marketing

or Inventory, Brazil Nuts, and Bottom Feeders . . .

My favorite afternoon snack is mixed nuts and seeds. There’s a special mix I buy that is perfect except . . . it contains Brazil nuts. I really don’t like Brazil nuts.

The good news is that my wife loves them. So every two or three weeks I bring her a canister containing all the remaining Brazil nuts. In fact, she likes them so much that I suggested that we buy a bag of Brazil nuts so she wouldn't have to wait for my leftovers. Interestingly, she declined.

Who is Your Brazil Nut Eater?

There are a lot of business management myths in the jewelry industry (a lot. A ridiculous lot). The one I’m tackling today is the one that says Designers Should Never Be on Sale.

Jewelry Lore has it that if you make high-end jewelry you should never be on sale, and that if you’re an eponymous designer, you should definitely never be on sale. But the truth is more nuanced than that.

On the one hand, the only reason people pay high prices (which ideally deliver high margins) is because your jewelry seems worth it. That is a troublesome phrase, worth it. It begs to be followed with the next two words, to whom. And the answer to to whom is what you need to get at.

But first, let’s do a quiz (answers follow. Do try not to cheat). Respond to each of these statements with True or False:

1. If you acquire a buyer on sale, they will always expect to buy on sale.
2. If you have regularly scheduled sales, people will wait for those sales to buy.
3. You should never advertise a sale online or anywhere outside the store.
4. You should never let retailers mark down your designs.
5. You should never put your own work on sale.

Now let’s see how you did.

1. If you acquire a buyer on sale, they will always expect to buy on sale.

This statement is mostly true. There are some fundamental differences between full-price and on-sale buyers, and the point of first brand encounter seems to be a meaningful in terms of how they buy going forward. What do I mean by that? Well, most of us are wired to look at certain products in certain ways. For example, I don’t buy used cars, but I would certainly buy a used boat. I don’t wait for technology or shoes to go on sale, but I do wait for home goods and kitchen items to go on sale.

It’s a myth that people are either “on-sale” buyers or “full-price” buyers. While there are definitely people at both ends of the spectrum, most of us fall somewhere in-between, and we’re product-dependent at that.

So let’s talk jewelry. Some folks are on-sale jewelry buyers; some are opportunistic, grabbing sales when they can but not waiting for a sale if they can’t; and some folks are full-price jewelry buyers. When you acquire a new customer with an on-sale item, their long-term response has more to do with their individual behavior related sale prices and jewelry than the fact that you were on sale when you found them.

So why is this statement mostly true? Because of this one detail: Our first impression of a brand not only sets our perception of the brand itself, it also sets our value thermometer. So the risk of acquiring a customer on sale is that you might establish a value perception for your jewelry that is lower than the regular price of your jewelry.

So what do you do about this? First, be prudent about where you advertise and market being on sale. For example, if your core customer is a Town & Country reader who has proven to be a full-priced buyer, don’t advertise your sales in Town & Country. Sure, you can tell your current customers about your sale items, but use a different medium — like email — to share the information. That way you don’t risk attracting new, potentially full-price buyers, and turning them into on-sale buyers.

On the other hand, if you’ve tried a different magazine and failed to find the right kind of new customers with it, but did find a few customers for your lowest priced items, perhaps you should advertise your sale in that magazine. At that point you’re not looking for a new full-price buyer: You’re looking for a Brazil Nut eater.

2. If you have regularly scheduled sales, people will wait for those sales to buy.

OK, this is a bit of a trick question. Your Brazil nut eaters will wait for sales, because that’s the only way they’re going to buy your jewelry. Your full-price buyer will buy whenever she is moved to. She’ll definitely take advantage of a sale when she can, but won’t wait for a sale if there’s something she needs or wants.

It’s your indifferent buyers that will learn to wait for sales. So the big question here is, how many indifferent buyers do you have?

If you have a strong core of brand loyalists willing to buy at full-prices, then you can probably get away with having a regular sale once or twice a year. But if your following is mostly indifferent, then having regular sales could lead to a very negative selling cycle in which everyone waits for your annual or biannual sale and your margins go down the drain.

The most important thing is to know your customer. You must understand when she buys, why she buys, and what motivates her to buy. In the meantime, while you’re learning all this, you may want to schedule sporadic sales. When you offer an occasional spur-of-the-moment sale, a just-because-we-thought-of-it sale, or isn’t-it-a-beautiful-weekend sale, you teach your customers that sales aren’t something they can count on. Again — this doesn’t change the behavior of your Brazil Nut eaters (let’s start calling them BNEs, shall we?) or your full-price buyers. It does, however, hedge against your indifferent buyers swinging the overall business into a sale-only mode.

3. You should never advertise a sale online or anywhere outside the store.

This is true only if you’re a designer/brand and you’ve committed to your retailers that you will not ever put your own products on sale. Otherwise, it’s false, but with caveats.

If you do both wholesale and retail sales of your line, then you must be very thoughtful of your retailers when you go on sale. I don’t recommend ever putting current designs on sale on your own site if you still have them out in the stores.

However, if you have a lot of dead inventory collecting dust at your retailers, and if you offer a 2::1 or 3::1 buyback of inventory (which you should), then you can certainly pull back that dead inventory and put it on sale. Sigh. More caveats now follow.

If your new work looks so much like your previous work that consumers won’t know the difference, then the retailers may still hate you for going on sale with your old work. If you and I were chatting right now, this would lead us into an in-depth discussion of the strategies involved in collection development. But since I’m writing a blog and not a novel, we’re not going down that path at this time. Suffice it to say that it’s on you to make sure that consumers can see a clear difference between work that is no longer available at retail and the new, presumably more desirable work currently available.

So. If your collections are truly distinct, then by all means – host a when they’re gone they’re gone sale and let scarcity drive interest. Heck, you probably won’t even have to mark your prices down very far.

For the rest of the answer to this question, go back and review my answer to Question #1.

4. You should never let retailers mark down your designs.

Definitely false. In fact, retail is the very best place to eliminate unsold goods. Think about all the luxury shopping you’ve done. Isn’t there a sale rack in every Neiman Marcus, Saks, and upscale shoe department? Even Mercedes and BMW clear out year-end models to make room for new models. Cruise lines go on sale during the slow season. Every single industry – excluding only the very highest of high end – needs its BNEs. Smart retailers cultivate this subgroup of customers in order to move out old inventory to make way for new. If you don’t have smart retailers doing this work already, then you probably have retailers who are refusing to buy now because they’re still sitting on your old styles (and everyone else’s).

By the way - every bit of advice I’ve given so far also applies to retailers. What you don’t want is a retailer who is constantly on sale, living on the knife-edge of margin and bringing your brand value down with them. You also don’t want retailers who run sloppy businesses and therefore must go on sale regularly to get a little cash flowing. But savvy retailers who know how to bring in inventory and sell it quickly to their full-price buyers, who cultivate more full-price buyers than indifferent buyers, and who actively cultivate the right amount of BNEs so they can quickly sell out their slow-moving stock on sale — these are excellent partners to have.

5. You should never put your own work on sale

This is mostly true. But perhaps not for the reason you think.

Not all your work is going to sell through. It’s. Just. Not. If you have a healthy retail distribution network selling stocked goods, you are going to create products that don’t sell through. If you’re doing your job right, you are cultivating relationships with retailers who know what they’re doing. The reason you give a wholesale price to a retailer is because you expect them to do the retail job. The whole retail job. That means marketing, smart buying, selling, and eliminating styles that don’t sell — and in the process making enough cash to do it all again. Yes, you should support the tail end of that effort with rational buy-back programs, but the retailer should be doing the bulk of the work. Otherwise they are not worth the full wholesale discount.

Yes, the retailer has taken a risk in terms of real-estate and built-in traffic, but if that’s all they’re bringing to the table, you need to figure out if that’s enough.

OK, so back to the point. The reason you should aim to never have to put your own work on sale is that your retailers should be eliminating those dead products for you, and you should be controlling your production sufficiently that the goods you bring back in a buy-back can be circulated to other retailers who can still move it (that means staying on top of your buy-backs!).

The fact that it’s taken me 1,786 words to get to this point bolsters the notion that the question of “to be on sale or not to be on sale” is a loaded one. But there’s one thing you can count on to be absolutely true.

Unless you only make one-of-a-kind, pre-paid, custom-ordered jewelry, you will always have some inventory that needs to be eliminated. Putting inventory on sale is a tried-and-true solution to this problem. That’s why you must study and perfect the art of the sale for your own business.

Today, shopping is Searching. Learn how to capitalize on that with a powerful inbound marketing strategy.

[00:00:22.110]
Hi, I'm Andrea Hill, the owner of Hill Management Group, and we have three brands that serve the luxury goods and jewelry and apparel industries called StrategyWerx, WerxMarketing, and MentorWerx. One of the things I encounter on a frightfully regular basis is clients or potential clients who have been throwing money at digital marketing, maybe AdWords or banner ads, or spending a ton of money on social media or social media advertising. And they're not getting results for that money.

[00:00:56.400]
And while there are a lot of reasons for not getting great results on your digital marketing, there's a fundamental reason that underlies all digital marketing success. And most people don't know what that fundamental basis for digital marketing success is. And so they're spending a lot of money on the tail end of the process without laying in the front end of the process. And as a result, they're wasting a lot of money and this is happening all over the place. So I gave this talk the first time in January of 2018.

[00:01:32.100]
And by the response to this information, I realized people are craving information about how to get their digital marketing in order. Everybody knows we need to do it, but people seem to think that there's that it's magic or luck that causes you to turn your digital marketing efforts into something beneficial for your business. And it's not magic and it's not luck. It's actually strategy and structure. And I'm going to share that information with you now because more people need this information so that they can make better decisions with their digital marketing dollars.

[00:02:07.140]
The first thing to keep in mind is that shopping has changed forever and it's changed forever, not in ephemeral or guessy ways, but in some very clear, measured ways. And once you understand what those changes are, you start understanding how to address it. So the first really big change is that less consumers are walking into retail stores, 80 percent less consumers are walking into retail stores. Now, you may think that that's also translating into retail dollars being down, but in fact, retail dollars are not down significantly.

[00:02:51.990]
At the time that I'm filming this, retail dollars are up about 12 percent. So how can it be that retail traffic is down 80 percent, but retail sales are up 12 percent? Well, it can be because people are still buying at retail, but they're not shopping at retail. The way we shop has changed. Even the way we buy has changed, too, but not nearly as much as the way we shop. So in the past, the customer we were looking for, those footfalls at retail, they were browsing, they were walking around in malls.

[00:03:31.920]
They were walking around in little downtown shopping areas. They were poking in and out of stores looking for things that interested them, that fit their needs. That doesn't happen anymore. Or more accurately, it happens, but eighty percent less than it used to. So where are people shopping? Well, they're shopping on their mobile devices and not just on their computers, but very specifically on their mobile devices? Over 70 percent of online shopping traffic is happening on a smartphone or tablet.

[00:04:06.990]
So how does that translate into 80 percent less footfalls and 12 percent higher retail dollars? Well, it translates because instead of going into a store asking questions, pulling things off the rack, looking at them, trying them on, going to another store, comparing those products and possibly picking up other things along the way, today's consumer picks up the smartphone and starts to do research and they're getting very, very savvy about their online research.

[00:04:37.500]
Now, it tends to be, I guess, a perception among business owners that all people are doing on their smartphones is comparing prices and looking for the cheapest price. But that's not actually what's happening. There's always been a segment of the population that wants to shop for lowest price. Let's call them our Walmart shopper. But if you think about it, you know someone or maybe you are someone who never goes into a Wal-Mart, even though the lowest price is available to you, you don't necessarily tap into it, right?

[00:05:11.970]
That's true on the smartphone as well. So sure, there are some people who are going to the smartphone simply comparing prices across the board and then going for the cheapest. Price your Wal-Mart shopper, but there are always people who want a better shopping experience, they want more information or they want a connection with the seller. If we're going to stick with this sort of big box discount analogy, let's call that a target shopper. The prices are a little higher than Wal-Mart, but they don't care.

[00:05:43.310]
They like the idea that there are more checkout lines open and more people to ask questions of in the aisles and the store is brighter. It feels more upscale. That's true on the smartphone as well. They're looking for a bit more service, a bit more experience. The queues are different. It's not a wider aisle. It's not better lighting. It's not the checkout line being shorter. It could be better information about the business, deeper information about the product, a way to talk with the company using Web chat.

[00:06:17.600]
There's always going to be that segment of shoppers as well. And then finally, there's always going to be your very high end shopper, somebody who wants the product when it's brand new. They don't want to wait for it to go on sale, maybe because they want to make sure they get it or maybe their identities wrapped up in getting the thing as soon as it's out. Or maybe they just don't worry about money and low price isn't as interesting to them as a very high end experience.

[00:06:42.650]
So I don't know that could be your, you know, all the way into your department store shopper a Neiman Marcus type shopper. And then there's always going to be these super high end shopper that only wants the best of the best. Let's call it that Barny's shopper. See, we have all those shoppers in the physical world of retail shopping. We also have all of those shoppers in the virtual world of online shopping. So if you've been maintaining this belief that people only use their smartphones to shop for price, I would encourage you to drop that.

[00:07:17.630]
What people are going online and shopping for is everything from price to information to connection to identity. But they don't walk into retail stores anymore to figure that out. You know, that 80 percent less footfalls we see going into retail stores. It's happening on smartphone devices and to a lesser extent, a much lesser extent on desktop computers. Then when the person knows what they want to buy, when they have a really clear idea, confidence level, an expectation that now is the time to buy it, they're going into a retail store and they're buying it.

[00:07:57.560]
And the reason that 12 percent up is the current retail store number is because when they do go into a store finally or two stores, but not 10, when they do go into that one or two stores finally to buy, they tend to buy more than they actually intended to spend before they went into the store. So 80 percent less footfalls because people are doing all their shopping online, predominantly on their phone, 12 percent higher retail, because when they do finally walk into that store, they spend more when they get there.

[00:08:37.340]
So here is your challenge in this brand new market, you need to be one of those one or two stores that the consumer actually walks into. And using your digital marketing strategy correctly will help you make that happen. So that is the first incredibly significant change that has happened in the world of retail shopping. So that's the first big change that we're talking about. The second big change relates to the way consumers consume media versus the way the jewelry industry in particular.

[00:09:12.260]
But this applies across all luxury goods industries compared to the way that the jewelry industry spends money on media and they're very different. So Google shared this information at a recent jewelry industry event. And they showed that in in terms of how the jewelry industry spends money on marketing, the vast majority of marketing dollars are still spent on print, followed by online and then billboard and then, you know, radio and TV that these are all part of the predominant jewelry industry mix.

[00:09:45.480]
However, the way consumers consume media, it looks very different from that. So consumers are spending their time online. Younger consumers frequently don't even have a television. They do streaming. They use projectors, they'll watch their phone or their tablet. But the level of television ownership is going down with younger generations. So when we talk about consumers spending time on TV, they're not necessarily spending it on traditional or cable TV. They are spending time on streaming TV like Netflix or.

[00:10:21.320]
Hulu or Amazon Prime, and they're not necessarily spending time on traditional televisions, their device usage has changed. So they're spending time on their smartphones and on their tablets and on plugging streaming media into computer monitors and watching it in a room. So that is the other really big change is that consumers don't consume media the way they used to. I don't think that's shocking to you. I suspect you already knew that. And that's why people are looking at how to spend their marketing dollars online.

[00:10:51.410]
But in the absence of a really good understanding of how to do that, we're seeing that the luxury goods industry and the jewelry industry in particular continue to invest in their advertising mix in ways that really don't match yet the way that consumers are consuming media. So now let's talk about the online offline marketing landscape.

[00:11:17.540]
There are just a couple of different parameters to think about when you think about your marketing. So on the one hand, there's brand advertising and on the other hand, there's selling advertising. So they're not necessarily always different. They overlap a lot, as you can see in this diagram. But we've got brand on the left and we've got selling on the right.

[00:11:39.020]
And then we now overlay another set of parameters onto your marketing mix, which is online, which I'm showing actually at the bottom of this diagram and offline at the top.

[00:11:51.050]
So are you brand advertising and or are you sales advertising or is it some blend of the two? And are you talking about your online offer or your offline offer? And we know which media fit into those various definitions and where do they overlap? Because planning your advertising today means understanding your options for marketing mix so much better than you ever had to understand it before. And now you don't just need to understand your marketing mix. You also have to understand devices.

[00:12:26.810]
And as you'll see in the middle of this diagram, we have mobile. Mobile is the center point for all advertising at this point, whether you're talking branding or sales, whether you're talking online or offline, mobile sits in the middle of it, learning to market this way with this really complex mix of options, it's not too hard to do. And anyone who could run a business can learn to market this way. But it does take time and attention that most small business owners aren't used to giving it.

[00:13:03.110]
Everyone today needs to have a level of marketing expertise that we didn't require even 15 years ago to run our small businesses.

[00:13:12.230]
So what we're going to talk about in the rest of this presentation is really how to think about the digital parts of your marketing plan and how to lay them down in an order that allows you to succeed with marketing dollars on digital. That mitigates the kind of wasteful dollars that people are throwing it at right now. And that gives you confidence that you're actually doing the right things in the right order so that you're not just throwing money at marketing and having no idea whether or not it's working for you, because I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who say, look, it looks like no matter what I do with digital advertising, it doesn't do anything.

[00:13:51.080]
I can't I can't determine that it did anything for my business. So I'm sticking with billboards or I'm sticking with print or I'm just going to keep doing my radio spots because at least I know what those do do. So when you look at this marketing landscape today, one thing that's clear is that every business owner must have a much better understanding of marketing then they needed to have in the past, before digital and online were a part of the mix.

[00:14:20.900]
And we don't always come to small business ownership with that kind of sophisticated marketing experience. In the past, it was sufficient to work with your radio rep, work with your newspaper rep, do some billboards and you could market a retail business. Today, it's nowhere near as simple. So while you don't have to become a marketing professional, you don't have to be able to do every single detail of a marketing mix strategy while you're running the business. It is critical that you understand what marketing looks like today and why it's changed and the order in which things need to be done.

[00:14:59.150]
If you can master that part of your marketing knowledge, then you can hire the right partners or employees to execute the marketing for you.

[00:15:08.870]
Now, let's just talk for a moment about two terms that you've probably heard something about in the last several years. And one is multichannel marketing and one is omni channel marketing. So multi-channel marketing is conveying your marketing messages through many different channels, it could be your if you're a retailer, your store is one of your marketing channels. It could be through your website, through online advertising, through social media, text, advertising, billboards, radio.

[00:15:38.640]
Those are all different channels that can communicate your marketing message to your target audience and your existing customers.

[00:15:47.040]
In multi-channel marketing, You will hit some of your customers through some of the channels, but you will rarely hit all of your customers through all of the channels. And that's one of the reasons that multichannel marketing is important, because your audience could be using many different types of marketing within your audience definition. So you defined this ideal customer and the peripherally ideal customers, and you can't assume that they use media the same way, even though they may all be interested in your product or your price points.

[00:16:20.520]
So that's what multichannel is about where we're heading in industry in retail is to omni channel marketing and omni channel marketing is different. It includes all of the channels of multichannel marketing, but they're all integrated in such a way that you understand where your customer came in from, which channels they've used, which channels they spend the most time on. And it's like a massage therapist never taking your hand off the customer, no matter where the customer came in from or navigated to whether some of it was in store, some of it was through a text message, some of it was through email, and some of it was through social. You actually have a sense of where that customer is in your marketing environment. And when you communicate with them, you can communicate with them in a relevant way, knowing already the ways they're already communicating with you or at least taking in your messaging. So Omni channel requires a lot more integration and a lot more thought process and planning than multi-channel does.

[00:17:28.770]
True Omni Channel is not really here yet and not to a great extent.

[00:17:36.570]
There are some companies that are doing a great job of it. Verizon is one, and I'll give you an example of how that worked in a minute. But to get to true omni channel, we need complete data integration across all our systems from our business operations systems to our front end point of purchase systems to the website and our social media and any other peripheral buying experiences we may provide for a customer. But true omni channel marketing means that somebody can order online, pick it up in the store, and that order online may be through their smartphone, may be on the computer, maybe through social media and maybe through your actual website.

[00:18:19.050]
Or they can just simply say, I'm coming to the store, I want to book an appointment. And could you have this product ready to show me? Can I, you know, come in, see it and get out of there? Because consumers today are definitely looking for some efficiency.

[00:18:30.990]
And you would be able to communicate back with that customer rapidly, whether they spoke to you through Facebook chat or on Twitter or via an email or a text message to someone in your store, you wouldn't have to go logging in to all these different systems to see who might be trying to communicate with you on them. That's what real omnichannel looks like. And as you might imagine, if you just picture the systems in your own business that you would need to integrate so that you could see your customer all the way across all your systems and your product all the way across all your systems.

[00:19:05.880]
It's not just difficult for small business owners. This is also a challenge right now for very big business owners, because most businesses are built on a series of different systems with varying levels of integration between them. So why am I talking about omni channel if we're not already there yet? Because there is a huge amount of effort going into making sure we get to omni channel. There's a huge amount of effort from data integrators and systems providers to make sure that their systems can talk to other systems that will provide nominee channel experience.

[00:19:39.720]
And the reason this effort is taking place is because it's very clear from consumer interactions and from consumer research that this is what consumers want to happen.

[00:19:51.330]
As with everything else that's been developed for, say, big business in technology in the last twenty years, these products, these integration products, whatever they're going to be, they're going to come down very quickly in price, just like websites did, just like text marketing did. So once they're available in a mainstream sort of way, they're going to be affordable for small business owners. And you can't miss that bus. So if you missed the online selling website bus first by a few years, you were probably able to catch up.

[00:20:29.390]
It might have put a dent in your business, but it didn't put you out of business. If you missed the social media wave by a couple of years, you might have lost some ground in terms of building engagement or building really big audiences before social media's parameters changed. But it didn't necessarily put a big dent in your business or put you out of business if you miss the Omni channel bus, you're going to miss a really, really big business opportunity.

[00:20:55.730]
And I do believe that will put people out of business because consumers aren't going to go back to old ways of behaving.

[00:21:03.230]
I don't say that to scare you, though, because like I just said, Omni Channel's not quite ready yet. So how is that good news? Well, it's good news because you need certain basic pieces in place in order to get ready for omni channel.

[00:21:20.840]
So while the programmers and tech people of the world and the big software companies are out on their end figuring out how to make that omnichannel experience seamless for consumers, you can be at your business laying the groundwork step by step to make sure that when that omnichannel opportunity is there or as each piece of omnichannel opportunity becomes affordable, you can take advantage of it immediately.

[00:21:50.030]
And it's those steps toward Omni Channel that I want to talk about with you in this presentation, the pieces of foundation that you need to lay. Because if you wait until Omni Channel is here and then try to lay all these pieces of foundation, you're going to be late to the party. The cool thing is that you can lay these pieces of foundation one step at a time. It's like that old question, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time?

[00:22:20.720]
So I'm going to show you how you can lay in each piece of your marketing strategy, your digital marketing strategy, affordably, thoughtfully, in a series of steps that allows each step to bring your business value before you put in the next step. And it's very important that you do it this way, because if you try to do step four before steps one and two are in place, you'll actually be wasting money on four because four won't be able to give you the kind of value it needs to, because four depends on two and one in order to deliver value.

[00:22:57.530]
So that's what we're to talk about today. We're going to talk about lay in those steps toward Omni channel so that by the time the technology is ready for you, you are ready for the technology. Oh, but I promised I would tell you the story about how Verizon is doing as well. I think it's really helpful to be able to picture how these processes or marketing steps will look, because the more you can picture it, the more you can identify why you need to put them in place.

[00:23:24.140]
So the example I have is a Verizon and they've got a lot of home automation products available through them. So I was looking online, I was on my smartphone and I was researching doorbell's that had little cameras in them and they had this little doorbell called Ring. And so I was flipping through the phone and reading all about ring, and of course, my app is always logged into my Verizon app because we use Verizon for our phone services. So they knew I was there.

[00:23:55.040]
How did I know that? They knew I was there? Because when I stopped looking at the ring technology on the Verizon website and I went back to my social media feed advertisements for this ring doorbell, I just kept popping up. No matter what I did. They popped up when I was on Twitter. They popped up when I was on Facebook. They popped up in a couple of other news feeds as well.

[00:24:14.930]
So Verizon knew that I was looking at the ring doorbell and then they chased me around the Internet with what we call remarketing or retargeting ads.

[00:24:23.630]
So then the next thing I did is, you know, the ads kept reminding me that I was interested in this doorbell. So the next time I was sitting at my computer, I pulled that. I actually responded to one of those retargeting ads, pulled up the ring doorbell, thought about it some more. And I actually put it in my online shopping cart. I was thinking maybe I'll just order it. But when I thought about it some more, I didn't want to order it right away.

[00:24:45.110]
I actually wanted to take a look at it. I couldn't quite picture how big it was. So I put it in the shopping cart, but I didn't check out. Well, a couple of days later, I get an email from Verizon saying, hey, we noticed you left something in your shopping cart. Are you interested in this ring? Doorbell And then they offered me some sort of an incentive to come into the store. We have a lot of phones with them.

[00:25:07.550]
The store is very convenient to, you know, where I drive into town every day. So I popped into the store. So we started on the smartphone with a shopping adventure research. And then they followed me around the internet with their retargeting and then I responded to one of those retargeting ads on my computer, put it into my shopping cart, they responded to me with email reminding me that I still had something in the cart and they incentivized me to come into the store, which I then did.

[00:25:38.530]
And when I got there, I spent money. That's what Omni Channel looks like. That's the way you need to be prepared to communicate with your customers. So that's what we're going to do.

[00:25:50.560]
This next thing is really important to understand, and I honestly don't think most people engaged in digital marketing actually understand it. And it's this. There is an order to digital strategy. It's just like building a house. If you dig the basement first, then you can, you know, put the walls in, get all your studs in. From there, you can start building out your floors and from there you can start finishing off walls and putting on the roof.

[00:26:17.470]
There's an order to building a house and there is an order to digital strategy. And if all you're doing right now is social media, that it's kind of like trying to decorate the third floor bathroom when you haven't actually put any stairs in yet. If all you're doing is some AdWords and maybe a little bit of social media, then that's a lot like trying to put the the drywall up before you even have studs for the walls. It's not only a waste of energy and time, it's a huge waste of money to not do your digital media strategy in order.

[00:27:00.670]
So the first step of a powerful digital media strategy is your website and your search optimization. So website and SEO, until those are nailed down and in a proper setup to be continuously developed because you're never done developing any of these. But until your website and search are optimized and developable over time, it doesn't even make sense to do much in the way of social or and it certainly doesn't make sense to be paying for advertising that you can't capitalize on.

[00:27:36.040]
Now, if I were giving this talk to industries that produce products for, you know, anywhere under twenty dollars, that wouldn't be as true. It would still be true, but it wouldn't be as critical. You can actually sell some stuff on social media if it's 11 dollars, you can actually drive digital advertising campaigns around one page website and a lot of social media and social media advertising for something that costs fifteen dollars. But you can't do that in high end goods.

[00:28:07.540]
High end goods take a lot longer to close. So at the very beginning of everything has to be a strong website and search strategy. From there you actually need to build your email and inbound strategy.

[00:28:22.240]
From there you can start spending money on advertising and after that your social media can actually start yielding some good prospects for you. But doing social media without the rest of this stuff, it's just the tail wagging the dog. So let's break this down and talk about each of these steps and see what I mean specifically in each instance.

[00:28:43.270]
So remember a few minutes ago when I was talking about the smartphone being the new shopping experience that people are looking for information about products that goes way beyond pricing.

[00:28:56.350]
That's what your website needs to provide as part of your digital marketing strategy. It is an extension of your store. It's not just a branding tool, it's actually a shopping tool. And when people shop, they don't just scan the racks and then carry it up to the cash register. They take something out, they try it on. They, you know, look at it on a hand or they put it on a shoulder. They look inside of it.

[00:29:23.830]
They look at the label, they look at the seams and how something's sewn or they look at the the solder joints or, you know, see how sparkly the gemstone is. When people shop, they really explore.

[00:29:35.920]
They look around the store, they see what else is for sale.

[00:29:39.220]
They get a sense of the vibe of this store. A lot of people will walk out of a store if it doesn't smell right, feel right, sound right to them. Your website has to do those things for people. It's got to be a place of rich content. It has to allow them to try before they buy, which is why video is so important. Everybody knows that video is a big deal. You have to market with video. But I don't think everybody realizes that at the heart of that video is a way to try before you buy.

[00:30:11.170]
So video allows people to try a product without setting foot in a physical store. This is what your website needs to do for you.

[00:30:22.510]
Beyond that, your Website has to be perfectly optimized for a search experience so that when people go into a Google search engine and it's going to be the Google search engine, 86 percent of the time, still, when they go to Google and they search for something, they don't go in and search Goldring. They don't go in and search blue top. They go in and they search things like heart shaped pink sapphire in white gold.

[00:30:53.410]
So if you don't have those words together in a pretty close approximation of that string next to a product in your website, that is a heart shaped pink sapphire in white gold, they're not going to find you. They're going to find someone else. So search is all about having all of the language, the phrases, the words that somebody would use when looking for a product that you happen to sell.

[00:31:19.840]
And that all happens in your website. Your website also has to be modern because the search engines decide which websites to present when the consumer is searching.

[00:31:33.910]
So if you actually happen to have a heart shaped pink sapphire, white gold ring and a consumer is shopping, searching, which is kind of the same, if you think about it now, shopping is searching.

[00:31:46.450]
If they're searching for that exact phrase and you have that exact phrase. But Google has already recognized that your website doesn't automatically reformat itself for a smartphone size and a tablet size and a desktop computer. They're not going to present your search results or they'll be presented so far down in the results that the consumer will never find it. Also, if you got it in your head that consumers always looked for designer ring and designer ring was the search term you were leaning on and you put designer ring on every single page of your site.

[00:32:22.600]
So consumer searches for designer ring one time Google gives them your search result. Consumer clicks on that result, goes to your website and sees your homepage. And it doesn't say anything about a designer ring. They quickly leave your home page, go back to the search results and Google's intelligent engine goes, "ahhhh, that search result wasn't accurate. The customer went to the page and immediately went back to search some more. I sent them to a bad place." Google doesn't want to send anyone to the wrong place.

[00:32:55.660]
Google wants to be everybody's favorite search engine, and that means giving people the right results the first time.

[00:33:02.080]
Once Google recognizes that, people come to your site and then they leave and go right back to the search results and look for a different option, you lose any ranking opportunities you have with Google or let's say Google has the choice between two jewelry stores who both have the phrase heart-shaped pink sapphire and white gold ring and say the last time you added anything new to your website was a month and a half ago.

[00:33:29.980]
And the last time that this other site, let's say everything else is equal, OK, you both give good search results. You both reformat for smartphones. The only difference is that the last time you updated your site was a month and a half ago and the last time the your competitor for this term updated their site was two or three days ago. And let's say that your competitor for this term consistently updates their site more frequently than you do. The competitor gets it because Google wants to send their customers to sites that have the right information.

[00:34:03.430]
The first link they click, no matter what device somebody is using, it looks right at reformats automatically, no pinch and pull, no moving things around on the screen. And they want to send them to sites that are regularly updated because they know that's going to be a business. That's, first of all, in business and second of all, very timely with their business information. So SEO isn't just about having all the right search terms. It's also the right technology to make sure that the website formats properly.

[00:34:34.300]
That's what it means to have a digital marketing strategy. Ready website and search environment.

[00:34:42.700]
So let's review some of these elements just to make sure you know exactly what we're talking about for your website platform. You have to have rich content. This is content that talks about products, teaches about products or your services, whatever it is you're selling, that you have video and photography and great written content. And one thing people ask a lot about is I hear this all the time, and I think it's wishful thinking. Well, is blogging dead?

[00:35:10.750]
And most people who own retail stores or who are selling a product to consumers don't really have a vested interest in blogging. So they're actually hoping blogging is dead because nobody likes to block. They don't want to write. Blogging is not dead.

[00:35:24.400]
In fact, blogging is more important than ever to your website, whether you call it blog or whether you call it what's new or what's happening or, you know, check out our latest information.

[00:35:39.580]
Doesn't matter what you call it, the the reason blogging matters is that while people may not read it, they search. So not everybody reads, but everybody searches. And putting regular new content on your site like a blog allows you to do it puts more words in the site that people can search to come back and find relevant content. So that's why you need new content. Now, sometimes people will say, well, can I put video on my site or can I do an audio, you know, podcast, a vlog, whatever.

[00:36:15.640]
Does it have to be a blog? You can do all those things. But remember, a search engine can't search a video or photographs or an audio show for words. Search engines can't go digging through that digital content for the words. So if you're going to use video or audio for adding new content, you have to include the written script of those video and audio posts so that the search engines can search and then bring somebody to a video that talks about the things that person is searching for.

[00:36:50.290]
So your website has to have rich content, other things your website has to do. I already mentioned responsive, which means that it automatically reconfigures for every device size.

[00:37:00.850]
It has to be secure. If you don't have an SSL certificate on your website anymore, it's no longer an option. So in the past, it was possible for you to have a website that didn't have an SSL certificate. The customer may not notice it. Google didn't really care.

[00:37:20.200]
Or if you were selling products online, then you would make sure you got an SSL certificate to secure the financial transaction today. No longer an option. Even if you're not selling online, you need an SSL certificate and consumers have learned to pay attention to those warnings that this website is not secure. Your website also has to be fast. The guideline is that every page that somebody visits on your website should open in three seconds or less. The average website page load for most companies in the jewelry apparel luxury goods sector is 17 seconds.

[00:37:58.240]
And that may not sound that long, but when you're waiting for a page to load, it's a long time.

[00:38:04.390]
I'll give you a sense of it. Let's go for 17 seconds here. (17 second pause in video) That was plenty of time to decide. I didn't even make it all the way to 17, by the way, that's plenty of time to decide. Oh, heck no, I'm going to back you know, back space or slide back, go find somebody else that's going to load faster. People don't wait for 17 seconds on their smart devices. So you need to load in three pages or three seconds each page or less.

[00:38:46.700]
Your website has to be informative. When we talk about a website experience, we're not talking about giving them, you know, many movies and cartoons. It's not entertainment for the sake of entertainment, unless you're a media company. And then it's important. But what we are talking about is whatever it is you sell or provide, you need to give a tremendous amount of information about that product or service. If you don't, then the potential customer is going to leave and find somebody else who gives more information.

[00:39:19.340]
You have to be shoppable. This is a sticking point for a lot of high end sellers that they say, well, nobody wants to buy, you know, a 10,000 dollar ring online or nobody wants to buy a, you know, 15,000 dollar pendant online or even a 6,000 dollar handbag. First of all, that's not quite true. People will buy very expensive things online. Now, what's also true is, most of them won't. The vast majority of high end goods are still sold in the store, but they still have to be shoppable on site.

[00:39:52.940]
You still have to have at least a representation of your product offering that somebody could put in a cart and have delivered to them at home or in your store. Some of it is psychological. Consumers just judge that a business is up to date by how up to date their website is, and that includes shop ability. Some of it is because some people will literally only shop online now.

[00:40:17.960]
And so you're going to miss out on that potential customer if they can't actually order the thing they want.

[00:40:23.150]
So whether all of your products are available for instant delivery or not and a lot of people in the luxury goods sector do bespoke products.

[00:40:31.880]
So some things you just cannot deliver instantly. But you must have some segment of your product offering available for instant delivery online. Otherwise you'll lose a certain amount of business, not only from the people who want to buy right now, but also from the people who want to walk into your store, but still want to know you can deliver that service for some reason.

[00:40:55.250]
That has to do with rapid gratification, I think, more than anything. So people want this instant or rapid gratification and just knowing they could have it, even if they don't act on it, seems to be a compelling motivator for people who are buying today. Your website also has to be trust building. So that goes back to being certified as secure with an SSL certificate. People look for those trust certificates on the bottom of the site. It also means, though, that you need to include things like social proof and social proof is Google ratings or Facebook ratings or some kind of section on your site where you're giving testimonials that today we tend to really depend on what other people say about a business before we decide if we're going to buy from that business or not.

[00:41:47.900]
And shoppers today are savvy.

[00:41:50.600]
So if they see, you know, if you only got two ratings, they're both five stars, but there's only two people aren't going to trust that nearly as much as if you have a four point two star rating, but you have 2000 ratings. So consumers want to know who's buying from this business, what is their experience been like? They also want to know how you handled it. If somebody had a complaint. And that all needs to be very public, you need to address all these things publicly in order to build trust on your website.

[00:42:20.360]
So that is what your website must deliver in order to be ready for prime time and ultimately ready for omni channel.

[00:42:29.330]
So now let's look at the next step in this house. We're building the websites, the foundation we're going to put in the studs, and that's your email and inbound marketing strategy.

[00:42:39.920]
To do the right email and inbound marketing strategy. You need to have some tools that allow you to do something called marketing, automation and marketing. Automation is where you build these lists of email addresses of customers and potential customers. You segment those lists according to, first of all, customer non customer. But it could also be customers who are interested in one product, category versus another, customers who buy frequently compared to customers who buy infrequently. It could be segmented by customers who are female versus male, who are self purchasers versus gift purchasers.

[00:43:18.920]
You could segment further by age or demographics. So part of your marketing automation strategy is actually building these lists of customers and prospects with whom you're going to communicate to ultimately bring them into your store or bring them back to your website.

[00:43:37.560]
You're managing the customer lifecycle in this stage, this putting up the stud stage. So I mentioned earlier that it takes a longer time to close a higher end buyer. You can't just run an ad, bring them to the website, get it in the shopping cart and sell it as you can. But it's not going to happen often enough to pay the bills. So with your email and inbound strategy, what you're doing is you're saying, OK, this is a long lead product because I'm in luxury goods, so I need to communicate with customers regularly.

[00:44:06.480]
And when I communicate with them, I need to communicate meaningfully.

[00:44:11.550]
So I'm going to send some email campaigns to some types of lists and other email campaigns to different lists. I may have a bridal list and a fashion list. I know my bridal list probably has a shorter life span than my fashion list does.

[00:44:28.480]
I'm going to communicate with my bridal customer probably more frequently than I'm going to communicate with my fashion customer because they're in the heat of all that planning and preparation. And there's a deadline ahead in the bridal list. You are establishing yourself as an expert with these customer groups by using email to communicate with them. One of the things I don't think most people realize is that of all the people who visit your website for the first time, just find the website, click a link or go searching or even just try it out, because they drove by the street and saw your store.

[00:45:02.520]
Of all the people who visit their website one time, only five percent will ever come back for a second visit. Now, it may be because they came to the website and didn't find what they wanted, but it's more likely that they came to the website. Oh, that's interesting, but not right now. And then forgot about it because we're all so overwhelmed with information. The way that you get people to come back to your website is through email.

[00:45:30.090]
Yes, through digital marketing as well. But digital marketing costs a lot more money and has a much lower ROI, digital advertising I should say, than email. So your marketing strategy really depends on bringing people to the site, capturing an email address, putting it in the right list or lists, and using email to communicate with customers and not just email blasts.

[00:45:56.370]
That's sort of like email 2.0 maybe, but email that's more personalized and more relevant to each person whose email address you capture.

[00:46:06.510]
So maybe the first time they respond to uh, they're on a page talking about, you know, making bespoke clothing or custom jewelry and a little popup box kind of slides in from the side, doesn't obscure the whole screen because nobody likes that.

[00:46:22.380]
But it slides in and it says, hey, you know, give us your email address and we'll keep you informed about other bespoke opportunities or, you know, set up a free appointment, whatever you want. They give you an email address. So we know two things. We know their email address and we know that they're interested at least in having something custom made for that. Well, within minutes of receiving that email address, they should receive a very personalized thank you note.

[00:46:49.380]
So, dear Janet, thank you so much for signing up for our list here. A few resources that you might find interesting about the way we put together custom products, but you're not done yet. So maybe four days later, could be three, could be five, Janet should automatically get another email from you talking about the customer experience, maybe offering her some sort of incentive to make an appointment.

[00:47:17.580]
And it doesn't always have to be a price cut. It could be a different kind of incentive. It could be a small gift. It it doesn't even have to be expensive. It's just something that motivates somebody to take the next step.

[00:47:29.370]
And then maybe six days after that, Janet gets yet another email. Maybe this email talks about, you know, testimonials from other customers who've gotten custom good from you. That's called a drip campaign where entering a customer into a particular list triggers a series of emails that are specific to that customer's interests. That's a very important part of email strategy today. So email and inbound is the studs in this house that we're building. And once your website is in place, that's the next thing you need.

[00:48:05.880]
You need to start capturing these email addresses so you can market to these customers and potential customers and keep them coming back to your website. Now, I used the term inbound marketing and let's dig in a little bit deeper to what inbound is all about. Inbound is is.

[00:48:25.160]
Recognizing the fact that you're going to find many of your customers away from your website and away from your store, you're going to find them through an organic search on Google or Bing or any of the other search engines, or you'll find them through an ad that they were targeted in and they clicked and came back to your website, or you'll find them through something you've done on social media. You might find them through, you know, having them walk by the store and just search your store name and put it into a search engine.

[00:48:55.790]
So Inbound says people are coming to you through their search activities and that you need to be prepared to capture their information and remarket to them.

[00:49:07.670]
So the first step is attract them. We do that through search optimization. We do that through advertising. You do that through your blog by adding regular new words and new products. Any new content to your site that gives people more opportunities to put in a search term and have you be the answer to that search term. So that's the attract part of the inbound marketing strategy. Then we want to convert them. You will not get an email address from every person who comes to your site, but you'll get a lot more email addresses if you ask for them.

[00:49:42.110]
And if you don't, so if all you're doing is putting a little, you know, on the footer of your website, if you're just running a little thing that says sign up for our newsletter, and that's where it is always at the bottom of the site, or if it's always off in like the right column of your site, you're not going to get many email addresses from those because people have learned to ignore footers and sidebars. But if you have little forms that, like I said before, slide in from the top or scroll like a banner across the bottom or the top of your website, or you do little quizzes and you send people results, any kinds of forums or calls to action, or if you do a social media post and you bring people back to a very special page that talks in much more depth than you can do on a social media post about whatever the topic is, those are the things that we use to convert people from visitors to people who have given us an email address.

[00:50:37.490]
So first we attract, then when we get them to the website, we try to convert them from there. That's when we start that long process toward closing a sale. So we keep track of that customer's information in our CRM system. And the CRM is what's going to do this. Marketing automation and your email strategy and your lead captures and list segmentations for you. A really good CRM does a lot more than that, and we'll talk about that more toward the end of this talk.

[00:51:08.480]
But when I say CRM, I'm talking about a very robust system that manages all your customer information and automates a lot of your marketing activity to them. So using your CRM, you're going to put email campaigns out to people that are relevant to their interests. You're going to do workflows.

[00:51:28.400]
So, for instance, it may be that somebody responds to a particular email and if they click on this, then you trigger a notice to you or to one of your employees to give that person a phone call.

[00:51:39.350]
So if you're in the luxury goods segment, you already know how important client telling is. Well, this allows you to combine your digital marketing and your phone based clienteling into one seamless set of activities.

[00:51:55.190]
So I notice that somebody hit love and then made a comment on a product that we were talking about on social media today. A good CRM will tell you that. And then that triggers a workflow to me because I'm not watching what every single person is doing on every channel. I can't. You can't. Nobody can. So but I get a triggered "to do" that says, hey, call Erica so-and-so, she's interested in this product. So your client telling just goes through the roof when you use your inbound marketing strategy the right way.

[00:52:27.380]
And that's how we convert. That's how we get people to actually make that commitment to buy a high end product, which they are most likely going to do in a store if there's a store available. And of course, if there's not, that's how you're going to build up enough trust for them to do that transaction with you online or over the phone. And then finally, we use this email and inbound strategy to continue to delight the customer, to continue to communicate with them using social media or surveys or questionnaires or, you know, give us your input.

[00:53:00.320]
Your CRM is going to allow you to do all that. So inbound marketing is saying people come find us and it's our job to capture that information so that we can continue to communicate with them until we get a sale and then until we get another sale and then another sale. So that's what I'm talking about when I talk about inbound marketing.

[00:53:20.810]
And now we're at the point of actually putting in maybe the floors are. You've got a foundation in your website, The Stud's are your email and inbound strategy managed through your CRM system.

[00:53:32.030]
Now we're going to put in the floors. That is your digital marketing advertising strategy. This is advertising that you pay for. So what are you trying to accomplish with this? Well, for the most part, you're trying to generate leads. Again, if you're not selling a product that's under 20 dollars, most of the time you're going to have to do some additional work to turn that lead into a sale.

[00:53:53.480]
So when you're advertising, when you're paying for advertising, you are paying for people to come to your website and see what you've got to sell. And when they get there, you really need to capture that email address. Otherwise you're going to lose 95 percent of them right off the bat. That's the 95 percent who will never come back to your website again, even though you paid to get them with one ad. And then of the five percent of the people who come to your website, what percent of them are actually going to buy?

[00:54:21.540]
So you can see this is a numbers game. When you're putting advertising dollars out there, you need to make sure that that ad lasts long beyond the initial click. So the most important thing you're advertising for are leads, email addresses. Every email address is worth money to you. So what else are you doing with your advertising strategy? Well, you're paying for advertising to show products, but you may want to be paying for advertising to show. Remember, I talked about try before you buy like a video allows people to try before they buy.

[00:54:53.600]
That's why all these bed sellers on social media show people jumping on beds and standing on beds and rolling around on beds and opening beds and packaging. That's actually a try before you buy advertising strategy. So when you pay for advertising, make sure you're paying to capture a lead.

[00:55:12.050]
And sometimes it's just capture a lead. By the way, you can run sweepstakes or giveaways or give free information in exchange for an email address. That's a great way to spend advertising dollars because then you take that email address and you continue to market to them. So get leads, try before you buy, build, trust - running ads that talk about how much customers trust you or running a testimonial ad or running an ad that talks about, you know, 2,000 5-star Google reviews.

[00:55:44.900]
Those are all very powerful things to do with advertising. So you're using your advertising to drive people to your website where you need to capture, lead, build some trust and allow them to try before they buy. And if you think about that, you can't make those advertising dollars work for you if you don't have a robust website to bring them to and you're not capturing those leads and moving them through an inbound marketing strategy that cultivates that lead until they buy something.

[00:56:13.910]
So if you bring someone to your website with advertising dollars, say you get a great cost per click through your advertising partner for online advertising, but you bring them back to a website, so you bring it back to the home page. It's so generic they don't understand why the ad brought them there. You don't capture an email address. You can't cultivate that customer. It doesn't matter how low your cost per click was because you can't do anything with the lead once you got it.

[00:56:40.100]
That's why paying for digital advertising is the third step in this process and not the first or the second. That's why doing this in order matters so much. One important thing about online advertising, and this really relates mostly to Facebook and this idea of boosting ads, a lot of people are on Facebook and they pay. It's so cheap. Right. I can boost this ad for five dollars. I can boost this ad for ten dollars if you spend five dollars boosting it ad but you don't get any business as a result of it.

[00:57:13.560]
That's not cheap. That's just throwing money out the window. I mean, you would not open your office window and flutter a five dollar bill or a ten dollar bill out of it every day and just throw that money away. But people are doing that with Facebook boosts right now. Every day you might be, too. So why would you boost a Facebook post for five dollars or ten dollars? Well, you would do it on any post that was designed to capture a lead, bring people back to your website to deliver some result that allows you to communicate with that customer more in the future or to sell something right now.

[00:57:49.920]
But if you can't bring them back to a page that they can act on instantly, or if you don't use that boost to capture an email address so you can continue marketing to them in the future, you're wasting money on boosting. Just because people like you on Facebook doesn't mean that they're paying the rent. So advertising strategy for luxury goods business should be predominantly about capturing leads, but it should also be used to convey trustworthiness, to allow people to try before they buy, to get people to start thinking about why they're going to buy from your business.

[00:58:22.740]
Now, your advertising strategy actually has several six actually unique pieces to it that you need to consider. The first is that every ad you produce needs to work on mobile. And not all ads look great on mobile, but all ads can be tested to see if they look great on mobile. So make sure that your advertising works on mobile. One of the things that Google has been publishing in the first quarter of twenty eighteen is that the most popular search phrase right now includes the words near me, near me is showing up in searches.

[00:58:55.200]
So coffee shop near me, tennis shoes near me, jewelry store near me, tailor near me, whatever it is, it's near me. Obviously people that are searching for something near me are most of the time on a mobile device. Well, that's kind of silly because most of the time everything's on a mobile device today. But your ads have to work on mobile if you want them to bring in customers. The next thing that I want you to think about is CRM or search engine marketing.

[00:59:24.240]
Search engine marketing is about bringing people to your business. And it's not just search. I mean, search and search engine marketing are not the same thing. Search engine marketing is really where you use the tools available in the search engines to convey more important and relevant information about your business. And by maximizing the use of that search engine information, you bring more people into your store or to your website or both. So what are those tools? Well, let's talk about it specifically in terms of Google, because, again, Google is 86 percent of search.

[01:00:02.400]
You have an opportunity for a business listing on Google, and that business listing can include everything from where your store is located, to how many Google reviews you have, to pictures of your business, to where you are on a map and the best directions to get there. I was driving home from Chicago the other day and I was hungry for Indian food and I was taking a different route because a couple of lanes on the tollway were closed. So it was a little different route that I'm used to.

[01:00:34.110]
And I said to my phone, because I'm driving, OK, Google show me Indian restaurants near me. Now, I was using Android Auto. So what popped up on the dashboard of my Subaru was a screen, and a voice said to me, there are four Indian restaurants near you. And I asked it to show me only the ones with four stars are higher and two of those had four stars or higher.

[01:01:00.000]
And then just by glancing at my dashboard, you know, the big navigation screen, I said, take me to Biriyani Point.

[01:01:12.090]
And all of a sudden my map was turned on and my car was telling me how to get to Biriyani Point, which was only two miles away.

[01:01:20.250]
If Biriyani Point had not completed the business information on Google, they would have missed out on me as a customer and the place was fantastic. I will definitely be going back.

[01:01:32.400]
So you need to make sure that your business information on Google is as complete as possible. Being also has business information. You should make sure that's as complete as possible to including links to your website.

[01:01:46.980]
You can load all kinds of pictures up so people can see pictures of your product, pictures of your establishment, pictures of what the street looks like, if you're hard to find whatever you want to do to highlight your business, that is a core part of search engine marketing is that you're using the search engine tools. So then when somebody searches for a business and you're the business that could help them, you want to make sure that the search engine puts the best business information possible right there on the search screen about you.

[01:02:20.570]
So that's a big part of what search engine marketing is all about. Now, of course, that's all about maximizing your visibility on the search engine itself. But what happens next when you bring people back to your website or to your business site or to your store, you have options within those search engines to provide specific links, not generic links. If you're just bringing every possible search back to your home page, you're not going to be converting a sufficient number of customers because your home page should tell a fairly broad story of your business.

[01:02:58.670]
And people don't go to search looking for broad stories. They go to search looking for specific stories. So this is where your website starts playing. A very important role again, is that if you're going to have capture somebody that's searching for something like.

[01:03:17.980]
Ruby engagement rings Then you want to make sure that you land them on the page with the Ruby engagement ring and that all the information they need about buying that Ruby engagement ring is on that page. That's not the same as bringing them to the product listing. So you may have a Ruby engagement ring for sale on your website. And it probably has a couple of different views of the product and the price and a basic description. And nobody spends ten thousand dollars for that.

[01:03:45.610]
So the product listing is going to be insufficient for that advertising that you're paying for. It's fine for just an organic search, but if you're paying for an advertisement that you carry alternative or, you know, non-traditional engagement rings, you can't bring that person for the ad that you just paid for. Back to the product listing. They need to come to a whole page and that page needs to show the product and the price. And it needs to talk about how many times, you know, rubies have been used as the primary engagement jewel in the past and which cultures valued rubies and why you might want to ruby instead of a diamond.

[01:04:20.950]
And you're going to be telling the whole story that you're going to have your Google five star ratings showing up somewhere on that page. And a couple of testimonials from people who bought engagement rings from you. That's how you maximize your digital advertising budget. So when you decide to run an ad for search terms or a little banner or whatever, you decide to pay for a retargeting or a marketing effort, don't just bring them back to the barebones information about the product you're selling.

[01:04:49.480]
Bring them back to a page that can really tell the story, draw someone in and make them want to buy. And don't make them go all the way to the bottom of the page for the buy now button. They may not want to read that far. Some people will be sold within the top quarter of the page. Have a buy now button some people need to read research and look at a little more. Put another buy now, button a little bit below that.

[01:05:10.390]
So let them encounter the buy now button several times as they go through that page.

[01:05:15.310]
But if you're going oh, and by the way, ask for an email address, if they're not going to buy now, at least get the email address. So here's the rule when it comes to search engine marketing. And by that I mean paying for search. If you're going to pay for a search, maximize the value of that payment by landing them on a page that can do something for you, that can actually give them enough information to motivate a sale or that at the very least captures an email address.

[01:05:42.890]
So that's a big part of your marketing effort, your digital marketing strategy for paid ads. I've mentioned reviews several times out. Reviews are so important for building social trust. So make sure that you're maximizing all the review opportunities you've got. Some people pay for an outside review agency and that can be very helpful, or a software that can be helpful for sending out emails, asking for reviews or automating texts, asking for reviews.

[01:06:11.440]
So you may lean on Yelp, you may lean on trust monitor. There's lots of different software or programs you can use, but no matter what you do, make sure you're also collecting Google reviews. And the reason for that is 86 percent of search happens on Google. And when they search for your business, if you've claimed your business on Google or if they search for something your business could sell and you've claimed your business and maximized your business profile on the search engine, those reviews are going to show up right there, right on the search page before they ever click the link.

[01:06:46.930]
So reviews are extremely important for building trust with potential customers and reinforcing trust with existing customers. So then the next piece of your marketing strategy or paid marketing strategy is going to be retargeting. And I've used two terms for that so far, retargeting and remarketing, but they're the same thing. And that's basically recognizing that somebody has come to your website and looked at a specific product or products and then making sure that your ad follows them around the Web when they go into various news feeds to keep reminding them that they were interested in that product. *Important note as of 2020-10-31: Google has announced that they will discontinue the use of 3rd party cookies for marketing purposes in 2021. This will change the way remarketing and retargeting are done, though at this time the way things will change are not entirely clear yet.

[01:07:22.900]
That should be part of your advertising spend for digital social advertising is also very beneficial and a separate paid social from social media activity to paid social, as when you're paying for ads to run on whatever social media channel you choose again, make sure that you can collect an email address or that you're bringing them back to something that can tell enough of a story to convert them to a customer, and preferably both. And finally, analytics don't spend a dime on your advertising are digital advertising unless you know how to use your analytics and you are actively setting up and using your analytics.

[01:08:02.500]
And by that I mean Google analytics, because that's the only platform that can tell you everything about what's happening on your site, where people went, how much time they spent there, where they came from, where they went next. Who they are, what they're interested in, what other kinds of sites they go to, your Google Analytics gave you all that. Now when you're buying advertising online, anyone you buy your advertising through will be happy to show you their dashboard.

[01:08:31.270]
That shows how much you paid per click, how many clicks you got, how many exposures you got.

[01:08:37.540]
All of that data is interesting, but it's not necessarily useful unless you've tied it back into your Google analytics, because just because you only paid 15 cents for, you know, 1500 clicks or 15 cents each for 1500 clicks doesn't mean anyone bought anything from you. You need the rest of your analytics to show what you closed of all of that, how many email addresses you've collected of all of that.

[01:09:00.940]
So don't spend a dime on digital advertising unless you have processes in place that will help you analyze your Google analytics and see how that advertising is paying for you and how you can improve it. Because advertising is always about doing a spend, analyzing the results, adjusting the spend, analyzing the results, adjusting the spend. If your analytics aren't turned on, you can't do anything but buy and pray. And now, finally, finally, we're at the point where social media can deliver some value for your business.

[01:09:36.520]
For the most part, for the most companies, social media does not deliver sales. 100000 followers on Instagram doesn't necessarily convert to a dollar of spending. You know, 50000 fans on Facebook or 649 likes on a particular picture or post doesn't necessarily mean you made any money. In fact, social media is not great for luxury goods in terms of turning people into customers. It's great for giving people ideas. So how do you maximize the benefits of your social media?

[01:10:12.160]
Well, first you have to have your website, your foundation in place. Then you have to have your email and inbound strategy and your CRM system in place. Then you need to be doing some digital advertising to drive people to relevant pages and relevant content where you capture email addresses and work on converting them. And then social media is like the icing on the cake. Social media is where you engage with people. It's where you build trust by them getting to know people in your company.

[01:10:39.490]
It's where you share fun content that's stimulating and can possibly link somebody back to a page on your website where you can capture their email address and then work on converting them to a customer. Social media isn't fluff, but it is frosting. So if you don't have the cake, I mean, some people like only frosting, but for the most part, you expect some cake to be underneath it. And that's how you have to structure your digital marketing strategy in order to actually make it make money for you because you're not doing social media for your business for fun or you shouldn't be.

[01:11:13.300]
You need to be doing social media for your business to convert customers to your business. So that's why it's the last piece and not the first, because on its own, it can't convert people. But it does have a very important role in terms of engagement and trust, building and keeping customers coming back and paying attention after a purchase which can help you along with your email and your advertising and your great website, get them to come back and purchase something again.

[01:11:40.240]
Social media at its best is a prospecting tool and an engagement tool, and that's what you need to be using it for.

[01:11:48.130]
And like I said before, don't ever boost a social media post that can't actually do something for you. Boost it if it's ready to capture an email address as part of the post or if it's going to bring somebody back to a page where they can buy something and also leave you an email address. Now, the thing with social media is that if you're just posting picture after picture after picture of things that you're selling, nobody's going to notice it anymore.

[01:12:13.240]
In marketing, we've always talked about Lean In versus lean back.

[01:12:19.210]
So this is before the book Lean In. It's a totally different kind of lean in.

[01:12:22.540]
When you're really interested in something, don't you end up on the edge of your seat looking at the television or really reading that newspaper or magazine or a book. It's really good.

[01:12:31.930]
You find yourself sitting up and leaning into the page and Lean Back is sort of watching a sitcom.

[01:12:38.320]
You're not you're kind of engaged. Maybe you're knitting or playing a video game at the same time. Lean Back is something's happening out there, but it's it's not commanding all your attention and it doesn't mean to be so. Social media tends to be a lean back activity for people. They're thumbing through a feed and just kind of seeing what pops up. And then something interesting grabs their attention and they leave in. You have to create lean in content on social media or you're just spinning your wheels.

[01:13:08.530]
So make it engaging, make it fun. Game of it. Do contests do things that get people talking and that engage. It will help them remember you so that all your other marketing activities can seal the deal, bring them to the website, bring them into the store, get them to make a purchase.

[01:13:28.230]
So those are your four steps for a digital marketing strategy. The website is the foundation. The studs are the email and inbound strategy with your CRM system, and then the walls are your paid digital advertising and SEM, and then the fixtures and the finish is the social media. And when you do them in that order, you will get value every step of the way.

[01:13:55.770]
And that's why I said start doing it now. Get your ROIC for each piece of it as you build. And then eventually true integration will be there. And there are bits of good integration available right now between your website and social media, between your digital advertising and your CRM. But we need to make sure that that for particularly for retailers, that technology is available to then integrate everything back to the store and your POS and business operations systems.

[01:14:25.620]
But each step of the way, you can get value if you do this thing right. So what do you need to be able to do it? Do you have to immediately go hire a marketing department that's digitally savvy and, you know, put six people in place doing all this stuff? No, you don't. And for larger companies, sure, you're going to want to do most of this in-house, but you do need some things. And here's what they are.

[01:14:49.410]
The first thing you need is just knowledge. So like this video today, you're building knowledge about what makes a digital strategy. As a business owner, you need to know enough to hire the right people or the right partners. You don't necessarily have to know enough to do all this. But if somebody sits down to interview with you and they're talking about omni channel, you need to know the difference between omni channel and multi-channel. You need to know what a CRM can do today.

[01:15:17.940]
You need to have enough knowledge like what we're talking about right now to know if somebody knows seems to know what they're talking about or don't. So you need knowledge and you're going to need to stay on top of doing some marketing, reading and reading some magazines like website, magazine, or find some online bloggers that you think do a good job explaining digital and just keep building that information that there's not going to be a time anymore where we don't need to pay attention to how technology and marketing are changing business.

[01:15:49.530]
So you don't need to be a deep dive expert, but you do need to be a broad expert.

[01:15:54.330]
So knowledge is important and then you need knowledge in your organization in the form of talent. So somebody is going to have to be knowledgeable enough to manage the effort itself or manage your outsource partners who are doing the effort. If you are a one person operation that you're going to be stretching because you have to also bring some talent, not just general knowledge, and then you also have to have very specific talent.

[01:16:19.440]
So you're going to be copywriters. Writing is very important to marketing. It's not a lost art by any means. And like I said, even if people don't read, they always search. And writers are the ones who lay the groundwork for that. So you'll need writers might be somebody on staff, might be an outsource partner. You need to have the skills to constantly updated. Refresh your website, might be on staff, might be a partner.

[01:16:43.980]
You need people who are developing this engaging social media content. You need people who are helping you plan and place your online advertising strategy.

[01:16:54.510]
So for most small businesses, that's going to be an outsourced partner and that's OK. But you do have to know how to manage it. And you do need to identify if there are any parts of this digital marketing collection of skills that would make most sense for you to have in-house and then managing all the other pieces of it.

[01:17:15.000]
Very few people are good at all of it. Just because somebody can use Photoshop doesn't mean they're a designer. And just because somebody can write a paragraph without spelling errors doesn't mean they're copywriter. So you need talent to pull this off and you're competing against other companies who are thinking about the same things. So the people who figure out the talent equation best are going to be the ones that have the most sales. You need a website that is robust enough to deliver all the things we've talked about today and which can continue to evolve.

[01:17:50.100]
You should never in these days you should be able to put a website in place that never has to be replaced again. Back when we started creating Web sites in the late 90s, everything had to be custom code. They were very static. They were very rigid.

[01:18:04.560]
Today's website technology allows us to be incredibly flexible and to evolve the website over time. So it always looks fresh, it always looks modern, but you don't have to invest, you know, in a brand new website every three or four years to accomplish that. So you need a website built on modern technology that does everything that you need from an SEO standpoint that can also can continue to evolve with your business and with the world of technology.

[01:18:32.420]
You need some creativity and analytics tools so you don't have to job out every single post you put on social media.

[01:18:39.110]
But you might need to use some fun tools like Visme or Animoto, to do fun video collages or photo elements or text overlays on photos. Simple tools like those in-house will allow you to put together great social media posts in seconds, really, and then get them out on your social media environment so you need some creativity tools. Doesn't always have to be Photoshop or illustrator.

[01:19:06.410]
And you also need some analytics tools. Google Analytics is an amazing tool, but it's not necessarily easy to use.

[01:19:13.580]
In fact, it's definitely not easy to use.

[01:19:16.070]
But there are other tools out there that you can use that will grab your Google analytics data and put it into reports for lay people who don't know how to read Google Analytics.

[01:19:24.890]
But so you can understand what all that data means from a business management perspective. You're going to need some creativity and analytics tools. Oh, back to step four. You need a CRM and you need a CRM that can actually do the heavy lifting that today's CRMs do. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and old CRMs, when CRM first came out in the mid to late 90s. It was really just about static customer data. Having all your customers information in one place.

[01:19:54.530]
You could see what they purchased when their birthday was important dates to them when their contract renewals were. But that was all it really did. Today's CRM, as I described to you back in the email and inbound marketing portion of this talk, can do so much for you in terms of knowing what your customers are doing on social media, on your website, which ads they're responding to which emails they're opening. How long do they spend reading things? That's what CRM is today.

[01:20:21.650]
You need a CRM system. They are really affordable that you can get a good CRM system for anywhere from one hundred and forty nine dollars a month to three hundred dollars a month (*2020 many CRMs are charging as much as $700/month for marketing automation). And that might sound expensive to you until you think about all the work that CRM system is going to do. You could not pay a person to sit there and stay on top of all those leads for 149 to three hundred dollars a month.

[01:20:47.330]
And then finally, you need strategic partners, because like I said, you're not going to be able to do all of this in-house. I own a marketing agency and I still won't buy my own advertising. When we do work for our customers, we partner with advertising agency, the ad placement companies like Ad Taxi. They have these amazing databases and specialized skills for doing the best job with your digital advertising every time. That's a specialty skill. We haven't built it in-house and we're not going to because there are so many good partners out there.

[01:21:19.790]
So even people who are deep into this space don't try to do everything themselves. And you shouldn't either. You're going to need strategic partners, as I mentioned earlier in this talk, open systems or systems, talking to each other seamlessly and sharing data across all the systems are essential for omnichannel. So part of what you need to be doing right now as you build these pieces of your digital marketing strategy house is making sure that you're working with systems that are open, that can communicate with other systems.

[01:21:54.440]
Now is not the time to hire a website developer who does everything for you custom. Because you're not you're going to end up with a very, very high cost of ownership website. Now is not the time to invest in a very niche product that nobody else is going to be using because other systems won't be open to it. So open systems are about systems that are able to talk to other systems and that are widely used enough that other systems want to build integrations to them.

[01:22:27.560]
That is a very important part of what happens next is that you have to be using these systems. So what are we talking about from an open system standpoint? Well, for your website, you need a content management system or a systems. Now, if you're an Internet pure play, you know, if all you do is sell thousands of products on the Internet, you probably could settle for a product that was mostly e-commerce. Shopify falls into that category.

[01:22:55.820]
You can do other things with Shopify than just sell products. But that's really what Shopify is optimized for. It's not optimized to be a great blog. It doesn't give you opportunities to build all these different kinds of landing pages that I've been talking about that tell a story and sell product. You can pay for other extensions to a Shopify type site that will allow you to do some of those things. But the costs just rack up when you use Shopify.

[01:23:21.770]
So I don't typically recommend that someone you Shopify for this solution is. The the basement, the foundation of their digital strategy, unless all they're ever going to do is sell stuff online, if you have a retail store, Shopify is not the solution for you, because even though you can quickly list all your products on Shopify, it's not going to do all the things you need to do to bring people into the store, which is a big part of what your online marketing strategy needs to do.

[01:23:49.770]
Systems that do do this well include WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Type three. These are all broad based content management systems that both sell products and do all of the other type of content marketing that you need. All of those systems have really extensive support networks across the world, not just in the United States. You can find a developer for all of those programs near you. All of those programs are programs that are free in terms of the software, their open source, but they're not free in terms of setting them up or getting them to look right, or you're going to pay for some development time.

[01:24:34.980]
But the software itself is part of the open source community and they're all very open to communicating with other systems and extensions. And that's why I strongly recommend products from that grouping. WordPress Joomla Drupal Magento would be my four favorite. They are not one size fits all. So if you talk to somebody who only works in WordPress, they're going to say, Oh, we'll build your website, we're going to build it in WordPress. WordPress may not be the right solution for you.

[01:25:04.800]
Now, for probably 80 percent of small businesses, it's a pretty good fit, but it's not necessarily the right fit for everyone. So don't just assume that because somebody does WordPress, WordPress is all you need. For some businesses, Joomla is a much better solution than WordPress. They're both easy to use. They're both low cost of ownership, but they have different they scale differently. On the other hand, if you have some really complex business needs, say you want to develop your POS into your website system or you want to put more of your business operations all in one system, I wouldn't recommend WordPress or Joomla.

[01:25:43.560]
I'd go up to Drupal for that. Drupal is going to provide a lot more sophisticated business technology for you. On the other hand, it's very hard to use. You're not going to end up supporting your own Drupal site the way you could with a WordPress or a jobless site. And then finally, Magento, if you have thousands of products to sell and you want the most optimized e-commerce product out there, you can't go wrong with Magento. So these are all fantastic software programs that you can use for your foundation, your website.

[01:26:17.610]
But they are not one size fits all and you need to explore which one really is the best fit for your business. So now let's talk about these advanced CRM systems. I was talking about the these systems that will combine your customer data management with your campaign management online, with your social media, you know, that help you put all your customer pieces together and ideally are talking to your point of sale system systems that do that are Greenrope, HubSpot, Infusionsoft, Active Campaign, Ontraport

[01:26:54.600]
These are all systems that will do this advanced CRM work for you. These do not come cheap. So the least expensive option that I know of is at 149 a month, most small businesses can access the other ones for, you know, at the high end, 300 dollars a month, maybe three hundred fifty dollars a month. And like I said, that sounds expensive and it is if you're not going to use them comprehensively. But when you turn on these systems and use them the way they're intended to be used, if you do all the right planning and all the right preparation and implement them and then really use them, you are never going to get one employee to that.

[01:27:34.800]
You only pay one hundred forty nine to three hundred dollars a month to do all that work. So they are worth every penny.

[01:27:41.580]
You just need to use them. Now, I talked about needing some creative and analytics tools as well.

[01:27:48.150]
And remember, I'm only talking to you about systems that are open to each other because we're trying to get to omnichannel. And the ones I'm recommending aren't the only ones that do the things I'm talking about. But they give you a good sense of some of the system choices that you have. You can also search with the phrase alternative to go to Google search and do alternative to HubSpot and you'll see all the alternatives to HubSpot and you can read up on them.

[01:28:15.210]
Just make sure that whatever you choose is of is an open enough system, that it can communicate well with other systems so that you're laying the groundwork for omnichannel as you build. OK, so creative tools. That you can use to put together great visual graphics, video advertising banners for your digital marketing, your online advertising banner ads, all of that. So some of the tools you can use for those things are Visby, Animoto clip champ cloud app and banner wise.

[01:28:50.690]
Now, the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, which my company uses, and I really believe that it is a fantastic suite for doing everything from shooting this video to all the graphics we put together for it. And you can do anything with the Adobe Creative Suite. It also has a very long learning curve and it's not cheap. If you have somebody in house that can use those tools, then great, go with something like an Adobe product or use your alternative to search.

[01:29:17.450]
And, you know, there are open source alternatives to Adobe for most small businesses. You're not going to have that skill set in-house and you actually don't need to spend that much time on a lot of your graphics. So in in-house, we have a videographer who is incredibly capable of using all the Adobe film tools. But if we want a really fast video that only takes a couple of minutes put together, it's still faster to go to Animoto. So they're going to give you these tools that I'm talking about, the graphical guidance you need if you're not a graphic designer, because a lot of this is tablet it and they're also going to give you speed and efficiency at very low cost.

[01:29:59.960]
So those are some of the creative tools that you need to constantly be adding fresh content on your website, in your ads, on your social media. And finally, you need analytics tools. These tools will help you facilitate setting and managing your key performance measurements. It's not worth doing advertising if you're not going to measure it and see what results you got from it and then refine your efforts and try again and measure that effort. So everything you do in your marketing strategy, online or offline, you have to set goals and objectives for.

[01:30:35.390]
And that's what these analytics tools do. They help you set goals and objectives and then manage your goals and objectives and refine and analyze all of your digital marketing. So you do need to learn how to use your Google analytics. That's the most comprehensive tool out there.

[01:30:53.120]
You don't need to use it in, you know, the depth that an analyst, a professional analyst would use them for, if that's not how you're wired or that's not where you're going to spend your time. But you do need to know how to use the basics of Google analytics. If you're a business owner or a business executive. And there are a ton of free software training programs online that will teach you how to use Google Analytics at a basic level.

[01:31:18.950]
But there are also some other online tools that you can subscribe to that will pull data out of your Google analytics and represent it in more management friendly graphs and charts and reports. And some of those would be WhatAGraph or KissMetrics, Clicky, WebTrends and WhoopLa are the ones that I've used and I like.

[01:31:39.770]
And I think they do a good job.

[01:31:41.720]
So make sure that you are analyzing your marketing performance. Don't just trust someone that you know because they're good. You assume they're doing good advertising and don't assume for a minute that you can't know what results you're getting from your marketing. One of the glorious things about digital marketing is that you can measure and know what's happening, but you have to have the tools in place to do it. And what all of this is leading up to is the point where all of your data in store or in business and online can be integrated to provide a seamless, rich, fulfilling, relevant experience to your customer.

[01:32:21.210]
So you started with your foundation, which is your website. And as soon as that website is up to par, including all the right types of information optimized for SEO, using a platform that's open to communicating with other systems, you'll start getting business benefit from that right away, even before you've layered on the next step. So that's your foundation. Now you go and you put the studs in and that's your e-mail and inbound marketing. So now you're collecting email addresses and you're segmenting your lists and you're marketing more frequently, but more relevantly.

[01:32:55.200]
And you could be sending out an email to a group of people every two days, but it wouldn't be the same group of people every two days. So you're not over marketing to them. You're just marketing more relevantly to people. So that's your studs. And then you start really, you know, putting in all of the the walls and the ceilings and, you know, the rest of your structure. And that's your digital advertising. Once your website and your inbound and email strategy on your open source or open system, I should say, not open source, but your open system CRM are in place now.

[01:33:30.690]
You can really maximize the value of your digital spend in advertising. And then finally, you're doing your social media, which is sort of making you more relevant, more immediately present, more engaging to the customers you're trying to bring in and also to the customers you're trying to keep. And you've done all of this using systems that are open to each other. They will talk to each other. They let data go out. They bring data back in.

[01:33:58.590]
And that was all leading up to the point where you can get to true data integration. So when the rest of the data integration tools that we're waiting for that are in development now, when they're ready, you're going to be ready and you will not miss out on true omnichannel. And you'll have been making money all along the way by bringing more people back into your store or to your website site and turning them into customers. That's what I wanted to share with you.

[01:34:27.090]
I think it was important to get this information to as many people as possible. So people will start thinking about the online marketing challenge much more holistically. I encourage you to share this video. It's free to anyone who will watch it, because as small business owners, we need to up our game, our knowledge when it comes to marketing and digital marketing particularly. And this is just a small part of accomplishing that. Thank you for your time. I hope this was really useful to you.

I was working with a client yesterday and she expressed a fear that is common to many people these days. This woman is extremely intelligent, highly successful, and well disciplined, yet she has the fear of being professionally and technically left behind.

It’s a reasonable fear. The world is changing quickly, driven largely by the pace of technology innovation. Twenty years ago everyone was aware that computers were changing the face of business, but the general perception was that computers were the domain of ‘computer people.’ 15 years ago business sociologists were telling us that the big chasm between Baby Boomers and Generation Y would be a difference in work ethic. Today it is apparent that Boomers are alienated by technology that their Gen Y counterparts take for granted.

Emerging manufacturing technology highlights the insufficiency of tool and die skills without computer aided design skills. Marketers who can’t navigate high end software and challenging database environments fall behind. Warehouse workers interact at a high level with automation tools such as mini-computers strapped to their wrists. Artists and craftspeople must master the demands of having their own websites – or at least be capable of providing direction to a website developer and manager. And the business executive who can’t independently navigate the myriad of internet and wireless protocols can get shut out of their business for days on end (or drive some poor IT support person crazy at all hours).

The challenges go beyond computerized workstations. Defined benefits and company-provided pension plans have given way to individual structuring of retirement strategies – leading to a requirement that all individuals understand markets and economics and investment strategies – which themselves  become more complex every year. Competition is constantly changing as the barriers to entry for new business continue to shrink. Even our communication is evolving rapidly as language becomes more technical.

Some people have opted out of the whole problem by declining to develop computer or technical skills. I don’t consider this an option. Anyone reading this blog would agree that the inability to read or write is a guarantee of economic deprivation. I believe computer illiteracy will contribute to a similar result in the near future (and to a certain extent, already is). If you moved to a non-English speaking country, you could not expect to gain successful employment or integrate into society without speaking the language. In the case of computers and technology, the other language has moved here, and everyone must be proficient. When a normally intelligent person “can’t” learn a new skill, resistance – not aptitude – is generally the culprit. Ending residual computer resistance will open the door to new competencies quickly for most people.

But what about my client, the very smart executive who is worried about keeping up? In her case, we discussed what she is afraid of keeping up with or in. She has broad business responsibilities, but they are not all-encompassing. So we made a list of the general areas of knowledge in which she can’t afford to fall behind, and then we identified a few key resources to help her stay on top of her game. After evaluating the field of possibilities, she decided she will need to incorporate two new monthly magazines, one weekly magazine, and 4-6 training classes (online or live) each year to sufficiently supplement her knowledge. In addition, she will enhance her project and decision-making work by including more research, particularly research of a peer-reviewed or academic nature. I could almost see her cortisol levels drop as she realized she could design a strategy for staying ahead of her game.

For anyone who plans to work past the age of 60, making a plan for staying au courant in the important developments of their chosen profession is a wise move. The knowledge that sort of stumbles onto us is a gift from the universe. But the knowledge we planfully acquire is an important gift we give ourselves.

(c) 2007, Andrea M. Hill

Everyone wants to know:

• What is the future of retail?
• Who will tell us what it looks like?
• What do consumers really want?
• How do we remain relevant?

These are urgent questions. How we get products to consumers has changed dramatically and forever, and a big chunk of our economy hinges on how well we respond to the changes. I think we can all agree that a retail future consisting entirely of Amazon, Walmart, and eBay wouldn’t be healthy.

In the meantime, our supply chain structures are wobbling. In the blink of an eye, consumers saw and embraced the opportunity to acquire what they want, when they want it, from the comfort of their own home, in their cubicle, or while watching the kids play soccer. The industry has primarily tried to address the problem with lower prices and price competition (“Beat the Internet” anyone?), but all that has accomplished is to strip economic value out of the supply chain.

The stress of technology-driven business change is so intense, that perhaps we don’t realize that other people in other times have gone through the same issues. Different technologies, but the stakes were surely the same to them, as were the challenges.

I can almost imagine how it felt to be alive when Guttenberg’s printing press came online. Printing presses democratized knowledge and changed the way we learn, educate, write, and think. The parallels to the way computers have changed our world are very strong, even though this happened nearly 600 years ago. Guttenberg’s invention came in the middle of the Renaissance, a time most people think of as being the cultural bridge between the Middle Ages and modern history. But we also know that the Renaissance was a time of deep nostalgia for the past, accompanied by a feeling of ennui about the future and the advances of humanity. Sound familiar?

Beyond the printing press, the Renaissance was a time of absorbing new knowledge – primarily mathematics (until then the purview of Arabic peoples). Mathematics and logic transformed thought and behavior, much like modern computing has changed thought and behavior (and without which, modern computing could not have happened). The philosophy of humanism was developed during this time, as people shifted from thinking merely about survival to what it meant to live well. There was an explosion of new techniques in architecture and art, and writing was completely transformed. While some bemoaned the death of poetry, others saw brand new figurative horizons opening before them. Again, sound familiar?

Renaissance history is a favorite study of mine, but it’s also an appropriate analogy for today. For one thing, it reminds us that history has been fraught with dramatic changes, and that humanity continues to plow forward; learning, prospering, and evolving (often despite ourselves). But another comparison is also apt: At its heart, the Renaissance was a period of rich and productive collaboration between thinkers of every discipline. Artists, mathematicians, philosophers, writers, and scientists shared ideas across disciplines, which led to an explosion of human knowledge. Each person, immersed in his individual discipline, was unable to see the bigger picture. The potential for progress emerged as they threw their ideas and questions and insights into the middle of the table and put them up for discovery and debate.

Today we are confronted with multiple challenges to business-as-usual. Technology hasn’t just changed the way we shop; it’s changed the way we think, learn, write, communicate, and socialize. Just as the introduction of math disrupted and changed all the other disciplines 600 years ago, technology has done the same for us (not to us) today. And I believe the way to address that change is to embrace it – with heaping helpings of collaboration.

Just last week, a retailer said to me, “You’re saying that marketing today requires extensive knowledge of how to do online marketing. I’m already too busy. How can I learn to do all this too?”

To which I said, “You’re asking the wrong question. Don’t ask ‘how do I learn to do all this too?’  Ask, ‘how do I find the right people to collaborate with?’”

Small business owners fence themselves in with the idea that they must do everything themselves. Instead, we should be seeking every possible collaboration. Collaboration allows us to focus on what we’re good at, while tapping into what others are good at. In the process, we all learn, and that learning happens more gracefully because it’s not overshadowed by the intense pressure of time and expense (or risk).

In some respects, this is already occurring. Significant numbers of workers have shifted from being employees to being contractors – in essence, providing their collaboration for a fee to companies who need their talents. The ubiquitous cloud is another form of mass collaboration; instead of companies housing and managing their own servers and software, they contract for portions of servers and subscriptions to software, leaving it to the service companies to manage their own software, hardware, and the constant advances of technology.

How can the jewelry industry embrace more collaboration? One obvious way is to create more marketing and selling synergies between individuals, organizations, and parts of the supply chain. The emergence of omni-channel strategies will further disrupt the notion of the traditional supply chain, forcing our current distribution networks to innovate or fail.

The retail store as we know it is almost entirely a construct of the 20th Century. Something else will be next. The word Renaissance literally means rebirth. The outstanding contribution of the Renaissance was the leap forward in human understanding, the mechanism was collaboration. It’s time for our own Renaissance, and I think the nexus, this time, will be rooted in collaboration as well.

Part II of this article: Collaborations to Watch

(with a big bow to Marshall McLuhan)

When you were a mere toddler, it's likely you took boxes, pots and pans and turned them into toys. In grade school, we took plastic sheeting and turned it into sleds on the perfect snow of Hospital Hill. In high school we turned Chevys into love machines, and I furnished my first apartment with crates and boards transformed into tables and shelves.

We humans are geniuses at repurposing. We take a thing and apply it for the purpose that we require of it, even if that is not the purpose for which it was intended. And we come up with some pretty terrific solutions.

But sometimes, we repurpose something accidentally. We actually think we are using it correctly, when in fact, our failure to understand its essential purpose means that we are under-utilizing it.

This is what has happened with websites. Here are a few examples:

The company that spends $40,000 on a custom website design to have a look that is unlike anyone else's.  Only to have to redesign the website from scratch two or three years later because the look is no longer current.

The small business owner who puts off his website design for months on end, because he has a "look" in his head and he's determined to achieve it. In the meantime, his online business suffers due to outdated technology and appearance.

The woman who loves minimalism - in her home, in her office, in her wardrobe - and insists that the website for her business mimic the same minimalism in its design - even though her business demands that a lot of information be shared.

What thinker/philosopher Marshall McLuhan taught us nearly 40 years ago was that we must employ each medium in a manner consistent with its inherent qualities and the way people use it. His point was that you couldn't separate the message from the medium (i.e., the medium is the message). Take billboards (please).  A billboard is designed to be read while driving by at 55+  mph.  You could certainly write a novel on one, but nobody would be able to read it. To use a billboard well, you have to think about what the user is doing when they encounter the medium (driving), whether or not the viewer can react instantly to the information (yes if it's to get off at the next exit, not as likely if it's to make an appointment), and what the user most appreciates in the billboard medium (tidbits of entertainment that can be fully digested in milliseconds). The physical reality of the billboard and the experience of the people viewing it are an essential part of the message itself. To use a billboard well, the message must be crafted in very specific ways.

The same thing is true of radio. Unless you have your own radio program, your options for reaching a radio audience consist of 15-, 30-, and 45-second spots. The medium requires that the message be fully understood without the use of visuals. The medium requires very tight writing. If the radio station is a music/entertainment station, the message has a better chance of being heard if it is itself entertaining. If the station is information-based, then an information-based message is likely to be effective. As with the billboard, the medium of radio plays a fundamental role in its message.

The concept of the website was developed by graphic designers excited about wireframes and by business visionaries excited about possibilities. And rightly so. But now it's time for us to be more thoughtful about the medium and how it interplays with the message.

Every type of website you can imagine - from a film studio to an accounting firm, from a music label to an online store - must provide content to its users. This is what people want from a website. They don't expect the website to give them a reflexology session, they don't expect it to repair their car, or test them for strep. Content. Information.

The information can come in the form of video, articles, infographics, pictures, social media streams. blogs, podcasts, and online flipbooks. Many of those content types are highly visual in nature. But here's where business owners often get off track - the website itself isn't a work of visual art. In fact, most websites - given what they need to accomplish - don't need to be very artful at all. They are containers for a broad range of content - content the consumers of your products and services want to access in order to cultivate the desire they need to make the decision to buy.  And when the container gets in the way - either by being too much the center of attention or by taking too long to achieve - it undermines the real purpose of the website.

Think about it in terms of a retail store. A store is a physical reality, a room or a series of rooms in an architectural structure. The structure itself needs to accommodate the store - space for safes with floors strong enough to hold them, space for displays and consumer floor traffic, counters, cabinets, offices, and bathrooms. Some physical spaces are very elaborate and some are plain, but at the end of the day they are just physical spaces with conduits, plumbing, drywall, and flooring.

What ultimately makes the space is the information you put inside it. The information includes display cases, the products within display cases, the colors of the paint,  light fixtures, lounge furniture, publications on display, signage, scents, sounds, and tactical experiences. The most magnificent architecture in the world won't compensate for poorly planned information inside the store.

The information in your website includes products, expanded information about products, company information, fonts, feeds from related content, embedded videos and graphics, interactive/social content, wish lists, ask-an-expert forums, and the shopping experience. The fanciest wire-frame design and most pricey website graphics in the world will not compensate for poorly planned - or missing - information.

Unlike real estate, the architecture of web design is changing rapidly. The conventions that looked good four years ago look stale today.  The designs that look appealing today will be out-of-date again soon. And though most of us know it's too expensive to give our real estate a face lift every other year, the stakes for not maintaining a contemporary look on a website are high.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is. It's to stop spending all this money on custom websites! I imagine a lot of graphic designers are cursing me right now, but as far as small business owners are concerned, custom websites are a waste of money - and they are not necessary. You can create a website in Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress with complete confidence that the underlying technology will continue to evolve. That means you don't have to invest in that evolution (though I strongly recommend providing some financial support to the open source community you commit to).

But what about the design? you ask. First, remember that design means a lot of things. The beauty of the design of each of these open source web platforms is the functionality, the ease with which you can integrate them with extra functionality, their tight integration with databases, and their constant evolution. And yes, design also means the look of the user interface.

If you take an open source program like Magento, Joomla, Drupal, or Wordpress, then pay a designer to create a custom front-end design for it, you are still throwing money out the window. Why? Because the next time you want to update your look, you will have to pay for additional custom design. The next time your core software takes a technological leap (which is happening every few years), you will have to pay for more custom design.  The next time website styles change (which is happening every other year), you will have to pay for additional custom design.

Instead, use a design template made by a company who is making its money developing templates. Not just any template. Don't buy any one-hit wonders. Buy the template from a company like Infortis or Yoothemes, a company that is dedicated to updating its templates and keeping them relevant and functioning with the current technology. A company that is staying on top of - or even setting the trend for - what is hot in website design. Then pay a website expert to tweak and tune that template to match the colors, fonts, and essential feeling of your brand.

Now it's the designer end of my customer base that's in a dead faint. "But I make beautiful jewelry! My website has to convey my design ethos!" one says. "I am known in the fashion world as a fashion adviser. My site has to convey my fashion sense!" But is that true?

When you advertise in a magazine, does your ad pop up in 3D to show your design ethos? Or do you simply choose colors and a layout that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because print ads are terrible at being anything but one-dimensional, though they are terrific at showing a photograph of amazing design.

When you run a radio spot, does your spot appear to be adorned in fashionable clothing? Or do you simply choose words and music that express your brand in a consistent manner? Because radio is absolutely awful at showing anything visual, but it can do a terrific job of conveying a message.

When we expect any medium to achieve things for which it wasn't designed -or that the cost of achieving isn't worth - the medium, and therefore the message, is undermined.

If you look at some of the most powerful, profitable websites, you will see that the design isn't particularly noteworthy. Amazon isn't that great to look at, but it is the king of all content providers. Lands End's design elements begin and end with simple navy blue elements, but they sure do sell a lot of clothing and home goods. The website for the Art Institute of Chicago has exceedingly basic design elements, but the website performs beautifully and looks beautiful because they use images to convey the mood.  There is nothing designerly or artiste about Jeff Koons' website, but it does a terrific job of sharing information about his body of work.

The underlying promise -and therefore, the message - of websites is content, experience, information, engagement. To sacrifice any of those things for an idea of the prettiest, funkiest, coolest, or most luxurious graphic design is to undermine the medium. To pay $50,000 for a look when you could have spent far far less and put the rest of the budget into content development is to undermine both the medium and your business. And to spend precious marketing dollars on elements that don't ultimately bring value to your business or meaning to your message is unwise.

Learn to use each medium for the purpose it serves best. Use the print medium to engage the visual senses and convey color and richness in a way that cheap monitors cannot. Use video, film, and television to tell big stories. Use billboards and social media to deliver snackable content. Use radio to speak directly to your customers and engage the sense of hearing. And use your websites as a container for all those exciting elements - and more. More information, more detail, more engagement, more content. Stop trying to make the body into a dress. After all, in the case of the website, it's what's inside that counts.

(minor updates for changing technology on July 22, 2023)

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by all the things we're supposed to be doing on social media . . . TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, blogging, landing pages . . . Threads? . . . who has time to run a business, right?

No doubt Social Media has an important place in at the table of marketing disciplines. But it's just one chair. If you are feeling burdened by your lack of a TikTok presence or the fact that you can't figure out what to blog or tweet about, consider:

• If your company sells to businesses but needs a direct brand awareness with consumers, then Facebook, Instagram and TikTok should be part of your marketing efforts.
• If your company sells to businesses and has something very meaningful to teach or share that your potential business customers want to learn and that something makes it more likely those prospects will call you to do business, then you should  blog.
• If your company sells to businesses and you have something so compelling to say about that business that your potential customers are likely to flag it so as never to miss it, then you should consider leveraging the power of LinkedIn to reach business owners and professionals.

Every business needs a business legitimizing website. It's no longer an option. But what you do with that website must be determined by your business objectives.

Remember a time when different jewelry producers could place their collections in retail stores, and rely on retail stores to bring in traffic? The numbers game back then was one of local customers. Retailers who were on a busy street, in a mall with good traffic, or who had achieved destination retailer status could bring in the numbers.

So what happens when the foot traffic isn’t there and most malls are ghosts of their former selves?

The destination retailer route is still alive and well, and retailers who do a good job promoting themselves to an ample consumer population – either by being located in an area with sufficient population density or by being savvy online retailers – are still a good bet. Unfortunately, that retailer is the exception in the specialty jewelry retailer world at this time. It could change, but if it’s going to, it needs to happen quickly.

That leaves designers with the option of selling direct, and the numbers game becomes an entirely different animal. Let’s look at two different types of numbers games:

The All-in-One Numbers Game

If you’re a company like Stuller or Rio Grande, you stock 30,000 – 35,000 different products from hundreds of different vendors. The mere fact that they do this means that a relatively small population – people who make jewelry – will end up at their doorstep for the things they can’t find from smaller wholesalers in their local market. The numbers game they are playing is basically a product numbers game, and they compete for the same roughly 20,000 – 30,000 customers. One can make a nice business out of that.

But what if you’re a designer that carries 50 – 200 products, or a retailer who carries 500 – 1,800 products? Without “superstore” status, what do you have to offer? Even if you sell your products in a dense population area, you can’t be sure you’ll sell those products in sufficient quantities to make a profit. Not when you’re competing with other people who do the same thing you do all over the country and even around the world.

No, your numbers game becomes the consumer numbers game, and for that you need the internet.

The Find-the-Consumers-and-Help-Them-Find-You Numbers Game

How many sales would you need each year to create the profits you want? 300? 3,000? There are probably 300-3,000 people who would be willing to buy your products at your prices, but you have to find them and you have to make it easy for them to find you. To do this, you must learn how to do digital marketing.

Are you excited about your 1,800 Twitter followers? You probably need closer to 20,000 to generate meaningful web traffic. And your 3,000 Facebook followers? You’ll need to at least triple that. Social Media is about far more than talking to an audience and hoping they talk back. It’s about finding new prospects, of the right attributes to ensure interest in your products, in significant enough numbers to generate sales traffic.

Do you make prudent use of the social media advertising opportunities available to you? Do you know when to boost a post, how to target your potential audience, how to write compelling headlines and which images to show? Social media advertising is not an art nor a hobby – it’s a discipline with plenty of data behind it. It should be approached with the same seriousness and intention that you use when buying television or radio time.

Are you sending email to your customer base? Weekly? Sending a quarterly email is entirely insufficient to generate the kind of top-of-mind awareness your business requires. And how many new email addresses are you adding to your email list? If you’re only collecting the email addresses of people who actually purchase, you’re missing an entire prospecting universe. Your digital marketing strategy must include active pursuit of the email addresses of people likely to be interested in buying from you. Your email marketing strategy should feel like a serial novel, thoughtfully telling the story of your brand through a selection of product offers, interesting information, events, reflections, and images.

Do you have a website that not only tells your story, but actively lists all your products and provides excellent descriptions of each product – complete with the search terms consumers are likely to use when looking for something just like that? Search is one of the most compelling ways to find consumers today, and maximizing the value of your website and product descriptions can bring you consumers you would never have known to target. Once the searching consumer finds your product, does your website inspire the confidence needed to make an online purchase?

These are just some of the things your business must do well in order to find the 300 – 3,000 consumers who will buy your goods this year, and next, and the one after. And here’s the good news: digital marketing isn’t rocket science. You can learn it yourself, or you can hire someone to do it for you. Either way, you need to find those consumers. And you need to help them find you.

Well, that’s about enough of the proverbial ‘long winter’s nap’ I guess. I hope everyone has had lovely holidays, solstice, or whatever it is you observe as the longest night of the year passes and we begin a new season filled with potential.

With the holiday sales past and our new year’s resolutions already becoming a dusty memory, it’s a good time to think about what we’re going to do better in our businesses in 2008 than we did in 2007. Maybe it’s a progression of something we’ve already started, and maybe we’re looking for something new. I’d like you to take another look at your branding. But let’s start with a little science.

P. Read Montague, a neuroscientist affiliated with a number of well-known universities, did his own Pepsi challenge using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) – which is imaging technology that is used to view the structure of the brain and measure responses relative to physical changes within the brain.

The first test was a standard blind taste test, and in Montague’s experience the test participants were nearly equally split between Coke and Pepsi. The fMRI measurement demonstrated that the areas of the brain associated with pleasure and satisfaction activated during the actual tasting. Not surprising.

Then Montague did a second round of tests with the same group of participants, this time telling each of them the brand name of the product they were tasting. Not only were the pleasure and satisfaction regions of the brain activated, but this time the regions associated with memory (medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus) were also stimulated. Montague’s conclusion was that “this showed that the brand alone has value in the brain system, above and beyond the desire for the contents of the can.”

Gone are the days when a company could build a brand around things like good service, fast shipping, low prices, high quality, or good selection. Those things are now the minimum standard necessary to compete. In 1984 we decided to raise the barrier to entry for new competitors in direct marketing by committing to ship our products in two days. Now any direct marketer who knows what they’re doing gets over 99% of their products out same day. There’s very little room for improvement in customer expectations in this arena. Products have become so inexpensive that luxury has become hard to define, leaving little room for improvement in the price arena.

Coke and Pepsi have invested many decades each in creating that reaction in the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. There is an entire generation that “would like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony.” We buy vintage-looking coke bottles at a premium price each holiday season to remind us of buying cokes in the old-fashioned soda-dispensors that moved the bottles along by their necks. The next generation had their Michael J. Fox Diet Pepsi ads. In fact, each generation has been given their sports stars, pop stars and movie stars drinking Coke or Pepsi. At the same time, millions in the US have memories associated with one soda or the other, and both have become a symbol of American pop culture to people around the world. And we’re not talking about brand recognition at the expense of profitability here. Though both companies have had their down years, they have continuously reinvented themselves to find new profit zones. But they have a solid brand foundation of warm & fuzzy brain reactions to the mere mention of their names.

Could they create the kind of brand recognition they enjoy today if they had to start today?

Well, that’s the question the rest of us have to answer. What are we doing to create reactions not only in the area of the consumer brain that registers the features and benefits of the specific product we sell, but also in the area of the consumer brain that says “ah yes! I remember them!” Remember, it can’t be low price, high quality, good service, or good selection. These days the consumer brain only registers those companies that don’t live up to those expectations.

There may be some tougher economic times ahead, but consumers will continue to buy products and services, and some companies will do better than others. If you are in a business that has clear competitors (which most businesses do), and if you can’t claim proprietary technology or intellectual property that prevents others from crowding your market space (which most businesses can’t), then you will have to establish a clear brand image.

There was a time when the sheer growth of the middle class meant that gaining market share was enough to guarantee profitability for the companies that entered early enough and aggressively enough to claim it. Think Coke and Pepsi. But times have changed and plain volume is just as likely to be a liability as a profit-ability. So what will you do to make yourself stand out – to the group of customers that is most likely to pay you well for what it is you have to offer (because without that group of customers, all the branding in the world won’t matter)? Make that hippocampus work for you, or you’ll be just another simple pleasure and satisfaction reaction.

(c) 2008, Andrea M. Hill

Sometimes I listen to parents complain bitterly about things their toddlers – or teenagers – are doing; things which are totally age-appropriate. If you’re like me, you think to yourself, “as long as you're a parent, you would have a better time if you learned about the developmental stages of children.”

I had a friend who once decided to ride his bike from Albuquerque to Santa Fe – a 65-mile trip. Half way through his journey – and in the middle of nowhere – his bike broke down and he didn’t know how to fix it. If you’re just riding your bike around the neighborhood, you can get away with not knowing any repair skills. But if you’re going to start making long treks in sparsely populated areas, you need to learn how to fix your bike and own the proper tools.

There are probably many things you wouldn’t do without learning a lot about them and practicing first: true wilderness camping without survival skills, throwing a huge self-cooked dinner party without cooking skills, sailing a boat in the ocean without navigational and boating skills.

Are you running a small business without small business success skills? If you are, it’s going to cost you.

As a small business – or even a micro-business – owner, you must do all the things the CEO of any company does; decide what to sell and how to sell it, whether and when to hire help, manage customer service, operations, and finances, make decisions. Even if you don’t have formal investors, you are managing a huge investment – your own. Your investment is the time you spend, the money you put in, and the profits you roll back in. You are responsible for all the same things as any CEO, but without the qualified support staff to fill in the gaps in your knowledge.

I was the CEO/President of several corporations over the past 30 years, from a $2million/year marketing agency to a $100million+ jewelry company and a $600million+ apparel company, and now I own a multi-brand consulting agency. The skills I needed between the $2 million level and the $600+million level were remarkably similar. I didn’t need to “be” an accountant, but I had to know how to discuss finances intelligently with my accountants. I didn’t need to “be” a production manager, but I needed to understand what my production managers were doing and how to help them be more successful. I didn’t need to “be” the computer network manager, but I needed to be competent enough to weigh the suggestions my network managers made and make good decisions.

When I first took over the apparel company, I realized that my accounting skills were lacking to do the analysis at that level. Did I go back to school to become an accountant? Absolutely not. But I did go take a class called “Financial Management for Non-Financial Managers” offered at a local community college. That, plus a lot of attention and practice, turned me into a strong financial manager capable of not driving my accounting staff crazy, and more importantly, of being the CEO my company deserved. Every year of my career I have added more business skills to my portfolio, and I continue to do so today. You must do this too.

You probably already know how to make and/or acquire the products and services you sell. This is the starting point for most entrepreneurs. But there are several business skills you must cultivate in order to ensure the survival and profitability of your company. These small business success skills include:

• Basic understanding of financials and financial management. You don’t need to become an accountant (in fact, paying a good accountant is one of the most important things any small business owner can do). But you must understand your role in financial matters, how to work with your accountant, and how to steer your company in the right direction.
• How to not just make a strategic business plan, but use it for ongoing business development and improvement.
• How to express your business strategy as a Brand, and how to imbue your whole organization – from product idea to post-sales satisfaction – with Brand elements that stick with customers and keep them coming back for more.
• How to hire, train, discipline, fire, and motivate employees. Even if you have only one employee, you need these skills. Otherwise, you risk paying someone to work for you without getting the full value of that pay.
• How to set up the necessary business systems to manage your customers, sales, inventory, marketing, operations, and accounting. By systems I don’t necessarily mean expensive computer software – the solutions can be anything from KanBan cards to computers. But you need to know which systems you need and how to set them up.
• How to manage your inventory to ensure high service levels, solid margins, happy customers, and no excess taxes. Inventory is about way more than just buying goods and making them. You must understand the role inventory plays in your company, and how to manage that role carefully.
• How to create and manage a sales and marketing plan.
• How to set up sales and customer service programs that drive volume and profits, whether you’re selling to business clients, through retail stores, or directly to end consumers (or any combination thereof).
• How to not only create and sell products, but manage product and product line profitability.
• How to prospect for new customers –from finding new potential sources for sales to keeping them interested, and learning how long it takes to convert a prospect to a loyal customer.
• How to decide which operations to keep in-house, which to outsource, and how to manage both types.

Being a business owner is a big task, and I’m not going to pretend that list is a quick or easy thing to master. But if you start learning these skills right away and keep picking them off one-by-one, you’ll become a better CEO from the moment you start . . . and the time is going to go by either way.

This is a link to a chart of these skills. It is structured as a pledge; a pledge to yourself to pursue and cultivate the skills you need to succeed. I encourage you to print it out, post it in a highly (and daily) visible spot, and check each one off as you tackle it. And here’s to you, on the road to becoming a highly competent – and vastly more satisfied – CEO.

I just returned from a trade show in New York, and I have to say, neither exhibitors nor retailers were maximizing the incredible value that trade events have to offer. The entire affair (a colocated retail show and supplier show) was just lackluster.

But it didn’t have to be.

My first observation was that a lot of trade show basics were missing. Exhibitors that didn’t consider their presence as a marketing tool. Booths that were completely lacking in compelling signage or any sort of draw to attract attendees to them from across the room. Salespeople unprepared with an offer other than, “what are you looking for? Let me show you my new collection.” And a lot of just failure to follow the basic rules of exhibiting at trade shows, which I’ve already addressed in these articles:

• 10 Rules for Successful Trade Shows
• Improve Your RTS (Return on Trade Show)

B2B buyers of all ages want experiences, and exhibitors who make an effort to turn their booth into something more compelling than the flyer-distributors on the strip in Las Vegas benefit the most from shows. If you sell tools, equipment, or technology, your products are exciting and can do the work of creating experiences for you if you treat exhibits as an opportunity to demonstrate rather than discuss. If you sell finished goods, turning your booth into the equivalent of an all-day-long HSN or QVC pitch experience, with clear offers and product sharing, will bring attendees to your booth. Show shoppers can find it intimidating to walk up to a booth and engage the seller, and they feel a level of obligation when they do. But it’s easy to walk up to a booth when a pitch is in motion … the psychological distance is comfortable, because the show “shopper” can tell that the pitch isn’t for them … it’s for everyone.

I could go on and on about how to improve trade show presence for exhibitors. But for the moment, I’ll just invite you to our next webinar, “B2B Marketing Playbook: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Winning Without Wasting.” Catch it live (Wednesday, March 27 at 12:00 PM Central) or watch the replay here for free. Free B2B Marketing Webinar

But what about retailers? I also notice that retailers are increasingly treating trade shows as buying shows, prioritizing time with existing suppliers to discuss things like buying more inventory and stock balancing. But buying and stock balancing are supposed to be the daily, ongoing work of being a merchant. Buying and stock balancing can be done over email, the phone, or a Zoom call, and should be looked at weekly.

On the other hand, there are a lot of things to be done at trade shows that cannot be done over the phone or in Zoom meetings or using email. So what are these things?

Before a retailer gets to the trade show, they should take time to review their merchandising strategy. Analyze their numbers to see what's selling and what's not, analyze competitors and customer feedback to understand what they’re not offering that they could be. Thinking about how they can differentiate their business from their competitors. If every retailer is selling the same or incredibly similar product mixes, then the only thing they end up competing on is price, and that’s a dead-end game, particularly in the luxury verticals I work in most frequently. Retailers often think they're competing on service, but good service is a minimum standard necessary to compete. Assuming that their service is good, what  are they competing on? Are they offering products that nobody else offers? Are they offering experiences that nobody else offers? How do they differentiate? These are the things retail buyers should be thinking about before they ever get to a trade show, because supplier partners should be an important part of that equation. Thinking about this ahead of time allows trade show shoppers to focus on those questions when they are at the show.

On the show floor, it's time to explore and say, “I have these needs. Maybe it’s a bulleted list of five things the buyer would like to accomplish that differentiate their business from both the individual product and overall product experience standpoints. This approach compels a buyer to explore a trade show in a different way, not for specific products they like, or which are similar to things they already carry, but for product experiences help them create better, differentiated experiences for their customers. Retailers will look at the show floor differently if they approach trade shows that way.

The other thing retailers should do at trade shows is learn about what's going on in the industry. The smartest merchants are asking everyone — whether exhibitors or retail peers or consultants — asking everyone, “What's going on? What's going on in your market? What's going on with your customers? What do you see that you think is unusual? What do you see that's concerning?” A trade show gathers an entire community of experts in one place, and the smartest retailers mine that environment for insight.

Another thing retailers should do at trade shows is ask a lot of why. Figure out who the producers are that do a good job of offering something new and different, who really listen to end consumers. Even if those products are not something retailers think would work in their store or market, they should pay attention, and take the opportunity to ask, “Why? Why did you decide to offer this at this time? Why are you the only ones offering this? What are you thinking about this product or this product category? What are you seeing that made you think this product or product category was needed?”

Perhaps the supplier won’t have a good answer because either the salesperson doesn't know or the company is just making things that are interesting to them. But some of them will offer useful insight about why a particular product is being offered, and retailers can learn from that. So asking why about new products is important.

Trade shows provide the opportunity for meaningful comparisons between brands, and retailers should use that concentrated supplier environment to gather information for comparative analysis.

This is the opportunity to ask suppliers about their trade policies, service approach, terms, and stock balancing. Do they support advertising? Do they participate in events? The answers to these questions enable retailers to ask themselves, “Are there opportunities to do a better job than the suppliers I'm working with right now? Am I already engaged in the best possible relationships?” The best possible relationship isn't as simple as the best price or the best stock balancing plan. The best possible relationship is the relationship that gives a retailer the greatest return on investment for their merchandising purchases, along with the most frictionless buying experience, because the cost of doing business varies from supplier to supplier. Trade shows are a great time to explore those things.

The last thing to think about for retailers shopping trade shows to consider, particularly for my readers in the jewelry industry, relates to the number of suppliers you work with. Abe Sherman, CEO and Founder of Buyers Intelligence Group (BIG), a jewelry industry supply chain analytics service, reports the average jewelry retailer has 200 suppliers. Now, they may not deal consistently with all 200 of them, but 200 suppliers is a lot of suppliers.

The number of suppliers a retailer buys from plays a direct role in overall merchandising effectiveness. More suppliers increases the cost of merchandising and decreases the ability to be important to suppliers. Trade shows are an opportunity to review the supplier mix, have conversations with existing suppliers about how they can work together to improve merchandising strategies, or identify opportunities to work with different suppliers that might check more of the boxes of what is important to the retailer.

If a retailer has three or four bread and butter suppliers that provide them with generic merchandising or generic products, and then has a dozen or so suppliers that provide them with differentiated goods not carried by their competitors, that's an interesting mix. If instead they have a dozen or so suppliers that are providing them with generic merchandise, and very few suppliers that provide them with differentiation, that’s not helping their business.

Approaching trade shows strategically can assist retailers in reducing their overall cost of merchandising and, ideally, increasing their value to some of those suppliers.

Using trade shows to improve differentiation, merchandise balance, cost of merchandising, and reshape and manage supplier relationships for the best possible merchandising strategy is a valuable way to spend time at trade shows. Save things like stock balancing and filling holes in inventory for the day-to-day work of merchandising. Trade shows are not about the day-to-day work of merchandising. Trade shows are about the once or twice per year work of strategy.

“Being able to do something online that you can’t do in any other way is important . . . That’s because the web is a pain to use today! We’ve all experienced the modem hangups and the browsers crash — there are all sorts of inconveniences: websites are slow, modem speeds are slow. So if you’re going to get people to use a website in today’s environment, you have to offer them overwhelming compensation for this primitive infant technology. And I would claim that that compensation must be so strong that it’s basically the same as saying, you can only do things online today that simply can’t be done any other way.”  Jeff Bezos

Website Innovation Goes Beyond the Technology

This quote is from an interview Jeff Bezos did in 1998. I remember reading it at the time and trying to wrap my mind around how I could take advantage of the internet in the business I was then running. It seemed clear to me in 1998 that even though we could use the internet to take orders and ship goods (the business was a jewelry industry distributor), using the internet as a simple replacement for phone or fax orders was not going to take sufficient advantage of the emerging technology. Back then, we didn’t even have the computer systems necessary to facilitate significant use of the internet. We didn’t have fast bandwidth to the building. We didn’t have employees who could type fast enough (or in some cases spell well enough) to manage online orders in the absolutely superb way they handled phone orders. We needed all the building blocks and had to build them fast.

So much has changed since then. Today, 70% of internet use takes place on a pocket-sized device with 4G or 5G. Still . . . if you take away the modems and terribly slow internet speeds of 1998, what Jeff Bezos said back then is still highly relevant: Every website must present a compelling reason to use it.  And yet, most businesses in 2021 are still not providing a meaningful, differentiated, online experience. That’s what website innovation is all about.

In 1964, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” Back then, he was focused on the communication medium of television, and how television was changing not only the way households received information, but the culture itself. But he could have easily been speaking about every communication revolution since then: cable tv, digital distribution of music, video games, then online games, social media, the internet. Each new form of communication brought with it new opportunities for communication, new ways of achieving objectives, and new cultural implications.

Business websites are also a communication medium, capable of changing the way customers interact with, experience, and feel about a business. But instead of using all that potential, most business owners have attended to only the most superficial aspects of offering a website.

• The standard page format of websites has barely changed since 1999: Home, About, Services, Contact, Shop. . . maybe News.
• Many retail websites feature pictures and in-store videos to show the website visitor what it would look like if they paid a physical visit. Some go so far as to spend tens of thousands of dollars producing virtual tours, à la real estate agent home videos.
• Product selection on retail websites is often limited to images and iframes provided by suppliers, or which come as part of an industry platform environment.
• B2B websites are even further behind, failing to put full product offerings online or offer the specific services (and price levels) their customers expect to access when meeting up at a trade show or picking up the phone.

Website visitors do not expect the website to replicate your store, are not motivated by seeing all the same products on your website that they find on every other website, and they certainly do not want to purchase your building. Much of what businesses are doing with their websites is missing the point — and the potential — entirely.

That's because most of the work of creating an effective business website isn’t about building the website at all. Effective websites are borne out of the work that comes before they are built.

The Pandemic Effect

Business as we know it has changed forever. Online shopping and buying trends that were happening prior to the pandemic have been dramatically accelerated – economists and social scientists have estimated that we experienced five years of technological evolution in the eight-month period of March - October of 2020. When physical restrictions are lifted, we will not go back to the old ways of working, shopping, buying, interacting with brands, collaborating with known suppliers, or finding new suppliers.

In many ways, this is excellent news. By 2019, most businesses had become mired in price competition. Too much corporate energy was being focused on driving prices down to satisfy price sensitive B2B and B2C customers. But chasing prices is a zero-sum game, forcing companies to offshore work, lay off employees, pile more work on the employees they have left, and ultimately, reduce quality.

Price sensitivity is not going away, but there is another truth here to which most business owners pay insufficient attention: You don’t need all the customers. You just need the right customers. Your value offering can be . . . must be . . . about more than price. Click to Tweet And your website, which will remain a central part of your communications strategy from this point forward, must communicate your value offering in more than just words. Your website must communicate your value offering through experience and benefits.

The Cost of Pricing

Ah, now you're thinking, "But price does matter! People bring up pricing all the time!" Sure they do. So let's break that down. When does price matter most? Two scenarios come to mind:

• Price matters when selling to highly price-sensitive consumers.
• Price matters when there is no other point of differentiation between products.

If you are a grocer in a food desert, God bless you and this article probably is not for you. For everyone else, if you are feeling the squeeze of price competition, it is probably because you have not done the work to differentiate your business from your competitors. Sure, there will always be customers (or potential customers) who complain your price is too high. But if you peer beneath the surface, you will quickly realize that those customers are not your ideal customers. Unless you are interested in competing solely on the basis of price, and are prepared to do all the operational improvements necessary to still make a profit while selling at the lowest price, you shouldn't be competing on price at all.

Doing the Work of Website Innovation

You can't produce a website that delivers an ideal experience to your target customer if you haven't defined your strategy. You must be able to articulate who you are, what you do that makes you different, and why you matter to your target customer. It is a big topic, but for a quick overview of what’s involved, here is a 17-minute podcast and transcript.

How you apply your business strategy to website innovation should ultimately be as unique as your strategy itself. Let’s look at a few examples to illustrate the potential.

An Online Retailer’s Website Innovation

This example involves a jewelry designer who sells to both boutiques (B2B) and consumers (B2C). Her product is fine jewelry, so it's expensive. She produces two collections for boutique distribution, for which she stocks small inventories and has the capability to produce reorders quickly. For consumer direct sales she only offers one-of-a-kind and custom. A big part of her brand value is her aesthetic – people come to her for her design. But her customers return because of her commitment to developing and nurturing relationships, and because she has an uncanny ability to help her customers articulate their ideas and desires and then realize those ideas in physical jewelry form. Finally, this designer has the exquisite ability to help a customer give herself permission to spend money on herself.

A Shopify style, put-a-product-in-the-cart-and-ship-it website will never be able to deliver on this value proposition.

To start, her website needed both a consumer front end and a gated B2B back end.

One-of-a-kind products that are ready to ship can be ordered as is or can be adjusted according to the client’s wishes. From within those product listings, it is easy to book a quick video chat or send an email or text message.

The collections available only through boutiques are also available for browsing, with easy links and directions to the retailers that carry them. She uses these pages to explain why she makes some products available only through retailers, and why she thinks it is important to protect and buffer her retail partners. This transparency builds trust and respect for her business principles.

All her product pages are peppered with links to articles with images and commentary about what she is creating and why. This invites her website visitors into her design process in a way that is unique to an online experience. When a customer visits the physical shop, she can experience the design process in a way that is intimately about herself. Visitors to the website can experience the design process in a way that is more intimately about the designer. Both are excellent experiences, and each is designed to work most effectively relative to the benefits and drawbacks of its respective channel.

The site pays extensive attention to the experience of creating custom design, with obvious and easy options to launch or schedule a phone or video call throughout the site. She toyed initially with trying to figure out how to create a ring builder, a website convention showing all the possible components and iterations of a design. But she ultimately decided against it, because dragging a graphic around to make a new graphic could not possibly replicate the rich experience of letting a talented designer guide one through the creative process.

Her B2B clients can log in to a secure back end, where they can see their negotiated prices and order products. They can place a purchase order or credit card order immediately, or schedule or launch a video or phone call to speak with the designer. B2B clients can also see past orders, track order progress, and see shipping details.

This website does not require expensive software or management. The technology is fairly basic. Superficially it may even seem like a lot of other websites. But by approaching her website through the lens of her strategy and value offering, this designer went beyond setting up a website and deep into website innovation.

Website Innovation for B2B

Let’s look at the website of a company that distributes instrument and music supplies to music stores and schools. They manufacture some of their supplies at their northern European production facility and distribute thousands of supplies from other manufacturers. Not only are they faced with a shrinking market, but their suppliers can also take advantage of the same internet technology to cut them out as the middleman.

To shake themselves out of survival mode and actually start growing again, they did a strategic overhaul in the years before Covid-19 came calling. During that process, they recommitted to the idea that their deep knowledge in all things music supplies was just as important as the products they sold. They decided to stop worrying about how much cheaper their clients could find things on Amazon, eBay, CDiscount, and Otto, and instead focus on how much their customers trusted them to not only sell the best products, but to help them select the right products.

They knew all their products had to be available for shopping and comparison, and that their business systems had to be upgraded to support that. Their systems overhaul made it possible to manage all their products in only one system and make those products sellable both through their traditional office support and on the website without any extra administration. The systems update also made it possible to show each customer their negotiated prices automatically and made it easy for customers to check on order history and statuses.

Implementing an Inventory Control System

But the big work of website innovation involved answering these questions:

• What are the things we already do really well – the things that gained us trust and respect from our customers?
• When we update our website, how might a website underperform on those important things due to the insufficiencies of a website compared to a phone call or a meeting?
• What can our website do to mitigate those shortcomings and offer something new and better, ideally in ways that a phone call or meeting could not do?

The answers to these questions clarified that their website needed to provide all the information, training, recommendations, and knowledge that their customer service team had been providing all along. The solution was to create a wiki-like information architecture using tagging and categories to make it easy and intuitive for customers to learn about any product, find other products like it, compare products, and do deep-dives into product features, functions, and benefits.

Because so many of their clients are music teachers, they had always offered proforma quotes and provided an extensive form library to assist teachers with budget requests. They turned these forms into an on-demand, easy-to-use, interactive, system. They are currently in the process of refining that system so they can more closely collaborate with individual schools relative to budgets for music supplies.

The website also makes it easy to jump on a phone or video consult, which blurs the line between online and in-real-life interactions, builds trust, and increases close rates. For this company, website innovation was about making sure the online experience was the best possible experience of their company by mitigating the downsides of the channel and playing up its potential.

What Will Your Website Innovation Involve?

You, too, can use your website as a strategic extension of your brand value. Customers are not looking for thousands of products on one site, without curation or context. Sure, they want to be able to buy things, but it is easier than ever to find things and buy them. In fact, consumers are currently overwhelmed by choice, much of it meaningless. 

No, if you want to stand out online, you must identify your target audience and do the brand-relevant things that matter to them (or that will appeal to the right subset of new visitors). The technology is available, and it is affordable. What is generally missing is thoughtful analysis, planning, and imagination. Once you do that work, new answers will occur to you that simply had not occurred before.

So stop. Before you jump into Wix (or Weebly, or Square, or Shopify) and start dragging and dropping your way to a same-as-everyone-else website, do the work. The thinking work of website innovation.

If you want to stand out online, you must identify your target audience and do the brand-relevant things that matter to them. Anything less is just a waste of website space. Click to Tweet

I’m not a consumer jewelry blogger, but this is something I wish every consumer jewelry buyer would know. It’s about how (great it is) to buy designer jewelry.

When you buy designer jewelry, your jewelry has a back story

Nearly every piece of jewelry I own came from a designer. As I write this blog, I am wearing raw diamond floret earrings and a raw diamond tennis bracelet from Todd Reed, a ring from Bree Richey on my left hand, a ring from Elizabeth Garvin and another from Jennifer Dawes on my right hand. I have lovely little button earrings from Robin and Remy Rotenier. I nearly always wear a bracelet from Walt Adler and another from a craftsman in Mexico whose name I have long forgotten but whose face I will always remember. My favorite brooch is a mokume-gane gem from Jim Binnion and Steve Midgett (yep! both of them).  Someday I will own a heart pendant from Rhyme & Reason. Something from Mark Schneider’s color collection. A mother's cuff from Erica Courtney. A Padparadscha anything from Omi Prive. Anything from Suzy Landa (preferably green or purple), hoop earrings from Pamela Froman, something nouveau vintage from Just Jules, Diana Widman’s Night Sky pendant, and a piece from ZAIKEN’s Throwing Stones collection.  (I have not received compensation from any of these designers for mention in this blog).

What don’t I own? A single white diamond ring. No diamond studs. I don’t own any Cartier or Tiffanys. I don't buy jewelry for the sparkle, the status, the vault value, or even the fashion. I love the sculptural quality of jewelry, the gemstones (all of them), the art. In this way, I am representative of the type of women who buy designer jewelry – or women who would buy designer jewelry if they knew what was available to them. There are many of us.

'Art' and 'Decorations' are Different Buying Experiences

Buying designer jewelry is not, should not be, like buying generic jewelry. What is generic jewelry? Any piece of fine jewelry that was designed for mass appeal. Does saying it’s generic mean it’s not beautiful? Not at all. I can see the beauty in a perfectly manicured lawn, even if it is similar to the other perfectly manicured lawns down the same stretch of manicured road. I just don’t want that for my own yard. My yard was designed, layer upon delicious layer, to make a statement (entirely different blog here – but you get my point). Does this make me a better customer or a more desirable customer for jewelry? Not at all. But it does make me - and women like me - a different kind of customer, and one that is not currently very well served.

Buying designer jewelry is about buying art you get to wear. What do you do when you buy art? You look for something that speaks to you. You look for something that pulls a feeling out of you that you weren’t feeling before you looked at it. You look for art that you know you’ll be happy to sit and stare at for hours and years on end. You don’t buy art to match the paint and furniture in the room – for the right piece of art you design the room around it. Good art grows old with you.

Great art doesn’t have to be expensive. Would I be giddy with excitement to own an original Rothco? Absolutely. But there is a painting in my living room painted by an artist named James R Gros. He is not famous and the painting cost me less than $200. But it’s one of the most expressive pieces I own. I never get tired of studying it, and everyone who visits our home at some point wants to talk about it.

Too many people do not know the joy of seeking and acquiring art – which is not a money thing, it’s an awareness thing. You can teach a child to buy meaningful art on her allowance.

So when I look for jewelry, I want it to have artistic merit. I want it to have been conceived of and created as part of a thought process about beauty, and craftsmanship, and precious materials. I want to know that whenever I wear it, I will see it, and when I see it, it will mean something to me.

That’s the first thing I wish every consumer knew about designer jewelry. That it’s buying art. When you take a person by the hand and show them the sheer delight and wonder of buying art, the experience can be transformative. I want consumers to have that experience with designer jewelry.

There's Another Opportunity Beyond Custom

 The other thing I wish consumers knew about buying designer jewelry is the difference between buying custom/bespoke and buying a designer commission. If a consumer has an idea for a piece of jewelry he wants to make, and he primarily needs a pair of hands to help him execute it; or if he wants a design that is very traditional but using some of his own elements, that’s what I refer to as custom or bespoke. There's no criticism in this – it's an essential service and can be a terrific experience. But that’s not the same as buying designer commissioned jewelry.

Just as you wouldn’t go to Klimt, hand him a photograph, and tell him to paint your portrait precisely as seen in the photo, I personally wouldn’t go to a jewelry designer and tell him what to make. A big part of the value of buying jewelry from a designer is the designer’s point of view. It's not that the customer has no input. Most designers who will do individual pieces have a discussion or series of discussions with the client first. They talk about gemstones, which ones the client likes most, and why. They ask about how the client wears jewelry, why they wear it, and how it makes them feel. As a client myself, I have loved those conversations. But once you find a jewelry designer who clearly has beautiful images in his head and the ability to turn those ideas into real objects, much of the joy in wearing the finished piece is turning the designer loose and seeing how that designer transforms your conversations about intangible things into a physical work of art.

Of course, not everyone who calls himself a designer is actually a designer. There is ample room for argument here, but generally someone who is truly a designer will have a clear point of view, a body of work that expresses that point of view, and a recognizable evolution in their thought process over time.

I have this imaginary scene in my head where a consumer walks into ABC Jewelry Store with her grandmother’s rings and says, “I’d like to turn these diamonds and rubies into something I can wear and love.” And the jeweler, who is very talented at the bench, asks “Do you know what you want?” The consumer says, “No, I really don’t, but I appreciate beauty, and I want something that is a bit unusual but which will keep me visually engaged for the next 30 years.”

And the jeweler thinks, “I’m really good at making jewelry – the best – but I don’t have an artistic point of view and what I make is pretty traditional looking. Since this consumer doesn’t want to direct this effort and she wants something different, perhaps I’ll teach her how to buy art!” Then he says to his new customer, “Let’s have some fun. I’m going to introduce you to some different types of designer jewelry – designers who will also do commission work. We’re going to see what you like and learn a bit together. Then, let’s pick someone for you to work with, and let them create a piece of art just for you, something that you will always treasure and be proud of.”

Shoot, I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Is this experience for everyone? Of course not. But for some, the right guidance from the beginning would turn buying designer jewelry into an obsession for them, something to look forward to once a year, or once every few years.

So these are the things I wish consumers knew. I wish more people were able to have the ultimate experience of buying designer jewelry. Because my new ring designed by Jennifer Dawes just arrived today. I’m utterly conscious that I'm wearing it. It brought tears to my eyes when I opened it. And I know that if more consumers felt like I do right now after acquiring a new piece of jewelry, they’d want fine jewelry more often.

Nobody walks into a Walmart and thinks she is in Target. She may be looking for the same brand of paper towel or hair color, but she knows which mass merchant's store she's in the second those sliding doors glide open. You might think this is about layout and lighting (and it is), but mostly it's about Merchandise Point of View.

If you were blindfolded and led into a Yonkers, deep between the clothing racks, once you took off the blindfold you may not know immediately where you were, but you would definitely know that you weren't in Neiman Marcus.  The two department stores have a very different Merchandise Point of View.

Both Radio Shack and Best Buy sell computer cables, but despite certain product similarities, the Merchandise Point of View is decidedly different.

Behind every successful retailer is a clearly defined Merchandise Point of View. Struggling retailers may struggle for many reasons, but nearly all of them have failed to define their Merchandising Point of View.

So what is a Merchandising Point of View?

Your Merchandising Point of View is your declaration of identity to the world of consumers, it is what your store is all about, it screams come in if you like these things and move along if you value those other things because that's just not what we're into here. A Merchandising Point of View both includes and excludes - because you don't need every customer to be successful. You just need the right customers.

The Merchandising Point of View often starts with what the owner of the retail store loves and values, but if it doesn't expand quickly to determine which customers those things matter to and whether or not there are enough of those customers, the  Merchandise Point of View is not sustainable.

Strong merchants (retailers) define their best customers - they know what their customers wear, how their customers spend their time, how their customers spend their money, how they align themselves within society, and what matters to them. Strong retailers know how to keep their customers engaged, and they do this with many elements, including excellent sales staff, desirable environment, promotion and marketing. But the most powerful way to keep customers engaged is to keep bringing them new and interesting products that appeal to them. The best way to do this is through a crystal clear Merchandise Point of View.

So how do you develop a Merchandise Point of View? You ask and answer these questions:

1. Which customers do we want?
2. Which types of products matter to the customers we want?
3. How do I want my customers to feel when they walk into my store?
4. Which adjectives do I want customers to associate with my store?
5. What is the unique story or experience of our store, and how do we express it - through words, colors, lighting, communications, customer relationships, design features . . .

Once you ask and answer those questions, you can select merchandise that not only fits with but also advances your store's unique story. This marriage of merchandise, experience, and physical (or graphical) space is the Merchandise Point of View, and like all marriages, it requires constant nurturing and attention to blossom and to be sustained.

What's your Merchandise Point of View? If you can't answer this question, it's time to get cracking! The profession of retailing changes daily, and you can't afford to get even one step behind.

Directing the creation of an advertisement, web page, or direct mail promotion can cause the most stalwart small business owner to develop indigestion. As challenging as it may be to determine where, when and how much to promote, that effort pales in comparison to designing or directing the design of the promotion.

The most common complaint of business owners is that the graphic designer or copywriter does not fully understand the product or service or cannot convey the message in a meaningful way to the prospective customers. This problem is complicated by the fact that most business owners are not trained art directors or advertising designers. Soon the designer begins grumbling about insufficient design direction and the business owner begins grumbling about mounting costs and missed deadlines.

Sometimes the business owner decides to just do it herself.  But when an amateur positions herself in front of a blank screen to design a page or write compelling copy, the result is like Novocain to the brain. So many decisions must be made, including colors, shapes, positions, photographs, fonts, headlines, and body copy. Some small business owners decide not to advertise rather than put an unflattering promotion before the public.

Promotional design does not have to be so difficult. The problem with most efforts is that the design process is the middle of an effort that has a clear beginning – a beginning most business owners do not understand or complete. This is the equivalent of building the first floor of a house before digging the basement and pouring the foundation. Advertising and promotional dollars are generally best spent promoting a brand or a business over single product promotions. The most important thing a business owner can do to ensure quality promotions is to develop descriptions for the following eight characteristics:

1. Competitive environment. This important overview identifies the competition and discusses how your business differentiates itself from its competitors, including what competitive advantage you enjoy and plan to exploit.

2. Target audience. A detailed description of the most likely customers for the product or service being offered. This should include information regarding who the prospects are currently purchasing from and all customer needs, habits, and behaviors that must be satisfied.

3. Core values. When a business understands the values it stands for it can consistently convey those values through copy, graphics, and service policies. Much as mature individuals prioritize and demonstrate consistency of behavior based on sound value systems, business benefits from the same consistency.

4. Most important message. Based on a sound understanding of the core values, distill those values into a statement that conveys the reality of the business and explains why the business exists.

5. Brand personality. Very few people beyond the age of eight establish meaningful relationships with objects, and a business is an object. If your business were a person, who would that person be? Describe that person as if they were a character in a novel. Hint: it's not necessarily you.

6. Voice, tone and image. Building on the work in #5, decide how this person speaks, what types of words they use, and what type of image they convey to others. The work of #5 and #6 is the process of anthropomorphizing your brand.

7. Reasons to act or believe. This is the list of emotional and rational reasons for prospective customers to act on or believe in your offer. For example, a rational reason to buy a new dress is because I need a new dress for my office party. An emotional reason to buy a new dress is because it will make me look beautiful. Customers require both rational and emotional reasons to act.

8. Sensory and emotional triggers. Though this section may seem silly, it is both a great deal of fun and a big help to the person designing and writing your promotion. Consider the colors, textures, aromas, sounds, visual imagery, and tastes you would like customers to associate with your offer. Once you have developed a cogent list, make sure the elements work harmoniously together. For instance, does your offering taste more like grape juice or single malt scotch? If single malt scotch is the answer, but the smell you associate it with is cotton candy, does that make sense?

Once these eight issues have been addressed, all that remains for each subsequent promotion is to draft a succinct statement about what the promotion is expected to achieve. This statement should include goals regarding customer perception, sales, and lead generation.

From a promotional design standpoint, the process of developing these eight elements will make the job of developing logos, selecting headlines, writing meaningful copy, and choosing colors and fonts significantly easier for whoever designs the advertising promotion. From a customer standpoint, the resulting consistency will contribute to an enhanced understanding of your brand that will lead to repeat business and customer loyalty.

(c) 2008. Andrea M. Hill

When Will We Start Treating Lab-Grown Diamonds Like a Product Instead of Like an Intruder?

The jewelry industry continues to take polarized positions on lab-grown. It seems like every time we've grown past this debate, another social media group comes to virtual blows over the topic. I'm not surprised - it was the same conversation when Chatham first started offering lab-grown emeralds and rubies. But it's not useful. Not to us, not to our customers.

You don't see grocery stories saying, "we won't carry organic/gluten-free/paleo/pick-a-theme" groceries because they interfere with our other grocery sales. They evaluate consumer interest and potential demand, and offer choices. Fashion has done this with alternative fabrics. Car companies had a harder time doing it with alternative fuels, but that's largely because of the expense of tooling up to produce new equipment coupled with wanting government assistance to do so.

When it comes to lab-grown diamonds, we get all tied up in our shoestrings with our own preferences, fears, and perceptions, and in the process lose sight of the customers.

In the most recent social media post and following thread, I saw all the same black-or-white arguments. Diamond mining concerns are doing great! So much change! Mined diamonds are terrible, so much abuse. Lab-grown diamonds are not ecologically friendly - so much electricity! Lab-grown diamond producers are abusive, they're all in (pick a country). None of these tropes serve the industry, our businesses, or our customers. But if we're going to have honest conversations and learn from each other, we need to get comfortable with shades of gray - because that's all there are right now.

Shades of Gray Shadow Both Mined and Lab-Grown
The social and ecological issues are very challenging to sort. Tens of millions of artisanal miners around the world rely on mining to feed their families. Anything we do in the mining sector must be done not only with regard for their health and safety while mining — but also with regard to their health if they cannot mine. In that regard, the pandemic is causing horrific food insecurity around the world.

Want to help support artisanal miners suffering from food security caused by the pandemic?

On the other hand, diamonds do not "do good" yet. Not by a long shot. They are "doing better," and better is a good direction to go in. So we must keep applying pressure on the mined diamond front.

But let's never demean progress. The natural diamond sector was pretty bad for a long time, they've made progress, and if we treat progress as an all-or-nothing proposition, it tends to stop. We don't want that.

So, are lab-grown diamonds a more or less ethical solution? Like natural diamonds, it all depends. If you're talking about factories abusing their labor, then no. But just because a factory is in China doesn't mean it's abusive. I spend a lot of time in manufacturing facilities around the world, and I've seen rotten treatment of employees everywhere — including in the United States — and excellent treatment of employees everywhere — including in China.

Are lab-grown diamonds more or less ecologically sound? Again, it depends. I know of growers working to use the most responsible power generation possible, and some that don't care about that at all. Until lab-grown producers start disclosing some of those details, it's just impossible to know.

But, if you have a customer who has a really hard time with the concept of digging and blowing holes in the earth, then lab-grown may be the flavor of "responsible" she's looking for. I don't agree with making green statements that can't be validated, but I'm uncomfortable with blanket statements that lab-grown producers are all disruptable too.

Which Holds Its Value Better (Hint: It's a Red Herring)

Do lab-grown diamonds hold their value for the future? That's a laugh — a discussion we shouldn't even be having. Not because lab-grown will or won't hold their value for the future — nobody knows that yet! It's a laugh, because mined diamonds don't hold their value. We should never treat diamonds of any sort as if they are a financial instrument. A very small number of collectors in the ultra-rare mined color diamond sector do use diamonds as a financial investment, but that's it. We should never make any promises or inferences to customers about the future value of a diamond.

Should you Sell Lab-Grown Diamonds?

So - should you or should you not sell lab-grown? Well, you could base that on your own preferences, fears, and biases, but I'll suggest that's a terrible business approach. You should make every business decision based on your businesses core values (which are different than biases), and on the desires and interests of your customers. It won't be the same answer for everyone, nor should it be. If analyze this question with intellectual rigor, self-awareness, and deep interest in your customers, you'll have the right answer - and nobody else can tell you otherwise.

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It was all over the news this month - Verizon Communications will buy AOL, Inc. in a $4.4 billion deal. Yes, this is big news for investors and Verizon competitors, but does it matter to you? It certainly does, and here's why.

Content Content Content (but this isn't the main reason)

The mobile market, dominated by Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, is fighting harder and harder for market share now that nearly everyone who wants a smartphone has acquired one. So how do they grow? They grow by competing in two areas: content and advertising. And the reason that content and advertising matter to the big mobile companies is that content and advertising matter to consumers. In 2013 (the last time we have numbers for this statistic), less than 35% of smartphone users reported they used their phones to make phone calls. You can see why that matters to the big mobile companies. But it also matters to you. Because what are they doing on their phones? They are accessing content.

AOL may have fallen off your radar, but one of the reasons they matter to Verizon is that they own some big content providers, like Huffington Post and TechCrunch. If Verizon is willing to spend $4.4 billion to acquire a company that looks like a has-been, you can bet your lunch money that they've studied this acquisition and decided it makes sense to them. They are betting that consumer hunger for content will only continue to grow. Sure, they could be wrong, but the folks at Verizon have been very smart so far, making less mistakes than your average bear. So tuck this in your idea bank: content matters now and it will matter more in the future. Ask yourself how you can participate in the content marketplace in the years to come.

Advertising Relevance

Another thing that AOL has and Verizon wants is the ability to sell and serve ads. We all know why selling ads matters. But what about serving ads? 

Think about this: The last time you considered buying advertising for your business, did you think about going to Verizon? Next time, you should. AOL earned nearly $1 billion last year from advertising revenues on sites that it owns, and another $856 million selling advertising for third party sites. That's a lot of consumer eyeballs. Even more important, the technology that AOL has developed for selling and delivering ads is very advanced, enabling them to slice and dice and target consumers better than most other advertising companies. Because of AOL's innovations, using technology to manage advertising is not only making targeting better, it's lowering the cost of advertising overall. Expensive human management has been replaced by algorithms that can decide in a split-second which ads to show each time a web page loads. 

Now that you're competing with businesses all over the world (and you have been, for much of this past decade), you can't just sit around and wait for consumers to remember you or to find out about you. You must advertise. But today's consumers are busy and distracted and they have no patience with irrelevance. You can get their attention though, if you catch the right people at the right time with the right message. Verizon is betting big that AOL's advertising technology is worth a lot of money. You should be betting that too. If you're not doing so already, start thinking about how your business can stretch its advertising wings and use the internet to reach more relevant consumers on their phones and tablets. 

Pay Attention to Video

Verizon believes that video will be one of the primary reasons people use smartphones in the years to come (AT&T believes it too). Verizon has already developed plans to launch a video service specifically geared to mobile devices. Enter AOL, which has created some nifty tools for delivering video advertisements. Their technology makes it easier for ad agencies and brands to enter the video advertising space.  Why does this matter to you? The consumer appetite for video seems to have no limit. If you're not already looking at ways to use video for your advertising, it's time to start. The tools to shoot and edit video are getting less expensive all the time, but it takes experience and skill to pull off video offerings that appeal to consumers.

When a solid company like Verizon, with deep pockets and lots of research staff, decides to invest in online advertising delivery, video, and other content, we need to pay attention. They have done the analysis and decided that mobile content is where all the consumers are going to be in the next few years. If they're right, then small business needs to be there too.

Frustrated much? You have 4,824 Fans for your Facebook Page, but only 15-20 of them ever see your posts. Why does this happen?

It's the Facebook News Algorithm

Facebook looks at every single thing posted as an object. Status updates, photos, video links, events - every post type is just an object to Facebook. And Facebook analyzes each object to see how much interaction it gets (likes, comments, shares). If the objects you share on your Facebook page get lots of likes, comments, and shares, then your overall ranking will be higher. If your rank is high, Facebook will show your posts to more people. Here is the information you need to get better visibility.

 Any time you login to your Facebook news feed, there could be 1,500 new stories for you to view. So Facebook has to decide which ones show up, and they created a system they call the Facebook News Algorithm to manage that. The specific workings of the algorithm are a huge secret, and it changes all the time (it used to be called EdgeRank, but if you use that term today you'll out yourself as oh-so-out-of-touch). We do know some of the scoring elements the algorithm uses though, including the following:

Affinity

Do you have some friends or fans that constantly respond to you, share your posts, and like everything you publish? Those friends and fans help you have a high affinity score. The more high-affinity scoring friends you have, the higher your Affinity score will be. Here's the catch though - it only works one way. You can't click on other people's content and increase your Affinity score. When you click on their content, you only increase their Affinity score (a nice thing to do, but it doesn't improve the visibility for your own content).

Level of Interaction

 Just like pouring someone a beer takes less energy than mixing them a martini, hitting the like button takes less energy than making a comment. Facebook knows that, so they give you brownie points every time someone gives you a mixed drink. Want to really increase your level of interactin score? Post activities such as contests and events - that's the equivalent of getting a Mojito.

Timeliness

If you share a new meme that nobody has seen before (and which they like enough to comment on or share), the algorithm gives you points for that. That tired old postcard of a woman complaining about no wine-glass-holder on her vaccuum cleaner? Not so much. Just to give you an idea of how Facebook looks at dated information - they call this element decay.

Relationship Settings

You can't really control this one,  but it's in the mix. If someone marks you as a close friend rather than as an acquaintaince in their relationship settings, that improves your Affinity score. If they choose to see all updates from you, rather than just most updates or only important, that works in your favor too.

Post Type Preferences

Some people love seeing photos in their news feed, some prefer reading status updates, and some only like videos. Facebook monitors which type of content people prefer, and then it serves them that type of content. So guess what - if you only post photos, the people who don't respond to your photos ultimately won't see your content!

Spamminess

If users hit hide post or spam on your posts, it hits you in the algorithm. No big surprise there.

Last Actor

The computing power behind the Facebook News Algorithm is so huge that Facebook is literally tracking every single user's last 50 interactions (that's 1.44 billion active users per month as of April 2015), and deciding which content to give them every time they log in. All the elements we've discussed play into this decision,  but one element - recency - has a lot of weight. If you just posted something and a large number of your fans log in, they are far more likely to see it than if you posted hours earlier. But you need to be careful with this. Some people have tried to resolve this issue by posting to Facebook 10 - 15 times per day. While that works on Twitter, it's likely to get you marked as a spammer on Facebook. 

Now What Will You Do?

You're not on Facebook for your health. If you're using Facebook for business, you need to get a return for that energy. Here are a few things to think about every time you post - each of which will help you improve your visibility to the algorithm and get your content in front of more potential customers.

1. Post content that encourages interaction. Questions, games, contests and surveys naturally drive more interaction than statements. Posts with pictures drive more engagement than posts without. Video really drives engagement. Research has demonstrated that readers and viewers love - and share - Infographics. Make sure some of your posts include interactivity drivers.
2. When you share photos they may show up in the feed like little thumbnails. Sometimes that's OK, but sometimes the image is too small to be interesting. Always post a quick title or comment that is interesting enough to make the reader want to click on the photo and open it up.
3. Ask! Ask for shares. It's OK to do. Not everyone will accommodate you, but it never hurts to ask (just don't do so on every post - that's annoying).
4. Share interesting content that comes from somewhere else but which you know will be interesting to your readers. Sharing the right links is interesting and educational for your readers, and gives you a wider range of things to share when you've said everything you can think of (for now) about your business.
5. Post many different kinds of content - photos, videos, statuses, interactive apps - to make sure that each different type of viewer at least gets served some of your posts.
6. Post when your fans are online. Facebook offers a handy little tool for this. If you go to the Insights section of your Facebook page, then select Posts, you'll see a tab that says "When Your Fans are Online." Post two to three times per day, and focus on the high density times.

Several recent studies are practically shouting at the jewelry industry to reevaluate our behavior and prepare for the future. We've relied on Baby Boomers to buy our luxury goods for so long, we've practically forgotten that they would eventually age out of the major acquisition stage of their lives (which, admittedly in the case of the Baby Boomers, was enormous and economy-building).

What are the Studies and What are they Saying?

The first study, by McKinsey & Company (A Multifaceted Future: The Jewelry Industry in 2020), essentially predicted that the jewelry industry would continue to consolidate and would start to mirror the changes in the apparel industry, which means more intense brand focus and a blurring of fine and fashion. Stores with a single strong brand identity and focus will be the clear winners. This points to younger buyers, who are more into the experience of a specific brand than the experience of encountering many high-end brands in one location. The department store jewelry experience will wane and the Todd Reed Studio store in Boulder, the Alexis Bittar Studio  stores in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago, or the Greenlake Jewelry Works experience in Seattle will rise.

The second study, by Unity Marketing and summarized in this article on Rapaport's Diamonds.net, says that we are at at tipping point in branding and marketing. The study asserts that older consumers - long depended upon for their brand-buying habits - have reduced their spending, and that luxury marketers need to adjust their marketing, branding, and channel behaviors to appeal to the younger buyers taking their place.

So what does this mean? Several things.

1. Respect the new consumer. Some things never change. Just as the parents of Baby Boomers were mystified by their children and found them to be disrespectful, responsibility-averse, and entitled, the Baby Boomers are laying the same labels on the next generations. If you're stuck in this rut, dig on out, because the labels are more a product of Baby Boomer age than of younger generation reality.

2. Learn about the new consumer.

1. Millenials are more informed than any prior consumer generation, which means they have done their research before they come to the sale, and they know a lot - perhaps more than most sales people - when they arrive.
2. They care less about social conventions than any prior generation - which means that they don't buy for status. If they want something, it's to satisfy themselves only, which means everything they buy is far more personal. "But wait!" you say. "They run everything by their friends first. Isn't that status seeking?"  Actually, it's not. It's collaboration. This is the most collaborative generation we've ever met, and their opinions matter to one another. They share, borrow, rent, and trade as a way to spread the enjoyment and the wealth.
3. They pride themselves on doing more with less. They search for the right deal, the right product, the right timing, the right experience. This is true in their jobs and it's true in their purchasing behavior. This generation has been labeled entitled, but that's not accurate. They just don't settle.
4. They value experiences. This is the first generation that will blow an entire paycheck on a meal and then live on Ramen for the rest of the month. It's not about the food, it's about the experience, and they don't want to wait until they are retired to have experiences.
5. This generation isn't waiting for luxuries. But their acquisition of luxuries isn't systematic, and it doesn't follow the same life patterns (school, marriage, children, luxury acquisition) as their parents did. If they want something now, they find a way to acquire it now. But see the four points above regarding what motivates them and how they buy it.
6. This one should go without saying, but remember that this generation doesn't perceive any difference between internet marketing and billboards - it's all communications to them. The time to perceive a difference between traditional marketing and new/internet marketing is over.  Similarly, whether a store is online or brick-and-mortar, it's all shopping to them. Sales and marketing channels are forever changed, and you need to be out in front of that.

Now What?

I have a few ideas for you, but first, I want you to go back to the previous section of this article, and read each bullet again. After each bullet, ask yourself, "how does my product offering, my brand, my store look to the new consumer in light of this piece of information?" Try to see it through the new consumer's eyes, because that young person is your next patron.

Now let's start with the basics.

Mobile computing. If your store/brand/offering isn't readily available to the new consumer on her mobile device, there's a good chance she won't see you at all. This next generation of shoppers does most of her computing right on her phone or tablet. If your website doesn't automatically reformat itself to be mobile friendly on any device, this new consumer will quickly dismiss you as out-of-touch and a waste of time.

Your Brand Experience. The new consumer mingles entertainment with shopping. Entertainment can be a variety of things, from educational and informative to interactive. Your store, your website, your social media presence, your radio ads, your magazine ads - all of these methods of communication must present a single, clear brand message that engages the new consumer's interest and emotions.

Unfortunately, there is no pat answer to how to do this. In fact, pat is the antithesis of the new consumer. To define your brand experience, you must dig deep into your identity, purpose, and meaning as a brand. Figure out what it is about you that consumers identify with - and what you want them to identify with. You won't appeal to all consumers, and that's the point. You don't need all the consumers - you just need the right consumers. Figure out who they are, and how to communicate with them, and you will discover which brand experience is resonant. This work can only be done by you. It can be guided by someone who knows how to do such work, but you are essential to it - it can't be provided to you.

Your Sales Organization. The new consumer is coming to the sales cycle late. What does this mean? It means that in the past we were able to guide the consumer through the sales cycle but those days are gone.. Before the internet and the uber-informed new consumer, most pre-purchase research was done in the store, aided by a skilled salesperson who was the expert in the product area. Today, consumers conduct significant research online prior to entering a store. They have already availed themselves of product reviews, user comments, technical reviews, design critiques, and alternative purchase options before they approach your sales organization.

At one time, a salesperson asking the question "How may I help you?" was making a an offer of help that was likely needed. Today those words are simply an annoying form of hello.  The only way to impress the new consumer with your sales organization is to be even more informed than them - and that requires work, and energy, and curiosity.

Your sales organization must have insight, knowledge, and stories that the consumer can't find anywhere else. The help the new consumer wants is not small talk and it's not a pitch - it's genuine assistance, even when that means getting out of their way. To the extent your sales staff is a contiguous, meaningful, seamless part of the overall brand experience, the new consumer will accept and welcome their assistance.

Retail is Evolving

A new retail experience is coming, one that combines the best of ecommerce with the best of bricks-and-mortar. It's the next logical thing. Ecommerce has taught mighty retailers like Amazon more about their customers than any other retailer has ever known about its customers before, and this information has been used brilliantly to tailor offerings, engage visitors, and close sales. We are rapidly approaching a time when consumers don't know retail without ecommerce as one of the options, and along the way consumer expectations of both are going to both evolve and blend.

If you're not heavily engaged in—invested in—ecommerce, you won't be part of witnessing first-hand what it means to serve customers in that way, and you won't have the necessary insights to take your business to the next level . . . whatever that may be. So be sure to include ecommerce as part of your business model now, doing your best to offer your products and services digitally and learning everything you can.

Keep Your Business Fresh

It's always a brand new world, whether we are talking about generational shifts in consumer behaviors, or technology change, or just next season's colors. The stakes may seem particularly high to you right now, as you take steps to ensure your business is not left behind, but in fact, the stakes have always been high. Static businesses do not thrive, and they never have.

The recent studies about changing consumer behavior are a boon to us, because they force us to stop and think about the business we need to be to stay relevant and profitable. Embrace the change! There's more where that came from.

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I've been thinking a lot recently about how hard it is to play the long game in business. It requires several things. Most people lack: Trust in the future, confidence about their choices and patience. The requirement for a long game is true in many areas of your business, but nowhere is it more stark than in the area of creating a meaningful online marketing presence. When social media first hit the scene in 2007 and 2008, we were all struck by the instant-ness of it all.

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I think of an idea. I write it. I publish it. I come up with an idea for a visual. I turn it into a graphic. I post it. Fast, fast, fast. Right? The problem is that the ability to produce and post things quickly has absolutely nothing to do with creating customer awareness or becoming a fixture of their consciousness. That is slow work, tedious work, and it takes a long time to see results.

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Because in today's marketing environment, success isn't measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you. Let me say that again, because what I just described to you is the most basic understanding of search engine optimization or SEO. Success isn't measured by how many messages you can blast out to the public, but by how many meaningful links you can create that will bring a searching public back to you.

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When we talk about telling stories online, when we talk about creating rich content, what we're talking about is all the words and phrases you bake into your website that will help a searching person find a product or a service you offer. And that takes time. Time isn't the only thing. It also requires a strong CMS website. That means content management system, not just eCom. It requires the creation of lots of good content — across articles and products and promotions on your Web site.

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And it requires patience, as you build out that content over time and that content gets turned into links by search engines. But time. Time is the thing most small business owners underestimate. After all, in the past, you could run a radio ad and a few people would come off the street as a result of it. Or you could run a TV ad or a newspaper ad and you could see pretty quickly if there was a response. You can run those same ads today and you might even have a few people respond.

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The problem is that today's consumers are completely distracted by whatever is happening on their smartphone and they're inundated with marketing messages everywhere they look and listen. Also, they aren't shopping around for products like they did in the past. They do their shopping online. And then if they like what they see, they come into a store to buy. And yes, 90 percent of all purchases are still happening in a store. In a recent report on retail, the NRF or National Retail Federation reminded its membership that it's not about "online versus retail" at all.

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It's about retail dependence on online. Today's consumers see online marketing as a seamless part of their retail experience as they search for online products and knowledge and references. And then they seek products out in stores and in-person. And how do those customers find your business, so you can be the store they walk into? Using search. They search for what they seek. They drill into the links that show the most promise. They check out the ratings and the reviews of the seller and the individual products, and then they decide where to go to buy.  The creation of that website content — leading to meaningful links —takes time. The creation of a strong system of references and reviews and ratings, which is what we call social proof, that takes time and patience and more time. But here's the interesting thing. In the first two or three months, it feels like you're doing a lot of work for absolutely no results. Then in the four to six month range, you start to see tiny benefits, but it's hard to trust them because they're small.

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Then if you've been super disciplined and you continue to develop content, despite the fear and frustration at around one year, you really start to see results. They begin to build slowly and then steadily. When I first started my blog in 2006, I had a grand total of three readers and I was related to all three of them. Now, 13 years later, my blog drives thousands of visitors per day to my websites. All those blog posts over all those years serve as links to my online presence. I don't pay for any advertising beyond my blog, because the rich content that I've put on the Internet is all the marketing I need. Of course, 13 years is a long time. You don't have to and you shouldn't have to wait that long to see results. And if you're selling jewelry or other luxury goods, you will need other marketing tools besides a blog. I just use this as an example of the exponential power of rich content.

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What you need to remember is that a year or two is not very much time at all. You also need to remember that this is the way marketing and selling work now. So if you haven't already, you need to commit to a long game of content creation so that a year from now you've already made significant progress. After all, the time is going to go by either way. What do you want to have to show for your business's marketing presence when next year rolls around?

We like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but when it comes to buying, we're just not (oh - and wait until I address reason versus emotions in business decision-making, though that's another article entirely).

Consumers - female and male - buy based on emotion. No matter how many statistics and facts they line up on the way to making a buying decision, that data collection effort tends to  be done in the service of making the decision they want to make. 

But you already know that trust and connection are essential to closing sales. Now make sure that you are also speaking to emotions from the beginning of the process - including the merchandise you choose to offer and the messages you convey to browsers and shoppers - long before the customer lands in the store or the products land in the cart. Be sure you are selling to feelings.

In this month's article for InStore Magazine, I wrote about how the anxiety and disruption of 2020 will influence the shopping emotions of 2021. Read the article to see how the themes of comfort, tradition, and responsibility are the themes to merchandise and market to in the year to come.