Jewelry Marketing Plan – Business Growth Strategies – Part 1
Marketing is buying customers
Marketing your jewelry business is nothing more than buying customers.
That’s it, and the sooner you understand it, the more comfortable you’ll be spending money on everything from advertising to sales training and from public relations to customer relationship management tools.
When you think about it, anything and everything you do to attract a new customer, or to get an existing one to do business with you again, is marketing. And everything you do to achieve any of those goals has an associated cost.
Running an ad in the local newspaper or industry magazine … costs money.
Some companies hire a salesperson and put him on the street. Even if it’s a straight commission guy and you don’t get paid until after the sale is made, you still have the cost of recruiting and training. And even though you don’t pay an upfront salary, in this case, you still pay that commission for every sale you make.
PR … that’s FREE advertising, right? Don’t say that to companies that pay public relations firms or in-house public relations specialists to get that press coverage. Even if you do it entirely yourself, you have to invest time, and we all know that time is money.
No marketing is free
No, there is no free lunch in the world of marketing. If you want new customers or old ones to come back, it’s going to cost you.
You cannot avoid this fact, but you can quantify it. You can find out how much it costs to bring in a new customer and how much it takes to bring existing ones back.
And while most companies can’t tell you what the specific numbers are for these two acquisition costs, anyone with half a brain can see that they should.
How else can you make smart, informed, and wise decisions about marketing your business?
What was your advertising budget last year? What percentage was dedicated to attracting new prospects, clients, clients or patients? How many did you really bring?
The formula
If you spent $ 100,000.00 on advertising last year, but $ 30,000.00 of that was on programs designed to keep existing customers coming back, your new The customer acquisition budget for the year was $ 70,000.00. If you attracted 1,000 new customers on that budget, each of those new customers will cost you $ 70.00.
Whether that is good or bad is relative. It depends on what your average ticket is and what your margins are, and how often and how many times a typical customer returns to shop again. But the important thing is that you now know something fundamental that will help you make marketing investment decisions in the future.
If you run an ad campaign that attracts customers at $ 83.27 each, you know that it is not an effective campaign. It may have been a weak offer or it may have been delivered to the wrong audience. It may have been a poor title, or you may not have bought your media well. But you know you have a problem if you at least missed your average acquisition point cost, and you can look to make changes to improve results.
On the other hand, a campaign that generates customers at $ 64.23 a piece is a success. You spent less than normal to bring them. It’s a gatekeeper and should probably be tried again, assuming everything else is the same, such as the average ticket and the willingness of these new customers to return for future purchases at the typical rate.
The power of testing and monitoring
Keeping track of these numbers also strengthens your negotiating position with the media.
“Look Bob, I know you have a rate sheet, but the truth is, your station is costing me $ 97.30 per customer, while KBS across town brings it in at $ 68.20. If you want me to keep doing business with Me, you’re going to have to get me a price that will generate new customers on my average of $ 70.00 minimum. “
Now Bob can work with you on the price, or not. If you do, your acquisition cost prices stay in line. If not, you can stop doing business with Bob’s station and never lose sleep. It was too expensive for what you get. Move that marketing investment to a place that hits your numbers.
Of course, to figure out any of this, you need to track your results on a regular basis. That means making specific offers and a specific call to action in your marketing efforts. Ask people to come in, mention a specific ad, bring a coupon, call a specific number or extension, or mention a specific code.
Example
We have a client who is testing local radio. You are watching three different radio stations. After a week, you have only received responses from one of the stations. How do you know? Because he made different offers at each station.
You will then change the ads so that offer n. 1, which ran on station “A”, now runs on station “B”. Offer # 2, which was at station “B” will now be at station “C”, and offer at station “C” now goes to station “A”.
If the responses still come from the same station, our client will know that it is the station that is counting the response and can spend more money there, and less or nothing with the “losing” stations. If the responses follow the offer, you will know that you have found a winning offer and that you can replace the losing offers and continue to use all three stations.
Of course, the number of ads running on each station is the same, as are the time slots in which the commercials run, so you’re trying to eliminate variables other than station and offer. This is kind of a simplification of the process, you understand.
Bottom line
The point is, you want to keep a close eye on how hard it is to attract a new customer to your jewelry business. Naturally, the goal is to “buy” them for the least amount possible, and then ethically get as much of them as you can, by repairing them over time.
Not much different from stocks … buy low, sell high. Only when it comes to buying customers can you have much more control over the market.