If you’re a writer looking to enter into the publishing world, your end goal is likely to sign on with a well-known publishing house and become a bestseller. While this is a great plan it isn’t that easy.

Most publishing companies are looking for writers who already have an established following that will buy your books and make them money. New writers with no fanbase are unlikely to get noticed. More so, self-publishing options like Amazon’s eBooks and Google Play Books require some kind of following to help you get noticed and make money, too. 

In order to build a following before signing on with a publisher, you have to market yourself properly. Considering that the industry is growing slowly and that the publishing market is constantly changing, adaptability and flexibility are two qualities that any writer must possess to turn their writing from a hobby to a career. To help you do this, consider these four marketing strategies for writers. 

# 1 Marketing Strategy for Writers: Create a blog and publish relevant content for your target audience

According to an Ascend2 survey, 72 percent of marketers say that the creation of relevant content is the most effective SEO tactic. A blog is just one of the digital marketing tools that helps you offer valuable content while gaining more visibility in search engines. Since blogs are content-based they should be the first thing a writer turns to gather a following.

The Spanish writer Ana González Duque made her work known through a blog. In an interview she said:

For a writer, a blog is their online business card. The reader will know from reading your blog if they’ll like your books.

Her first novel, Dr. Jomeini’s Blog, was written in the form of a fictional blog. She initially published it online where she gained a following and was then discovered by a publishing house. 

Your blog can turn into a future book, a space for reflection or even a site where you share your creative process with your audience. This is the case of the book In Vino Veritas by the writer Virginia Gasull. The author created a blog of the same name in which she discussed how she researched everything to write her book and develop her characters.

With this strategy, she was able to generate interest in her work and engage with her readers who were interested in the subject of her book. It’s about creating a community that knows your book in advance and is ready to receive it once it is published.

Keep in mind that your blog won’t become popular overnight. It’s a laborious process that may take months to pick up traffic. Luckily, the results will be worth the effort. Here are some tips so you can create a blog and improve your SEO positioning and attract relevant visitors.

• Post valuable content for your readers. This means non-commercial content that focuses on addressing the concerns of your target audience. Each post on your blog is a new page that Google can index. This influences your website’s SEO. If your content has valuable information and your writing is high quality, your readers will keep reading and share it. When they do, they’ll create new links to your blog. These links contribute to improving SEO so your potential readers can find you easily on Google.

• Choose the right keywords for your posts. Put yourself in your readers’ shoes and choose the words they would use to find your post through a Google search. Keywords influence the positioning of your blog’s pages for a specific search. Among the keywords that come to your mind, choose those that have lower competition and a higher volume of searches. You can figure that out with tools like SEMrush, Moz or Google AdWords Keyword Planner.

• Put your keywords in the right places. Google will list your web pages when someone searches for the keywords you selected as long as they’re in the titles of your posts, the subtitles, in the first paragraph, the snippets of the URLs (the text that appears after your domain name in the URL and that matches the title of your post); in the meta description (the summary that is shown when your website appears in a Google results page) and in the “alt” tags of the images.

• Make sure your posts have at least 2,000 words. The length of your posts is a factor that influences SEO, too. According to QuickSprout, the first 10 results Google shows for any keyword are long-form articles with a minimum of 2,000 words. Therefore, long posts tend to get better positions on Google.

• Use social networks to share your blog. Your posts are also a source of relevant content that you can share through your social profiles. Thanks to the viralization potential of social media your followers can share or retweet your posts which will generate more links and drive traffic to your blog. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are the most appropriate social platforms to share your blog since they allow you to add links to your posts.

#2 Marketing Strategy for Writers: Contact bloggers who do book reviews

A study by Collective Bias, the leading company in influencer marketing, reveals that almost 60 percent of users have taken a review in a blog or a social media post into account when making a purchase decision.

If a blogger who has thousands of followers speaks well of your book, people will want to read it, but for that to happen you must first contact the blogger(s) and build a good relationship with them. Keep in mind that it’s not worth it to send them a link to your book or ask them to read it and write a review. If they don’t know you, they probably won’t do it.

If you want to increase your chances of getting influencer reviews, follow the steps and tips below:

Investigate in social media

Explore hashtags about books on social networks to find influencers who post reviews about the books they read. For example, #bookstagram is one of the most used hashtags on Instagram for this purpose. Another less popular hashtag that may be useful to you is #bookreview.

You can also use Twitonomy which allows you to find influential profiles on Twitter from a specific hashtag. Klear also lets you search for influencers on the most popular social networks while BuzzSumo can help you find the most influential journalists and media outlets who write about the topic you’re targeting.

Analyze their social profiles

Find out what social media channels these influencers are using and look at the number of followers they have and the engagement they get on their publications (likes, shares, comments, etc.) to measure the impact that a publication of theirs could have on your book.

Above all, analyze the content they publish. If you think your book could fit in with their content, follow them. It can be useful to make a list of bloggers who have profiles you are looking for.

Interact with their content

After following them, try to capture their attention by interacting with their publications on social networks by giving them likes, commenting on their posts and sharing what you find interesting. If they have a blog, you can also leave a comment on their posts. But be careful! Do not comment publicly on their posts asking for a review, or posting a link to your book because you will probably be perceived as “spam”.

Limit yourself to observations about the content, valuable contributions to discussions if you know any of the books they recommend or congratulate them on their work. Make sure to use the same username in all your social profiles to be recognized. Add the word “writer” or “author” or something similar in your username. By doing this you’ll call more attention to yourself since they’ll know what you do before visiting your profile.

For example, the North American author KM Weiland uses the term “author” in their Instagram username.

Get in touch with them directly

After interacting with them on social media, look for a direct contact route. If you get these influencers to follow you back on Twitter or Instagram send them a private message. If they have a public email address, send them an email. In case you are targeting a journalist, you can contact the publication and ask for the journalist you are looking for.

If you can establish direct contact with them, introduce yourself, tell them what you like most about their content, tell them that you are a writer and then tell them about your book in a brief but enticing way. If your book and one of those that the influencer has recommended to his followers have anything in common, offer a comparison. This shows them that you really know their tastes and you’ll hopefully create a bond with them.

Finally, tell them that you would love to hear their opinion about your book and that, if interested, you can send them a free copy without any commitment.

Keep interacting with their content

Once you have managed to contact the influencer directly and they have agreed to read and review your book, continue interacting on their social media posts from time to time so they don’t forget you.

If you see that they haven’t published any reviews, you can write or call them to ask if they have been able to read your book and what they thought. If they have not read it yet, don’t force them. If they have already read it and their opinion is positive, tell them that you would love to be a part of their content and that you would really appreciate a review of it. 

#3 Marketing Strategy for Writers: Turn social media into your best ally

Social media is one of the most effective channels for the acquisition and retention of customers or, in this case, readers. Social media allows you to build a community of fans or followers around your brand that will be exposed to your messages.

According to a report by Social Media Examiner, 89 percent of marketers say that their activity on social media has generated more exposure for their businesses. As a writer, you have to start thinking of yourself as a brand and then build and cultivate that brand to achieve success.

Here are some ideas you can apply to your social media strategy:

Use popular hashtags in your publications

Search the most relevant book hashtags your target audience participates in and use them to tag your posts. Make sure they are popular enough to attract a good amount of visibility.

There are some tools like RiteTag, Hashtagify and Keyhole that can help you find the best hashtags. These tools will give you information about a hashtag’s popularity and their audience while also suggesting new ideas.

Show your day-to-day life in your social media

Writers tend to be more known by name than by their face. Social networks give you the opportunity to break this scheme and humanize your work. By showing yourself and your personality, you will be able to connect more with your readers. It’s okay to talk about your books but do it in a subtle way.

You must bear in mind that social networks should not be used shamelessly as promotional platforms because people don’t use them to buy things; they use them know what their friends (or the people they follow) are doing. You can publish photographs of yourself while you are writing or of everyday situations that you wish to share with your followers and make subtle allusions to your new works. You have to find the balance.

Ajay K. Pandey’s Instagram profile is a good example of this. Similarly, these photographs that the writer Jamie McGuire posted on her Facebook page about a meeting she attended in Rome are also a good example of this.

Make posts about the books you read

It’s not worth talking about your work alone. Social media was conceived as a space to share content and interact with other users. To avoid posting only about your own work and life, talk about other authors’ books and make recommendations to your followers making sure to tag the authors of the books if they have a profile on the given social network.

By doing this, there is a chance that the author will see your post and will reciprocate by making a public post recommending your work to their followers. Your visibility and sales could increase considerably if the writer has a large fanbase. Sometimes, you can gain more talking about others than talking about yourself.

Below you can see a recommendation made by the writer Jessica Knoll on her Instagram profile.

Organize contests or sweepstakes

Contests and raffles are a good way to increase the number of followers on your social profiles and get leads (users who give you their email and allow you to continue contacting them that way).

You can give away a free book by choosing randomly from all followers who comment on a specific photo or make a post using a designated hashtag. You can even have fans register for a contest through a form with their name and email address.

Post fragments of your books on Instagram

Although Instagram is known as a visual platform, there is room for your book. You can post images with snippets of text from your book. Users might be drawn to a text-heavy photo since it’s a nice surprise on feeds that are heavy with images.

For example, Robert Drake usually publishes simple images with small pieces of text from his books on his Instagram profile and still gets as much or more engagement than with other types of posts.

Ask your readers to leave a review on Facebook

According to Marketing Land, 90 percent of consumers say that positive reviews influenced their purchase decision. Facebook is the second platform after Google that people use to read reviews so try to get your readers to leave a review on your fan page.

You can also offer a discount on upcoming books or raffle off a reading-related gift, like a personalized bookend, among those who left a positive review on your Facebook page. If you get several positive reviews, people will be more inclined to buy your books.

Below you can see some of the reviews that the author Keri Beevis gets.

#4 Marketing Strategy for Writers: Create audiobooks of your writing

Audiobooks are a relatively new book format that is becoming increasingly popular in the book market. In Germany, 2.83 million people bought more than one audiobook in 2016 while copies of audiobooks went from 348,000 in 2013 to 675,300 in 2015 in Norway.

By creating audiobooks of your work you can reap more benefits including:

• Greater accessibility: One of the advantages of audiobooks is that they are accessible to people who can’t read. BBC News revealed that in the United States the illiteracy rate is 8.1 percent of the adult population. There are many people who have dyslexia or who have not had to opportunity to learn to read. If you can bring your book to the illiterate population, blind people or people with reading difficulties, you will be expanding your audience.

• More attractive format for young people: Several studies show that young people are much more accustomed and drawn to the use of new technologies than to traditional formats. Audiobooks can be the solution to the “laziness” that young people seem to have for reading. If your works are directed to a younger audience, audiobooks can be a good way to reach them.

• Multitasking: Another advantage provided by not having to read a book is the possibility of combining audiobook consumption with other daily tasks that, otherwise, could not be carried out. Just like when you listen to the radio, you can listen to an audiobook while doing other things. It’s perfect for users who don’t have time to read.

There are several websites dedicated to the sale of audiobooks including Audiobooks.com and Ivoox. Audiobooks can be easily created with apps such as Audiobookmaker, too. Here, you simply have to copy and paste the text of your book into the application, verify that it can read it and then export the audio file.

If you liked these marketing strategies for writers and want to learn more, you can also take a look at our post about Email Marketing for SMEs and find out how to create an effective newsletter that you can use to keep in touch with your fans.

The post 4 Marketing Strategies for Writers to Gain Readers 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.

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For local flower shops, it can be difficult to make yourself stand out amongst all the other floral businesses–not to mention, department stores. It can be even more difficult to know how to utilize marketing strategies within the rise of social media and Google Ads. In fact, learning how to use online marketing tactics and implementing outstanding marketing ideas for flower shops is crucial to keeping up with the competition.

It’s important for small businesses everywhere to adapt to the internet age. According to the U.S Bureau of Labor, the job outlook for florists is at a 6% decline. However, as of January 2018, most florists remain optimistic about incoming sales. With a successful marketing campaign, you can be sure your business has successful years ahead of it.

In this article, we’re going to talk about what marketing techniques florists can use to catch up with the digital age and increase their business.

Marketing Idea for Flower Shops #1 – Use Social Media

Flowers are very photogenic and so it would be a shame not to share them online. More than that, though, social media is a great way to build visibility, find loyal customers and keep people coming back to your business every birthday, anniversary, or holiday.

According to MarketingSherpa:

95% of consumers aged 18 to 34 followed brands on their social media accounts.

It’s a great way to build your brand as well and create an image around your business. Here you can show your audience what kind of florist you are, whether you specialize in a certain kind of event or clientele or if your designs have a certain unique style to them.

Instagram

Instagram is the social media site to go to for visuals. This is the perfect place to keep an unofficial portfolio of your work. It’s important to post high-quality photos. Instagram is both a way to connect with your potential customers more directly and a way to showcase your skills and art.

Post your best photos–those that capture the energy and affect your flowers had on the environment. For example, if you specialize in weddings, feature interesting and attractive photos of the event with your flowers showcased throughout.

Botanica Floral Design, an eco-friendly flower design business created and owned by Josef Reiter, has a beautiful collection of photos on Instagram. The photos are professional and give off a certain feeling that tells visitors of the page the sort of style Botanica specializes in.

The incorporation of succulents with the expected flowers is complimented well by the color scheme chosen for the page. For Instagram, it’s important to think about how the photos look individually and together because of the way an Instagram page is formatted.

Many of the photos have warm lighting or an almost indiscernible sepia tint. The photos look good separately and match together.

A general rule for all social media marketing is to vary the types of posts you make. Yes, Instagram is all about the pictures but try and include photos of just flowers, photos with people, and/or photos at different kinds of events.

If you just take photos of flower bouquets in the same lighting and same position, the followers you gain will get bored. Not to mention, it won’t give those people interested in your business much of a feel of what your flowers look like in different situations.

Another general rule of social media marketing is to make sure you post consistently, whether that means once a week or once a day. Posting consistently means your followers will see you consistently throughout their day or week and that will keep them engaged with you and your business.

Facebook

Much as with Instagram, to be successful in your Facebook marketing, you have to post consistently and vary the kinds of posts you make. The important part here, however, is making a business page for your flower shop, which is where all your posts should go (as opposed to your personal profile). You have to have a personal Facebook page to make a business page.

Facebook is a good place to announce special events you’re holding, post pictures of your store or bouquets, and post about your current sales.

Facebook also offers the option to showcase your reviews like in the example below.

In the corner, you can see this flower shop’s rating is “4.9 out of 5,” which is a great thing to show off to those who visit their Facebook page. People trust reviews. According to a survey conducted by BrightLocal, 72% of consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more.

Throughout their page, you can also see a variety of posts, from standalone pictures and videos to sale announcements accompanied by beautiful Christmas themed bouquets. They focus on holidays and celebrations, which is evident in their recent Christmas open house.

Their Facebook page helps create their image of a community-minded, celebratory flower shop. What you post on your social media influences how your business is perceived. Think about the image you want to convey and stick to it. What are the customer service goals surrounding your business? What style are your floral designs? Creating an image around these questions is the key to branding with social media.

Pinterest

On Pinterest, people can create “boards” and create an aesthetic for their events using a collection of images. For example, a bride can create a board that shows the imagery and mood she wants to see at her wedding. Florists can also use Pinterest to show the sort of aesthetic their flowers communicate or the sort of bouquets they want to create.

Julia Rockwell uses Pinterest to showcase the style and beauty of the bouquets she aims for. If someone is looking for a florist and comes across her Pinterest, they’ll quickly understand her taste and style.

Pinterest has 250 million active users and, according to SproutSocial, 7.53% of referral traffic comes from the website, the second highest next to Facebook. With numbers like that, Pinterest is definitely a social channel to consider.

Marketing Idea for Flower Shops #2 – Build a Website and/or Blog

Building A Website

Owning and keeping up with your own business website, apart from social media sites, is a basic step in creating a good online marketing strategy. Your website is where you can freely keep all information pertaining to your business that a potential customer may look for in one place.

According to USPresort, 90% of people visit a business’s website before making a call or stopping by, so it’s important to make your website accessible, well-organized and attractive.

Botanica’s menu at the top shows you what you generally need your flower shop website to consist of. Botanica has a focus on weddings and so there’s a link just for that. Other shops may have a menu button for occasions or prices, like the one below.

You should make it easy for visitors to find what they need to. The occasions drop-down menu shows visitors what services they provide. Both websites also make it easy to investigate what their flowers will look like stylistically for a wedding.

The “About” link for this example is in the upper right corner while Botanica’s is included in the menu list. You should have an “About” page on your website to make it easy for visitors to find information about you and how to contact you, should they need to do so.

Josef Reiter of Botanica Floral Design, who we interviewed for this article, said most of his clients come from Google searches. “They [clients] search by zip code. I’m localized that way,” he said. “I think online is the number one place to focus on.” Reiter’s insight on how clients find Botanica Floral Design shows that your website helps the community around your business find you.

Not only does Botanica Floral Design appear when searching by zip code, but it’s also well-optimized enough for the search engine that it appears organically–without the help of paid ads.

Blogging

Blogging is the best way to get organic clicks. According to Curata:

Over 50% of marketers say that creating content has increased their brand visibility, SEO and web traffic.

There are a few factors that go into how Google chooses to rank organic search results, including search engine optimization and visitor interest. Google can tell when a visitor clicks on your site and then leaves immediately or if that visitor scrolls through and reads most or all of the content you have provided. According to SearchMetrics, top-ranked content on Google is on average between 1,140 to 1,285 words.

Though SEO does play a part in being found online, you should also prioritize creating useful and interesting content. Google will rank you lower if your visitors click on your site and find nothing to make them stay.

In the example above, a company is using blogging as a way to get visitors on its site, but the blog post itself is interesting and informative. You can write about anything that’s related to your business. You could write about the meaning of flowers, like in the example above. You can write tips on how to make your own bouquets or even about where certain flowers come from.

Like social media, varying your post subjects is a good idea to keep things fresh and to keep your visitors interested, but stay on topic.

Also like social media, blogging keeps people who like your content coming back and those people are more likely to think of you when it comes time to purchase. Additionally, well-written blog posts will make you appear more knowledgeable and trustworthy, especially if someone comes across your business through your blog first.

Marketing Idea for Flower Shops #3 – Use Google Ads

Paid ads can be a great way to stand out amongst the crowd. They put more control into your hands than other kinds of advertising because you can choose where your ads end up and who sees them. Targeting is a huge part of making your Google Ads campaign effective. For local flower shops, making sure your narrow down your location so your ads only appear to those who live or shop around your area is crucial to saving money.

Every time someone clicks on your ad, you pay for it. Here are the most effective types of Google ads a florist can use:

• Search Ads

Google organizes search ads using an auction. How much you pay for certain keywords will make you more likely to rank on the first page, but it’s not the only aspect affecting your ad’s placement. The quality of your ad and user experience matters here as well.

This ad promises the “best wedding florists” and “beautiful flowers from $99.” All in all, it’s a very clickable ad. Its usage of numbers catches the eyes and it promises affordability as well as beauty. The description is also interesting because it promises “to do the legwork for you,” highlighting the ease as well.

Using numbers, taking up as much space as you can (with your limited amount of characters), and using keywords like “beautiful” or a location like in the example above, is a great technique for catching the eye of people scrolling through and compelling those interested into clicking.

The ad above is clearly optimized to a certain location so it only appears when people search for that location. This prevents the ad from being clicked on by people who would have no use for or interest in it.

People are much more likely to click on ads when they’re already looking to make a purchasing decision. According to WordStream,

65% of all paid ad clicks come from people with high intent to purchase.

So, when someone clicks on your ad, there’s a high chance they’re looking to buy your products before they even reach your page.

To learn more about Google Search Ads, take a look at our article about what Google Ads is and how it works.

• Display Ads

Display ads or banner ads are ads that you see as you scroll through your favorite websites. They look like this:

Display ads are a combination of visuals and text and so it’s important to make sure your chosen photo is eye-catching and that your text matches but compels the person viewing the ad to click on it. A call-to-action is important because it leads your potential customer to take an action instead of leaving them guessing.

While the ad above features a phone number, it doesn’t say “call now” or instructs the viewer to click anything.

Display ads appear when someone is not looking to shop and so, according to WordStream data, their click-through rate is lower (3.17% for search network vs 0.46% for display). However, display ads are a great retargeting tool, meaning they’re a great way of pursuing potential customers that left your website without purchasing anything.

For example, if someone adds flowers to their cart but never checks out for them, you can use display ads to remind them about their interest while they scroll through a blog about wedding decorations.

Targeting is as important here as for search ads. Because those viewing the ad aren’t necessarily looking to purchase and because the click-through rate is lower than for search ads, it’s important to make sure your ads are appearing on the right websites. You don’t want your ads appearing on websites that have nothing to do with your business. You would be losing money were you not to work on targeting the right people.

Marketing Idea for Flower Shops #4 – Utilize Yelp

Reviews can go a long way. According to BrightLocal survey, consumers read an average of ten reviews for a business before feeling they are able to trust them and 57% will only use a business if it has four or more stars. As you can see, reviews are important for your business and nothing improves reviews more than good customer service.

Besides providing great customer service, though, there are certain ways you can increase the number of reviews for your business. When a customer has a positive experience with you, ask them to write a positive review for you on Yelp. Yelp also makes it easy to contact reviewers so you can follow up when someone is unhappy.

Reiter, the owner of Botanica, cites online reviews as one of the things most helpful in acquiring customers.

Yelp keeps all the information someone might want to know about a business in one, compact place. As you can see in the example above, Yelp shows you the location of the business, showcases a collection of photos (should you choose to showcase those photos), and makes it easy for someone to start an order without having to be directed to another website. If you were to scroll down on the page, you would also see the price range, hours, parking availability and more for the business.

Make sure your Yelp business page looks complete in order to increase trust and reassure visitors they’re in the right place to leave a review. Upload photos and fill in your business information. For more tips, check out our article on how to increase Yelp reviews.

Marketing Idea for Flower Shops #5 – Don’t Forget Offline Marketing

While online marketing is important and can mean the difference in a successful campaign and an unsuccessful one, offline marketing is important as well, especially for local businesses. Most of your customers will come from the neighborhoods surrounding your business.

According to the book Killer Business Plan by Peter and Lydia Mehit:

Most of your business comes from a one to five miles radius.

You should reach out and connect with your community in order to build the support of those around you.

Word of mouth is one of the most powerful ways to increase business

According to Nielsen, consumers are 90% likely to trust recommendations from people they know. Word of mouth has the highest trust rate in comparison to any other form of advertising, including online reviews newspaper articles.

As with reviews, the best way to increase the amount of positive word of mouth interactions is to make sure you have great customer service and solve any issues that may arise in order to keep your customer happy. Just like people will tell their friends and family if they liked your business, they’ll tell them if they had a bad experience.

Networking is another important step to offline advertising

Reiter said he belongs to BNI (Business Networking International), the world’s largest networking organization. Joining programs such as these, or other kinds of networking groups will put you in contact with more florists, who you will be able to exchange information with. This will allow you to keep up with trends and stay in the know for important things about your business.

Not to mention, building connections with other people in your field will lead to referrals. “I tend to ask pretty much everyone how they found me. And it’s either through referrals from other wedding vendors I work with… and other florists,” said Reiter. “We refer each other when we’re not available.” Maintain positive relationships with those you have worked with and other florists you meet and they’re more likely to refer you to their clients.

Magazine Advertising

Reiter also advertises in magazines and has been featured in Oregon Bride Magazine multiple times.

Advertising in magazines allows you to reach those people who are most likely to be interested in your business, similarly to Google display ads. Choose a local magazine like Oregon Bride Magazine (in the case of Botanica Floral Design) so you can reach those people already near you.

For Oregon Bride Magazine, you can advertise in multiple ways, including paying to be featured in their “Vendor Directory” section and in their magazine print. According to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa, 82% of people trust ads they see in magazines and newspapers.

You can also think about advertising in a direct mail magazine. Direct mail magazines are free magazines that don’t usually contain content, only ads and coupons. This is most effective for small businesses and when offering deals on your service.

Coupons allow people to keep your business in mind and tied to a physical object. Whenever they see your ad on their fridge, they’ll remember that they’re interested in your business.

Conclusion

Reiter sees the future of marketing for flower shops in SEO and social media marketing. “I know some wedding and event florists that the only marketing they do is social media,” he said. It may seem difficult for some local florists to get the hang of online marketing.

However, online marketing is the future and it’s important to keep up in order to avoid being left behind. Hopefully, this article helped you figure out how to get started and what to focus on in your future marketing endeavors.

The post 5 Marketing Ideas for Flower Shops appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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There’s a lot that goes into decorating a clothing store. You have to think about how you’ll attract attention from passersby, how you’ll showcase your best clothes, how you’ll organize the space… The list goes on. Fashion is a creative and innovative profession to be a part of and you may find it hard to balance both the marketing and the creative aspect of designing your store. It has to look good but it also has to be practical, after all.

There are so many directions you could go and it can be difficult to envision the best combination for your store. Understand what kind of clothes you’re selling and who wears them. Think about what you want your store design to say.

Got it?

Now, the question is: how do you apply that idea in your head and make it work in real life? We’ve put together a list of practical tips to help you decorate your clothing store in a way that communicates the image you want and remains effective in bringing customers in.

From the Outside

Consider what you want your store to look like from the outside. What clothes do you want to be showcased by the windows? What kind of vibe do you want your store to give people walking by?

A study was done on visual merchandising by Dr. Pratima Merugu and Dr. Krishna Mohan Vaddadi in 2017 prove that window display, lighting, promotional signage, and in-store product display can significantly increase impulse buying. Your window display is often a customer’s first impression. As the study points out, a window display is

accepted as the most important part of store design because it is the first meeting place the customer has with a brand.

You want what’s displayed to define your brand’s style and you want it to be creative and pleasing to the eye. Boring, unchanging displays may do the opposite of what you want. If you’re located near several other clothing stores or in a shopping center, you have to try that much harder to make your window displays stand out.

Make your displays art! The window displays of brands such as Hermes and Louis Vuitton are well known for their artistic approaches. In fact, in 1925, Vuitton wrote a whole essay about window displays, saying, “The art of creating a window display fall both within a sharp sense of architecture and the skills of a stage director.” His displays reflected his artistic values.

Source: LOUIS VUITTON

The display on the right is a 21st-century version of the sketch on the left, drawn by Vuitton himself. As you can see, the importance isn’t all about making the products stand out. It’s about the arrangement, the colors, and the feeling a piece of art invokes in a passerby.

Or look at the way Chanel has changed displays by utilizing a holographic triangle.

The idea is new and creative. The special effects catch attention and are fun to watch.

Think about lighting. You want it to be bright because that attracts more attention but where do you want that light to go–the whole display or just on the mannequins? Do you want spotlights or hanging lights? What kind of light fixture would work to define your brand? It’s really all about your brand. If you sell outdoor clothing, your display could invoke outdoor lighting and include a woodsy background. If you sell fun, colorful clothing, your lighting can illuminate the whole display to make the color pop.

Notice how Bridge & Burn uses lighting and decorations to invoke the image of being outdoors. This is a good example of how to make your window display interesting while relating it to your store theme.

You should think about color. What color theme defines your brand? Incorporate it into the display and coordinate the clothes you showcase accordingly. It doesn’t have to be obvious. It can be an accent color or a window sign. Make sure your color scheme matches, though, and your theme color doesn’t feel out of place.

Remember the holidays. People shop more around the holidays, particularly after Thanksgiving and before New years and it’s the perfect chance to mix your theme up with some holiday cheer. Play up that red, green, or silver around Christmas Time. Other holidays like Halloween or Valentine’s Day aren’t quite as big or as elegant as Christmas, but that doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate them! There are ways to add subtle holiday themes without overwhelming your display.

The display below is a prime example of making your displays art. It’s okay to go more creative during the holidays and, though it doesn’t have to be as thorough as this example, interesting displays like this will definitely catch the attention of people walking by.

Source: Marie Claire

Don’t forget about your signs either. The painting or signs on the window are just as much part of the display as the mannequins, background, and lighting. It’s fine to go without any signs but if you decide to include them, you can use them in a few ways: to advertise a sale, to send a message, or to reinforce your brand. You should try to keep it simple to avoid overwhelming people walking by with messages.

The repetition of your store name on a display window reinforces your brand and reminds or makes a customer aware of whose clothes they’re looking at. It’s a good way to associate the style with your brand name. On the other hand, you can use your brand’s slogan or the tagline for a campaign to send a message about what kind of clothes you currently sell.

If you’re having a big sale, advertise it with your display. Phrases like “step into spring” or “warm up this winter” make the passing customer aware your seasonal theme has changed. Descriptive words or words indicating a state of being like “be chill” or “gorgeous” indicate the what style of people you’re targeting (cool people, for example).

After your display is all set up, look at it from every angle and make sure you like the way it looks. You can’t control from what direction a passerby will see it, so try to make it appealing on all sides.

Inside the Store

The Layout

There are a lot of types of layouts retail stores use, such as grid, loop, or free-flow. Some layouts work better than other for clothing stores. Grid layouts, for example, work best for grocery stores or bookstores, but they’re not great for apparel. They look like this:

Consider instead a loop or free-flow layout. A loop layout is exactly what it sounds like. The store is set up in a circle with merchandise in the middle. Customers are encouraged to walk around the whole store and it’s a great design for browsing. Products are usually organized by department and themes.

Source: smartsheet

Loop layouts are mostly used by large department stores. For a smaller store, it can create some frustration. According to a study by Tijmen Elbers, loop layouts force customers to put a lot of effort into searching for products but it can also provide an unusual and interesting shopping experience.

It may not be the best choice for customers who know what they’re looking for but for those coming in to browse, it can be especially beneficial.

On the other hand, free-flow layouts can be just, if not more, beneficial to clothing stores as loop layouts.

Free-flow (or freeform) layouts are commonly used for (typically smaller) clothing stores. The image above is of Forever 21 and though it’s not a small store, their layout is distinctly a free flow. If you’ve ever been inside a Forever 21, you can see they don’t put shirts with other shirts or pants all in the same section. They tend to organize by style more so than by department.

So, free-flow layouts are not as organized as loop layouts (which may be hard on you or your employees) and there’s not a distinct pathway, but Elbers’ study finds that customers tend to browse more when stores are organized free-flow style.

Though free-flow layouts aren’t organized by department, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a method regarding how you organize your products. You could showcase new products at the front of the store and put high-demand products at the back so customers need to go through the whole store to get to them. You can also organize your products by color theme or by product type (for example, putting all accessories together) without having distinct departments.

It’s also important to consider where you’ll have your checkout according to your layout. For a loop layout, it would be beneficial to place your checkout near the exit on the left. Eventually, your customer will complete the loop and come back to the front of the store.

For a free-flow layout, on the other hand, it would make more sense to place your checkout in the center or the back of the store. When choosing where to place your checkout, keep in mind that you’ll have to keep an eye on customers and some positions might make it more difficult than others.

Keep in mind that many retail stores combine several layouts in order to maximize the use of their space and it’s okay to experiment with your layout to find the best possible design.

The Decompression Zone

The decompression zone refers to the area customers see when they first walk into the store. It’s important this part of the store gives the customer enough time to adjust to the environment. At this point, customers are taking in the store and forming their first impression. They’re adjusting to their shopping speed.

According to an essay by Dr. David Lewis-Hodgson, it takes around ten paces for a customer to move into “shopping speed.” Lewis-Hodgson also points out it’s important not to put anything of value in the decompression zone as it’ll most likely be overlooked.

This image of a clothing store called Lizard Lounge shows how they do a good job of creating an atmosphere and avoiding putting product right at the entrance (in other words, the decompression zone).

The same essay mentions Americans’ tendency to go right as soon as they enter a store. The right wall will probably be the second thing your potential customer sees and is considered a power wall. It’s not your only power wall but it’s likely the first one your customer will see. Consider putting your best merchandise (popular, seasonal, etc.) on the right wall or other power walls.

Furniture and Comfort

Even if you decide to go for a store layout that doesn’t provide a clear aisle, make sure you give customers enough room to browse and avoid bumping into other customers. Personal space is important! A study done by Devi Prasad Kotni finds that a customer’s positive experience in a store increases by 18.9% if they can move around easily. Experience also increases by 20% if there’s a comfortable exit, meaning there’s enough space for a shopping cart (if you provide them) and it’s easy to leave should they choose to.

You can also think about providing seating arrangements. Shopping, especially for clothes, can feel tedious for many people. Providing them a place to rest, especially if you weren’t their first stop, can encourage them to slow down and stay longer in your store.

The clothing store, Xtabay Vintage Clothing Boutique, provides ample seating for customers, managing to make space look comfortable and natural by connecting it to their store theme.

You can provide seating inside your fitting room as well. Trying on clothes can be even more tedious than finding them so providing enough places for your customers to hang their things and sit down if needed will maximize comfort and reduce the frustration associated with trying on clothes.

A combination of things such as lighting and mirrors can affect a customer’s experience inside a fitting room. A study called “Consumers evaluations of fitting rooms in retail clothing stores” finds that the biggest problems consumers had with fitting rooms were the lack of hangers, mirrors or sitting units, small-sized rooms, and bad lighting. As with when customers are shopping, it’s important to give enough space in the fitting room so they feel comfortable navigating.

Having clean, tall mirrors and good lighting that allow your customer to clearly see their entire outfit is a must. Fitting rooms are notorious for bad lighting so try and avoid unflattering lights. Overhead lighting and fluorescent bulbs, for example, can make for unflattering lighting. Try to use LEDs. Instead of having light come from one direction (from above for example), experiment with the organization of your lighting.

Try to find a way to illuminate the whole room and the customer, not just certain aspects of the room or the customer’s body. When lighting shadows the face or illuminates one part of the body (like the waist, for example) it can negatively affect the customer’s perception of their body and, consequently, the clothes they’re trying on.

Controlling the Environment of your Store

• Lighting

More freedom is available to you outside the fitting room when it comes to lighting. In your store, your lighting can reflect your theme. Would cool or warm lighting work better with your color scheme and clothing theme? What kind of effect do you want to have on your browsing customers?

Warm light is good at creating a cozy, romantic atmosphere and would work well over warm-colored products. On the other hand, it may distort the color of products that don’t mix well with warm lighting.

Lizard Lounge utilizes warm lighting to create a cozy, casual environment. It fits in with the urban feel their clothes reflect.

Cool light is energizing and clearer. You won’t have to worry about it distorting any colors. It’s more typical of a store to use cool light.

MACHUS uses cool lighting and big windows, creating the feeling of brightness and natural light. The clear light reflects their theme: designer clothes.

If you have the space and the inclination, there’s no reason not to give both a try in different parts of your store. Just be careful not to overwhelm your customers with a too-busy environment.

• Music

A 2017 study done by Ayane Fujiwara, Sheilagh Resnick, Kim Cassidy, and Abraham Brown from Nottingham Business School and Nottingham Trent University claims that music has a positive emotional effect on customers, which could lead to an increase in spending, but they also pointed out that music picked without much consideration could do the complete opposite.

Called “piped music” in the study, thoughtlessly picked music was found to irritate customers and could also affect their health. That doesn’t necessarily mean you should avoid playing music in your clothing store. It just means you have to be considerate to what kind of music you play.

Picking music that fits the atmosphere of your store could produce the effect you want. For example, playing pop in a clothing store targeted to teens would most likely elicit the response you want because customers’ perceptions of the music match their perceptions of the products.

• Mirrors

You don’t have to limit mirrors to your fitting room. Putting mirrors on walls or pillars in your store can make it easy for customers to look at products they don’t necessarily need the fitting room to try on (like coats or sunglasses). Not only that, you can use mirrors to make your store look bigger and more appealing.

According to Internet Retailer, e-commerce accounts for 27% of U.S apparel sales. The market is quickly growing as well. In 2017, apparel sales grew 18.7%. So, let’s take a look at what online stores can do to reap the benefits of the offline customer service experience.

If you’re an online-only store, there are offline options for you as well. So far we’ve talked about how to decorate what we typically understand as a clothing store but, though they’re a fairly new trend, let’s touch a bit on fashion showrooms as well.

Fashion Showrooms for Online Stores

Fashion showrooms are the perfect mix of the best parts of shopping online and walking into a physical store. Customers get the chance to fall in love with the clothes before they purchase it and you get the chance to give them the customer service they’d miss out on if they only shopped online.

Showrooms give the convenience of having something shipped to your home and provide the peace of mind of knowing the product is going to fit and be made of good quality. But the real charm in a fashion showroom is the unique customer experience it creates. We have some tips on what you can do to create your best possible fashion showroom.

Before we go into them, though, let’s talk a little bit about how showrooms work and why they can be the key to a successful business.

People are most familiar with showrooms when it’s for buying furniture or appliances. It can be a little hard to understand how something similar would translate to apparel retail. There are marked differences between a fashion showroom and other kinds of showrooms, particularly when it comes to services offered in the store, but the process is mostly the same.

Once someone comes in and decides on what clothes they like, employees can offer to have them ordered and shipped to their home or the customer can place the order online themselves. This saves space because there’s no need to keep a large supply of inventory on hand.

It’s an unfamiliar process for many people but that doesn’t mean people aren’t open to giving it a try. Though baby boomers weren’t too keen on the idea, Retail Dive finds that 55% of the millennials in their study found the idea of fashion showrooms appealing.   

Fashion showrooms can make for a great marketing strategy, regardless of whether you use them as temporary pop-up stores for your online business or as a permanent feature. If your business is online-only but you want to give physical stores a try, showrooms are great to experiment with.

Take the popular online clothing store, ModCloth, for example. Modcloth only has three locations in the U.S where you can go into a physical store and look at their clothes. A few times in the past, they’ve opened temporary pop-up shops in other places. It’s appealing to go to a ModCloth location, even though you’ll have to order online anyway because you’ll get to see the product in person while getting expert help from a shopping assistant.

The image below is what a temporary ModCloth store in Portland (that is now permanently closed) looked like. Their choice to use the hashtag #ModClothIRL on their window display is a great way to signal people familiar with the online brand and make others curious.

At a showroom, a customer can get properly measured so they don’t have to worry about ordering the wrong size. They can get all the help they need and the customer service they would experience at an offline store and still benefit from the convenience of an online store.

Other showrooms have been known to offer other kinds of activities like manicures to create a “hang out” place. Though it’s not necessary, it could be beneficial for you to think about what kind of activity would relate well with your store theme. For example, the girls’ accessory store, Claire’s, offer ear-piercings.

Fashion showrooms, expectedly, tend to look sparer than other offline clothing stores. They only need to carry one of each size and color of a product because they aren’t selling anything or much out of the physical store. Making them look more upper class or using spot-light lighting or utilizing fewer racks is typical of showrooms. A small space is not only beneficial for this kind of store but necessary. A space too big would make a showroom look empty.

Creativity, be it through lighting, coloring, or layout, is especially encouraged for a showroom. Showrooms are all about the experience. A customer needs to feel it was worth it to return to the store, especially because they have to order the products online anyway.

If you liked these tips on how to decorate your clothing store, check out our post detailing 5 Marketing Strategies to Better Dress your business.

The post How to Decorate a Clothing Store appeared first on Kolau Blog.

Kolau had the opportunity to interview Amber Kroeker, CEO & Founder of Pip & Grow, a Portland-based company that took a decades-old Finnish tradition of their product, baby box, and revolutionized the product here in the U.S.  Their baby box is designed to help reduce the number of infant deaths from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) through safe sleep.

Through knowing their consumer and growing their community, Pip & Grow thrived in the baby safety industry.  The company has recently been named one of the Grand Winners for the 2018 American Small Business Championship and SCORE Awards winner for Outstanding Retail Small Business.  

How did Pip & Grow all start?  

So the idea and the concept came up to me almost 5 years ago.  I have a background in pediatric trauma and injury prevention. One of the parts of my job was to look at infant death and the preventable cause of infant death.  Of that, safe sleep was one of them. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome also known as SIDS — we don’t really call it SIDS very much in the medical community but basically infants die while sleeping —  is the leading cause of death of babies under the age of 1.

We have 4,000 babies die a year in the United States while sleeping. In part, I noticed a gap in the industry of lightweight, portable sleep spaces that parents could use that was foolproof and good for the environment.  Right around that time, I heard about the Finnish Baby Box and wanted to bring that to the U.S. I wanted to make it and so I applied for an Innovation Award and won it. And that’s where we started.

Could you explain what a baby box is and what makes your Smitten Baby Bassinet Box different from your competitors?

Ours is a completely different product than the others.  The only similarity is that all the products are made out of cardboard.  Our product looks more like a bassinet and less like a box. The other products look exactly like a file box.  They have four sides and a lid. We took that concept and built on it and make something more beautiful, user-friendly, and safer.  Our product, while it does have four sides, our sides are angled out to help with air flow and help non-profit organization store them easier.  

We have a lot of hospital partners that buy hundreds and thousands of things at a time and storage is an issue and so this product allows it to nest it within itself.  We took the lid away because we knew if we gave the opportunity for something bad to happen, say well-meaning sibling or a grandparent or a babysitter putting a lid on a sleeping baby.  We didn’t want any part of that so we took the lid completely away.

So you mentioned donating bassinets to a non-profit organization and I see on your website that you allow customers to donate a baby box to families in need with their purchase.  Is this also part of your marketing strategy? Could you tell me more about this?

When I first started on this road, I really wanted to start a non-profit but decided instead to start a company and grow slowly and stay small until we could get more of a social benefit corp status.  My background is in corporate health and that has infused itself into every fiber of the company.

The theme of taking care of each other and giving back is the mission of our company. To do that we are made solely in the United States.  We don’t have any manufacturing overseas, so we’re keeping our jobs in the U.S. And we do a lot of donations and supports to hospitals and non-profit organizations.

So an example of that was earlier this month, we sent down so far 50-100 bassinets to the victims of the California Campfire.  So those families that have been displaced, many of them with newborn babies had to flee with the clothes on their back, we sent down bassinets to help those families. We’ve done that with the floods in Texas and a few other places as well.

What marketing channels would you say drives the most customers/leads?

I think the best marketing channel for leads is really the convenience of the product and really looking at the product as part of the social consciousness of the consumer around baby products.  For years, parents been told they need to buy tons of stuff for their baby and what we really want parents to recognize is that they don’t need a $20,000 crib or the fanciest, top-of-the-line products.  

Something as simple as a cardboard box can be a safe convenience space for your baby and kind of looking forward to how they can leave the world a better place for their child as well.

Our product is sustainable, recyclable, and overall less harmful to the planet.  We find that this really resonates with people and the story of how the company was founded also resonates with them. That’s kind of the marketing aspect that we play up. We try to get people to come to our community. We call ourselves the Pipsters and we have Pipsters Pride Day and all sorts of fun things our community could participate in.

I noticed that you have a blog and a newsletter.  What kind of content do you write for your readers?

We post content that we want to read.  We’re moms and we know what’s important in what moms want to know and that’s what we try to educate on.  So some of the blog posts are gonna be safety-oriented because that’s my background and my expertise so it might be “How to Have Conversations with Your Pediatrician Around Safe Sleep” or “What Safe Sleep Look Like” and even so far as looking at how we parent and the issues that come up while parenting.  It’s a little variety of everything.

We’ve kind of let the blog lapsed a couple of months and we will be reviving that quite a bit in the coming year because we do find that parents engage with that and really do like it. Our newsletters are sent out to everyone in our reserve and we try to keep them short as well because we know that people don’t have a ton of time so it’s usually goal-oriented or one-topic focus.  

I also see that Pip & Grow is featured on several media sites.  Do you have a PR strategy in place?

We do.  We are working with a marketing company right now and our PR strategy is pretty much trying to work with the coverage we were able to get already.  All of that has been organic so due to the awards, we got a lot of attention and partnerships that came out of that. So we’ve just been leveraging that to try and get a little bit more coverage as well.  We don’t have a huge budget for any of that because we are a small company but we’re growing rapidly. That’s something we will be strengthening this coming year.

What are you doing for customer retention?

We have a couple of techniques for that.  We want our customers to be happy, satisfied, and love our products so we do some follow-up with them.  We’ve done some email surveys where we just reach out and ask them about the product, their experience and what it was like to use the product and how we can make it better.  And then also we reach out thanking them for supporting us as a small business and it means the world to us. We find that we have a lot of retention around that because people believe in the mission and the idea of making the world a better place for our kids and for each other and I think they’re really subscribed to that.

What advice can you give to other small companies in the baby product industry that struggle with customer acquisition and retention?

I think it’s really important to understand your customers and understand what is the value proposition to them.  You may think you have the coolest product but if it doesn’t hold value for parents then they won’t purchase it. Also be authentic.  I think that’s really important. Some of the best advice from our business mentors is “people buy you, they don’t buy your product” and we really found that to be true.  Our customers are buying an idea and it just happens the product is awesome as well and that’s helpful.

Finally, give me a prediction of what you think will be the best way to win customers in your industry in the next few years.

I think it has to be innovation and not necessarily technological innovation but just innovation in how to make things easier for parents and also with the guide towards how to make things better for our planet.  We are such a consumer culture and looking at how we can help parents get back to basics, I think that’s where we’re going to be seeing a lot of movement in the industry.

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Knowing your ideal client is key to promote specialized wood products. But finding a good niche, committing to it and trying to craft a unique product is arguably even more important. Kolau interviews Leigh Spencer—co-founder and managing partner of Alabama Sawyer (Alasaw), a specialized wood shop in Alabama, United States that designs modern, environmentally sustainable furniture and home products from fallen trees in the Birmingham, Alabama area.

Your company is one of the 2018 American Small Business Champions. Why do you think you’ve received this prize and what makes your business unique?

I think we got the prize because we have shown a commitment to building our business. We strive to improve our marketing, but also operations and our finances. I think that we’ve shown the world that we see our business as coming from a lot of different angles. We have our marketing story, but we understand that building our business is more than that. So, given what was sort of the prize, I think that they knew they needed a business that saw that there are many pockets surrounding a business, not just a good product, not just good marketing. You have to understand that there are so many things that make it successful. So, I think they were attracted to our commitment to all these things.

What I think makes our business unique is that we are using urban trees to make beautiful long-lasting furniture and we are focused on that. Our commitment is to use materials that are regularly wasted. We have lots of expert woodworkers that could do a lot of different things, but we want to do one thing. So, we are going to focus on reusing this material and finding products to make out of it, and an audience for that. I think that shows what’s unique.

How did the idea of designing modern furniture from fallen trees in the Birmingham, Alabama area come up?

My husband and I moved two years ago from Los Angeles. In Los Angeles, we had sort of an all-purpose woodshop. We did whatever people asked us to. But we found this niche of using urban trees. In Los Angeles, people would call us and say, “there’s this tree on my property, can you do something with it?” And we didn’t necessarily have all the instruments to do it ourselves, but we would find ways to get it done and we really liked it.

And then, my husband is from Birmingham, Alabama, so he wanted to find a way to work there and be closer to his family. He spoke at a design conference [in Birmingham] and sort of saw the idea that this is a better place to do this business. Timber is the third largest industry here, there is more rain than there is in Los Angeles, there is more space… And some folks came up to him after and told him, “well, why don’t you do this business here?” So, it sort of occurred to him like, “oh yeah, we could do this business here.” And just various personal situations… It seemed a good time to make a change, so we went for it. And here [in Birmingham], there are a lot of big trees everywhere and people are very attached to them, so I feel like the community is really engaged in the process.

We see on your website that you’re designing products and offering services for different targets. How have you defined your ideal clients and what do you do to reach them?

Professionals and trade people are ideal clients because they will come back. They are a gatekeeper to lots of people that want to buy furniture. So, yes, interior designers and also architects will do to an extent. But they [architects] are sort of a different part of the process. All these jobs range, but trade professionals are definitely important and we target them in a number of ways.

We have a newsletter that we send out to trade professionals, we have events in person where architects or designers come and learn about finishing… We just try to teach them about what we do. And we have a sample kit we send out to designers which is like a presentation in a box with our cards and wood so they can see a little bit what our finished product looks like. But first, we try to reach them with a postcard and then we follow up with phone calls or emails and tell them we want to send them a sample kit. We also go to events to try to network and meet people. Finally, we also try to reach out to our potential clients on social media.

Which marketing channel drives most customers?

I would say there are two things, one is referrals: meeting people and then they talk to other people. We are a young business, I think we are still in a very small circle—like we are only a few degrees of separation—I mean, we are still very close to our customers. Also, traditional PR, like we won an award… for example, Garden & Gun is a magazine. Here, we got an award and we’ve gotten a lot of business through that. Traditional media has helped us a lot, and then, just word of mouth. It’s our goal to just expand out by word of mouth through other things.

You gather all your media appearances on your website. What do you do to get the media talking about your business or products? Do you apply any PR strategy?

We try doing a little bit of PR, sending press releases and relating to editors, but, although we don’t dedicate much time to it, it’s fairly successful.

Another way that we get press is through some of our wholesalers or retailers—the people that sell our products. I think editors look through their websites and find us. So, having retail relationships has been good, also.

We see you’re regularly posting high-quality pictures on your Instagram profile and even doing some eye-catchy mosaics. How important is Instagram in your marketing strategy and what kind of content do you think works best in your industry?

I think Instagram is very valuable for that sort of support. It’s branding. I don’t know if it’s driving that many sales at this point but it’s very good for branding. The reason we put more emphasis on it, though, also is that I enjoy putting time into it.

I always find that the pictures that do the best are pictures that show people, like the people working at the business and show that there are “people making these things.” And also, Instagram users like pictures of food… and dogs… they love dogs [laughs]. We try to relate food and dogs with our business to get more engagement in our pictures.

So, is Instagram the best social media platform for your business?

It depends on what it is. I definitely have people saying, “I found you on Instagram.” That definitely has happened, that we have made sales because of Instagram. Designers love Instagram, so, my ideal customer is on Instagram. And they will say, “I have been trying to figure out how to use you because I’m following your stuff.” When I have an event, Facebook is the best, as I can post the event, so that’s what I use Facebook for. I actually think I should spend more time on Pinterest.

What are you doing for customer retention?

I do offer incentives for buying something, like friends and family discounts at certain times if they follow the newsletter. We send them thank you notes, we try to keep in touch with them… sort of traditional, really, I like to send people cards.

You said you have a newsletter. What kind of emails or content do you send to your newsletter subscribers?

We do some emails that have stories about the process in the shop, some that show a new product and some that have press that we’ve gotten. It’s sort of like our blog, really.

What advice would you give to a small business that is in the beginning stages?

I think my advice might be that it’s difficult and you can’t be discouraged by other companies’ apparent success because we’re all sort of putting our best face forward. But, actually, it’s hard for everybody, so you can’t feel like, “oh, that company… it was so easy for them,” ‘cause it wasn’t, it was hard. But, at the same time, you don’t feel like it is [hard] because you like it. So, it’s going to cost more than you think and take longer than you think, but if you love it, you’ll just do it and it won’t feel like work.

Finally, give me a prediction of what you think will be the best way to win customers in the wood industry.

It’s doing a good job and having other people sharing it with other people. It’s word of mouth, but it fits into social media, it fits into reviews, into PR… If my customers do a job and use my product and they get PR… it’s all about everybody’s success. I mean, whether it’s a consumer’s home that they’re happy with or a trade professional’s project that their customer is happy with… Everybody’s success drives everybody’s success.

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The post Advertising & Marketing a Woodworking Business | Interview with Alabama Sawyer appeared first on Kolau Blog.

Going niche is a great strategy for small businesses that are starting up and looking to gain a competitive advantage. It has its advantages and drawbacks, but if a company manages to get the most out of the benefits, the negatives can be ignored.

We had the privilege of interviewing Reid Hemsing, CEO of Two Wheel Gear, a Vancouver, CA-based company that has designed a unique line of bags for carrying suits while biking to work. Two Wheel Gears has managed to market the niche product in a very successfully way receiving the “Best Marketer” award at the Small Business BC Awards.

How did it all start? How did the idea of designing bags for carrying suits while riding a bike come up?

It’s kind of a long story. It started, actually, a lot longer ago than you would think. It originally started in 1999 with two guys who kind of invented the idea of these bike suit bags. I met them in 2009. Then, I was going to university and I was the vice president of kind of a business club and it started as kind of a marketing project with them on this really cool homemade product. It was just a suit bag at that time.

After a certain point, as we were building it, I needed to have something invested in it. We basically worked out the idea and decided we could actually build a really nice product and sell it to more people, but we were very grassroots at the start. Basically, in 2010 I kind of took it over and took on the whole company and started building and designing the bags in my basement. We just started this little ecommerce store online and were shipping bags to people. Customers that were in my city, I would deliver the bags at lunch hour and meet them in front of their offices, so it was really grassroots that way.

But it wasn’t until 2014 when the company really started. I gathered all this feedback over the last few years and what was on everybody’s wishlist was the new product so I decided to quit my job, moved to Vancouver and started Two Wheel Gear as my full-time company. That’s how the company really started. From there, it took on a little bit of its own life and we got into some bigger retailers and kept building our reputation and our actual brand.

A lot of this feedback actually came from that early adopter group that was very passionate about giving their feedback about our super-niche product, on how much they loved it, wanted to change this or wish it had this. I’ve always done this. Now, I keep a running design document in Evernote on each one of our products. Every time I get an email, I read one of the reviews or I get any suggestion for something, I always take it and I just add it into this ongoing Evernote document. Then, when it comes to the time I need to redesign, I go through all of the feedback and figure out what is good to put into the new model for the next year. I’m always kind of collecting that feedback and putting it into the products.

You’ve recently received the Small Business BC Awards’ Best Marketer award. What makes your marketing strategy outstanding?

I think we’ve done some kind of marketing no other real cycling company—or not a lot of cycling companies—really use. I would say the main thing that got us a lot of attention is that we did two really cool marketing campaigns. The first one was that we sponsored a local Vancouver athlete. She was a skier that competed in the Olympics for skiing before and she was just trying to make a transition to cycling. Before she made the Olympic team or anything like that, we sponsored her and helped her get to the next level. Then, we made a really awesome video with her that kind of suddenly launched one of our products. We did a big campaign around her switch from skiing to cycling called “Go Georgia Go” (the athlete’s name is Georgia Simmerling).

Her team went on to win the bronze medal in Rio and that was kind of a good kickstart to our campaign. This is how we started a Facebook campaign and an engagement campaign that got people picking up our stuff. Doing that with Georgia Simmerling in a low-branded way, we got a lot of news outlets that picked up our video and shared her story, so we got a lot of free, earned media. We learned that you have to be different and create these kinds of really good high-quality videos. This is how you can get noticed online. From there, we took a bigger step and what really got us more attention, especially for the award, was a viral video campaign we launched on social media.

When I was starting the company and I was in the changing rooms, I’d always have middle-aged guys who were at the shower and—when I pulled my suit out of my bike bag—I just had these guys in a towel asking me about my bag. So, I wrote this two-part script about these middle-aged guys in the changing rooms at the office that were talking about the one guy’s “bike bag.” It was a comedy kind of piece. Good comedy is really hard to find on marketing and advertising and it’s really risky to do, but if you can do it well it’s the most viral type of marketing.

So, we hired those actors and acted out a scene based on my experience in the backroom and when we launched the videos and were launching our products, we did a huge push. We gave away some big prizes, had some really good partnerships. We really had a good strategy for using our landing page on outbounds and driving people to any one of our social channels. You can see that a lot more now, but I think there weren’t too many companies doing it the way we were doing it at that time, where every way to enter to win this new bike, and this new bag and this new set up had to relate to sharing our content out there. It was really good content, so we had a really nice snowball effect. We really got out there really well and that was what really made, I guess, our award. They talked a lot of us taking risks.

“Biking to work” is the activity that we are serving and we are serving this niche group of people that are biking to work, so we don’t try to be everything for cycling. We just focus on one aspect so we are all about this person that is biking to and from their office, what they need to bring with them and what is the perfect bag for just that activity. So our bags don’t really look like other bags for cycling nor function like them.

Also, all the way through to our SEO and keyword strategy, it’s all about biking to work. If we were just trying to compete on cycling bags… it’s really tough for a small company to do that. With that kind of niche product you know you’re going to be right near the top or the top search result for that. So, our SEO strategy is all related to biking to work, it’s not just generalized cycling type of keywords. So we don’t think of ourselves as a full cycling company but as a life start company that’s for people biking to work, essentially. We can just be in a niche or we can kind of dominate that niche and then we can start to broaden from there.

As you’ve told me, you focus on a very specific target (people who commute to work by bicycle and need to carry their suits). What are the advantages and drawbacks of going niche?

The advantage of it is that you can become kind of the best in that one specialty category. The main drawback is that it’s a way smaller pool. If you’re looking at the full, broad cycling market, compared to what we do—which is very specialized items for biking to work—it’s a lot smaller pool so you have to really know who your customer is in that pool.

It wasn’t by mistake that we made that video with 40-something-year-old guys in a corporate changing room setting. That’s because we know this is a big target for us and for our products. I think being known for one thing is really good. For us, even though we have different products now—we have convertible backpacks, convertible briefcases and different items for biking to work—we will always be known as the “bike suit bag guys.” Maybe that’s not our biggest product in the future, but having that one kind of legacy or that one thing that’s attached to your name is really good and it kind of builds your online reputation. So, I think you have to start from something that you can be the best at.

Other than your online store, we see you’re selling your products through some specialized bike stores in your province and you’re also partnering with the giant mountain equipment company, MEC. How has it helped your company increase sales?

Yeah, it has definitely helped us to increase sales. That distribution network called MEC, they can put us in stores around the country very quickly but I think the biggest thing is the trust and the credibility. When you’re talking to people or you are doing your other marketing, knowing that you’re in a big store that is well-trusted automatically puts a level of trust in the consumer’s mind, way about that they had never heard of you before but they know this company is selling your product and they will automatically trust you a lot more and know that it’s quality stuff.

I think that reputation and credibility piece was probably the biggest thing, other than just getting some more sales. It would kind of put us in a new league of company or products and that was very important.

Where do you get more sales from? Do your customers prefer to buy online or in physical stores?

We still get more sales online. About 65 percent to 70 percent of our orders all come online and about 30 percent is throughout wholesale channels or smaller events.

Which of the marketing channels you use is the one that drives most customers/leads?

I think, honestly, the best channel is SEO and coming up organically in search results. If we come up and somebody is searching for something we have, that is the best way that we’re going to make a sale. I would say that our best referral is Google so we can do very well with our SEO. We come up in forums a lot, like Reddit and different bike commuting forums. Those kind of referrals, I think, push us the most qualified leads.

Then, other than that, Facebook has to be a part of any marketing strategy because it’s so targeted and now it’s getting even better as you can start setting up different panels for cold leads, warm leads, and your remarketing that goes on your website to Facebook and you can get them back to your website reminding them why they were interested. So, Facebook has got to be the other main source for our customer leads. We’ve been really working and tuning in that strategy continually, but I still think the most important is to position organically in Google.

How do you get customers back again?

This is one of the most difficult challenges for businesses like ours. Just because you make really high-quality bags people don’t need to buy a new bag every year, so we’ve created a family of products, so they are all kind of complementary to each other.

If you think about the lifetime value of a customer in my business, it’s not like, “I’m going to reorder your specialty coffee every month because I’m always using it.” For us it’s like, “Ok, how do we get somebody to buy not just one of our bags but the whole line of our bags?” Knowing that our bags will typically last somebody a lifetime—but, if they’re really using it, maybe five years is the lifecycle for a bicycle bag like ours—you need to basically have a family of products so people don’t just own one bag, they own three or more bags, and every five years they’re going to need to update their bag and come back to buy a newer better model of it.

So, all of our bags are pretty complementary, we have the big suit bag, but you don’t need to take that on casual Fridays, you’re taking your smaller bag or, if you travel, maybe your briefcase that goes on your rolling luggage as well, so they complement all different styles.

That’s how we really found a way to create a family of products that keep people coming back. Then, yet to keep reminding them of the new stuff, we’ve also implemented a good email marketing strategy.

In your website, you claim to build not only bags, but community. How important is it for you to build a community around a brand and which marketing actions are you implementing to build yours?

For us, biking to work is the main thing of our company, so we will seek out [organizations] and a lot of organizations will seek us out for any of their bike initiatives. For example, certain companies having a little bike fair at their organization or bike to work week challenges in different cities all around. We kind of work with the organization groups and do a lot of prize sponsorships, so we will send free bags or free products to different organizations that are all about biking to work. That’s how we get our grassroots offline marketing going.

We do that with a lot of charities too. Like any really good charity that we feel that we’re connected to, especially the ones that have to do with bicycles, like there’s this “Ride to Conquer Cancer” in Canada, which is very popular. We sponsor them with free bags and free t-shirts to give out and hand out to people during the race. So, lots of those events have a lot to do with what we do and have the same people that are our customers participating in them. We try to have some sort of a presence at these local events; that’s how we give back to the community and support different initiatives for cycling.

We keep going out on the streets, too. We still have a tent that we set up and show people our products. As we are an online digital company, I sometimes struggle with it because it’s not scalable and it doesn’t build us a bigger business, but as far as the local community goes, you have to have a good footprint where you are from. So, I think building that community that is local only helps your online reputation because those people still come and they will review you on Google. They are the kind of people that are like, “Oh, I met Reid and it was so great to learn about his company” and they will send nice messages and write on your Facebook wall. That stuff is a little more grassroots, but it’s still important because it still translates online. I mean, it helps and fits into your online channels as well. For example, into your content funnel for what you can post.

What advice could you give to a startup that is in the beginning stages?

Video, right now, I think is the most important thing. People want to watch a short video that explains what you do and why it’s so important for them to pay attention to you. So, I think at the very start, as soon as you can, invest in a good, quality video that shows exactly what you do. Also, try to put aside some budget that helps you promote that video with Facebook Ads or whatever channel that you want. Maybe it’s investing in a PR person that can help push that out to all the media sources that you need.

Honestly, I think companies, when they are starting up, they always try to make a really cheap video and sometimes that can work, but in my opinion, especially what’s worked for Two Wheel Gear, is that we’ve created really high-end professional videos and people thought we were a lot bigger company than we are and that helps in a lot of ways. If it’s good, quality content, people will watch it and comment on it .It’s hard to afford sometimes at the beginning, but that video asset lasts a long time so it’s a really well spent money.

Finally, give me a prediction of what you think will be the best way to win customers in your industry in the next few years.

We’re doing some crazy 3D, 4D modelling of all of our bags that we’re hoping to get on our website fairly soon. So you can actually zoom in, like a VR experience, but you can rotate the bags, go inside the pockets and see exactly how it attaches, like you are interacting with the products right on the website. I think things like that and distinguishing yourself, I mean being different and trying new things, is always going to be the best way to win customers.

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The post Niche Marketing Ideas – Interview with Two Wheel Gear appeared first on Kolau Blog.

As the legendary marketing strategist Al Ries says, “The strategy, the sense of timing and the exact moment, are the high peaks of marketing. Everything else is just hills.” Even though companies with a legal department carry out most of their work internally, a Deloitte research study reveals that 52% of internal departments are considering contracting legal services from non-traditional law firms. This creates an opportunity for small and medium businesses that are trying to attract more customers.

To stand out from the competition, you must analyze and know how to take advantage of the opportunities that arise in our environment. In this post, you will discover how to take advantage of 5 marketing strategies for lawyers to boost your business. Ready?

#1 marketing strategy for lawyers – Be specific

Competition in the legal sector is fierce and the number of lawyers and law firms that offer the same legal services increases year after year. The American Bar Association’s (ABA) website shows that there are more than 25,000 members just in the Labor and Employment Law section.

As a small or medium-sized company, you may have noticed that there are hundreds of law firms that offer the same services as you. They may already be promoting their business through the Internet successfully, too. Competing directly with them means entering into a long and painful marketing battle. For this reason, the first marketing strategy that we propose is to specialize in a niche—focus on a specific type of service or customer.

Use niche marketing to demonstrate to your potential clients that your company is an expert in the specific service and that they will be in the best hands by hiring you. For example, the US law firm Kronenberger Rosenfeld specializes in Internet, technology and multimedia law and is one of the leading firms in the country in this field.

Benefits of niche marketing for lawyers

•   Differentiation: Focusing on a specific niche will give you added value that will differentiate you from those law firms that offer all kinds of services.

•   Persuasion and credibility: The more specific your niche is, the easier it will be for you to establish yourself as an authority. People will then begin to perceive you as an expert in that specialized area of ​​law.

•   The possibility of setting higher prices: According to Philip Kotler, considered the father of modern marketing, people are willing to pay more for a specialist that meets their needs.

•   Greater visibility in search engines: If you specialize in a niche, you will be able to optimize the SEO of your website in a much more efficient way by using more specific and less competitive keywords. It will be easier to gain visibility on search engines. For example, the aforementioned law firm Kronenberger Rosenfeld, included its main keyword “internet law” into the URL of its website (www.krinternetlaw.com). Google takes this into account when positioning a website in its results pages. In the following image you can see that the firm holds the first position on Google for the keyword “internet law firm.”

•   Recognition: According to Steven M. Gursten, partner of Michigan Auto Law, a firm specializing in traffic accidents, if you specialize in a specific niche, it’s more likely that other lawyers will refer you cases. It can also improve the chances of the media contacting you for information about your area of ​​specialty. You can even be sought after to talk at seminars.

•  Cost reduction: According to a publication by the ABA, niche marketing allows you to focus your resources, your time and your money on a specific group or industry. This is less expensive than mass marketing and it’s a significant advantage for small law firms or freelance lawyers who can’t afford to invest millions of dollars in advertising.

However, we must also bear in mind that specializing in a specific service also involves risks. The size of your market will be smaller and the possibilities of growth will be limited. Therefore, you should study the potential of your niche and its long-term profitability in depth before establishing yourself as a specialist.

#2 marketing strategy for lawyers – Make Google AdWords your ally

Did you know that 92% of all searches in the world are made through Google? The importance and omnipresence of the search engine is already something undeniable and its evolution with the introduction of Google AdWords—the pay-per-click platform used to create ads on Google results pages and other sites—has brought clear advantages for those companies that want to gain visibility and increase their sales by spending less and earning more.

Surely you’ve heard the phrase, “if you’re not on the first page of Google, you do not exist.” Unfortunately, it is a reality. Academic researchers say that 91% of users do not go beyond the first page of results and more than 50% do not even click beyond the first three results. Even marketing authorities say that “the best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of the Google search results” and they may be right.

Advertising on Google can be a good marketing strategy for lawyers for many reasons:

•   It places you in the top positions on Google in less than 24 hours: Positioning your website naturally through SEO techniques can take months. Getting the first position among the organic results also means that you’ll actually appear in the eighth position since the first four results are ads and the next three are Google Maps sites. In contrast, Google AdWords lets you pay for your website to appear within the first results on the search pages based on the keywords you choose. If you are now wondering if people click on the ads, the answer is yes. The American company iLawyerMarketing did a click test on a search related to legal services and the results showed that the first three ads were clicked on more than the first three organic results.

•    Advertising on Google is relevant and timely: Ads on Google are not intrusive since they only appear when users are looking for a solution to a problem or need. In this case, searchers are trying to find a lawyer so users who see your ad on Google will be much more receptive than those who, for example, see an advertisement for your firm in a local magazine.

•    People search for lawyers through Google: According to Google Trends, searches that include the word “lawyers” have maintained stable popularity over the past five years. This confirms that Google can help you reach your target and acquire new customers.

•    The legal industry has a high conversion rate with AdWords: According to a recent analysis of WordStream, legal industry ads in Google have an average conversion of 6.98%, the second most significant percentage of transformation in comparison to 15 other sectors.

•    With AdWords, you spend less: Launching a campaign in AdWords usually has a lower cost than buying advertising space in traditional media such as television, radio or newspapers. You only pay when users click on your ad so that you can get more out of your marketing campaigns.

If you’ve never used AdWords and want to know more about how it works, we recommend our Google AdWords tutorials. However, if you do not have time to figure out how AdWords works and you want to save yourself from hiring an agency that creates and optimizes your ads, then the Kolau platform is for you. With Kolau you can do it yourself in the easiest and fastest way. Try it!

#3 marketing strategy for lawyers – Create valuable content using SEO for your website

Andy Taylor, associate research director at Merkle, says in Search Engine Land that the organic and the paid positioning are complementary and that it is essential to understand how they work together.

Although investing in Google AdWords and optimizing your campaigns make it possible to appear among the first three results of Google, it is not always possible to achieve it for all of your relevant keywords. The same is true for organic positioning.

According to a Moz study, the click-through rate (CTR) of organic results has lost 25% of the share of clicks on computers and 55% on mobile devices. While it is true that changes introduced by Google in recent years have impaired the performance of organic results, users are still clicking on these types of results. For that reason, the more presence you get in Google SERPs —be it organic or paid—the better.

Here are some ideas and essential tips to successfully implement a content and SEO strategy for lawyers. However, to obtain the best results, it is advisable to hire a professional SEO expert.

•   Create a blog on your website and publish educational and informative content about the legal sector that other sites and organizations wish to share. Creating high-quality content that provides value on issues related to justice can help you increase the credibility of your website. This can help you get a better position in Google. How? If your posts contribute educational or informational value, they are more likely to be shared or linked to by related sites or organizations. Each time they are shared, you will get high-quality inbound links which Google will take into account when positioning your website on their search result pages. For example, the New York law firm The Dearie has a blog on its website that publishes posts with useful and practical tips to deal with situations related to its field of specialization—accidents.

•   Use keywords that are relevant, have a high search volume and a low level of competition: When choosing keywords to use in the content of your website or blog they should describe your business and your services. You must take into account how many people are actively searching for those words or phrases. It is crucial for it to be a significant number. You also have to check the level of competition each keyword or phrase has. The lower the competition, the more likely you are to get a good position in Google. Some tools help you find this data. You can use Google AdWords’ Keyword planner for free if you create an AdWords account. Here’s the Google AdWords Keyword Planner interface:

•    Optimize your website for SEO: SEO experts have identified factors that influence the positioning of a site. Most agree that, in order for Google to understand what your page or blog post is about and to rank your site higher for the keyword you have chosen, you have to make sure the keyword is within the title of the page, in the URL, in the subtitles, in the first paragraph of the content, and repeated several times throughout the content. The keywords should also be in the “Alt” labels of the images and in the meta tags. On the other hand, you should also make sure to include internal links that allow navigation between the different pages of your website as well as external links from third party websites that point to your website. Your website should also have a responsive design that adapts to the screens of mobile devices (Google started penalizing non-responsive sites in 2015). Finally, the loading speed of your website should be as fast as possible.

•   Create long, high-quality content: Content marketing has undergone a significant change since the number of articles on your site is no longer as significant as the quality of the articles on your site. Google is no longer impressed by those hundreds of short articles with superfluous content that nobody wants to read. Now, it awards the first position to websites that include substantiated, long and authoritative content that provide relevant and definitive information about a topic. Several studies have shown that pages or posts that contain more words tend to get better positions in Google and, therefore, more traffic. As proof of this, after analyzing its blog, HuBSpot discovered that the posts with more organic traffic were those that had between 2,250 and 2,500 words.

•   If your business is local, create localized content: Let’s suppose that your firm is located in Barcelona and it offers legal services only in this city. By adding “Barcelona” to the keywords in your content you will be able to reduce competition since you will be using longer and more concrete words. This is known as a long tail keyword. For example, if you offer legal services for traffic accidents in Barcelona, ​​you could create a post about how to claim compensation for traffic accidents in the city using the keyword “compensation for traffic accidents in Barcelona.”

#4 marketing strategy for lawyers – Take advantage of social media

Social media can become a very interesting marketing channel for lawyers since it is a great help in customer acquisition and loyalty. In addition, it is perfect for branding. In a Social Media Examiner study carried out in 2016, 89% of salespeople indicated that their efforts in social media generated more exposure for their businesses.

The fact that you can build a base of followers that can receive your content on a daily basis helps you to stay in their top of mind. Still, to get this loyal base of followers you must generate exciting content for them. Several experts argue that only 20% of the posts you post on your social media should talk about your company and 80% should focus on the interests and concerns of your target.

Here are some tips and ideas you can put into practice to get the most out of social media.

•   Use LinkedIn to reach your target audience through groups: According to an ABA Techreport 2017, LinkedIn remains the most popular social network among lawyers and law firms. In that report, 54% of the lawyers surveyed claimed their law firms use the site. Since it is the professional network par excellence, most lawyers and legal service companies use it to network and stay up to date on their industry. However, it can also become a powerful acquisition tool. Do you want to know how? This network allows you to participate in discussion groups to share resources, knowledge, and experience. If you look at your potential clients’ LinkedIn profiles, you can see what groups they joined. By participating in groups where your targets are located, you can contribute opinions, information or valuable resources about your area of ​​expertise. Those potential clients will read what you say in the group and will be more likely to turn to you for legal services than other firms or lawyers who they haven’t interacted with.

•   Create video content to increase the reach of your posts on social media: According to Socialbakers, videos get 135% more organic reach than photos on Facebook. More so, according to an investigation by Tubular Insights, 73% of B2B marketers say that the use of videos has had a positive impact on their marketing ROI. You can create educational videos that offer useful advice about everyday legal issues or problems aimed at your target audience. You can also make videos of testimonials from your clients or videos about the day-to-day operations of your law firm. Even brief audiovisual pieces where you comment on news or current events regarding legal aspects of your area of ​​specialty can draw traffic. An excellent example of this is the following video from the Canadian law firm KPA Lawyers Professional Corporation in which they offer educational content aimed at their target niche through an explanatory video drawn by hand—a format that has gained much popularity in social media. There are plenty of ways to create great video content for your website, you just need to get a little bit creative!

•    Share the content of your blog on social media: An excellent way to create interesting content for your social media followers that can simultaneously generate more traffic to your website is sharing links to your blog posts. Make sure you create attractive posts that generate interest and make your followers click on the link to read the posts. Below you can see an example of a publication on the Facebook page of the American law firm Lexington. In the example the firm manages to highlight the importance and usefulness of the subject of their article through a question that sparks reflection.

•   Take advantage of the trending topics on Twitter to gain visibility: Twitter is a social network where immediacy and what happens nowadays prevails. This means that the published content expires quickly and disappears from the map. In general, when there is a significant event in the social, political, technological or cultural field there are often hashtags about the topic in which a lot of people are actively participating. This creates the well-known phenomenon called “Trending Topic.” Try to monitor these hashtags to find opportunities to join the conversation with relevant resources and opinions related to the topic. You can tweet by linking to a post on your blog that provides information related to the Trending Topic or even create specific content to take advantage of it and generate traffic to your website.

•    Create retargeting campaigns through Facebook or Twitter Ads: Surely you’re familiar with those ads that follow you everywhere after visiting certain websites. These are called retargeting ads, also known as remarketing ads. The decision to choose a lawyer can take several days since most users who visit your site also visit other law firms and compare them before making a decision. If you create a retargeting campaign on Facebook or Twitter, you can stay in the mind of your potential clients and they will be more likely to come back to your website to request your services. According to a DataXu study, retargeting can increase your conversion ratio by almost 150%.

As Mike Volpe, CMO of Cybereason, says, “do not be afraid to be creative and experiment with marketing.” Even if your sector does not lend itself to innovation, the way in which you manage to attract customers and communicate with them can always be creative. The key is to know your target well. If you know your audience in depth, you will know where to find potential clients and how to attract more.

Did you like this post? If you want to know more about online marketing strategies for lawyers, you can also check out our previous post about Email Marketing for SMEs.

The post Marketing for Lawyers: 4 Strategies to Boost your Business appeared first on Kolau Blog.

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The fashion industry is one of the most dynamic and thriving industries in the world. It combines a vast variety of activities, from the proper production of products, the transformation of prime materials, and the creation of articles of clothing, shoes, and accessories, among others. One of the skeletal supports of this sector is the point of sale. The retail market accounts for 1.1 billion dollars a year. Together with the massive production of food and beverages, the smaller clothing markets and complementary productions are in an ideal position to become one of the foremost profit generators within this business, and Marketing for clothing store is key.

The market is characterized by various large textile groups, with Inditex (Spain) at its helm. Following it are H&M (Sweden), Gap (USA), Fast Retailing (Japan), and VF (USA). These and other large multinational corporations —L Brands, C&A, Primark— enjoy the majority of the profits of this industry, with hundreds of thousand of establishments, leaving smaller, independent clothing stores on the sidelines. These businesses have been left to use their creativity to put plans into action in order to draw clients into their locales.

Currently, there are numerous examples that can allow you to increase sales and to face the competition. We gathered 5 marketing strategies for this post that you can apply to your clothing store, a “fashionista” version of how David can face Goliath and be victorious in a direct confrontation.

1# Marketing for Clothing Store Strategy — Communicate with Your Target Audience

It’s essential to open EFFECTIVE lines of communication with your target market. If you don’t ensure that your messages reach them, how can you possibly expect that your efforts for expanding your sales will be noticed? In reality, it’s impossible. When talking about these methods of communication, it’s important to keep several tools in mind:

• Offline, at the very point of sale. Create signs to ensure that offers reach customers. This advertises promotions and adds value to your products in your own establishments. It’s normal for some of these to get passed over but they shouldn’t be omitted for that reason since the investment is minimal and the results are more than sufficient. Here, we will look at an example of a British chain, TopShop, that always uses a thousand and one ways and methods to say that it is having a sale or that one of its cousins is in order to attract its clientele. They use a simple technique with large lettering, simple typography, and a clear message like, “Mid-Season Sale. Up to 50% off on selected lines.” Those who put themselves on display will end up bringing in more customers.

• Online. Having an online presence is essential in such a competitive sector as the textile industry. It’s true that not all businesses can or should be online, but if it’s within the abilities of the business to open themselves up to the internet, they shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to explore this outlet. Currently, within countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, between 14 and 19% of total profits for national clothing businesses comes from online channels, much more outstanding than other countries, such as Spain, where it just reaches 10%.

A New York eCommerce that has known how to make itself known among the great companies of the world is the intimate line Adore Me, which started with its own resources and, thanks to a capital fund risk, has been able to give its brand a push. This is one example of a small retail business that has grown rapidly through the use of the virtual world, where it is essential to thoroughly know the public and to be knowledgeable on how to reach it. Upon visiting their website, it is possible to quickly verify their marketing techniques that they use in order to impact the user.

2# Marketing for Clothing Store Strategy — Offline Events to De-Virtualize the Audience

Whether you have an online store or not, organizing parties and activities is a way to attract both faithful clients and those that don’t know what they can find in your store. The recommended course of action is to prepare an agenda in which events are laid out at the beginning of the year so that events can be planned with time, using the proper marketing tools, and taking advantage of efficient communication channels. The most appropriate times to ‘make noise’ within the fashion industry are the following:

• Kick off of a new season (spring, summer, autumn, winter) with a showroom and a fashion show where some of the star pieces from the company are shown to the public.

• When sales start and during tax season, reach consumers with an invitation to a special celebration where you can offer added value, not just a promotion or sale price.

• Celebrate anniversaries or special dates in the life of the business, such as when the business turns another year older or if there is a desire to commemorate a concrete moment that is important to the business. Take advantage of these occasions to invite those that follow you and cast a spotlight on your brand.

• Create special sales to liquidate clothing that is leftover from a season that is almost over or create events surrounding specific pieces. One day could be declared “blazer day” with discounts for those that want this indispensable wardrobe piece or you can make “purse weekend” with promos for these accessories.

3# Marketing for Clothing Store Strategy — Window Displays: An Art that Continues to be Necessary (and Effective)

Window displays can be defined as the art that adequately presents the articles that an establishment has for sale through a combination of objects and materials. The power of how window displays are done should never be underestimated and solid proof of this exists in the fact that, when one travels, a favorite pastime is to walk by the “golden walkways” or the main urban roads where one can view the display windows of the great firms. What we can see today in the windows of Loewe, Prada, Louis Vuitton or Hermes are authentic works of gold, art in a pure form, which can be verified with the following images.

There are various factors that need to be taken into account when referring to window dressing:

• Change it with a certain frequency. The speed with which fashion trends and the clients taste changes demands that brands react with a certain degree of agility. Before, modifications were made by season, redecorating to display when a new season was coming. Today, it’s recommended to offer novelties to clients every two weeks or, at a bare minimum, once a month. What’s important is to be up-to-date, to be aware of the street styles, and to know what’s selling so as to incorporate these factors into the window display designs.

• Lighting. It’s a basic point, but an essential one. People that are walking by will be looking at your items because you draw their attention to them. Firstly, it’s crucial that you provide appropriate lighting within your store, and then hook them with the items on display.

• Deciding what should stand out and placing it in a privileged spot is key. If your strength is the high-heeled shoe, it’s important to showcase them. If, on the contrary, you have a sunglasses collection that has arrived that is all over bloggers’ pages, make sure that you use this to appeal to your audience. It’s important to thoroughly study what is available within an establishment to determine which items are the strongest for the business.

• Thematic window displays work. When a special occasion is approaching, such as Valentine’s Day or Christmas, take advantage of this and decorate your store with pieces that can be connected to the festivity.

• Set up a window display calendar. Planning is essential for any business. Be sure to plan with important dates in mind and don’t use the same display for a long period of time.

4# Marketing for Clothing Store Strategy — Packaging and Marketing at the Point of Sale

Just as important as the last point, you want to offer a global shopping experience to the user that is fully satisfactory. You hook our clients with a bold window display, they come inside and find that the inside of the business invites the consumer to lose themselves amongst the clothes and accessories on the racks, they decide to take something home and then the packaging enamors them more! There are very interesting tendencies that exist that push for the use of cardboard and recycled paper to wrap up the products. Another idea is to include a few sweets to the bag and a business card. Of course, a coupon that can be used for a discount on future sales or offering them a fashion magazine can help, too. If special dates such as Valentine’s Day and Christmas—which we already reviewed a similar example in point 2#—be sure to include festive packaging elements related to the holiday. This is something that customers will appreciate.

These are some simple ideas for clothing stores that can be used to improve your point of sale marketing strategies. They are details that will cause the consumer to remember you, speak well of you, and likely return for a repeat experience. It is within these small things that the charm of a business resides.

One of the packaging techniques that has most surprised us is one used by Heidi Klein, a luxury bathing suit line. The packaging is beautiful, with both style and elegance, and no one would say that these exquisite boxes had a bathing suit inside, right? They appear as though they hold precious jewels or high-quality leather.

5# Marketing for Clothing Store Strategy — Active Presence within Social Media

Not surprisingly, 97% percent of the 250 most renowned retail brands in the world are on Facebook. This must be for a reason, right? Well, of course, there is a reason! Currently, social media is like a playground where everyone spends part of their day chatting with friends, acquiring new information, and whiling away the hours. This means that any fashion industry needs to participate in these methods if they want to reach more of their potential audience in a better way. If you’d like to know more about Facebook strategy you can also take a look at our previous post: The best time to post on Facebook.

Facebook is the most outstanding one and can be a substitute for electronic commerce until the small business decides to create its own online store. However, it’s not the only one. According to information acquired through a study done by Campalyst, an online marketing agency based in New York, behind Zuckerberg is Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+. We can’t leave Instagram out of the picture either, as it’s one of the most essential tools used by both this powerful industry as well as industry influencers. These can provide any business with a solid backing and push them towards success.

As it’s always recommended to observe who is doing well on social media, we leave you with the top five brands currently using social media according to Campalyst: Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Apple, Adidas, Nike, and Dell.

If you need more information about Social Media strategies, the 5 Social Media Strategies for Small Business in 2017 post is also for you. Check it out!

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The post Marketing for Clothing Store: 5 Strategies to Better “Dress” Your Business appeared first on Kolau Blog.

A group of Mexican young people are very familiar with this problem, and above all, of how it truly affects their country. With a main focus of social work, “creating a movement”, as Nabani has explained to us so well during an interview regarding Isla Urbana. They attack the problem with the help of a rainwater collection system, a system that is being implemented step by step in concrete zones in Mexico, with fantastic results.

Nabani, can you tell us what Isla Urbana is and what you do?

Nabani: Isla Urbana is a social project, and we are dedicated to the design and installation of rainwater collection systems, a sustainable answer to the water problem. It started as a social project that has advanced with time, and is turning into a business as well.

You have received several prizes and acknowledgements, such as 1st place in the Youth Prize by the Mexico CIty Government, what did you do to earn these awards?

Nabani: We have received several prizes, some such as the UN Water on a global scale, and among the most important was one from MIT which recognized 35 Innovators under 35 years old within Mexico. Mainly what has been recognized is that our system works very well. The rainwater is collected through a low-cost system that does not require electricity. This gives it the great potential to become very efficient eco-technology that can be used to help solve one of the most important problems that our planet is facing, which is the issue of water.

What makes you different from your competitors?

Nabani: There are many projects that are dedicated to developing eco-technologies, so in that sense we are sister projects. That we are very similar in our efforts to form a better world. Particularly, some friends of ours are dedicated to generating energy through the use of fertilizers (animal waste). But as far as rainwater collection, there aren’t other social projects.

We are a business and we are interested in creating economic sustainability because we want to live off of our work. Nevertheless, our priority is not to have a business that grows and that sells the systems and expands everywhere. Our focus is to design and create rainwater collection systems that anyone can have access to. We are much more interested in the installation aspects, and the purchase of rainwater collection systems. That’s partly related to promoting awareness, as this water issue is something that affects everyone. It doesn’t matter how little resources you have or how much money is available, water can run out for all of us just the same. If we only focus on the sales, we are leaving a lot of things to the side, that are important to us to discuss.

There’s a part of it regarding making money and living off of it; but there’s another part that answers more profound interests than this. The money side resolves important needs; but the other side is that there is a need for a solution to this grave problem that exists regarding water. And past being a solution, we are managing to interest people in ecological issues and we are able to empower the citizens. Something that makes us different is that we are not simply focused on selling to the client, but that we want to create a movement through our project. We want people to feel that they have control over the quality of the water that they drink, the quality of the water that they give their children. It’s a social background in which we want to work as well as communicate.

And speaking about the social focus, you have certain projects in specific communities?

Nabani: Yes, we are mainly focused on two separate projects. One of them (the most important and with the most volume) is located on the south side of Mexico City, in the upper regions. In Ajusco, the area that leads to Cuernavaca, all of the villages that are above Tlalpan and Xochimilco. All of the houses that are located above there that don’t have any connection to the system, in other words, that water doesn’t come out of the faucet for them. They are the ones that only receive water through the tanker trucks. This presents a grave problem on all sides. On one side, it’s very expensive for the government to send out the trucks to these areas; they spend a lot on gasoline, as well as drivers. On the other side, these trucks generate a lot of contamination, as they are old and are not in good shape, which generates large quantities of CO2 (major contaminate). And on the other side, families sometimes have to wait between two weeks and a month for water to get to them. Families are in charge of delegating it, but the waiting lists are very long (before they had to start at 3 am). They are places where the people don’t have resources, we are interested in taking our systems to these areas facing these issues, and bettering the situation.

We work towards focusing all of our efforts on the same point. To be able to see, measure and show the impact of our system; if this was with varying focuses and various locations, it would be much more difficult to control. Our intention is to reach 10,000 installations of our system in this area. Right now, we have over 2,000 and we are projecting 3,500 will be in place this year. Right now our objective is the upper south area of Mexico City so that they can live off of the rainwater collection and the Government can see that and say: Oh! The people are living off of rainwater there, let’s take that seriously.

Another important project that we have in place is in Sierra Huichol with the indigenous group of the Wixárikas. We work within the state of Jalisco and Nayarit and in the mountainous area but not the desert. We have been working with them for approximately 6 years at a slow and steady rate, to put it one way. It has been a slow process due to the conditions that are involved with working with this indigenous group. But we are seeing results that are just as good if not better. People here had to go and get their water from the river two or three times a day and walk 1 to 2 kilometers carrying 20 to 40 liters. This task was supposedly the women’s job, because it is considered a home duty. We saw that they had a minimal amount of water available for the children, which led to eye infections, skin infections, and even infections on their stomachs; and the women had back problems. But the systems have had great results. The people there have been practically living for a year off of the rainwater, which is very clean. It’s cleaner than the water that falls in the city as it’s not as contaminated. In rainy season, what is used during the day (even if there is waste), fills back up during the night. In dry season, they use the stored rainwater (it can reach up to 15,000 liters of stored rainwater).

Alright, and in regards to the company, you sell these water retention systems. How do you obtain clients?

Nabani: The business side has been very natural, we haven’t invested even one peso in publicity. All of it has been very organic, and as the project is very interesting, we have reporters come to us all the time that want to get to know our project and to see what we are doing. So what else is there to say other than that they come, they arrive by themselves. People see and understand the problem that exists with rainwater collection. Our main objective is to promote rainwater collection within Mexico City and throughout the country as a whole. If we can accomplish that through the civil association, we’ll go ahead in that direction.

But we are realizing that the business aspect is also necessary to make our project effective. It supports us so we can cover expenses, but there are also people that say that they have the money to pay for them. The systems are not very expensive; in fact, the profits we receive from our sales are not that high. We don’t want to turn into a business that solely prioritizes 100% annual growth. What we are genuinely interested in is seeing how many systems we have installed, how many liters they are able to collect, how much water is being stored in the aquifer, etc. In that sense, the clients come to us because they have read about us in magazines, and social media (because we share our content).  

But let’s not forget that we are looking to upgrade the kits that we sell, giving those individuals that come to us and tell us about where they live, more options. Furthermore, if a rainwater collection system is not convenient for them, we also have other water saving options or dosing. It has been a very natural and beautiful process, because clients come to us as people have grown consciousness regarding this issue, sometimes through information that they have given us; or sometimes through their own deduction process. Individuals are able to add on to the project, it doesn’t matter where they’re from, but that they are able to help this movement forward by creating further awareness around them, and knowing how to take advantage of what nature has given us.

I see that you have a strong social media presence. How important are these outlets for Isla Urbana and which one works best for you?

Nabani: For us, they are extremely important. A project like ours that doesn’t have access to mass means of communication; except for reports that we have participated in. But in the end, they aren’t in our control, we can’t say what we want to say in front of the camera; and the channel is going to edit it, and is going to place what they want.

Social media networks are the revolution of this age. You can get directly in contact with people, and this is very important to be able to talk to and clarify, as many times as necessary, what rainwater collection is all about. We see it as a labor of explanation, as there are people continually writing us to get to know and understand what this system is about. For each person that is asking us something, we answer them as though it was the first time talking about this subject, explaining it to your mother. That’s to say, we discuss it with patience and interest in ensuring that you understand, and that we are able to take care of any concerns that you may have.

They are a very dynamic means to express the essence of your project. If you see what we have on our social media accounts, in reality, we are expressing who we are; a group of young, entrepreneurial Mexicans, that have a good time, and are concerned about the environment on a global scale but maintain a positive outlook. Social media allows us to communicate with others, in a very complete and sensible way, regarding the intentions that rule our actions.

This year, we have placed an intense focus on the communication aspect of this endeavor. As it happens, within social media you can easily find great quantities of information, so what we are concerned with is filling our space with content that generates something relevant, and that presents a clear objective. We want to focus on our followers and on having high-quality content, more than quantity. The quantity will come with constant work, trying to be creative and forgetting the clear transmission of the message we want to send; followers will come on their own, one way or another.

What other strategies, speaking of the business aspect, do you use to retain clients?

Nabani: We are interested in constantly providing new information; in other words, that the public is able to come and get to know, as well as understand the rainwater collection system as a first step. We spend our time doing studies on the quality of the water, the rain, and working on the components of our systems with academic institutions such as UNAM. We look for our clients, giving them information that we generate regarding the rainwater collection, since it is an idea that generates a movement and a change of consciousness.

Establishing a relationship and a dialogue through social media networks is important, as there are so many people that reach out to us through them. We are able to write people that have our systems installed to answer any questions or doubts that they may have, as well as to ask them how the systems are working.

What advice could you give another startup that is within its beginning stages?

Nabani: What I’ve seen is that there are many startup projects here in Mexico, as well as many within Latin America, that try to follow ideals that are inspired within a system or a model very similar to the ones seen in the United States. There was a boom in apps, and many young people in Mexico City started to think that they had to create apps for everything, because if people used it they would be millionaires in a second.

I don’t think that it’s a bad idea to enter into the world of apps and technology. But it can be done from another focus point, and it can be used to solve local needs, including more pressing issues. Focus your efforts, your talents and your creativity on things that could be more useful for someone else. In fact, if you look at it from an economic perspective, those who make up the section of the market that have less resources is larger than the market group that has more money available. If you focus your business on the base of the marketing pyramid, if you are able to reach this sector, you’ll see much better results as there is much more competition between individuals to create apps, and other items for people with money.

Particularly in Mexico, if you try to compete fairly against Silicon Valley in terms of technology, we are light years behind. It’s like starting a marathon with someone who has more experience, but you have to be smart about the situation. If you want to compete against someone that is already doing something, and is doing it better than you, it’s about a strategical error. I recommend focusing on local issues, instead of imitating others, and to create your own identity.

As youth, we are also a creative force behind important work, as we are focusing our efforts on our country. I would recommend that you view failures as a part of success. Here in Mexico, failure is something that is seen as the worst thing that can happen and you stay there, only seeing how down you are and you give up. But I have learned from this project that failures and errors are an essential part of the process, and that without them you won’t reach true success in anything. The exercise that I do, and that I invite people to do, is to imagine that money didn’t exist. Imagine that nobody has more money than anybody else, or that the whole world has a lot of money, what would you do?. With this exercise, you can identify if what you are doing answers this question.

Work, work as a team, and you’ll fail but what’s important is that you enjoy the process. There will be happy moments and moments where you feel sad and discouraged. But you need to find happiness in the everyday and in the enthusiasm of your venture, as well as in your own work.

It could be said that our project is very special in this sense, thinking about the water problems that face Mexico City. It’s a monstrous undertaking that would scare anyone. But when you can think up a solution, although it may be small, this can set off a chain reaction to something much bigger and much greater in the future.

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