Marketing is your responsibility; not your bookkeeper's, not your salesperson's, not your bench jeweler's.
Owning the store means not only making sure it runs every day, but also planning marketing far enough in the future to ensure continual profits (or at least break even in this economy).
It's time for an online marketing plan that you can get running quickly.
Here's a list of things that we have measured successfully for retail jewelers. This list alone can be used as the basis for your online marketing strategy:
1. Add new information to a blog on your *website* regularly.
2. Manage a Facebook Business Page and give your customers a reason to Like you there.
3. Link your Facebook status feed updates to Twitter.
4. Maintain a Flickr account and post new photos of jewelry daily, properly labeled.
5. Properly manage Search Engine Optimization on each page of your website.
6. Add a product catalog to your website so customers can browse your products (price: optional, purchase: unneeded for brick & mortar stores).
7. Set up a mobile website so customers can browse the product catalog on their cell phones.
8. Include educational information on your website.
9. Make sure you have links from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr all leading back to one another and your website.
As you can see, this is a daunting task, but honestly it's only daunting for the first week or two while you set it all up. Maintaining this strategy is easy once you have a system in place for each of the 9 items above.
While you continuously work through this 9-part strategy you need to remember to correctly optimize all your stuff for search engines. Learning search engine optimization is easy, yet tedious. Review http://jwag.biz/ for some help on that; we spell it out for you.
Before it's too late, you need to incorporate the above 9 ideas into your overall marketing strategy for the 2010 Holiday Season.
We feel you should be directly involved with this, but you could contract out some of this work to your website company, or hire an "internet junkie" college student for the job. You could also talk to your general marketing company about this proposed 9-part plan; they can definitely do this for you if they have a dedicated internet department.
