a catalog on Facebook and link it to your Instagram account: 

• Access the Facebook business management configuration, known as Business Manager.

• Click on Catalogs located inside the principal menu under “Assets.”

• Select “Add” to create a new catalog where you can assign a name and the type of products you offer to your listings.

• Upload the product information through data feed files. Facebook offers you a free CSV template to download and fill in with all the options you want to create a complete catalog.
  

Once ready, you can link it with your Instagram account and get your followers to interact more with your products. 

Online Catalogs

With 1.66 billion digital buyers worldwide, it is not surprising that e-commerce has become a vital trading technique for businesses. For jewelers and artisans, it is a great channel to offer products to the right audience beyond your physical location.

Creating an online store is easier than you think. If you are just beginning, you do not necessarily have to choose to create your own website and buy a domain. You can, instead, choose to use the most popular platforms that have high traffic and take advantage of its popularity to get visibility.

These are currently the most popular and secure platforms for online jewelry sales:

Etsy

Etsy is an online market platform for unique and handcrafted products. It is a space for artisans, artists and collectors to sell their best products. The public that uses it prides itself on dressing and wearing clothes that nobody else has so they are willing to pay the price for such items. It currently has more than 60 million visitors.

If used properly, Etsy can provide artisans and jewelers with a unique opportunity to generate significant profit. For example, LeiLei Secor, a college student, generated more than $100,000 selling handmade jewelry on Etsy.

According to a recent study,

50 percent of jewelry sold online are diamonds, 18 percent are precious metals and 12 percent are other gems and pearls.  

With this in mind, it is important to talk about how to create a store on Etsy and how to stand out from the millions of stores that already exist on the platform.

• Find your niche: it is important that your store has a focus so you can properly target a specific customer base. For example, if your focus is precious stones and metals, your store could showcase opal products to attract customers who like opals.

• Invest in outstanding photos: unlike a physical store, people who shop online can’t touch and examine your products. For your store to be successful, it is important that you use high-resolution photos. Nobody will want to invest in a piece or a set if it doesn’t look striking and attractive in its photos.

• Take note of other successful stores: you can look for inspiration by studying other jewelers who have used the platform to sell their jewelry effectively. This will give you a better idea of how to approach and interact with users that visit stores like yours.

• Create irresistible offers: in the jewelry business, it is proven that the best dates to sell jewelry are Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day and Christmas. Still, you don’t necessarily have to wait for those dates to offer something special. To attract customers outside of the popular occasions, you can offer, for example, discounts on sets of rings, necklaces and earrings.

In the following example, you can see how a jewelry store is presented on Etsy. It is based in Tel Aviv, but it makes free deliveries all over the world. The information also tells us how long the store has been active, how many sales it has had and how many reviews were left by satisfied customers. Currently, this store has almost 5 stars.

Joining Etsy and opening a store costs nothing, but there are three basic rates that businesses pay. These rates are per publication, transaction and payment process. Each publication costs $0.20 USD and lasts for four active months. When you have a sale, Etsy charges 5 percent of the transaction on the sale price, including shipping. Finally, the Etsy payment system charges a 3 percent processing fee.

It is a small price to pay to take advantage of the high traffic that Etsy gets, but you should still keep it in mind when pricing your products on the platform. 

Currently, Etsy is available only in North America and Europe as well as in some Asian countries. They have proposed to launch it for the Latin American market in the near future, though.

Shopify

Shopify is an e-commerce platform that allows users to launch a personalized online store, grow it through the platform and run the business as they would a normal personally owned website. Shopify allows you to sell from almost every country in the world through its platform. It is based on a cloud hosting system so you can create your store as if it were your own web domain. 

It is a simple option for those who do not have the necessary tools to create their own web page. It even allows you to customize the themes to create a unique store that fits your brand’s identity. Unlike Etsy where stores are hosted on their platform, Shopify allows you to create it your way. You can even name the domain assigned by Shopify whatever you want.

To begin, you will have to choose one of their payment plans starting at $29 USD per month. Once you pick the plan, you can create your account, customize your page and add all your products to your store.

Shopify is quite popular among small jewelry businesses because it allows you to sell online, in person, in different online markets and through social media. For example, you can synchronize your Shopify store with your Facebook catalog.

In this image, you can see a jewelry shop based on Shopify. As you can see, it is totally customized to create a unique brand and differentiate it from other shops. In addition to all the options it offers to feature the products, it also offers the option to buy items through Instagram by redirecting potential customers to another one of its networks.

Shopify indicates that you can have SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tools included in your payment plans. This will allow your potential customers to find you faster using different search engines. 

If you want to learn how to create and design your own website without third-party platforms such as Shopify, check out this useful guide about how to create a professional website. 

In conclusion, having a good product will always be your foundation, but selling jewelry in such a competitive world requires you to come up with good ideas and innovative marketing strategies. Find the essence of your brand, determine your audience and dominate the platforms that your clients use the most. Do what you can to adapt your business to these modern, digital times.

Remember, selling jewelry is an emotional process. Stay on top of the trends, work the different niches and create a unique brand that resonates with your audience. Social media is a channel that allows close communication with your customers so take advantage of the tools offered to strengthen your relationship with them and focus on creating something as unique as the pieces you sell.

The post 3 Jewelry Marketing Ideas to Attract More Customers appeared first on Kolau Blog.

WellSpring is a wellness company headed by founder Lloyd Graham and his son Matthew Graham who leads their Social Media Marketing and Product Optimization department. Together, they strive to offer top-quality fruits and vegetables to create 29 different raw juices on a daily basis. They use locally-grown produce from the farming community to ensure quality while supporting local infrastructure.

It was a pleasure to interview Matthew and learn how he and his father grew their business to where it is today. The company is a great example of how a strong belief can be turned into a passionate and healthy business that will not only be profitable but that will also benefit a loyal and growing customer base. 

QUESTION. Matthew, how was the idea of creating WellSpring Raw Juices born?

ANSWER. WellSpring is a brand that started two years ago when we took over a company that has been in existence for more than 20 years. My father is a vegetarian and we practice and live a healthy lifestyle, so when we saw an opportunity to take over the brand and then apply some of our expertise into improving it so that people have good nutrition, we didn’t think twice.

Until recently, we have not done any advertisement or marketing, yet we have two branches in our business communities in Kingston and there are many Jamaicans that choose to have a proper healthy diet.

For the last three, four months we have settled a little footprint. We have applied technology to our business, we have started to optimize the business in terms of getting it out and having a digital footprint so that people can access information about our products. In general, just to make it more convenient for our consumers.

Q. Did you see a trend toward vegetarian diets when you decided to start your business?

A. More than a trend. What we saw was that people were seeking healthy alternatives. We wanted to be something consistent, we wanted to be a part of a lifestyle that they live, to make it possible. More so, it is a challenge that Jamaica has been facing; it is not easy to access convenient healthy alternatives consistently. That is a problem that we seek to address by having a brand that is trustworthy with a reputation that has been built on its own with the right attention to ensure that all our products are the best quality. Our customers love us for that, so we keep that in the center of everything we do. Every single day. 

As a Christian company with the beliefs we have set in place, we just do what we feel is the right thing to do which is create a healthy lifestyle and make good from that. We believe our consumers can do the same.

Q. What makes your company different from your competitors? 

A. First, we provide the best quality. I mean, we try our best to keep the standards up, regardless of the challenges that we face in terms of access to goods, maintaining exceptional quality. 

We do a very interpersonal process with all the products that we have. Our foods are practically handpicked in order to make the best juices that we can. Everything comes from our organic farm so we can ensure our products’ quality.

Q. What do you think is the secret to your company’s success?

A. I think there are two aspects of the company that allow us to be successful. The first is that we have very good products and we are very proud to say that because we do our best in ensuring that they are the best. 

The second aspect is that we stick to our principles and we ensure that we stick to them regardless of whatever challenge we might face. That is our uniqueness. Our customers know that at the end of the day, whether it is a stormy day or a sunny day, they will get the best juices that they can get, the best healing food, proper nutrition and always an open door on a daily basis to get consistent nutritious, healthy alternatives.

Q. Based on your own experience, what is the best marketing channel to attract new clients to your business?

A. Well, this is why we got into Kolau. As I said before, we have recently had our digital footprint set up. We have our Google Business profile, our website (under construction) and we do social media promotion and marketing. 

WellSpring has been growing mostly organically because, as I said before, without paid advertising and yet we have a wide range of customers across the island. 

So, when we did start to push WellSpring out to get people to know that we are going to be more convenient, give them better products and easier access to the things we provide, then, it just naturally grew. I think it had a lot to do with how we positioned the company. 

Therefore, I think the best way to attract customers is by having an attractive digital footprint and best possible quality products.

Q. What strategy or strategies do you use on social media?

A. I call my social media strategy “life experiences.” We showcase people enjoying and utilizing our products. We showcase our farm and the things that we produce and we send our message across so our potential clients get to know we are here in different ways. On a daily basis, it is all about interaction, speaking with our customers and communication in terms of what they need and what we can provide. Customers really appreciate that. We have been growing on social media platforms so far and it is something that we are grateful for and something we want to build on.

Regarding the social media platforms we use, we have Facebook and an active Instagram account. I think Instagram is a very good platform as it is able to reach markets better than other platforms, simply because it is visual and people love to see things for themselves.

Q. Are you using a specific strategy to retain your customers?

A. To retain our customers, in terms of maintaining a good relationship with them, we have our customer relationship management platform in which we integrate our social media channels and our stores. That tool allows us to communicate with our customers, to get to know their preferences, their feedback and also allows us to provide them with a better service as they give us reviews.

We do social media ads, business cards, flyers and all that stuff but it costs a lot in terms of design, product development and product optimization. The good thing is that we have mobile apps and platforms that we are able to use, like Spot+, Canva, My Quick Video to create the content that we need. You need to offer good content as a brand because once you have the information in place, people will choose the best service and the best quality product that they find. So, what we do is provide the best quality and information so they can know what the best benefits are.

Q. What advice would you give to a startup that is in their beginning stages?

A. I would advise them to use Google and ask random questions no matter what the problem is or whatever challenge they need to overcome to ensure that their brand can be ready for the worst. I encourage anyone just to ask these questions and the answers will come in the form of information, apps or content. So, I would just appeal to anyone’s real curiosity in terms of learning and getting the right information to get their brand ready for the worst situations.

Q. Finally, what do you think will be the best way to win customers in your industry in the next few years?

A. In the next three to five years, what I can see would definitely be a phenomenon is access to goods and access to good customer service. The more convenient you can make your brand or your product, the more people come to you. And I believe the more information that we have, in terms of educating our consumers, will lead to better relationship management. All we do is done to get consumers. We want people that have healthy lifestyles so we know what it takes. People are on their phones and computers every day so if you get to them there, that is the first way to attract them to you and that is just a principle that I believe. 

All businesses should adapt and ensure that they have a proper digital footprint with their proper marketing strategy, even a basic marketing infrastructure is better than none. My father would always tell me that a push plan is better than no plan. I believe that a small plan to market your business is better than not having a plan to market it at all. So, for the next three years, I believe that special delivery services, convenience to goods and access to information will be the best ways to attract new customers to your brand.

Every week, we highlight a company from Jamaica, within the framework of the MSME Digitalization Plan, whose trajectory, achievements and experience are an inspiration to all of us. It is an honor and a privilege to be able to bring these great stories together and learn from them.

The post Interview with WellSpring Raw Juices – MSME Digitalization Plan in Jamaica appeared first on Kolau Blog.

More and more companies are deciding to use video in their marketing strategy. In fact, a Hubspot survey reveals that over 50 percent of consumers want to watch promotional videos and, thanks to improved technology, they’re watching and sharing videos on a scale never seen before. This is because videos are more entertaining, more digestible and easier to remember than other types of content. 

According to psychologist, Susan Weinschenk, also known as “The Brain Lady” and author of six books about consumer behavior, videos intensify our attention and focus because people have been programmed to pay attention to movement and noise. For this reason, videos went from a simple marketing tactic to an important part of almost every company’s advertising strategy.

In fact, a Wyzowl report found that 91 percent of video marketers consider videos to be an important part of their marketing strategy.

In the past, only the larger companies with inflated advertising budgets were able to invest in proper video marketing. However, affordable high-quality cameras have made producing video content easier for businesses big and small.

To help you create your own video, you need to learn the strategies behind creating high-quality content that promotes your company. This includes how to produce and edit it as well the steps to take to reach a larger audience.  

Where do I start?

Thanks to technological and communicative advances, producing these videos is more affordable as well as more profitable than ever. You don’t need to invest in expensive equipment or hire outside help if you don’t want to; you can still create a quality promotional video for your business and keep money in your pocket.

To further explain things, here is a detailed video with some specific tips to help you create a one-minute promotional video.

All you need to do is follow the simple steps outlined here and you’ll know exactly how to produce a useful promotional video.

# 1 Get a Basic Recording Equipment

To film the video content, you’ll need 3 basic components:

• A camera: Depending on your budget, this can be anything from your mobile phone to a professional video camera. Filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Sean Baker have confirmed that quality videos can be shot on smartphones by filming winning movies with an iPhone 5s camera.

• A microphone: Although most cameras come with a built-in microphone, you should invest in a separate microphone to capture your message properly and ensure that there isn’t too much background noise that can distort the sound. Considering how much content is uploaded every second to platforms like YouTube (over 400 hours per second), you have to do everything you can to create quality content for your audience that will stand out among everything else available.

• Editing software: In order to trim, edit and finish your video you need to work with the appropriate software. Currently, there are plenty of free options like Movie Maker for Windows or iMovie for Mac. There are also professional programs like Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects. You’ll need to learn how to use these softwares to edit your videos so they look and sound the way you want them to before you share them with your audience (more on this later).

# 2 Create a Content Strategy

Videos are a powerful marketing tool as they create a stronger emotional connection with viewers than any other format. They are an ideal way to establish a deeper relationship with potential consumers by evoking feelings through a visual experience. A well-made video gives viewers the opportunity to consider how they would feel in a given situation and how it would play out in real life.

In order to create a video that does this, you need to create the right content strategy by first considering what type of video you want to create to promote your business. Ideally, you want to create videos that tell a story that inspires and delights your audience. This will attract attention and compel them to interact with your content and brand.

Educational videos

Lately, how-to videos are the most searched for type of video content. Consumers frequently turn to Google or YouTube to find the answers or solutions they need with searches for educational videos increasing 70 percent every year.

Your potential customers are currently looking for answers to their questions or problems. As a business, you can take advantage of this by creating these videos to market your business. By providing answers in an educational and entertaining way, you will draw and hold their attention and gain their loyalty.

Take the following video, for example. It’s from a Seattle coffee shop called Seattle Coffee Gear. In it, they teach viewers how to prepare a quick and easy mocha using a coffee machine. The tutorial is done in a fairly simple but entertaining way. More so, the actress is a local employee so there is a recognizable and friendly face that viewers can relate to.

Testimonial Videos

Each time a potential client comes across your business or service, they will want to know what other clients’ experiences have been to ensure that they will make the right decision when choosing to do business with your company. To further prove this point, a recent study by Bright Local found that:

84 percent of people trust online testimonials as well as personal recommendations  

There is no better tool than a testimonial video to provide an impartial opinion to potential clients. To benefit from this technique, talk to your current customers who have expressed their satisfaction with your service and see if they’ll agree to speak on video about their experience as a client. They can discuss what problems they were trying to solve by working with your company and discuss how you helped them as well as how they felt at the end of their journey with you.

Companies benefit from these videos because they can take control of their online reviews and turn them into a story that evokes positive feelings in potential customers.

This video by Virginia Kitchen & Bath Remodeling, a small remodeling company, is a great example of how to do this. The video is authentic and professional, but you can also see that it was made in an accessible way. They include pre-remodeling photos and overlapping shots of the remodeled kitchen along with the audio testimonial from their satisfied customers. As proof of its quality and effectiveness, it has almost 2,000 views.

Product Videos

To really show the tangible benefits of your best products or services, there is no better way than creating a video that explains and shows what makes each one special. A study by McKinsey Insights revealed that in a world with so many products to choose from, proof of an experience or of the product in action can help customers make an easier purchase decision.

For your video to be memorable, you must create interesting dialogue that flows naturally and explains the product thoroughly without being too long and boring. It should look professional and represent your brand clearly but, above all, it should evoke emotions in the viewer and establish a relationship while also persuading them to take action by either contacting you for service or buying your product(s).

Another technique that is common in successful product videos is taking time to focus on the problem that your product or service is meant to solve. This will show potential customers what they can fix in their life by using your product or service.

As you can see in the following example, Dollar Shave Club offers a special service: with a $1/month subscription, you get razors sent directly to your house—a simple service that has not been done before. The narration of the video sounds credible and the video is made in a way that makes the viewer identify with the actors. All of this entices them to take action. A touch of humor can also help viewers enjoy the video while learning about the product, too.

Presentation Videos

These videos could be in the “About the Company” section of your web page. The objective here is to inform the viewer about the essence of the brand and your business. It is a great way to introduce yourself, promote your company and differentiate yourself from your competitors.

A Wyzowl survey revealed that this video strategy is so effective that 97 percent of marketers say it has helped increase users’ understanding of their services. More so, 76 percent say it has helped increase sales.

A good presentation video is used to share the vision of your business with your audience. It is the ideal way to share everything that makes you proud of your business with your target audience including the strengths, the details of your overall service, the achievements you’ve had and even a little of the history behind your company. Remember, keep it short and entertaining to captivate the viewer and hold their attention.

In this example, you will see how another small coffee company has managed to promote itself with a fairly simple video. With more than 18,000 views, the owner talks about what makes his business unique. It explains their philosophy and their vision, where their products come from and also teaches viewers how their products are processed and packaged. The video is so evocative that you can almost smell the coffee beans.

According to Forbes, video marketing is not the future, it’s happening right now. You don’t need a huge budget to create a good video; you just need to be aware of current trends and do something interesting and unique in a concise way that is share-worthy. You’re only limited by your imagination and creativity.

# 3 Video Production

Now that you know the most effective types of videos to promote your company, it’s time to produce your own video. To do this, you must first identify your target audience.

Knowing your audience is vital to your marketing strategy because it will guide everything you do as you develop your content strategy until you complete the project. You have to keep their wants and needs in mind in order to create a video that will resonate with them.

Knowing the wishes and needs of your audience will help you determine what kind of video will be best so you can organize the information in a way that makes sense to the viewer. You can also evoke certain feelings that will help them feel connected with your business.

Understanding who your video is aimed at will allow you to effectively communicate your message and achieve your fundamental goal: increase your sales.

Holly Buchanan, author of Future Now, explains how to communicate the right message by focusing on these three questions: 

•     Who is my audience?
•     What actions do I want them to take?
•     What kind of information do they need to take action safely?

You can do market research to find out what your audience usually gravitates toward once you have determined the answer to these three questions. Steve Jobs used to quote Picasso when he talked about the innovation of his products: “Good artists copy, the best steal ideas.” You can look for inspiration through a market study and create something equally unique based on what your competitors have already done.

This product video from Lenovo is a great example. It’s very similar to many viral videos that have driven big brands to achieve more visibility. It presents a product with the help of an artist and representative influencer, explains how to use it and is visually appealing and captivating. But it also shows that the brand not only knows but understands their audience and their needs.

Plan the Concept

The concept of the video that you are going to produce to promote your business should be based on what your audience wants. You must decide the tone and style that will resonate with them and create an emotional connection between your audience and your company.

With this in mind, write a script based on all the aspects above. Present your message through an interesting and attractive narrative that expresses what you want and gives your audience a reason to take action in whatever way you want them to. More so, our script can’t sound like a sales pitch. Instead, you want to get your message across in an informative and entertaining way that makes your viewers believe that they need your product or service in their life.

According to a study conducted by the Nielsen Group, a good script for a marketing video should establish a relationship with your audience in a few minutes and deliver your message in an attractive way that will lead viewers to take action by either contacting your company for service or by buying a specific product.

To create a convincing but not very obvious script, you must write it from the perspective of your viewers, not from your perspective as a business owner or manager. This will allow you to stand in their shoes to relate to them so they connect with your message easily while still promoting your brand and getting your message across.

For example, if you own a car agency and you choose to make a product video to show your best cars, the tone of the script could be casual and open, with a touch of humor that promotes confidence in your brand.

Once you have planned the concept and the script is ready, it’s time to schedule the recording session.

Filming and Editing the Video

The composition of the shots and the video, in general, is crucial to produce quality results. This refers to the specific way you choose to frame and organize your shots in order to get the look you want. Here, think about how to position your actor(s) and props (if any) and what angles you choose. This is what will grab the viewer’s attention first.

A rule of standard composition is called the “rule of thirds.” Imagine that your shot is divided into nine equal sectors by two horizontal lines and two vertical lines creating a grid. This will naturally attract the viewer’s attention to the main points of interest of the shot.

Numerous studies prove that a viewer’s attention usually focuses on the points of intersection rather than on the center of the shot, so it’s best to position the subject at those points of intersection instead of right in the middle of the shot. This allows you to send a stronger message than you could with only words.  

The next thing to take into account during filming is the lighting. Bad lighting (like a bad script) could ruin all your production efforts.

This example shows how the video can change depending on the lighting. With each shot, different emotions and even personalities can be transmitted. Currently, there are many post-production editing softwares that allow you to fix lighting errors, but the best thing to do to avoid that is to shoot your video with the correct lighting in the right environment from the start.

Let’s say that you are filming a testimonial video. Your satisfied customers are sitting on a sofa, in a space with good acoustics and with large windows providing a lot of natural light. But you also have fluorescent lights on the subjects. This creates a temperature conflict that ends up in a bad end result.

If your resources don’t allow you to get professional equipment, here are some tips to improve your shots:

• Take advantage of natural light and avoid conflicts with other types of light. Try to be as consistent as possible so that the result is clean and natural.

• Avoid shooting outdoors at noon when the light is above the subject. 

• Record during the “magic hour” (the light right before sunset or right after sunrise).

• Play a little with the camera’s tools. White balance, for example, allows you to manually adjust the color temperature to capture the actual colors of the shot.

Finally, you have to edit all the shots for consistency so the video tells a good story. At the end of your day (or days) of recording, you will have hours of raw video that you’ll need to piece together to complete your video. Join the shots together the way you want, add graphics, the logo of your company or even record dialogue over the shots.The true story of your video is told through this final edition.

This is the ideal time to add sound and music to your video to complement the visual elements you have already filmed in order to bring more life to the video. Overall, it is important to make sure the final result looks polished and professional and it captivates your viewers.

# 4 Choose a Platform for the Video

You have two options to upload your video online. Marketing videos can be hosted directly on your website or you can share it on one of the main video platforms like YouTube or Vimeo.  

The second option is the most effective because it allows you to easily share and insert your video on your web page while also giving you the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

For example, did you know that every month 1.9 billion users visit YouTube and watch more than 1 trillion hours of video? Using YouTube in your marketing strategy will give you the opportunity to take advantage of this massive audience. Currently, it’s the largest social video platform in the world so don’t ignore it.

YouTube offers a user-friendly interface for those who don’t have a lot of experience uploading videos. Ideally, you should create your own channel for your company and link it to your other social networks to keep your audience connected and give them a sense of community. This option will allow you to add your logo, funds, brand elements and even other videos to keep the audience excited. You can also invite them to subscribe to the channel to stay updated on the latest videos.

As you can see in this example, YouTube lets you customize not only the video but the entire channel to fit your brand’s voice. The post-production tools allow you to add a subscription button and another button to help share other related videos, too. As an additional bonus, it is a platform that works perfectly on mobile phones and other devices since it has a mobile app.

When your video is ready to be published, you’ll have to add a description and a title. These elements are partly responsible for your video becoming relevant and attracting your target audience.

Now you know how to make a promotional video for your company from the best tools and software to use to the proper way to share them with potential customers. As you can see, making a professional video does not necessarily require a professional production team or large budget. You can do it with what you already have, just let your creativity lead the process and study your target audience so you deliver the right message.

Remember, you are producing a video to convey emotions and encourage a call to action. With this in mind, you can create an attractive visual experience that suits your potential clients’ needs and, in turn, increases your bottom line.

The post How to Make a Promotional Video appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Calling yourself a homeowner is a dream that many of us have. It gives us tranquility and social status while also being a great investment. As the renowned writer Mark Twain said:

Buy land. They aren’t making it anymore.  

Being a real estate agent means that you sell more than property, you sell dreams. While this is a great sentiment, getting clients in real estate isn’t always easy. To make this a little easier, you need to figure out the best marketing strategies to attract more customers. Before you do that, you should familiarize yourself with real estate industry trends that can help you in your efforts.

#1 – Advertise on Google with Google Ads

In the last decade, our world has increased in terms of technological advances and the real estate market has not been left behind. According to The Digital House Hunt, 90 percent of home buyers used Google to start their search. Similarly, searches related to the real estate industry have grown by 253 percent in recent years.

Due to the high level of competition in the organic results in Google, your first strategy to get customers should be to do so using Google Ads. This will allow you to position your ad within the first results on Google through a simple but highly successful technique: pay-per-click.   

Google Ads works for real estate agents because it allows you to target the ad to a specific and local audience, something that will be discussed in detail later. Follow these simple steps to effectively use Google Ads to earn more customers while spending less money.

• Create campaigns using geo-targeting: Like any good real estate agent, you should always keep in mind “location, location and location.” No matter how good your ads are, they will not be as successful as they could be if they don’t appear in the right place. With the geographic segmentation of Google Ads, you can target your ads to specific areas where you are more likely to find the right customers while simultaneously restricting it in areas where you are less likely to find them. In this example we can see that when we want to target our ads to Dallas, we have several options, each with a different potential reach:

• Keep in mind the type of device: 89 percent of new home buyers use a mobile device for their initial research so it is very important to optimize your ad keeping that in mind. For example, it’s a good idea to add a clickable phone number to the ad to make it easy for the user to get in touch with you.

• Create an attractive copy: The text of your ad and what will generate that important first impression on the right customer should be creative and appealing. While writing engaging copy for an ad isn’t always easy, the results are always worth the effort. But what makes a good ad? Simply put, the content! For good content, you must achieve three things:

• • Find out the need of your target audience
  • Put yourself in their mind and speak their language
  • Be convincing and prove your value 

• Use VERY specific keywords: After taking into account who you want to reach with your ad, you must write your copy using specific keywords so the wrong people won’t see it. Why? Because you’re paying for the click. To mitigate risks, use exact keywords and phrases to get the right traffic to your ad and website, such as:

• •     Two-bedroom apartment for sale in Downtown Portland
  •     Affordable country house for sale in Hillsboro
  •     Best real estate agents in Portland

As a real estate agent, the online competition of moguls like Zillow and Trulia is immense. By avoiding using general terms, you can distinguish yourself from this competition. If you do happen to use generic terms, you’ll be in the middle of that competitive pack and won’t attract customers the way you want to. 

#2 – Make Quality Videos

Producing videos of your properties will help you stand out among your competitors and connect directly with your customers. According to a study conducted by the National Association of Realtors (NAR), it was found that only 11 percent of sellers use videos of their property to market it despite the fact that 61 percent of homebuyers believe that the videos are a useful feature to utilize while searching for their ideal home.

To get the best results using this tool, create short and simple quality videos to better grab the attention of those who see them. The shorter and more direct, the better.

Become a real estate superstar by creating quality and eye-catching content to keep potential buyers interested in what you have to say. It is quite common to see videos with more than one message. While this might seem efficient, it actually confuses viewers and drives them away. Do not repeat those mistakes! 

Divide your content into different videos making sure that you have one overarching topic in each. Consider these popular kinds of real estate videos:

Introductory Video

Consumers want to know you so they can assess if you are the right person to guide them in what is likely to be the most important purchase of their lives. A biographical video is a perfect opportunity to do this. 

According to Alice Soon, Marketing Manager of Pillar to Post Home Inspectors, the branding experience is literally the way a customer lives and experiences your brand and how it feels to interact with you. With an introductory video, you can make your representative brand an intrinsic part of the client’s real estate purchase process.

Use the time of the video to explain who you are, your background, certifications, achievements, sales history, mission, etc. See it as your opportunity to connect on a more personal level with the client.

When viewers can hear your voice and see your face, they automatically feel much more connected to you and your brand. In fact, it is so important that searches such as “find an agent” have increased by 46 percent annually on YouTube. An example of a good video presentation is this one by Julia Warren: 

This introductory video of just over a minute and with more than 5,000 hits shows the viewer the kind of person Julia is, makes her look accessible and also shows her passion and effort she puts in her business.

Testimonial Films

Create genuine testimonial videos that highlight positive stories from clients who have had a pleasant experience working with you to buy property.

This type of testimonial can do more to show you’re an ideal choice than any written review can since they can visually analyze how authentic the person giving their review seems. This video will help your potential clients figure out what they can expect to experience when working with you based on a real client’s experiences. 

Highlighting a happy and satisfied customer is one of the best ways to promote your business. Obviously, you should not force a client to make a review, but if you manage to establish a good professional relationship and the client is happy with their results you can ask them if they’d like to help you.  

Prepare questions that will show off their positive experiences and show prospective clients why they should choose you. 

Ask questions like, “Why did you choose me as your agent when purchasing your new home?” “How was your experience working with me?” and “how did I help you find your home?” These questions will ensure that the testimonials convey the messages you want them to while also streamlining the videos so they don’t run too long or have too much irrelevant information in them.

This video by Greg Guinto is a great example of how a video testimony should be made. It uses music to generate positive emotions, it’s short but direct and manages to capture the happiness of the buyers and generate confidence for potential customers. 

In the video, his previous clients highlight the qualities of Guinto that made their real estate experience more than satisfactory.

Neighborhood Videos

A key factor that homebuyers take into account when making their final decision to buy a property is its location, namely the neighborhood and the community around the home 

The property for sale could be perfect in every way: it could have a kitchen with marble tops, spacious rooms, a huge garden and a swimming pool, but it is useless if the surrounding community does not match the needs of your target clients.

A video in which you showcase a desirable neighborhood is a great way to advertise a specific property. Create a clear picture of the location in question where you cover all aspects that may be important to your customers such as nearby attractions, schools, nightlife or transportation to get potential buyers to imagine living there.

Use the opportunity to provide interesting data including its history and architecture, transit options, etc. Then the viewer can explore what their daily life could be like in that neighborhood.

Richard Silver, a Toronto real estate agent, made a great video about the popular neighborhood Rosedale. In less than two minutes, it shows what the neighborhood offers in depth. This includes the type of families that reside there and local businesses and schools. In addition, it manages to show one of the most popular neighborhoods in the country as an easily accessible one.

The way in which he addresses the spectator is soft and friendly, making the clients feel that he not only knows what he is saying, but that he is an open and caring person. His approach to potential buyers and his good use of digital marketing have positioned him as one of the best agents in Toronto.

Video of Property Listings

Finally, you can make a video to show off the property you want to sell. Investing in a high-quality video to show your listing to potential clients will make you stand out among your competitors and is the perfect opportunity to show buyers the key aspects and characteristics of the property for sale.

Many agents believe that selling a property is like selling a lifestyle. The Partners Trust real estate agents in Los Angeles understand that the success behind a good listing video is in a great narrative. In this video, we can see how they take advantage of this marketing technique as few do in the real estate industry:

They have created what could be considered a professional short film complete with aerial shots and impressive drone movements and scenes in slo-mo that tell a great story. The video not only shows the essence and beauty of the property but also the lifestyle and status that it can bring.

They create an opportunity for potential buyers to transport themselves to the moment they open the doors for the first time and imagine themselves as the owners of the home. It is an impressive production full of great visual and emotional content. They use the video information section on YouTube to describe the type of property, location and design then they let the video tell the rest of the story.

Now that you know what kind of videos you should create, let your creativity take over and highlight your brand to outshine your competitors.

#3 – Use Social Media like a Pro

Social media is a very effective way to interact with your current customers and new prospects, improve the perception of your brand and attract more traffic to your website. It also allows you to establish your online presence, advertise your properties for sale and set yourself up as an expert on the channels. The trick is to know who your objective audience is and how to get to them.

Use social media as a communication link between you and your customers to optimize your online presence. Leigh Brown, president of the Council of Residential Specialists and agent of RE/MAX Executive Realty in Charlotte, says that in addition to presenting you with a good platform to show off photos, you must have conversations with your followers, be visible and be present in all interactions.

Next, we will talk about the most effective channels among the agents that will allow you to reach the largest number of potential clients and your objective audience.

Facebook

We all know Facebook as a place to connect with old friends and family. But it is also an excellent platform to connect with potential customers and generate greater business opportunities with less out-of-pocket costs to you.

Your professional Facebook account should be filled with valuable content that captivates the visitor and invites them to interact with your publications. This will allow you to take advantage of this powerful marketing tool to get more opportunities to advertise and sell your properties. 

There are two ways to advertise on Facebook, free organic publications and paid publications.

This publication is a great example of how you can use free organic publications to showcase a property and make it look exclusive while inviting the potential buyer to take action.

Facebook is a great tool to create paid ads with quality content and clear calls to action that can attract potential buyers, similar to how Google Ads works. However, Facebook’s algorithm is quite different.

This social network allows users to filter their searches in more precise ways, such as by price, size, etc., but it also lets you generate optimized ads and direct them to your target audience.

The best way to generate optimized ads oriented to the right audience on Facebook is through the Marketplace. Here you can create a catalog of your products, in this case, your property listings.

The Marketplace is an excellent way to advertise your business and the different properties you have in a single paid publication. Dynamic Ads for Real Estate allow you to display more than one property and invite potential customers to take action by calling you or visiting your page to find out  more, as we can see in this example:  

Pinterest

Pinterest is the fourth most used social media platform and is a great tool to promote your listings. It allows you to show off your best photos and visuals of the property and connect with quality prospects quickly.

Your listings should be shown through appealing photos that create an emotional connection with potential buyers in order to drum up interest and get them to inquire about the property and eventually visiting it in person.

On Pinterest, you have the opportunity to create “boards” with multiple listings of different properties, posts about the neighborhoods where you are focused, interior design features, and even one about your personal life to introduce yourself to potential clients.

This is a perfect example of a Pinterest profile of a real estate agent in Denver where he has used the platform to display not only the listings of properties he has for sale but also part of his personality and present himself as someone quite accessible and trustworthy.

Yelp

Today, users rely a lot on reviews from others and the ratings they give a business. Since buying a home is one of the most important experiences in a person’s life, it is to be expected that people will base their opinion of a potential real estate agent on the positive and negative opinions of other buyers.

Yelp is the most visited review platform in the world. Here, users have written more than 142 million reviews. As a professional agent in the real estate industry, positive reviews can boost your position in search engines and help elevate you over your competitors so it’s important to focus on providing the best service you can and establish strong professional relationships with your customers. 

At the same time, Yelp can also work as a search tool, so keep your profile updated to remain visible and make it easy for users to locate and contact you. Here’s a Yelp guide on how to add the call feature to your profile.

#4 – Start a Real Estate Blog

According to HubSpot, companies that publish more than 16 blog posts a month got 3.5 times more traffic than companies that did not publish anything. Despite that, only 11 percent of real estate agents have a blog.

Having a real estate blog could improve your odds of positioning your company on the first pages of Google and get you closer to your target audience. You just need to use your blog to create and promote the right content on a consistent basis.

To turn your blog into a successful marketing tool and attract more customers, find a topic that is of great interest but also connected to the phrases or keywords that your ideal buyer would look type into a search engine.

For example, if you sell houses in Salt Lake City you can write about the things that make that city a great place to live and why it should be considered when looking to move.

Dan Bhrom, an agent in Salt Lake City, and author of the blog SearchSaltLake.com knows very well that having a blog attracts a lot of potential clients. In this case, the person searched “moving to Salt Lake City” on Google and Bhrom’s blog post was listed as the first option. 

Dan hasn’t dedicated his blog to the listings of properties he has for sale, but he has managed to optimize it so that it appears for the right people in order to connect with potential buyers. 

#5 – Take Advantage of Real Estate Services and Websites

According to the National Association of Real Estate Agents, multiple listing services generate at least 32 percent of qualified customers so we also have to talk about how you can use that service to get more customers.

This marketing strategy is necessary in order to remain relevant in the technological world in which we live. This is especially true since there are giants like Zillow and Trulia leading the digital platforms. However, they are not the only ones. There are around 800 MLS (Multi Listing Services) that share ad information and invite other agents and brokers to collaborate.

Sellers benefit from greater exposure of their properties while buyers benefit because they can get information about all properties listed in the MLS while working with a single broker. 

According to the National Association of Realtors, two-thirds of real estate agents have their own web pages but report that they list the properties they wish to sell on multiple platforms, including REALTOR.COM, Google, Zillow and Trulia.

#6 – Create Newsletters

It is not surprising that more than half of merchants believe that email is one of the most effective channels for generating profit. 

Maintaining a weekly newsletter to send out to your regular clients allows you to remain relevant while sharing all the content you have already been creating on your social media platforms with them. This will generate interest and, if it is relevant and provides value, will be shared with their friends, family and contacts. Hopefully, those people will then go and subscribe to your newsletter or, better yet, contact you and become a potential client. 

To make your marketing strategy successful, you must follow certain patterns:

• It must have relevance: You must segment the emails that you send to adapt them to different audiences that subscribed to your newsletter. Sending relevant marketing pieces to your audience is a critical technique to ensure that your message is effective. A study by MarketingSherpa found that: 

4 out of 10 subscribers reported that they marked the emails as spam simply because they were irrelevant.  

• Must be goal-oriented: Sending a newsletter should be aimed at a larger goal, namely to generate an even larger customer base. Identifying the purpose of each email will help you decide how that email should look and also measure whether it was successful or not.

• It must contain quality content: Creating quality content is not just something you should do, it is what the receiver expects you to do. The subscriber subscribed because they trust you will provide them with something valuable and interesting. Put yourself in the receiver’s shoes and ask yourself if your content is something you would like to receive, don’t think about selling; instead, give them quality information.

Examples of Good Content for a Newsletter

• Content that is interesting and informative: Share topics of interest based on your experience as an agent or the current times. For example, you can share bathroom remodeling ideas based on features in your favorite properties or you can share interesting developments concerning the current state of the real estate market.

• Show some of your best properties: Since the goal of everything is to gain more clients, you should take advantage of your newsletter and use it to promote the most interesting properties that you have at the time.

• Use your videos: Share one of the videos that you have produced about the neighborhood that generates the most interest to educate whoever reads the newsletter about interesting draws or popular restaurants in the area.

• Keep them connected with your brand: Finally, email marketing allows you to keep the content from all of your platforms together in a single click. Write an enticing invitation for them to follow you on all your platforms and to refer you to other potential buyers through incentives in order to maintain relevance and attract more customers.

These 6 marketing strategies for the real estate industry are effective and we can prove it. Following these steps, you will increase your customer base and position yourself as a great real estate agent. As you know, the industry is quite competitive so it’s essential to use the right strategies to obtain the best results.

The post 6 Strategies on How to Get Clients in Real Estate appeared first on Kolau Blog.

Providing good customer service may be difficult to achieve without face-to-face interaction. That’s one of the main challenges in the e-commerce business. However, social media has the potential to become the perfect ally to succeed at offering a top notch customer service.

This time we had the chance to interview Brooke Howerton, CEO of The Paisley Heart, an e-commerce clothing company based in Fort Worth, TX that is making shopping easy and convenient for busy women while still having that same fun experience as physically shopping in-stores. 

The Paisley Heart was named 2017 Best Women’s Fashion Store by Fort Worth Star Telegram and Small Business of the Year 2018 by Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce for their unique business model and excellent customer service. They explain to us how they’ve come to understand their customers’ needs and find ways to accommodate them on an online platform, making them thrive in the e-commerce business.

How did The Paisley Heart come to be and why is it called The Paisley Heart?

Honestly, I just love the name “Paisley”.  I love the print Paisley and have a lot of it.  I’m also a mom of four boys and if I had a girl, I would name her Paisley and that’s how the name came to fruition.  As to how it came to be: I always loved fashion, I loved shopping and as I said, I have four little boys so it didn’t afford me the time to go out and shop in the mall or even in the stores.  

It’s always online trying to find things that fit and areas/shops that benefit me.  It was hard, so I decided that I could do it. I was going to make it my mission to find a way to cater to women, especially, busy women such as moms, teachers, business women, who don’t have a lot of time to spend shopping.  I wanted to bring that to them and that’s where it started.

I started really small, just sharing with my friends and other ladies that I worked with because I did work in a corporate environment.  One thing leads to another and it just blossomed into this magical thing that it is today.

The Paisley Heart was voted 2017 Best Women’s Fashion Store by Fort Worth Star Telegram and voted Small Business of the Year 2018 by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.  What makes your clothing store different from your competitors and why do you think you won these awards?

I think honestly it’s because of the personal touch.  My goal is to make women feel like they’re shopping with their best friends.  When they login into the Paisley Heart, whether it be the website or a Facebook group, or a mobile app, any of the mobile platform they can go to, it’s not a bunch of stock photos of models modeling pictures. 

It’s real women, myself a lot of times, modeling those clothes for them in a video, explaining how they fit, why we love it, what the materials feel like, and how’s it going to fit on you. 

If customers have any questions, they have outlets where they could just pop us a question and tag us, either myself or another staff member is going to reply to them and say, “hey, if you’re on the borderline on sizes,  I would size down on this one.”

So basically you have a personal shopper that’s there for you, with you, making you feel like you have your best friend shopping, you have that advice and reassurance that you’re not just choosing it.  On top of that, we have free shipping so you’re not wasting your money on shipping and then have to return something.   

What is the marketing channels do you use and which one of those drives the most customers/leads?

Facebook was the first social media channel we use and continues to be the driving force and where we do most of our business.  For sales-wise, we have a mobile app that we utilize often so it’s easy for a customer to pop on and purchase something with just a click, but still, it stems from Facebook because we’re posting things there and it’s notifying and linking up with all the different platforms and notifies customers on their cellphones. 

What kind of content do you post in your newsletter and how often do you send them out?

We don’t do a lot of newsletters so to speak, but we do ‘announcements’ because they go out through Facebook messenger.  We don’t do emails as much as alerts. If we post something, it’s gonna alert you on a ping on your phone letting you know something was just posted.  If we’re running a sale, we’re gonna post it all over social media.

We do live videos so that engages our audience and we get to know them just as much as they get to know us.  It feels both ways because we know what they want and they also feel like they have a personal relationship with us because they do. They could reach out to us and tell us what they want, to see what they need, and what they like and don’t like.   

I see that you are a vendor at events hosted by schools in which locals can shop The Paisley Heart clothes in person.  Could you tell me more about? 

I would say that’s my biggest advice to anyone who’s trying to start a boutique or any other small business and you’re trying to get your name out there.  You have to be out there in the presence of actual people, get to know them, put your face out there, show them your product and that involves doing shows and giving back to the community, and getting involved. 

So I started out going into teacher’s lounge and setting up there and giving 10% back to that school for whatever they are doing to give back to their teachers and PSA fundraisers. I also went back to my home high school and set up for their craft fairs and support the drill team and there are band boosters.  

You’re also going to get head-ups for a lot of donations too and so you got to be very careful and wise with your time so if you can say, “Hey, yeah, we’ll love to donate.  Let me know what your next pop-up show is or when can I come to your school and I’ll give 10% back to your school.” This way it benefits both parties.

You get to be in the eye of new potential customers and it’s benefiting that school or organization.  You can both benefit from that and grow together and it puts you out to the community more too. It feels good and fun to give back as well. 

How often would you say you do these events?

Literally, as much as I could.  We are talking sometimes 4 times a week.  As often as I can get into school or a craft fair on the weekends.  I didn’t push myself on anybody by any means. I wanted them to want me there, but I wouldn’t say I’m not a hustler because that’s what it takes to be successful, right? 

I would get myself out there and everywhere I could to talk about Paisley Heart and I still do that. It’s just natural to me now. I love it and that’s my passion.  

Now it’s easy to do because people ask you about it.  You don’t even need to prompt that conversation. It’s just natural and they’re asking you about it.  It just keeps spreading like wildfire.  I always say “hustle humbly” because the more you put yourself out there, you’re going to see that return back as long as it’s coming from a good place.  

When I started the business, I only had two kids, and now 4 kids deep, it’s really hard to do those shows.  Thankfully I don’t have to do as many now. So I’ll do them more in the fall with 2 or 3 big shows and around Christmas time I try to invite everyone out to the warehouse so you can come in if you’re local. 

You can shop behind the scenes of everything and come out and see it in person. It helps when people can try things on and touch them and know that the quality is there and know what the business is for them to want to come back and shop with you again.  

What is The Paisley Heart doing for customer retention?

I would say quality for sure, over quantity.  I make sure that the product that we sell is something that I’m proud of and that I would want to wear every day.  Everything that comes in, I’m still excited about.

When we get a new box of inventory, I can’t help to open it, can’t wait to see what’s in it, and that needs to stay true.  I want to be excited about what we’re doing and care about my customers.

Our Facebook page of women all support each other and our staff supports each other. Honestly, a group of women getting along really well together and like to support each other and have a good time makes it really easy.  We accept returns as well.

Customers are always right. It’s hard because, honestly, maybe they’re not always right, but you want to make them feel like they are. So as long as they feel special and they know that you care about them, they’re gonna continue shopping with you.

At the moment, The Paisley Heart is an e-commerce clothing store, do you ever plan on opening a brick-and-mortar store in addition to the online one?  

Well, never say never, but I hope not.  Honestly, I love being an online boutique and that’s why I feel like we created such a presence that people do feel like they know us and they could trust us so I don’t have to venture into that brick-and-mortar because that’s a whole nother area that I’m not honestly really interested in.

We are going to have a warehouse where customers can come out if they need to and we have that for us.  We have the shipping room, we have the showrooms, so in a sense, we have that brick-and-mortar. We just don’t open ‘walk-in-walk-out-anytime-you-want’, it is more exclusive, you can come in by appointment, things like that. So at this moment, no I don’t see a brick-and-mortar in our future.

What are your future plans for The Paisley Heart?

Our company is growing still and that’s super exciting.  The goal is just to keep providing the service that we have but to change with the changes. 

Facebook is always changing. What if it goes away, you know. We have the website, we have the mobile app, we have Instagram, so just to make sure that we are touching all the different outlets and areas where women do shop and just continue catering to them and keep growing. 

Our staff this year has grown again. We have a new photo shoot coming up. We have a bigger warehouse we’re moving to next month and we continue to do that financially sound as well, making sure that we have enough to cover those expenses before we move forward, to grow in a smart way.   

What advice can you give other clothing boutiques that struggle with customer acquisition?

The question that I always ask when people wonder how I’ve grown is asking them if they’ve done shows, have they done the pop-up shows, have they put their name out there, have they talked to their friends about it, and do they have a game plan. 

Vision boards are really big right now and I think that’s a great idea. If you’re the type of personality that needs something laid out and written down where you can say, “Ok, here are the boxes, I need to check these to make sure I get from Point A to Point B.”  As for customers, it’s the same way.  

If you’re wondering where to even begin, I would say start calling your shows, get into places, and from there start talking about your business, dreams, and encourage others to be a part of it as well.  That’s where it keeps growing. Slow and steady that’s how you have to do it. I was lucky to have support from the beginning and I know that that’s not always there, but it is super important that you find that support system.  

I was still in corporate when I started the business so I was telling people, “Hey this is my idea and I think I’m gonna run with it and this is what I’m doing, so would you join my group page?”.  And they would tell their friend and that person would tell their friend and you just got to keep it going. You can’t be lazy about hustling your name, what you’re selling, your quality, you got to be your biggest advocate, for sure.     

What advice can you give to clothing boutiques that have a hard time with customer retention?

For retention, I would say, every time something comes in, you know, someone returns something that they obviously have worn or they have a question where you just want to roll your eyes, but you have to think ‘what’s it going to do to my business’, ‘how’s it going to be if I reject this return or if I tell this person this or ignore them or disregard their feelings’, ‘how is this going to pan out in the end’. 

If they don’t feel like the matter then that’s bad. So I always say, ‘if it were me and I had done this and I truly felt this way, how I hope to be responded to.’ Time and time again, I always write back from a good-hearted place and make sure that the customer understands where I’m coming from, even though it’s not always easy.

In the end, if they feel strongly about something and I feel differently, I’m going to cater to them.

Give me a prediction of what you think is the best way to gain customers for the retail clothing industry in the coming years?

I would say you need to do it for them.  Stores are hard to come by these days where you actually go into a brick-and-mortar store.  People are shopping online. People are really needing help. They’re busy. They have busy lives and there’s a lot going on.  They’re going from Point A to Point B constantly all day long. Any help they can get, that’s what you need to give.  

It’s a service, basically.  I sell a service. I sell helping you shop, bringing you quality for an affordable price, I do all the legwork for you and all you have to do is trust me and order the product.  Time and time again once they learn that you have a good product, you follow through, and you’re truly there for them and your business is sticking around, then you get a repeat customer right there.  They’re always going to come back.

I would say keep going with the changes, stay up on what’s happening, be willing to change with that, and love on your customers.

The post Marketing for Online Clothing Stores – Interview with The Paisley Heart appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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Looking for marketing tips for Yoga as an instructor? Yoga is becoming more popular! More men and senior citizens are practicing yoga than ever before, going from 4 million men and 4 million 55+ old practitioners in 2012 to about 10 million and 14 million respectively. It’s not hard to see why. Ongoing research continues to find endless mental and physical health benefits for practicing yoga. 

Not to mention, for many people, yoga is a meditative and spiritual practice. That may be why it can feel inauthentic or contradictory to create a marketing plan for your yoga business. The truth is: marketing is necessary for a successful yoga business and there’s absolutely nothing wrong or contradictory about implementing it.

There are ways to create a marketing plan that fits your business authentically without compromising the core values of yoga. In fact, being dishonest can hurt your business much more than help. Marketing is about making your business discoverable and connecting with people who want to connect with you.

#1 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Find your Niche

The first question you need to ask yourself is: do you know your clientele? Who is in need of or enjoys your classes? This is directly connected with what kind of yoga classes you offer. Do you teach beginners’ classes or mostly advanced classes? Can your yoga help with back problems or relieve stress? 

You have to understand your clientele, what they look like, and what they’re looking for in order to be able to find them using a marketing strategy. Take a look at your current classes. Are your clients older or younger? Why did they sign up? Do they have health problems or are they particularly fit? Are there many long-time students or more beginners? Do these things change depending on what class you’re teaching?

If you’re a new yoga instructor, this may be more difficult to identify. You’ll have to look at the yoga classes you offer and think of all the benefits someone could get from them. Is your yoga especially fun or spiritual? Do you teach a yoga class particularly useful for losing weight? According to a study conducted by the Yoga Alliance,

61% of people start yoga for increased flexibility, 56% start for stress relief, and 49% start to improve their health.

When marketing, it’s good to emphasize these benefits. Consider what makes you or your studio different from other yoga instructors or yoga studios. Maybe you teach classes not many other kinds of yoga studios teach. Having a niche can be very beneficial, whether the niche encompasses only one class or your whole studio.

There tends to be less competition for niche categories which can lead to good business for you. For example, you’ve probably heard of yoga studios that specialize in teaching pregnant mothers and their families. Ready Set Grow is a great example.

They teach prenatal yoga, postpartum yoga, and family yoga, which is a great niche category. There will always be new mothers who feel they no longer have time for yoga and there will always be pregnant women looking to stay healthy and take care of their body.

The physical restrictions of pregnancy may be difficult for yoga practitioners, so a class meant for them and their physical needs will put their minds at ease and prevent them from stopping yoga altogether during their pregnancy.

You don’t have to dedicate your whole studio to a particular group, though. Offering, for example, a class for people over fifty, a beginners’ yoga class, or a class with a focus on body positivity will bring in a group of students who may not do yoga otherwise. 

The same study conducted by the Yoga Alliance found that the top reasons for people not trying yoga were: being unsure if yoga was right for them, not knowing how to get started, feeling out of place, and feeling like their body is not right for yoga. Providing a solution for these reasons will help you stand out among the crowd and fill a demand not many other people have been able or have thought to.

You could also think about providing services apart from yoga. For example, if a significant percentage of your students are parents, you could do what Yoga Union does and offer a childcare service.

It’s true Yoga Union is located in a community wellness center and so it makes sense for them to provide more services for the community around them, but if you have the means it’s worth considering filling pain points such as these that may be preventing your potential students from attending your classes.

#2 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Create Your Yoga Website

When it comes to online marketing, you should, at the very least, have a website for your business under a custom URL. Your website should at least have your business contact information, your yoga classes schedule, the cost of a class or a membership, and the location of your yoga studio.

Most yoga websites’ menus look like the one below:

There’s the homepage, which broadly introduces your visitor to your yoga business. Your homepage is a starting point, so providing easily accessible links to your registration page or showcasing special deals or incoming events is a good way to go.

Yoga Union’s homepage is very well done, starting out by introducing their visitors to a set of goals (honor, support, and connect).

If you hover over Honor, Support, or Connect a short description of how they fulfill that goal pops up. Below that, Yoga Union showcases links to encourage visitors to become members, view the class schedule, or see what events are coming up.

The About page is also a basic necessity for your website. The Breathing Room’s “About” consists of a map to their location, an “Info to Know” section, and a section with their contact information. They also have links, accessible through the menu, directing visitors to descriptions of their teachers and information for new students.

Yoga Union, on the other hand, uses the “About” section to answer frequently asked questions and to link to a photo gallery and to testimonials. It’s a good place to put the information you think is important for your potential or current students to know.

The “Offerings” section on The Breathing Room’s menu is used as a link to classes and the class schedule. It’s reasonable to put prices and membership benefits under the same section, though The Breathing Room has it in its own category (which is also fine). The important thing is to make it easy to find your pricing and membership information.

Lastly, the contact page is necessary but pretty simple and straightforward. That’s where you put the location of your studio (even if you also have it in your “About” page), a phone number a visitor could reach your business at, and typically an easy way to send you a message or email.

Those are the basics, but if you do anything else like write a blog or organize events or offer yoga teacher training, your website is definitely a great place to include that information. If you’re proud of your space, showcase photos of what it looks like. After all, the environment in which you teach your yoga can be important for a lot of people.

If you have a newsletter, encourage your visitors to sign up. If you’ve created videos, show them off! You may think newsletters, blogs, and videos don’t benefit you and take up too much energy but content marketing has been repeatedly proven to be very effective.

#3 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Using Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about ongoing quality. It’s not the kind of marketing strategy that will get you results instantaneously and it doesn’t work if you don’t put in genuine effort. Hubspot found that companies who published more than sixteen blog posts per month got about 3.5 times as much traffic than companies who published less than four.

This goes to show that content marketing is effective but it’s especially effective when done consistently and frequently.

You can utilize content marketing for your yoga business in a multitude of ways. You can write e-books or blogs or make videos or podcasts about yoga, teaching others what you know or sharing your journey. These are all great ways of extending your reach while helping people learn something or engage with you.

You can also put out content that is somewhat related to yoga but not necessarily about yoga. For example, you could keep a travel blog, make lifestyle videos, share health tips or healthy food recipes. Anything a yoga practitioner might be interested in or find useful is something to consider making content about.

Barre3, a workout company with multiple studios throughout the US, for example, has their own online magazine that posts articles about things from slow cooker recipes to interviews. 

Their message of empowerment is also reflected in their articles. For example, their article titled “We’re Revolutionizing The Fitness Before + After” is explicitly about denying the “unrealistic, unattainable… unhealthy before and after photos” and making the after photo a happy ending (instead of a comparison of weight). This particular post also includes a call to action, prompting their readers to take their version of a before and after photo on Instagram.

Call-to-actions, especially ones that encourage participation from your visitors that feels normal and natural, are a great way to keep your visitors engaged. Referring them to social media encourages long-term engagement as well.

#4 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Try Email marketing

Email marketing can be a huge opportunity for your yoga business. Yoga is so often about creating and nurturing a community. Sending consistent, authentic, relevant emails can help with that. Not to mention, emails can help remind your students about upcoming events like retreats or special yoga classes. It’s often about keeping your current students in the loop about what’s going on with your business.

Sending out emails is a great way of connecting with newer customers and keeping current students interested in your business. Don’t spam your email list though! Keep a schedule. Decide if you want to send out emails biweekly, weekly, or monthly. Be aware that if you send too many emails, they might get marked as spam, your recipients might give up trying to keep up with them, or they might unsubscribe.

Make sure to customize your emails according to your target group too. Don’t just send the same email to everyone. See where they are in their relationship with your business.

• If they’ve signed up but have yet to attend a class, send them an email reminding them to give it a try.

• If they’ve just gone to their first class, send them an email congratulating them and suggesting more classes.

• If they’re a longtime student, send them emails about class, teacher, or schedule changes.

Customize further by sending out birthday offers. Wishing your students happy birthday creates a positive association with your business and strengthens your connection with your customer. Emails about special events or deals are good ideas as well. All your emails should contain something of value for the person who is receiving them.

Remember when creating emails to make them functional on mobile devices. Many people read their email on their phones. Also, follow all the rules for the CAN-SPAM Act, which includes making sure you offer recipients the option to unsubscribe and identifying email ads as ads. For more about email marketing, check out our article on how to tailor your email marketing campaign to each customer.

#5 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Make Yourself Seen on Social Media

Social media is all about engagement and has been found to work wonders for yoga businesses, particularly on platforms like YouTube and Instagram. Yoga jumped in popularity between 2012 and 2016, according to the Yoga Alliance, going from 20.4 million practitioners to more than 36 million. The same study found that:

65% of practitioners practice yoga at home and 50% of practitioners cited cost as the most important studio trait.

It makes sense many of these people would choose to practice at home through videos or apps and it also makes sense to meet those people where they are.

When it comes to social media marketing, posting online consistently is key. It doesn’t always need to be original content. Sharing articles you enjoyed or propping up other yoga instructors is an option as well.

YouTube

YouTube is the most popular social media site in the United States. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 73% of Americans use YouTube. There are countless yoga YouTube videos out there. YouTube is a popular website for sharing classes with an online community. They can be however long you want, ranging from ten minutes to an hour.

This is a great way of finding beginners or people who can’t afford to go to in-person classes. Many yoga teachers also use free online classes as a way to build their online following. Often, they offer longer online classes for a fee on a separate website, usually through their own yoga website.

A great example of a yoga instructor who successfully utilized YouTube and created a huge online community is Adriene Mishler. She has four million subscribers on YouTube.

Adriene Mishler has been posting videos on YouTube for six years, uploading several times a month (sometimes a week) and accumulating more than 345 million views. Her success is rare, but it also shows what you can achieve with great marketing and dedication.

Her consistency–posting videos frequently for six years–and the accessibility of her videos definitely play a part in her popularity. She sets challenges, such as her 30-day challenge titled “Dedicate,” that are doable both for beginner yoga practitioners and more advanced ones.

If YouTube class videos is a direction you choose to go, it would be a good idea to post a decent number of classes that are accessible for beginners.

There are other types of YouTube videos you can post that would also be beneficial. You can post informational videos. Your videos could explain the benefits of yoga or define Vinyasa or share what you know of the history, for example. Making videos, in this case, is both social media and content marketing.

Instagram 

Instagram is a popular place for yoga. You’ve probably seen (or even posted) photos of fit yogis in difficult poses. These kinds of pictures are expected from a yoga account and you should absolutely post them on your Instagram. Though, it wouldn’t hurt to add some variety to what you post. This is true for nearly all social media platforms, not just Instagram.

First, decide if you want to market yourself or your studio on Instagram. If you’re marketing yourself, your account will have to focus a bit more on your personality and most pictures will likely include you or someone your followers might recognize. Take a look at Rachel Brathen’s page. She identifies as a “Yoga Girl” and a mom in her Instagram bio.

Her photos reflect what she’s told us in her bio. We see her meditating on the beach (some of her other photos also show her practicing yoga more clearly). We see her with her children and with her romantic partner. Her Instagram appears personal. She has a good mix of photos that appear to be taken herself (such as photos of her kids and selfies) and photos that appear professionally taken with gorgeous backgrounds such as the one below.

The real marketing comes in, casually, in her bio, where she writes, “JOIN OUR YOGA RETREATS + TEACHER TRAININGS!” She includes a URL that will take those interested to the yogagirl.com website.

Rachel Brathen also has a YouTube channel, which she uses to post the occasional yoga videos but, unlike Adriene Mishler, also has many videos about her and her family in the style of lifestyle YouTubers.

If you choose to market your studio instead of yourself as a yoga teacher, you can go about it a different way. You can still post photos of you or your fellow yoga teachers (or students) in impressive yoga poses. You can also showcase events happening at your studio or show off what the studio itself looks like. You can post pictures of classes, such as the one below by the yoga studio, Parallel 45.

Of course, you could do the same with an individual account. The main difference is that an account for a studio will inherently be more focused on community, not just one person. 

Facebook 

When it comes to social media marketing, you can’t forget Facebook. It’s the second most popular social media platform in the United States, losing only to YouTube. According to the same Pew Research Center survey mentioned earlier, 68% of Americans use Facebook.

At the bare minimum, you should create a business page for you or your studio–somewhere people searching can find information. Your Facebook business page can be a great place to bring in new students curious about your business and keep current or long-time students updated on events and classes.

Parallel 45’s Facebook page does a good job in many ways. They advertise a special event (CandleLight Restorative Yoga), making it easy for people who come across the post to RSVP or save the event on Facebook. Facebook also lets the user’s friends know they are interested in the event, spreading awareness.

Next, they have their 5-star rating showcased on the right side. If you’ve gotten positive reviews on Facebook, show them! They increase trust in your business. The Spiegel Research Center found that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by 270%. Same with the “Community” section. Parallel 45 has a decent amount of likes and follows, showing that it’s not just a few people that think they’re great.

More tips on Social Media Marketing

Apart from making you seen by potential and current students, social media has the benefit of helping you keep in contact with other yoga instructors or even to connect with instructors you hadn’t known previously. You can prop up other instructors through your posts or give them credit when they give you an idea for something. Chances are some will do the same for you and you might even end up co-teaching or hosting an event together one day.

Here’s something to keep in mind: social media is only one part of a successful marketing strategy. When talking about Adriene Mishler’s success, it’s important to note that though most of her content makes its home on YouTube, she also shares on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Not to mention, she also participates in and shares events, has her own website, runs a blog, and sends out a weekly e-letter. Rachel Brathen also does some content marketing, including participating in a podcast and creating yoga practice videos.

Another thing to keep in mind: try to keep things real. People can tell when you buy a stock photo and post it to your Instagram instead of taking a real photo of real people. Also, posting consistently is important but try to engage your followers or subscribers as well. Respond to their comments and like the Facebook posts they mention you in. Retweet and share their stories about how you helped them find a home in yoga.

#6 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Use Google Ads

Using Google ads can be a great way to grow your business but if you’re lost about how to go about getting started or making your ads effective, you’re not the only one. There can be quite a bit that goes into creating and using Google Ads. We’ll only go through the basics, but if you’re interested in learning more check out some of our other articles about Google Ads.

You’ve likely noticed the paid results that appear when you search something on Google. Google (partly) decides which ads appear on the first page using an auction, in which you set how much you’re willing to pay for keywords. However, Google also takes into account the quality of your ad, user experience, click-through rate and a variety of other things, all of which add up to your quality store.

The combination of your bid and quality score determines how much you’ll pay each time someone clicks on your ad.

Focusing on a location–for example, San Francisco if you are based there–reduces how many clicks you’ll get from users who wouldn’t actually be interested in attending your classes. If someone searches for yoga studios in New York but you’re based in San Francisco, you don’t want your ad appearing to them.

You should also pay attention to how your keywords are doing. Keywords are the words your potential students would use in a Google search to find your business. For example, someone might type “private yoga lessons.” If you offer private lessons, then you should include the phrase in your list of keywords so your ad appears when they search it.

Let’s look at some examples of yoga ads.

Most of these do a decent job. The first ad emphasizes meditation and health, attracting people who may be interested in that. The second ad emphasizes yoga for “All levels,” attracting people who might be beginners. They both showcase what makes them stand out.

Second, most of these show off an offer. For example, the first one offers a sign-up fee of 99 cents, which is a great deal. Alternatively, the next two offer free trials, which is also appealing.

Third, two of them show their positive ratings as well. As mentioned earlier, positive ratings increase trust in your business. Gaia.com has over 4,220 reviews, making it that much more reliable. It makes sense they would be the first to appear.

Google also offers another kind of ads: display ads. You see Display ads when you’re browsing a website and a banner or a video ad relevant to your interests appears on the top or side of the page. Sometimes, it’s an ad from a website you had clicked on earlier. They look like this:

You can use these kinds of ads to target people who browse through yoga websites and may be interested in classes or to people who visited your site and left without taking action (known as retargeting or remarketing).

#7 Marketing Tip for Yoga Instructors: Use Offline Marketing Tactics

Yoga is often about community and so you can’t forget about your offline marketing. This is all about connecting with your fellow yogis in real life.

Advertising on Magazines

Have you ever received a free magazine in the mail? If you’ve ever flipped through one, you’ll notice that some ads contain free offers, such as coupons for a free book or a free beginner’s yoga class. For a yoga business, connecting with and bringing in the community around it is important and paying to advertise yourself in a local magazine can help you bring more members of your community into your classes.

Print ads are the most trustworthy form of ads, according to MarketingSherpa. While only 61% of people trust search engine ads (the highest trust rate for all online ads), 82% trust print ads.

It’s not enough to just make yourself known, though. Like with many other marketing tactics, you should focus on something you can give your potential student. What is the benefit for them? You can use the whole ad to highlight the great things about your yoga practice, studio, or qualifications, but it won’t work as well as giving the reader something they want.

So, if you’re holding a free class, advertise it in magazines popular with your community or ones they receive without having to pay or opt-in for. Or use coupons as a one-time cost waiver, so that whoever uses it can take a specific class for free. If the coupon is for a recurring class, it’s best to put an expiration date or to keep the coupon (rather than handing it back) after its been used to prevent abuse of the offer.

You don’t have to limit yourself only to free yoga classes. Give away free yoga products if someone shows up to one of your classes or give away entry to a special event. Whatever it may be you’re giving away for free, make sure you know the audience you’re advertising to.

When picking a magazine, investigate their audience and if it overlaps with your marketing targets. Fitness, women, and community-based magazines may contain the demographic you’re looking for, especially if they occasionally (or often) write about yoga or local businesses, but chances are magazines about cars or birds won’t work as well for you.

Generally, you should be honest about what you’re offering. Don’t try to hide it if your offer includes fees, such as shipping and handling. If, for some reason, signing up for your offer will incur other fees, make it as clear as you can. For example, if someone comes to your studio and discovers what they thought was a free class is going to charge them to rent a yoga mat or that the coupon only covered 60 minutes of a 90-minute class, they may not be happy with you.

The same is true if you require them to do anything other than show up–for example, if the coupon is only valid if they sign up online or through the phone first, you should request they do so in the magazine ad. Any conditions should be made clear. You don’t want to trick them into paying for something. You want to gain their trust and make them pleased enough they’ll return to your studio.

Word of Mouth (Referral Marketing)

You can’t underestimate the power of word of mouth. The Yoga Alliance notes that 65% of yoga studio owners take into account their friends and professional acquaintances’ referrals when hiring new teachers. 40% of people get their yoga information from their friends and 33% of people take up yoga because of their friends.

Often, “referral marketing” happens naturally. You just have to provide the best service you can and engage meaningfully with your students. If you’re good at what you do, you’ll be recommended to others. 

Though, you don’t have to just hope you’re students will recommend you to their friends without saying anything. Encouraging students after a class to tell a friend about their experience or about an upcoming event or special class is something to consider. If someone compliments you or your yoga practice, suggest they tell their friends about it too.

You could also offer incentives. For example, if someone convinces a friend to sign up for a month, you give that person free classes or a gift card.

This is a good example. The longer the referral lasts, the better the incentive, but also take a look at the headline. “Yoga Is Better With Friends” encourages the visitors of this page to refer friends for their own benefit and happiness. “Wouldn’t yoga be more fun with your best friend?” it asks.

Keep good relationships with other instructors

Networking and maintaining positive relationships with other instructors will help you in the long run. As mentioned earlier, when hiring, many owners take into account what other instructors say. Not to mention, connections will bring more opportunities such as co-teaching and substituting. Just remember to return the favor!

Keep the cycle of giving and receiving going. If you’re just starting out as a yoga instructor, the connections you build will help you get going and find students outside of the online world.

Volunteer at community centers and occasionally give free classes

According to the Yoga Alliance, the third most common way practitioners began yoga is through a free class. Advertise it well online and around your neighborhood (such as local magazines, as mentioned) and you’ll bring in plenty of beginner students or even students looking for a new studio.

Volunteering at a community center or giving a donation class will expose you to more people, especially people trying out yoga for the first. You’ll have the opportunity to connect with more professional acquaintances as well. Not to mention, you’ll be doing something good for your community!

Hold special events

Like Parallel 45’s CandleLight Restorative Yoga event, special events will create a stronger community within your studio, attract new people, or even bring back people who may have temporarily stopped practicing.

Fun, community-oriented events such as bingo where the winner gets a limited amount of free classes–something else Parallel 45 has done as a New Year’s Event–are great ways to encourage current students to continue attending and grab the interest of potential students.

Hopefully, you found these marketing tips for yoga instructors helpful! If you did and you’re interested in any more social media strategies, we’ve written an article about social media strategies for small businesses. Check it out!

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