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Hi, I'm your host Larissa Worstiek. Through this podcast, I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and innovators so they can thrive by doing what they love. I'm passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands and I'm excited to share my passion with you.
This is episode 120 and today I'm going to be sharing some helpful tips for how you can plan your marketing content and just get more organized in general so you're not scrambling at the last minute to get written and visual content that you need to successfully execute your marketing campaigns and reach your target customers. This is actually my own personal recording of a presentation I recently did for the Women's Jewelry Association and if you're just listening to the audio of this, you may want to check out the Joy Joya YouTube channel to actually watch the whole presentation with the accompanying slides which I'll be sharing there. I do want to remind you that if you want to ask me a question that I will potentially answer on a future podcast episode, you can go to JoyJoya.
com. You don't even have to share your name. You can be anonymous.
I love to hear questions from listeners and viewers. Before we get to the episode, as always, I want to share some marketing related news and insights from the past week that caught my attention. I actually saw that Greenlight Digital, which is a digital marketing agency, they conducted a survey about how business owners feel about social media marketing and they said that over 25% of entrepreneurs that they surveyed stated that social media marketing feels more exhausting to them than scaling Mount Everest.
Wow. Do you feel similarly? 17% said they actually dread even thinking about marketing. 19% claimed that social media is an enormous waste of time and 28% said that social media marketing costs more than it's worth.
I was very shocked to hear those numbers. Most entrepreneurs, why do they feel frustrated? I mean, I'm sure I don't have to tell you this. They feel like they're pouring money, time, energy, resources down the drain every time they launch a new marketing campaign and they struggle to produce tangible results that they can really measure and then tie back to their social media marketing.
This agency, Greenlight Digital, believes that business owners can actually reap long-term rewards by combining clear and compelling messages and cultivating true fans. That means instead focusing a lot on engagement, on creating meaningful long-term relationships with customers and remembering that marketing is truly a process that needs to go on for as long as you want to be in business. Vogue Business recently shared a pretty interesting article about print marketing and how, according to them, it's not dead and is actually making a return in a post-pandemic world when it comes to marketing.
Recent privacy changes definitely make it difficult for brands to reach customers in a way they may have before. And because of this, luxury brands are leaning into more traditional forms of analog marketing, like direct mail and branded books. These kind of books and physical items offer a closer, more intimate look at a brand's collections.
It's also a really nice keepsake. It goes along with the whole luxury feel. It's definitely tougher now for brands to stand out on online platforms without investing in paid marketing, and experts really say that direct mail is still a worthy investment for luxury and larger brands, even though it can be expensive to produce.
The goal of this would definitely be to craft special relationships with customers and build loyalty. I do know the jewelry brand Spinelli Kill Cullen was doing this for a period of time. I don't know if they still are.
They were producing a print magazine that was more lifestyle related and less product driven, so it would be interesting to know more about how that worked out for them. I always think it's a cool way to stand out in marketing, but again, it kind of requires a larger budget and a lot of energy to get that content going. And then finally, this is a little less marketing related, but of course, most of you know that the Italian jewelry designer, Elsa Peretti, has died at the age of 80.
She was a really amazing woman. She revolutionized the jewelry industry with her biomorphic designs, and best known for her long standing collaboration with Halston, she actually designed jewelry and perfume bottles. And her first collection for Tiffany in 1974 blew up and women were actually seen shopping for her sterling silver pieces for themselves.
Kind of the beginning of this self purchase movement rather than waiting for men to give them gifts of jewelry. Really amazing woman, so I wanted to take a moment to mention her and honor her on the podcast. If you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can sign up for my email newsletter by visiting joy joya.
com slash sign up and you'll get a digest with the links every time a new episode drops. Okay, let's get to my presentation about planning your marketing content. So in this presentation, I will explain why you should start planning your marketing content if you aren't already.
And I'll teach you how to do it in an accessible, easy, non intimidating way. This is a way that I do with a lot of my clients together. So you'll get my behind the scenes secrets that people pay me money for.
So you guys are really lucky today. And I'll share some of my favorite tools also, many of which are free. So you can start doing this on a very small budget and get up and running today.
A little bit of background about me, Lauren did a good job of introducing me. But again, I run a digital marketing agency based here in Los Angeles. We work exclusively with jewelry brands.
I'm really passionate about helping jewelry entrepreneurs, especially solopreneurs. And as Lauren mentioned, I'm the host of the Joy Joy jewelry marketing podcast and the author of the book Jewelry Marketing Joy. And I love presenting on webinars and virtual conferences.
So this is really exciting for me to be sharing this information with you. So what exactly is content? I think maybe it seems like an obvious question, but I think it's such a general term that people forget all of the different types of content you can be utilizing for your jewelry brand. It's not just social media.
There are a lot of different ways to share and distribute content. And my personal philosophy is the more creative that you can get with it, the more you can get in touch with your customers and the types of content they're consuming, then the better off you'll be to position yourself for success. So some different types of content, of course, Instagram, all the different formats like Stories, Rails, Instagram Lives, Facebook posts, other types of social media posts like maybe you're on TikTok or on Clubhouse, all of these other social media platforms that are available.
Blog posts, style guides, videos like on YouTube, virtual events, whether you're doing that on Zoom, some other platform or Instagram or Facebook Live, podcasts, eBooks, your email marketing campaigns, and even something fun like a quiz to engage your customers and get them excited about your brand. So it's more than just a social media post. There's a lot of different ways that you can be distributing content.
And you need to kind of start thinking about all of these different ways and how you can potentially utilize them for your brand. I really like to try to get jewelry entrepreneurs to shift their mindset about content. So here's a question that I want to pose to you today to let you marinate on this question throughout the presentation.
So what if you stopped thinking of your business as one that sells products? Of course it does. But what if it wasn't exclusively that and started thinking of your business as a brand that shares valuable information, creates meaningful opportunities, even shares a story, communicates some kind of ethos or vision is adding value to the world. So not just about your products, but about the story and the information that you're sharing because those are the things that are really going to attract your target customer.
And content is the vehicle that's going to allow you to achieve those things. So I want you to kind of try to shift your mindset in this way and keep this question in mind as we move forward today. So if you're not sold on content yet, if you're wondering, why should I like invest my time and energy into it? You should definitely know about the benefits of content.
It's a chance to connect with your customers in a way that's not always sales focused and also not always product focused. You know, constantly talking about your product will only get you so far in this industry. As I'm sure you know, there's lots of beautiful stuff out there.
And if your only differentiating factor is the beauty and quality of your product, that can only take you so far. So content gives you a chance to connect with customers in another way. It's an opportunity to share your brand story and your voice to share the story about you, about why you do what you do, about why you make your products, what makes you unique, why do you want to connect with your customers so much.
Also to share more information about your products, obviously, it can help you rank in search engine results. So people finding you through Google search, this is it, especially in jewelry, I see that this is an area that's highly neglected. I would say jewelry entrepreneurs are really focused on social media, particularly Instagram as a customer acquisition channel.
And they forget that especially if you have an e-commerce store that there are other ways that people can potentially find your products in your brand. Ranking in search engine results is one of those things. Content can also help you gain data about your customers.
There's one brand that I work with that they sell pearl jewelry, and I've worked with them for a few years on building out their blog content. Some of it is really educational and informative, like we talk about how pearls are graded, how to care for pearls, about the different characteristics and qualities of pearls. But some of the content is also entertaining.
So for example, we talk about movies that heavily feature pearls, or we shared Halloween costume ideas that featured pearls. And once we kind of build up this huge store of content over the years, and we looked at the Google Analytics traffic of people coming to the site, we just had so much more information about the customers and the traffic and about the path to purchase than we ever would have had otherwise if the only content on their site was the product. So building out your e-commerce site with as much content as possible just gives you more and more information and you just can't go wrong when you have more information about your customers.
It allows you to make better marketing decisions in the future. And it also, content also allows your customers to engage with you longer. If someone's learning about your brand for the first time, I would say they're probably just giving it a quick glance.
People have really short attention spans nowadays, but if you can share a piece of content with them that's interesting and engaging, it will hopefully encourage that person to stick with you for even just a few seconds longer and then have a positive associated feeling about the interaction they had with you moving forward. And those are all great things. What are some problems that can arise in a content strategy that we're going to learn how to avoid today? And maybe you've even personally experienced some of these problems in trying to do your planning.
You might be scrambling to get photo and video assets at the last minute or to coordinate with your team members to get those assets. You may find that you're actually not communicating your brand in a super consistent and cohesive way. So if you're not planning all the moving parts, maybe your email marketing is saying one message and your social media posts are saying another message.
So the ways that the customers interacting with you are very disjointed and they don't make sense. Maybe you're missing opportunities to reach new customers. You're probably finding that you have low engagement on social media platforms.
You're probably feeling overwhelmed by marketing. You're completely missing the right customers. And you're relying too heavily on the product first approach, which kind of what I hinted at a little bit earlier.
You're relying so heavily on the beauty and the quality of your products and having the mindset that the best product wins, that you're forgetting how saturated and competitive the marketplace is and missing an opportunity to perhaps connect with customers in a slightly different way. So where can you start? Where are we going to get started today on your path to an amazing content marketing strategy and plan? First and if you know me, if you've worked with me, if you listen to my podcast, you know I'm a total broken record about saying this and I joke about getting it tattooed on my head that you need to know your customers inside and out. This is more than just like knowing their age range, their marital status, where they live.
You need to know where do they spend their time? What are their shopping habits? What types of content are they consuming on a regular basis? Who do they follow on Instagram? Who influences their shopping decisions? What gets them excited about a brand? What's going to make them excited enough to sign up for someone's email marketing newsletter? You really need to get into your customer's head in order to do this exercise effectively. So if you don't already have detailed and implementable customer personas, I truly encourage you to take that step first before you move on with the rest of this process. And you want to also not just keep this information in your head.
I know a lot of people I work with start out this way. They kind of know they're like, Larissa, I don't, I don't need to write this down. I just know it.
Okay. That's not helping me. That's not helping anyone else on your team.
And it's a very short sighted approach because you're not thinking about how one day when you're going to be uber successful, how are you going to scale that and share that vision, share those personas with your team? So this is something that should be documented. It should serve as, as I wrote here, the North Star of all your marketing. You need to be referring back to it for every single decision you make content or otherwise.
Now that you know your target customer with your content, you need to decide where to invest your time and energy because I can guarantee you that every person in this zoom room has at some point felt like they need to be doing more and have asked the question, should I be on TikTok? Should I be like creating zoom virtual interactions with my customers? Like, should I be doing more here? I guarantee you every single one of you has had that thought before. I'm urging you to not have anxiety about that. Kind of put that thought aside, banish it from your head, instead get really clear on where you're going to be investing your time and you're going to make that decision based on your target customers.
Where are they spending time? What feels natural to them? You're going to go to those places and invest your time there and you're going to put blinders on like this and ignore everything else because it's just going to be noise and distraction. So if your target customer doesn't spend a lot of time shopping on Instagram, then maybe Instagram isn't worth as much time and effort as the different platform. If your target customer likes watching YouTube a lot, then maybe you need to push yourself to be creating some video content.
So I need you to get really clear on where you're going to focus. After you have your areas of focus, you know how you're going to distribute your content. You know where your customers are going to be paying attention.
You're going to do an idea dump. It sounds kind of gross, but this is what you're going to do. I do this a lot with my clients.
I sit down with them quote unquote on Zoom for like up to two hours because this can be like some of the most time consuming part of this process. We sit down together and we look at if possible, this may be overwhelming when you're kind of doing this for the first time, but look at the next six months of your business ideally. And that might feel kind of overwhelming.
You're probably thinking, I don't have a calendar. I have too much stuff to deal with here and now in the moment. The truth is every business kind of has a natural calendar and a natural cadence.
How is this? You probably have products and collections that are going to be released in the next few months. You probably have holidays that are very important shopping holidays for you like Mother's Day. Obviously like the Christmas holiday.
There are probably natural times of the year where business is slower for you. Business picks up. Maybe you have a lot of diamond jewelry.
April is going to be a big opportunity for you because it's the birthstone. Vice versa. So every business kind of already has this like natural calendar built into it.
And I would say start there and really lean into that. Do an idea dump or a brainstorm of what all of those things are. If it helps you to have an actual calendar in front of you and thinking through like what happens each month, what happens each season.
You may also as I listed here, holidays and events, upcoming trends. Literally I was just on another call this afternoon and we were looking at the Pantone website and I was telling my client like let's look at spring color trends. If you don't have anything else to talk about in April, let's find a way to tie that back to your brand.
And I think she's on this call too. So she knows I'm talking about her. Any products and collections you foresee launching important dates for your business.
Do you have any business anniversaries, milestones? Do you have a photo shoot coming up where you can tease new assets? Do you foresee offering any discounts or promotions, any events that you're going to be doing and any products that you'd like to really spotlight or highlight for whatever reason, whether it's because it makes a good gift for a certain day, whether it's a birthstone, whatever. Write down everything you can think of in whatever method you like the best. Google Doc, paper, Microsoft Word, whatever, whatever, brainstorm it, get it all out of you, not in your head.
I really like to use when I'm stumped, nationaldaycalendar.com. Probably some of you know it. It's kind of cheesy.
It's a website where you can go and click every day. It tells you these like social media holidays. So yesterday, for example, was National Puppy Day and I featured my dog Charlotte on my Joy Joya social media.
It just gives me something else to post about. It gives me an opportunity to talk about that something that's not my business. It's fun.
It helps me kind of showcase my voice in a different way. So you may want to comb through a website like that and just make note of some dates that could be relevant for you and get creative with it. I definitely suggest doing that.
And then for every week, I would say choose an area of focus. So take that brainstormed list and see if you can plug it into a calendar so that every week in your calendar for the next six months, you're able to pull from your brainstorm and assign those things to every week. So every week should have some kind of thing going on.
If there's a week that doesn't have something going on, you're going to have to get creative and make something up. That's probably the hardest part. But I do find when I'm doing this with clients that when we have weeks where we can't, we don't naturally have something, it actually really forces that person to get creative.
So maybe we can think of like a promotion that we wouldn't have done before, or maybe we can highlight a product in a new way that we wouldn't otherwise have done. So it pushes you to keep thinking about how you can get in front of your customers and to keep your calendar full. So once you kind of know, you've taken your idea dump, you've taken a calendar, and you've plugged all of those things into your calendar so that every week has a theme, you're going to now look at all of your customer touch points.
Oh, and I did mean to say on the previous slide, use whatever calendar works for you. You like Google Calendar? Great. You have a paper planner? Great.
Whatever works. I'm going to say later in this presentation, the best tool is the tool that you actually use. So I don't care what it is, as long as you feel excited about using it and you keep coming back to it.
So the type of calendar does not matter to me as long as you're able to fill it in and it makes sense to you and you can share it with whoever needs to also see it besides you. So now that you know week by week, what is happening for the next six months of your business, I want you to look at all of your customer touch points. So when I say customer touch points, that means every way that a customer interacts with you.
For most jewelry brands, those would be your e-commerce website. They would be your different social media profiles, so your Instagram profile, your Facebook profile, Pinterest, whatever, whatever, and your email marketing campaigns. Those are kind of the most common ones, the most common ways that a customer would interact with you.
You want to look at all of these touch points and then decide, let's say for the first week of May in anticipation of Mother's Day, you've decided this is going to be your last push for Mother's Day gifts. So knowing your customer touch points, you have to decide, how am I going to communicate this message on my e-commerce website? How am I going to communicate this message on all my social media profiles? And how am I going to communicate this message in my email marketing campaigns? So this is moving toward the goal of consistency, cohesiveness. You already know for the first week of May, you want to talk about Mother's Day, last minute shipping or last minute gifts.
Now how are we going to translate that to each way that a customer interacts with you? So I kind of just put some ideas here. Maybe you can change the hero image on your website. That's the main banner image to showcase Mother's Day gifts.
Say last minute, maybe there's some kind of call to action with your shipping cutoff on your website. Maybe you can create an Instagram story about your favorite Mother's Day gift ideas to remind people like they need to order. There could be Instagram and Facebook posts about that.
And then you can do like a last minute push for an email marketing campaign, maybe with some kind of discount code to really get people moving. So that consistency has to happen across all of the platforms. Now that you have this like framework of all the weeks for the next six months and all of the places that that message needs to be communicated, you're going to want to like dial it in a little bit more.
This is getting going from like a high level to like more specific. So this can sometimes be hard to do for a full six months because obviously when you get more specific with things, it's harder to look that far ahead with them. But you're going to excuse me, you're going to want to try to do it as far out as you can make a list of any assets that you need to fulfill the communications you're going to have with your customers for every week.
So for my Mother's Day example, probably like the last week of April to prep for that first week in May, you're going to need to make sure you have all the pictures cropped and the correct pictures for your e-commerce website that you want to feature. You're going to want to make sure that you also have those pictures in different formats for Instagram. Maybe you have like a video version of that asset.
Maybe you need to create that discount code in order for it to be shared in your email marketing campaign. You know from doing marketing for your business that each thing that you put out there has a lot of little moving parts. You're probably not super conscious of them.
You just do them because you know you have to. But the trouble happens when you're scrambling the night before or the day of to make sure you have all this stuff when you would rather be designing and making jewelry and not having to worry about these things. If you have it in your calendar ahead of time, the assets that you will need in anticipation for these communications, you can make to-do list items for yourself to make sure that they get done and they're queued and you could even have them scheduled.
You know that would be a dream to not have to worry about this stuff. But it requires you to get ahead of it. So when you're doing this planning on a more micro level, there are a few tools that I like to use to help me and my client stay organized.
My personal favorite one is Asana. There's a free version of it. It has a slight learning curve, but there are also so many resources available to use it.
And some that other people have told me that they liked are Trello and Todoist. And again, as I mentioned before, the best planning tool for you is the one that you're going to actually use. If you like a paper planner, I say go for it.
I love paper planners. I cross-reference everything from Asana to my paper planner. If you're kind of just getting started with this and you're new to it, I recommend signing up for some free trials or doing like the freemium versions of them, playing around with it, deciding what makes you feel comfortable, and then really leaning into the one that appeals to you the most.
So I put a screenshot here. I made like a dummy Asana list to go along with my Mother's Day example. And this is just a very small sub-segment of a six-month plan, but I break it down week by week.
Like I said, I know that the week of May 2nd, I want to be doing a last-minute push for Mother's Day. So I gave myself due dates here to make sure that all of those things happen and that they're consistent. I know that I'm going to be sending an email marketing campaign on May 4th.
I know that I have to get my social media posts ready. And I know that I also need to merchandise the website to match the other messaging that I'm going to be communicating. So just these three things for a solopreneur, those can be pretty daunting tasks.
And if you only saw those three things on your calendar, you would probably be overwhelmed by any one of them. The best way to not be overwhelmed is to break things into smaller tasks, digestible tasks, and then give all of those due dates because if you're able to stay ahead of them, they won't all overwhelm you at the same time and you'll get to your goal before you even realized it. So I know for my email marketing campaign that needs to be sent on May 4th, I'm going to need to brainstorm subject line ideas.
So I made a due date two days before that I better have some subject line ideas ready. But that'll take me like 10 minutes of my day, okay, but I'll have them ready and I won't be scrambling at the last minute with writer's block not knowing what to do. I know that I'll need to format my email template for it to look nice and cohesive.
And when that's all ready, I know that I'll need to schedule my email so that it's ready to go. I can breathe a sigh of relief and I know exactly who it's going to done. Check, check, check.
And my favorite part about this is when you click the check box and it's done. It's the most satisfying feeling. And same thing with social media posts.
I know that I'll need to plan the post for that week in a tool like later, which I'll talk about in just a moment. I know that because I'm also promoting birthstone in May, I don't have any great pictures of my emerald jewelry, so I need to make sure the pictures are taken. And I want to also make sure I'm emphasizing the shipping deadline for Mother's Day.
So I'm creating sub tasks for myself. And then to merchandise the website to make sure it's all consistent. I'm going to make sure that hero images change to feature emerald jewelry picks.
I want to maybe if I have a Shopify site, create a collection just of my emerald jewelry. And I also maybe even want to start teasing summer styles. So here I'm even looking out even further.
And you would do the same thing week by week. Depending on how you do your marketing, there might be some tasks that you have to do every week. And in a tool like Asana, you can actually create repeating tasks to remind you like on Tuesdays every week, I have to do X.
So those are really nice to set up also if you've set aside Tuesdays for like picture taking for example, you know that that's what you're doing that day, you can make notes about the pictures you need to be taken. And if you have other people on your team, this is even better because you can assign things to them and make sure everyone's getting things done right when they need to be getting done. So this is what I refer to as sub planning, because any of you are all I'm assuming all of you who have social media accounts for your businesses know that something like Instagram requires its whole like microcosm of planning on its own.
So I'm using Asana as like my big picture planning. And then I am making a note to myself to do that sub planning here. And then I'm using a tool like planally, which is really great specifically for Instagram visual planning and scheduling a tool like later, which is really good for planning and scheduling across Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest, or a tool like Sprout social, which is a little bit more robust and has more analytics involved.
I like to say that social media should be planned two weeks out. And if you can kind of coordinate that with your overall content calendar and figure out a way to make that work here, it is let me tell you, it is so nice to just schedule all that stuff and not have to worry about your social for two weeks. Of course, you should be on there engaging meaningfully and being present on the platform, but you've just taken something off of your plate that you don't really have to worry about for two weeks.
And you can go work on other parts of your business because you have successfully coordinated all of this. So the main takeaways that I would like you to have today is you need to know your customer and this needs to be documented. This is your North Star.
This is the thing that's going to help you make all the decisions and answer all the questions that are going to come up when you're doing all this other stuff that I talked about. You always want to start with a plan and a calendar. That's going to begin with an idea dump that you eventually organize week by week and you eventually organize further by creating sub tasks and you eventually organize even further by planning out more granular things like your social media.
If you can, I would love for you to be able to plan out into the future as far as possible. I'm talking with some clients right now about holiday, if you can believe that, but it sounds crazy and maybe overwhelming. But I know from experience, people coming to me last year in November, freaking out about holiday and me having to sadly tell them that it's pretty much too late for you.
So if you can get way ahead of that, you will be in such a good place positioning yourself for the most lucrative time of the year for many jewelry brands. And I want you to encourage, I want to encourage you to use the planning tool that works the best for you. So I can't necessarily tell you what that's going to be.
I recommended a few options, but the one that works best for you is the one that you're going to use consistently and that isn't going to feel like super painful when you sit down to do it. So that is the end of my presentation. That was such a fun presentation to share with the Women's Jewelry Association and with you.
And I hope that you learned something that you can take away and apply to your marketing strategy. As a reminder, my book Jewelry Marketing Joy is published and ready to ship. I even have a checkout set up on my website, so if you want to purchase the book for a discounted price and learn more, go to JoyJoya.
com slash book.