One month ago today, I introduced the 2015 Holiday Run-Up with the premise that this year you could create several specialized marketing campaigns, or micro-campaigns, focused on singles products or groupings of products. Implementing the micro campaigns would require lots of product photography, correctly targeting your customers, writing lots of product content, sharing that product content to social media, coordinating your print ads and social media posts, and even some contributions to local charities.
Naturally, that's a lot to cover in one brief Daily Golden Nugget, so I broke it all out into 19 parts. Today is the complete summation of the entire Run-Up with links back to each part.
Creating Uniform Branding with Ads and Photography
The examples I provided in this Nugget show you how to use different photography in different ads that will lure customers back to your website. Too many jewelers get stuck in the rut of using their one and only product photo in all their marketing for that item. Instead of using that boring approach, this one shows you how to use creative photos for online, email, and several other types of ads, including offline.
Tracking Offline Ads with Domain Names
This is a pretty simple idea, but most people don't even know that it's possible to track your print media ads with different domain names. Domain name prices have dropped a lot, making this idea inexpensive to implement. Simply buy up a bunch of domain names and use them on your print ads instead of your regular domain. The results of your tracking will appear in your Google Analytics account.
Planning The Correct Photography
More often than not, I see jewelers using simple white background product photography in all their ads, even online. The internet is such a rich medium that should never be made to suffer with boring white background photos. While white background product photography is certainly important for e-commerce sites, it's the dazzeling colorful background photography that gets recognized on social media and in print ads. This Nugget provides ideas for interesting background and how they should, and should not be used on social media. Make sure to read the photo tips in this one to prevent making some critical mistakes.
Uploading Customer Email List to Facebook
Facebook provides an easy way to target your existing customers with ads, and create a lookalike target audience. All you need to do is upload your customer email list to Facebook by following the steps given in this Nugget. With an email list of 500, you can create a lookalike audience of more than 1 million other potential customers. Targeting your own local customers is one thing, but if you target ads to a lookalike audience you will need an e-commerce website.
Directions for First Time Users of Facebook Audience Insights
Don't have a list of email addresses to upload to Facebook? That's okay, since you can use Facebook Audience Insights to build a customer avatar for ad targeting. Using Insights, you can choose local towns, age ranges, and various interests that your customers might have. You can save these targeting lists for later use, but more importantly, Facebook also shows you other areas of interest that your audience has. This opens a world of new possibilities and ideas for creating ads that will resonate your those saved audiences.
Holiday Charity Events and Gift Card Donations
This topic is a favorite of mine because it dives into the life time value of a customer and if you should give gift cards away to attract a new customer. In short, yes, you should always donate at least a $50 gift card to any local charity that's having a find raising event. The expectation is that the gift card will be raffled at one of these events and the winner will be a new customer. Giving away a $50 gift card is less expensive than the typical cost for new customer acquisition for most retail jewelers.
Online Product Content
There's no shortage of jewelry websites with boring product catalogs. Most retail jewelers will settle for simple online jewelry catalogs with photos and instructions to call for more information. This strategy simply does not appeal to the new jewelry buying generation. Modern customers want tons of product information available on your website so they can be fully informed before taking their first step in your store. Given the choice, most of them would probably prefer to make their purchase decision online and only spend a few minutes in your store. This Nugget have plenty of ideas of how to populate your website with delicious product content.
Planning For Unknown Photography Needs
Put those creative ideas to use and shoot as many product photos as possible when working with your photographer. My suggestion is to use a different product photo every time you publicize that product. The photo can be shot at a different angle, with a different background or simply showing a different aspect of the jewelry than what you've shown previously. Have the extra photography ready for random social media idea that comes to mind.
Facebook's 80/20 Ad Rule
Facebook changes their policies often, but their 80/20 rule for Facebook ads has been around for a while. In a nutshell, any text you have in the ad must not occupy more than 20% of the ad image. However, that's not 20% of the pixels of the ad, it's 20% coverage of the arbitrary grid they use to measure your ad. Check out this Nugget to see how this 80/20 rule works in practice.
Boosting Facebook Posts
In order to reach your customers, you need to boost your business Facebook posts. But don't just boost your posts to the generic Facebook population, you should boost your posts to a specific targeted Facebook audience. This Nugget explains how that works and refers to the other Facebook Run-Up Nuggets already mentioned above.
Pinterest for the Holidays
Pinning your product to Pinterest might not get noticed immediately, but it's a social network that keeps on giving for several years. This Nugget gives you Pinterest image format suggestions, topic suggestions, and even shows some proof of how great Pinterest is over time. Check it out, and start using Pinterest today.
Instagram for the Holidays
Still struggling to figure out Instagram? Jewelry designers are already a few years ahead of retail jewelers with this social network. Designers have discovered how easy it is to build a following of people who are curious to see new work unfold. This Run-Up Nugget gives a brief introduction to Instagram and some ideas for using it.
Twitter for the Holidays
Wondering how many times to post to Twitter in a single Day? This Run-Up Nugget is also an introduction to Twitter for business with reasons why it's okay to tweet multiple times a day. It also explains some easy strategies for getting started with Twitter.
Google+ for the Holidays
I certainly could not have a Holiday Run-Up without explaining Google+. While Google+ might never be the social media juggernaut that we hoped it would, it's still larger than many other social networks. Businesses should be posting to Google+ as part of their overall marketing strategy. If Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are on your list of social networks, then Google+ should be too.
Social Media Timing
Every expert has a different opinion on when you should post to social networks. My own opinion is for you to post to social networks when your audience is using it, and not to listen to the experts. This Nugget shows you how to read the Facebook Insights report to see exactly when your audience is online.
Online Ads vs. Long Term Website Content
Paying for some online ads should be part of your needed online marketing strategy. However, some jewelers would rather pay for online ads instead of spending the time to bulk up quality content on their website. It's difficult to build a profitable business when you only get traffic from online ads. Over the long term the content on your website needs to attract enough organic visitors so you no longer need to rely on paid ads. This Nugget explains how it works.
Using ROI to Determine Future Print Media Targeting
This Nugget gives a brief example of how a retail jeweler can calculate ROI of print ads to local towns. This return on investment (ROI) calculation helps you choose which local newspapers to continue advertising in, and which ones to discontinue. It also explains an approach for testing ads in new residential developments like those popping up in the movie Back to the Future.
Setting up Google AdWords Express
In this final installment of the 2015 Holiday Run-Up, I provide new screen shots and instructions for setting up your first AdWords Express ad. If you plan on using Facebook ads, then you should also use Google AdWords Express as shown in this Nugget.
2015 Holiday Run-Up Concludes
And there you have it; all the links to 19 of the most in-depth, complete topic Nuggets that I've written in quite a while. This is also my largest dedicated series (20 Nuggets in total counting this one) since I started the Daily Golden Nuggets in July 2010. I'd love to hear your feedback of how you applied all these topics and the results you received. I've already had some good feedback over the last month, so please keep it coming.
