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Welcome to the Joy Joya podcast where jewelry is joy and everyone is encouraged to add more polish and sparkle to the world with topics ranging from marketing tips to business development, best practices and beyond. This is the go to podcast for ambitious jewelry industry dreamers like you. Hi, I'm your host Larissa Wurstiek.

Through this podcast, I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and professionals so they can thrive while adding more beauty to the world. I'm passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands and I'm excited to share my passion with you. As we all know, jewelry is joy, so I'll gladly seize any opportunity to talk about it.

This is episode 190 and you're checking out a weekly segment of this podcast called The Gold Mine, which is a more intimate, personal and brief take from me about a topic of my choosing, but typically in the categories of entrepreneurship, growth, mindset, as well as my own personal observations about the industry. If you're new to this podcast, welcome. You can get interviews and business development and marketing tips on Sundays and The Gold Mine with me on Wednesdays.

If you're a return listener or viewer, thanks so much for following along. This week's topic is all about the three most common big picture strategy related issues that I see with jewelry brands today. So I want to personally share the following three things.

What are these most common marketing issues? Why do I think they're happening and how are they related to the jewelry industry specifically? And then what are some things that can be done to overcome them? Again, these are more like strategy related big picture, really macro. So I'm not talking about like, I see a lot of jewelry brands aren't getting enough likes on Instagram or something, which to me is like a very micro problem. These are very big picture things.

If you are a solopreneur or a small business owner, don't go away. Don't just leave because even though these are very macro and they are definitely problems that like bigger companies have, I think that even the solopreneur or the small business owner can experience these things and then I see it very often. So it's not exclusive to a certain company size or certain business owner type.

These are just things I see across the board in the industry in general. So the first thing that I see more and more, especially with the rise of the gig economy and the availability of freelancers and people who want to do kind of like piecemeal gig based work is that for many jewelry brands today, many different sizes types, etc, marketing efforts are becoming very siloed. So a for a solopreneur, maybe they are hiring one person on Fiverr to do this.

They have an intern to do this. They work with someone on Upwork to do this. And they have a few different providers that they work with.

And I'm not saying it's bad. I mean, I think it's great to have a strategy where you're really like nimble and flexible and you can kind of work with all these different people as needed, as you scale until you're at the point and you can hire an employee. And then talking to a big company, sometimes their internal teams are so overloaded with like the day to day, especially when it comes to marketing demands, pressure to keep up is so high, marketing is constantly changing.

They're just kind of in their treading water. So they do sometimes bring on outside freelancers to take on like very specialized and specific tasks. So this is again, not exclusive to a size of a company to a type of a jewelry company.

Okay, so they're siloed. Things are happening kind of like in buckets. Here's the problem with this.

There sometimes ends up being a misalignment. Not everyone is following an aligned strategy, because they're kind of working on their own. And then whoever is like leading the marketing charge, perhaps they're not considering like how all these moving parts are working together, because they kind of take for granted that they should be working together.

And a more specific example of this, let's say you have one freelancer or a specialized agency like working on SEO over here, and you have one like intern or whatever contractor working on social media over here. And all of those people or teams may be really great at their jobs and functions individually. But my belief is in digital marketing, it really needs to be a holistic approach.

So all of these people should, if not communicating with each other, be aligned under one common strategy and have KPIs or key performance indicators that are kind of addressing how all of this is working together. So that's one common strategy related challenge that I see. Number two, when it comes to performance marketing or paid marketing, again, I think this can apply to the solopreneur, the small business owner, as much as it does to the bigger companies.

So there's a lot of pressure. I think in an industry that's super competitive like jewelry, that's very visual, that depends a lot on social media to attract and continually engage customers. We all know the algorithms are frustrating.

It's getting harder and harder to get organic reach. So people or companies, brands, business owners will invest money for paid exposure. And it starts to feel like a rat race.

And the pressure to perform is so focused on these platforms where we think we should be performing, where we think, oh, if we just spend another few dollars, we will be able to overcome the saturation that the competition has in the market. And I'm not saying that performance or paid marketing is wrong. There's definitely a place for it.

But when you are like communicating your brand from a place of pressure and grind and just running a rat race, I think again, there can be misalignment of loss of focus on the bigger picture. The resources just get tied up in this day to day grind. And then the bigger business development and marketing plan get kind of lost in the mix.

And it's just to focus more on short term rather than long term. That's another really common challenge that I see. The third common strategy related issue that I see with jewelry brands is shiny object syndrome, which I think is funny because we are in an industry of shiny objects and hey, it's appropriate.

We all have shiny objects. So why wouldn't we be attracted and have a shiny object syndrome? So let me tell you what I mean by that shiny on object syndrome is like this tendency to not be super focused when it comes to business strategy and marketing strategy. And I think in a world where technology is constantly evolving, digital marketing best practices are constantly evolving.

There's always like a new technology, new cool thing, new idea on the horizon that's going to likely lead to the next success story. It's hard to really like stay in your lane and be focused on your core business values and your marketing strategy. And just like suddenly be like, Oh, I want to try that.

Or like, will that be the thing that's going to change the business? And so there's a tendency to really just throw at something at everything out there and again, lose alignment with strategy. And I want to invite you or I would say just to try. I know the temptation is great because there are so many shiny objects on there, but to like pick a lane and really stay in that lane for a determined period of time.

Like if you're going to try something new, have a strategic reason behind it, pick a time period that you are going to try that for stay in your lane and don't don't look at anything else. You know, maybe be open to it. Let yourself hear about things, pay attention to what's happening, but don't get derailed every time there's a new potential thing that could change your life because marketing takes time to work once you implement it.

And if you're always changing course, you're going to be misaligned with your strategy and not give anything the time to work. I see these three things that I mentioned specifically happening in the jewelry industry just because of the nature of it. It's super competitive.

We're very visual. We're very visual. Driven business.

It's it involves photography, visuals, video. There's also a lot of emotion and a focus on brand storytelling. There's creativity involved.

There's also a need to keep like innovating and finding new ways to tell the story. And I think that this industry is just like prone to getting caught up in these like strategy related issues. Can you relate to any of these things that I said? Do you find that you sort of get caught up in either dealing with silos or maybe you're not even aware that there are silos and now you're like, Oh yeah, I do have kind of all of these really bucketed things going on.

Or I do feel like I'm kind of caught up in the race of marketing. Or I do kind of like always find myself looking at the next greatest thing or being distracted by new practices and technology. What can you do to overcome some of these issues? I think it just requires having something documented like a North Star of your business, not just with marketing, but with your business strategy in general, and making sure to keep revisiting this.

Like this is what we do. This is who our audience is. This is how we do it.

This is how we do it. And then choosing a period of time that we're going to keep doing this. And then we'll revisit it and see if it's working or not working.

What adjustments do we need to kind of make having key performance indicators that aren't specific to different digital marketing initiatives, but having like a master key performance indicator view of your business that brings together like email and how email is aligned with your e-commerce and with your social media that really integrates your metrics in a holistic way, checking in with them at least once month so you can get like a full dashboard of your business. And then again, committing to something before you decide to make a change and making sure that any changes you make are driven by strategy and not by whim or intuition or feeling. So what did you think? Can you relate to any of the things I mentioned in this episode? Have you found yourself dealing with any of these challenges in your business? I would love to know your thoughts.

Please leave a comment on YouTube or let me know in a podcast review. You can always email me lorisa. That's larysa at joyjoya.

com. And thanks for listening or watching. Thanks for listening.

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