Use the Desire for Experience to Your Advantage

A lot has changed in the world over the past couple of decades. Selling used to be a fairly straightforward venture, with a business selling their product and people buying it. But as the years go by, more and more people want to be shopping from responsible companies, small businesses, and companies that have a voice.

As millennials and generation Z get more buying power, brands need to be ready to adjust their marketing strategies to attract new customers. Research has shown that millennials in particular value experiences over goods. So, how can you use this knowledge to get customers to purchase your products?

If you think about experiences, you likely think about big vacations and adventures, but experiences are actually much simpler than that. Going out to dinner, getting drinks with friends, and taking a walk in town all can fall under the term “experiences”.

So, how can you mix this into your marketing strategy?

Use Social Proof

In the era of social media, more and more people are turning to friends for recommendations when it comes to purchases. Consumers are also checking reviews and social media platforms before making a decision.

By offering social proof, you’ll show consumers that your brand and products can be trusted, because people are already talking about them on social media.

Add faces to reviews. Share stories from consumers about how your product changed their lives. Share glowing reviews on your social media channels and in email blasts.

You can often get these reviews simply by asking your customers for them.

Utilizing user generated content is another great way to create social proof. Ask your customers to share photos of them using your product. This works particularly well if you make it part of a contest. The more social proof your brand has, the better the sales will be.

Use Social Media

This is different than generating social proof. Utilizing social media to create an experience for your customers is one of the best strategies you can implement.

The first way to do this is simply to interact with your customers. Fostering engagement with your customers will make them more satisfied with the experience of shopping with you. Reply to comments and answer messages. It shows your customers that you care about them, and leaves them with a positive idea of your company in their mind long after the interaction is over.

You should also aim to create content that drives customer engagement. Not only does this increase your organic reach, but today’s consumers love the ability to interact. Try creating a poll, asking consumers to share photos, or discuss a topic in the comments of your posts.

Create Memories

Memories are powerful when it comes to marketing. By creating positive memories for your customer, you are more likely to gain their loyalty. There are plenty of ways you can create memories for your customers that don’t rely on only your products.

You may choose to host events. Free classes, webinars, workshops, and special sales are excellent events that you can hold in-person or online to get people’s attention. When they think back on your brand they won’t think only of your product, but how your event helped them or created a positive experience for them.

Tell a Story

Telling stories can move people in ways that simple advertising cannot. By using stories you can form a deeper connection with your audience. You can use stories to humanize your brand. Find ways to inspire using your product, then craft a story about it.

The story can be as simple as you featuring an image of your product in use with a bit of copy. It’s all about showing how your product or service is creating stories and being a part of people’s lives.

What are you doing to create experiences for your customer? Let us know in the comments!

How to Make Your Business Blossom

It’s time to shake off the lethargy of winter and refresh your business for spring. Whether you’re a new business or well-established, it’s never a bad idea to take a look at your business and find ways to boost sales and improve customer service.

We’re bringing you our top ten ways, some big, some small, to help you boost your business this spring.

1.      Update Your Photography

Photography is more important than ever, so take the time to go through your product line and take note of what items need better photographs. Ideally you’ll have more than one photograph of each product. Some examples of additional photographs you’ll want besides the studio shot includes lifestyle shots, detail shots, and shots of the product from different angles.

You might also consider changing the feeling of your business by adjusting the tone of your photographs. It’s spring, so consider using more natural light with clean backgrounds. Some of your products can likely be re-branded for the season, so if you have the manpower test this out on a few items!

2.      Check Your Shop Stats

If you don’t have a routine in place to track your businesses analytics, now is the perfect time to start! If you’ve not set up analytics, do it. If you have, take a close look at those statistics. Make notes of what products are selling and which ones are not. How is traffic arriving to your website?

You may also want to check your business data across different timeframes. You can check out your shop stats by week, month, or even for a year. Pay attention to what times of year you are selling the most products. Knowing the busy and slow periods of your business can make it easier to build your business strategy.

3.      Update Your Copy

Your copy is important not only as a tool to convey information to your customers, but for search engine optimization. Your product descriptions should highlight the most important aspects of your items while also answering customer questions.

Don’t focus only on product copy, though. Take a look at your About section, as well as any other page on your website that you may not update often. There may be errors you never noticed, or there simply may be a better way to convey the message you want to put out to the world.

4.      Reflect On Your Brand

What makes your products and your brand unique? How does it stand out compared to the competition? What can it offer to your customers that other products or companies cannot? Take some time to reflect on these questions. Record your answers and use them to improve your marketing strategy.

Make sure your tone, graphics, packaging, and social media all reflect the answers to these questions. You want not only to do what your competitors are not, but to be true to your brand across all aspects of the company.

5.      Share Your Story

People are craving personality, so make sure you show it. Corporate responses and posts are a thing of the past. Give your customers a look at work behind the scenes. Let them get a glimpse of the employee culture at your company.

While you don’t need to give an entire history of your business, customers like to see where you’ve come from. Show how you’re involved in the local community. Highlight the people behind the brand to inspire trust. This can be through social media, on your company website, or both!

6.      Create Social Media Routines

You likely already have a presence on social media, but if you don’t have a routine for social media posting, you’re missing out. A social media routine can save you a lot of time and stress. While some platforms benefit from spur-of-the-moment posts others, such as Facebook, are great for scheduling posts ahead of time.

Creating a social media routine can seem overwhelming. Start by breaking down the tasks you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly. Daily you should be checking each social media profile, replying to comments, and working on new content. Weekly you should be scheduling posts and checking your stats. Monthly you should be creating a social media strategy and coming up with new experiments. You can use these guidelines to build out a proper social media schedule.

Bonus: 5 Social Media Strategies For Small Businesses 

7.      Consider Customer Feedback

Take a look at reviews from your customers across various platforms including Google and your Facebook page. Take notes from these reviews to see what shop policies can be updated to better serve your customer base.

If you don’t have a lot of feedback, don’t be afraid to reach out to your customers requesting it. You can’t make improvements to your business if you don’t know what customers like and what they hate. When looking at feedback figure out what you can change, what you can’t, and how you can improve your business overall based on what your customers are saying.

8.      Meet With Your Employees

Your staff is another great way to get feedback on how your business is operating. Check in with specific projects and also the work your employees are doing on a daily basis. Brainstorm ways you can improve the business with them. Ask for their ideas, and don’t just ask, but put them into practice if you think it could work.

Not only will this help your sales, but it will have a huge impact on employee morale. The better your employees feel about their work, the harder they’re going to work, especially if their ideas are being tested.

9.      Get Your Workplace Organized

Whether you want to get your space, shipping area, or documents organized, now is the time to do it. Getting organized can take a lot of time, but it will make your business run more efficiently down the line.

It will probably feel overwhelming at first, and that’s okay. Break your list down into manageable tasks to make your given project easier to handle. Make sure you let your employees know when something is being re-organized so they’re not caught off-guard, and also so they’re prepared to be more patient with hiccups that may come up during the process.

10.   Celebrate Your Milestones

Take some time to celebrate the successes your company has had. Share good news not only with your family and friends, but across social media and with your employees. If your company reaches a big milestone, celebrate! Reward the hardworking members of your team!

You should be proud of your accomplishments. Think about those accomplishments and what that success means to you. What can you do to keep that momentum going? When you use this thought process it becomes easier to keep your business growing.



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5 Social Media Strategies For Small Businesses

There’s no denying that good marketing is the key to business success, but many small businesses struggle with marketing simply due to a lack of budget. But even without a lot of money to pour into marketing, there is a lot you can do to help your small business grow.

Social media is an excellent low-cost option when it comes to marketing. It allows you to spend as much or as little as you like while still giving you access to millions of potential customers.

1.      Decide What Social Media Channels Are Right For You

Different social channels provide different benefits, but trying to work with all of them as a small business will likely leave you with lackluster content. Instead it is better to choose several social media channels that will resonate most with your business practices and reach your target audience.

Facebook certainly has the largest reach and is excellent for sharing news, blog posts, and reaching a large audience. Facebook also allows for remarkable customer targeting that is easy to use.

Instagram is becoming increasingly popular with younger social media users. Sticking to specific filters can make it easier to keep your brand image consistent, and hashtag campaigns can be very effective.

Twitter is still a relevant platform with plenty of active users. It is a great way to share concise information about your brand and an excellent place to engage with your customers.

Pinterest is all about saving content for the future. Use it to create boards that your customers may be interested in. Pin some of your own content but also make sure to pin plenty of other people’s content as well.

Youtube can be a great option for businesses as well, especially if you sell products that would benefit from how-to and installation videos.

2.      Create A Schedule

Creating a social media schedule seems overwhelming, but it will actually save you a lot of time in the end. How detailed it is will be up to you. Start by brainstorming ideas of the content you want to share on your social media pages.

You can then schedule your social media posts using free tools like Hootsuite. This will take the pressure off posting to social media manually and can make it much less overwhelming.

Don’t forget to take some time to use social media impulsively. You don’t want to let a schedule stop you from jumping in to relevant conversations.

3.      Vary Your Content

Make sure the content you are sharing across social media isn’t only promotional. Not only will algorithms penalize this, but your followers aren’t using social media to see photos of your products, they’re using it to be entertained.

Use social media to engage with your customers. Give them a taste of the work you do behind the scenes. Link them to guides that will help them with their problems. Of course don’t forget to promote yourself, but that shouldn’t be the bulk of your posts.

Sharing relevant content, even if it is from a competitor, isn’t a bad idea either. It will show that you are committed to giving your followers the best information out there.

4.      Respond To Comments

Yes, replying to comments does take time, but comments mean audience engagement, and the more engagement your posts have on social media, the more people will see them.

Posts with a lot of likes and comments show that the content has value. Communicating with customers using the comments is an excellent way to build conversation and drum up interest in your brand and products.

Remember, social media isn’t about selling, it is about being social. Connecting with your audience builds trust in your brand which should bring about increased sales.

5.      Repurpose Your Content

If you need to sit down to create brand new content for every single social media platform, you’ll never get anything done. Learning how to repurpose your content multiple times and across multiple channels is essential.

For example, if you’ve created a “How-To” guide, you may start by linking to it on your various platforms. You can also create an infographic based on this information that can be shared on Facebook and Pinterest. Then, make a video that goes into further details that you link to via Twitter and Facebook.

This cuts down on the amount of original content you need to create from scratch.

Of course these are only a few basic tips to get you started. There’s a lot to learn about using social media for business, but trial and error is all part of the process.