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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 Worstiek.

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 214. You're checking out a weekly segment of this podcast called The Goldmine, 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 Goldmine with me on Wednesdays. If you're a return listener or viewer, thanks for following along. In this episode, I'll be talking about how you can maintain confidence in your marketing whenever you're trying something new and how you can trust that something can potentially work for your business, even when the future is very uncertain.

I'm not saying that you should 100% naively believe that everything will work when it comes to marketing and what you try with it, because that would be unrealistic. But marketing does require you to give it time to work and time requires trust, patience and confidence. In the last episode 213, I spoke about the biggest missed opportunities in marketing and I think it does take a lot of confidence to seize opportunities like the five that I mentioned in that episode.

This one is intended to give you the boost, the inspiration, the motivation that you'll need to take that leap. I'll be discussing how to set realistic expectations around marketing when you're in an experimental phase, three tips for maintaining confidence when you're trying something new and uncertain and what to do if something doesn't work out the way you had planned, which is totally possible. Okay, so number one, how can you set realistic expectations around marketing when you're trying something new, when you're in an experimental phase, maybe you're pivoting, maybe you are seizing those missed opportunities that I mentioned, maybe you're just sick of the same old and you want to do something different, which I highly encourage.

Know that marketing cannot carry your business on its own. That's just the truth and reality. So realize that marketing has to work in harmony with all your other business processes, including sales and product development.

It also can be affected by things totally outside of your control, like the economic climate, consumer behavior, buying trends, time of year, you name it. There are things that you can't control that will also impact your business that marketing cannot substitute for. Of course, when it comes to marketing, it's super important to have a plan and strategy in place, but sometimes life will throw a lot of curveballs at you.

The good news is that no marketing effort is ever a failure. Let that sink in for a second because I really hope that this changes your mind about marketing. No marketing effort can ever be a failure, will never be a failure.

Regardless of what the results are, the positive thing about any marketing initiative that you do is you will learn something important from your attempts and you'll be able to evolve and iterate for your next endeavor. It's one of my favorite things about marketing. You can't lose.

You can't fail. So don't put so much pressure on it. Realize that it's a long game and that things will probably change no matter what.

So have an open mind about it. Be ready to pivot in accordance with whatever new information you gain and go from there. So let me share three tips for maintaining confidence when you're trying something new and uncertain because even the most positive, resilient people, they'll have their confidence shaken in one way or another when they are experimenting with a new direction.

All right. So now that I've convinced you to be bold and to try something new, I want to let you know how you can maintain confidence and certainty in your decision. I meet a lot of entrepreneurs in our industry who when I first talked to them, we first go through ideas, we first set up a strategy.

They're super excited about the idea at first, but then they lose steam and enthusiasm and focus after they realize it's going to be a long game that will require work and patience. So number one, remind yourself that you can let data guide your way. So this is also assuming that you have data, that you are somewhat familiar with your business data, which I very much encourage you to be.

It's assuming that you've done the foundational work, that you know your customers inside and out, that you know your business and your products and you understand what's realistically possible. Then you can trust in the data and let data help you maintain confidence. So if you ever falter and doubt yourself, just go back to the numbers because they don't lie.

This will be especially helpful if you're trying to go after unfulfilled potential in your business. Like let's say you know you could have more traffic to your website from Google search. So let's put the things in place that are going to, that we can predict will help us achieve that.

Check in with that number regularly and let yourself know once a month, every few weeks that you've made your decision based on what the facts have told you. The numbers will always ground you and put your doubts and fears into perspective. They will also serve as a reality check and be your guideposts for the journey moving forward.

So that you are not driven so much by emotion and you are just driven by fact and data. Tip number two, actually document your goals and not only the goals, but also your motivations for them. It helps when you have goals to have intrinsic motivation.

So that means you're not motivated by a reward or something external, but instead you have an internal motivation. Like you enjoy running your business, you feel fulfilled by making a difference in our industry. Document these things, put it somewhere where you can see it daily so that you know not only what you're working toward, but also why.

It's the same like if you had a fitness goal. Let's say you wanted to improve your cardio, like you wanted to go from not being able to run it all to being able to run a 5k so that you can be healthier. If you remind yourself every day why you're doing it, like you want to be able to keep up with your children or whatever, you'll likely, you'll probably work out more regularly than if you just woke up and thought, oh, I'm supposed to be working out today.

So if you have an actual motivation that drives you, you'll be more likely to stick to your goals and do the difficult things. And then my third tip about maintaining confidence, don't expect or wait for perfect. I know that some of you listening or watching are perfectionists.

In some ways, it's a great personality trait to have because you're always focused on improving yourself. You probably have a growth mindset. You're always focused on excelling in your business, but in many ways your perfectionism is going to hold you back and maybe even cause you to falter in your confidence.

So if you're striving for perfection when you're blazing new trails, then you're pretty much going to set yourself up for failure because when you're doing something new that no one else has done before, perfection just isn't an option. What's the model for that? It's never been done. There is no perfection.

You're creating something new. So you have to be open to the messiness. You have to embrace the messiness and realize it's going to get you somewhere new and different and be okay with that.

So what happens if you try something new, you keep your confidence, you're able to maintain your positivity, you're able to go through the steps to get from point A to point B, but things don't work out as you had planned, which happens a lot. It's just the reality of being in business. So it's probably more often than not that something is not going to work out the way you had planned.

The thing about that is many people assume that something not going to plan automatically equals bad failure. I suck. I failed. Oh my God.

But you have to totally turn that on its head. Something not going to plan could actually be the best thing that has ever happened to your business. And I say, embrace it.

Be open to all the things you will learn that you would not have otherwise learned if you hadn't done the thing and quote unquote failed. Ask yourself now that you have this new information, now that you've had the experience, now that you've tried something different, is this actually a time to go in a new direction and pivot? And don't be afraid to admit to yourself that it's time to change if that turns out to be true. Just basically don't ever, ever, ever call it a failure because if you do and you convince yourself of that, then you'll be too afraid to try new things in the future.

And that's pretty much the death of the business. So don't do that to yourself, especially if you want to be in this for the long call. What do you think? Do you feel inspired to try something new? Will you return to this episode when you need a reality check or a boost of confidence? Please leave a comment on YouTube or let me know in a podcast review.

You can also always email me, Larissa, that's L-A-R-Y-S-S-A at JoyJoya.com. And thanks for listening or watching. Thanks for listening.

Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more information about working with JoyJoya, visit JoyJoya.com where you can sign up to download our free eBooks about various topics in jewelry marketing.