So... it's June. What's on your agenda for this month? Perhaps you have holiday advertising planning on your mind. If not in the next 2 weeks, then certainly you'll be thinking about it over the next 6 weeks.
As you evaluate your advertising budget we want you to take a very close look at what you spent last year, and what the return on investment was for each method. Many jewelers reported upticks in sales last holiday season, but was that because the economy turned around or because advertising methods worked?
While at JCK we spoke to a few successful jewelers that were not selling online, but were heavily marketing their website. In fact, those successful retailers told us they were spending between 50% and 70% of their entire marketing budget through online marketing instead of traditional media.
Most of you reading this probably don't have e-commerce features on your website. But that's okay, because your primary objective should be to drive traffic to your retail store, and you can do this even if you don't have an online catalog.
Here are 8 ideas:
1. Figure out what your advertised specials will be for the entire season. Last year several vendors had complete suites jewelry to use as Black Friday Doorbusters. Call your vendors now and ask them if they will be offering anything like that. Otherwise, just map out your specials for each day of the season.
2. Coordinate with your website programmer and make sure all of those specials are on your home page or other appropriate landing pages. Create the landing pages this summer, but hide them from your main navigation for now. You can turn them on later, or easily make modifications if the next several months dictate--but you won't be scrambling from scratch.
3. Sign up with an email service and start sending email notices this month. Send 1 email in June, 1 in July, then 2 emails each month from August to November. In December you will send at least 3 emails. Make sure you budget all these emails into your marketing. It's critical that you start sending emails this month, otherwise you will run the risk of being filtered as spam during the Holiday Season.
4. Advertise on Google AdWords. Target your local area only, and point your ads to the coordinated landing pages your programmer created in #2 above. The landing pages need to be created prior to this step.
5. Advertise on Facebook. This includes the ads in the margins, offers you post to your timeline, and Check-in Deals. The ads will cost money; the offers and deals do not, but they are also less likely to be seen.
6. Hire someone to tweet your specials. There's a bit of wizardry behind using Twitter, so you'll have to find a good social mogul to do this for you if you don't already have an active account. It would be good to build up Twitter Followers before the holiday season; thus, like the emails, you need to start this now.
7. Pinterest. Create an account and start pinning now. During the Holiday Season you will pin all those specials every time you send them out.
8. Foursquare Check-in special. Create one because they don't charge you for that service.
There's at least a labor cost to each of these setups. Google and Facebook ads will also cost money. Figure out the costs now and factor that into your holiday marketing budget. Whatever money is left over is what you can spend on traditional media.
