SPEAKER_00
Ready to break free from algorithms, vanity PR, and money sucking ads? My name's Larissa Worstiek and I've learned in seven years of jewelry marketing that content is the crown jewel. My agency Joy Joya takes a holistic approach, leading with laser focused storytelling, impactful content creation, and strategic content distribution. This method has worked for the solopreneur as well as the multi-million dollar company, and now I'm sharing the same systems and tactics with you.

Here's to standing out in the sea of sparkle. Welcome to episode 274. In this episode, I'm going to be diving into the essential stages of marketing for jewelry brands and why it's so crucial to understand their distinctions.

I've noticed that many new jewelry business owners might not have a clear grasp of what marketing really involves, and that's perfectly fine because I'm here to provide some clarity. But first and foremost, I want to clarify that marketing is really distinct from public relations and sales. So while marketing can entirely support these functions, it really does operate differently, and I won't spend too much time on that.

If you want to learn more, I have like a whole chapter on that in my book Jewelry Marketing Joy. But today on the podcast, I'll explore the two primary types of marketing that you'll be engaged in for your jewelry business in the long run. The first type is audience building marketing.

So these are the marketing activities aimed at getting people to notice your brand. Imagine sending an email campaign to a totally empty subscriber list or posting on Instagram with zero followers. It won't yield you very much, would it? So to make the second type of marketing customer relationship building marketing effective, you also need to be actively involved in this first stage of audience building marketing.

And if you're launching a new jewelry brand, then you'll likely dedicate most of your efforts to the first type because as you can imagine, you need to attract those initial eyeballs and interest. Even if you're in established jewelry business, I'm sorry, you can't afford to neglect audience building marketing. It's something you're going to have to be doing for the lifetime of your business, but more so at the beginning.

And you should continue to focus on attracting new audiences while nurturing relationships with those people who are already interested. So are you ready to understand marketing on a deeper level? Keep listening or watching as I explore the differences between audience building marketing and customer relationship building marketing. I'll provide examples of both types and delve into why audience building marketing especially can be super challenging as to what results to anticipate from your efforts.

But before we get to the solid gold, I'd like to take a moment to remind you that this podcast has both audio and video. So you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube by searching Joy Joya. You can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe but also to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

Okay, let's get into today's episode of my Starklers. So if I'm going to boil down marketing, all of marketing, to one simple definition, it's about creating relationships and nurturing relationships. That's it.

It's not about gaining clout or about being a salesperson. As I mentioned in the intro, this is not PR, this is not sales. It just comes down to building relationships with your target audience.

And if you really have trouble wrapping your head around marketing, I just want you to think about it the same way you would friendships. Okay, so if you want new friends, then you will likely put yourself in situations where you might meet new people, like taking a class or joining a book club. And if you want to maintain your friendships, then you keep in regular contact with your friends and show interest in their lives.

And if you want to do both, make new friends while keeping your friends, then you do all those things. Simple, right? Well, that's marketing, except you're the business and your friends are your customers. So hopefully that sounds really straightforward.

So why then is marketing so hard? Well, if you've ever tried to make new friends and keep your existing friends, you know that friendships are much more complicated and nuanced than what I just explained. So sometimes they can be really hard to meet great people that you vibe with, even if you put yourself in the right situations. Sometimes it could be hard to keep friends, even if you do all the right things, people move away, their life circumstances change, sometimes disagreements happen, etc.

So the same way that friendship is complicated, marketing is complicated too. And so in an effort to try to make it a little less complicated, I want to talk about just two ongoing stages of marketing that your business 100% should be doing. The audience building marketing and the customer relationship building marketing.

So the audience building is like finding friends. And the customer relationship building is like keeping friends. And as I mentioned, again, in the intro, audience building isn't just for brand new jewelry businesses.

So even jewelry businesses that have been around for decades need to do audience building because there's turnaround in customers and the business is always evolving. And the challenge with audience building, as you can probably imagine, is that it's really hard to get seen and heard in the crowded marketplace. And that is a reality that especially new jewelry business owners have trouble really wrapping their heads around, not that they can't accept it, or maybe they have some idea.

But once you really get into the difficulty of audience building, especially as a new jewelry business, it usually is a wake up call for a lot of people. So, and here's why. First of all, if you don't have a substantial marketing budget to invest in audience building up front, it demands a significant amount of time and patience invested.

So you either have to invest your money, your time, your patience, have that sweat equity, building that sizable and engaged audience, it takes time as you work on establishing brand credibility and recognition. The jewelry market is often saturated with competitors, and that's one thing that really makes it challenging to stand out. But also, there's the challenge of maintaining a consistent online presence, creating quality content, implementing effective strategies, all those things require resources.

And that's why audience building is so hard, because it's a multifaceted effort that demands either time, financial commitment, or both. And many new entrepreneurs, they get discouraged after just a year or two, because the reality of all that, it's a lot when you're doing it in practice. At Joy Joya, we actually don't often provide at the service of audience building marketing for newer jewelry brands.

And for many of the reasons that I just mentioned, it's not that we're not able to do it, or that we don't like doing it, but it's more that many new jewelry business owners really underestimate how much work it takes. So because it's so much more work on our end, and so much more guidance and experimentation and strategy building, we actually need to charge more for this type of marketing than for customer relationship building marketing. And the other thing is, is that no one, there's literally no one with a crystal ball to predict how long it's going to take for a new jewelry business to see success with their audience building marketing.

I would love to say six months, but there's really no way I or anyone else can guarantee that. So working with new jewelry business owners on audience building marketing, it puts a lot of pressure on everyone involved in a situation that literally cannot be controlled, no matter how hard anyone works or how rock solid the marketing strategy is. And those are hard pills to swallow when you're new, you're not making money yet, you would like to start getting reliable repeat customers as quickly as possible.

It is the unfortunate curse of starting a new business where you don't have many or even any customers, but you're also probably going to have to invest a lot of time and or money at this stage, probably more than you could have anticipated. I do have some good news though. I don't want this to sound all negative, I'm just trying to be more realistic with you all.

So if you don't have a lot of money, but you're willing to put in the time and you're willing to be consistent, there's definitely audience building marketing that you can DIY until you get to the point where you can have more like lift off and have customers that you can market to more regularly. So let me share what some of those tactics are. Brand collaboration.

So that would be partnering with a brand that already does have quote unquote eyeballs on their brand to do a marketing campaign and gain the visibility of their audience. Customer referral can work if you already do have a few customers, even if it's just a handful. So encouraging your current customers forward of mouth to get new eyeballs on your brand.

There's brand ambassador or micro influencer partnerships. So that would require you to either give free product loan free product or pay someone to represent your brand. And that way you get access to their audience and their influence kind of helps you gain new eyeballs on your brand.

You can host in person and virtual events to potentially get new eyeballs on your brand. Seek out retailer partnerships. So wholesale can actually be a great way to gain visibility for your own brand for direct to consumer.

Because being in retail stores can kind of be like a discovery channel for people to find out about you when they wouldn't have known about you otherwise. You can try direct mail marketing. You can do search engine optimization or SEO, which would require you to create content on your website that's searchable.

And then that way people can discover you through Google search. You can do some grassroots PR. I did mention that marketing is not PR.

But I do think that this can be an audience building strategy if you're able to kind of connect with journalists with like taste makers in your local community and get the word out about your brand. You can try community building. So if you do have more of a niche jewelry product and it's possible to build a community of like minded people or people who share a certain interest around it, that could be an option for you.

And then also thought leadership. So that would be again, if you have a niche product, you cater to a really niche target audience, you can kind of become like the thought leader about that topic, create content around it and draw people to your brand through the personality, the knowledge, the vision, like the stance that you have. And then once you start getting eyeballs on your brand, you'll want to be laser focused then on building an email list that is so important for me in my mind, that is the foundation of being able to take audience building to customer relationship building.

Because that way you have more control over the data, as opposed to if you're only focused on building a social media following, where you don't have a reliable way to really market to those people, you are really at the mercy of the algorithm. But with email, it means you can pretty reliably market to your email list on a regular basis. So once you do get to the customer relationship building stage, examples of that type of marketing for digital would be email marketing would be social media marketing.

And actually some of the marketing that you could use for audience building can also be used for relationship building, depending on how you approach them. So in person and virtual events, yes, while that can attract new eyeballs, they can also be adapted to serve the existing people who are already interested in you and build that relationship further. Community building, again, to deepen the relationships that you've already had, and thought leadership as well.

So once someone gets to know you, you can continue to build trust and deepen the relationship through thought leadership. So where does one process start? And where does the other begin? It's not always a clear cut distinction. Again, these stages often overlap.

Brand awareness or audience building efforts are going to are ongoing, and they should continually attract new customers. This isn't like a one time thing. And then you stop and you only focus on relationship building.

And relationship building activities have to also occur simultaneously to keep your existing customers engaged. And once they're really like invested in your brand to encourage repeat purchases. So what do you think about that? Do you kind of better understand these two ongoing processes of marketing? And which of the audience building strategies that I mentioned sound like they could work for your brand, especially if you don't have the budget, the time to spend on like bigger efforts, like say advertising or other more proactive outreach, I would love to hear your thoughts.

Okay, let's get into the gold mine. This is a segment where I get personal and share insights on entrepreneurship, mindset, success, growth, and all things business. This allows me to kind of share some topics and insights close to my heart.

So on this week's gold mine, I want to talk about guarantees in marketing. Earlier in this episode, I mentioned, especially when it comes to audience building, it's kind of hard to know what will happen, even with your best and most consistent efforts. And that is a tough pill to swallow, because while you're doing that without knowing what the outcome will be, you're going to be putting money, time or a mix of both into your business while you're doing audience building.

So is it possible for any marketing to be guaranteed? Well, if a marketing company or even an employee or team member guarantees you a certain outcome from your marketing efforts, should you believe them? No, don't please don't. It's virtually impossible. It is impossible to provide guarantees in marketing, particularly during the audience building stage.

And here's why. Marketing involves engaging with a diverse and dynamic audience, each with unique preferences, behaviors, reactions, and these factors cannot be predicted with absolute certainty. There's also the external environment that's constantly evolving with market trends, the economy, competition, customer interest, fluctuating so unpredictably.

And as a result, even what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow. And again, that makes it impossible to guarantee specific outcomes. And lastly, the effectiveness of marketing strategies relies really heavily on human psychology and behavior, which again can be influenced by countless variables.

So even the most well researched and executed marketing campaigns can't ensure that every single person in your target audience will respond as expected the same way. And just with marketing in general, marketers really have to continuously adapt and refine their strategies based on real time data and feedback, and then also embrace a flexible and experimental approach. So you're probably wondering with all the risk and uncertainty, why do marketing at all? Well, it's kind of like why then have a business? Because if you want to have a business, you have to do marketing, you cannot escape it.

The two are inextricably intertwined. Marketing is pretty much the process of figuring out how to get people to like you, trust you, and buy your stuff. So if you want to be selling your stuff, you have to be marketing, and not just in spurts and not just when you feel like it, but with precise consistency and commitment.

But the good news, the silver lining here is that the more you kind of trust this process, and the more you lean into marketing and are consistent about it, the better you'll get at avoiding the guesses and experiments and actually become good at making educated decisions about your customers and what they'll respond positively to. So hopefully, you can take that as your motivation to undertake this difficult process for your business. What are your thoughts about that? Do you wish marketing would come with a guarantee? How does that all make you feel? Drop me a message via Instagram DM, leave a review on the podcast, or comment on the YouTube channel.

Let's chat about it. Did you have any questions about today's episode? You can always email me lorisa, that's l-a-r-y-s-s-a at joyjoya.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with a friend who'd appreciate it. And don't forget to subscribe as well as leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

If you're completely new to digital marketing, then you'll want to purchase and read a copy of my book Jewelry Marketing Joy. Visit joyjoya.com slash book for more information.