Between your website, local newspaper, direct mail, radio ads, billboard, social media, and word of mouth, it's difficult to calculate exactly how your customers are finding you and what ultimately convinced them to make a purchase. What was once an easy task of calculating the ROI for an individual ad is now impossible because of so many different ways a customer can engage with you online.
"Attribution modeling" is the modern process of analyzing and assig... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The digital screen on my bathroom scale has been on the fritz more and more every day, and I finally decided to do something about it today. I've owned different wearable devices over the past 7 years to monitor my health and daily activity, but I didn't yet have a smart bathroom scale to monitor my BMI or other health factors. Today was the day I would finally get one.
I contemplated buying one off Amazon.com but decided that I'd rather compare models ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I recently came across a seminar titled "How to Promote Your Online Store In A Cost-Effective Manner" and thought it was an extremely misleading headline. Whenever business owners ask me about cost effective online advertising, they usually mean "least expensive" rather than asking me how to achieve the best ROI with their online ads.
I've also found that many business owners believe that online marketing is simple, and that anyone can do it. Preying upon this belief, there are ad a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I've previously estimated and explained that the customer cost of acquisition for a retail jeweler is somewhere around $75. You can calculate this number by summing up your advertising expense for a campaign and dividing that by the number of new customers you've acquired during that period.
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... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"Save the clock tower! Hey kid, save the clock tower. Lightning struck that thing, 60 years ago!"
Today is Back to the Future Day, the day predicted in the 1989 movie Back to the Future II (BTTFII) where Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown race to the future--Wednesday, October 21, 2015--to save the McFly family from a horrible fate.
The holiday season is quickly approaching and you need to consider how you will be spending your advertising dollars. Will you hold an event promoted with post cards and phone calls? Will you have a Black Friday sale promoted in the local newspaper? What medium will you use for your weekly ads for the holiday season?
There are a lot more choices now than just newspapers, post cards, billboards, TV, and radio. VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is final part of my 3-part series on Time Management. I realize it's a bit ironic that I've written Daily Golden Nuggets on Time Management and it's taking forever to read through them.
In the first two installments, I explained my methods of how I prioritize time, how I figured out the best time of day for me to work, how I deal with time consuming tasks, the time suck of social media, and how delegating tasks saves me time.
What is the real value of the content you produce? Should you be creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you? What about content curation?
This is part 2 of my in-depth answers to those questions. I've identified 6 levels of content and list them here in order of their most valuable to least valuable:
1. Business Owner Creates Content 2. Business Owner Curates Content 3. Business Owner Socially Engages 4. Hire Content Creator or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'll be the first to admit the website content creation difficultly level is pretty high. Content includes infographics, photos, podcasts, PDFs, videos, testimonials, and, of course, the written word. It takes hours to prepare each of those types of content but the return on that time investment come in the form of several years of attracting customers throu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As the internet and online shopping have become more popular over the last few years, today, the first Monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday, has earned the designation as Cyber Monday. This is the day when many e-commerce websites have 24 hour sales to lure shoppers to spend their money online instead of shopping in local stores.
Every year comScore.com reports the sales figures for different shopping days through the holiday season. Although the calendar date of Cyber Monday changes ever... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the Thanksgiving Holiday in the United States. For many years, this day marked the official point on the calendar as the start of the holiday season in the US. Not too long ago, you wouldn't see a single Christmas Tree or holiday decorations in a store until the Friday morning after Thanksgiving. The Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade would march down the streets of New York and not a word about Christmas was mentioned until Santa Claus went by on that last float, giving us the go-ahea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout all of last week, I've been laying the groundwork for a complete holiday 2014 marketing plan that you can use to promote a chosen suite of items.
Over the last three days, I've given you some specific marketing tactics that, as a whole, would equate to a large marketing campaign for the holiday season. I began with a discussion on choosing the right products for the campaign, then explained how to VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm reviewing another section of the seminar I presented on July 27, 2014 at the JA NY show. This segment is about paying for traffic on Facebook; should you be doing that?
Paying for online advertising always has a right way and a wrong way. Typically the wrong way is seriously wrong and it's a complete waste of money. Most businesses, not just retail jewelers, are advertising on Facebook wrong.
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store. (Part one here)
Let me do a quick rundown of all the example numbers from yesterday...
The following visitor referrals have come to our website over the last 30 days Visits from Facebook: 15 Visits... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
I have 4 predictions for retail jewelry stores for the 2013 year. Here they are...
Prediction #1. The problem of easy tracking of users from point of origin online to an in-store sale will NOT YET be solved. This is one of the largest problems that retail jewelers face; in fact all businesses that use online marketing to increase the business of their brick and mortar stores face this problem. The true ROI ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the final part of our long series on Black Hat SEO and recommendations on avoiding it.
Yesterday we gave you the first 4 of 9 tips every jewelry should be aware of when hiring an SEO Professional to work for you. These are very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional much more rewarding.
5. As for those ROI reports, don't be unrealistic with your expectations. The web is not a static ecosystem. Obviously you want more traffic, more customers, and higher profits, but traffic and customers cannot be created or destroyed; they instead are stolen from other websites.
As soon as the efforts of your SEO Pro start working, you need to realize that your competitor will step up their SEO game, too. T... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 6 days, we've given you Black Hat SEO discussions and examples of how to avoid them. Unfortunately there are a lot of SEO "professionals" out there that want nothing more than to take your money and promise you results.
A quick Google search for "link building services" returns 35,300,000 results and tons of ads, meaning there is big business in link building. Do you think all those paid link building services will openly tell you that they use Black Hat techniques? Remember that Black Hat SEO refers to anything you do that will trick the search engines into ranking you higher in the SERP.
If you're not doing your own website SEO you will eventually need to hire someone to do it for you. Between today and tomorrow we're giving you 9 very blunt directions that will make working with your SEO professional mu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Ever wonder why your marketing strategy fails, or doesn't return any real investment? You spend thousands on a billboard just to have friends say "I saw your billboard." You spend thousands on a radio ad just to have the FedEx guy say "I heard your ad on the radio today."
Each and every time you spend money on an ad, it should return enough sales to at least cover the cost of the ad. If not, well, then you did it wrong.
Wrong demographic target, or wrong placement, or wrong words, or maybe simply no one cares about what you are trying to sell. Of course, there's always the possibility that your ad slogan has some other urban slang definition and everyone's laughing at you.
Now in the second week of online marketing attempts, we are seeing random and sloppy ads from many jewelry stores.
Advertising is the key to any successful jewelry business; well, that is to say the advertising needs to be successful in attracting customers. Only then will the willing customers come.
In the past you would publish your ad and then wait patiently for customers. With the internet we don't have to wait too long to figure out what's working and what's not. The tool to use is Google Analytics.
Analytics allows you to see how people are using your website.
Here are some things you can learn from analytics: * What they are clicking on * What colors work best * If your jewelry photography effective * Which headlines work best
Highly successful jewelry stores usually see analytics and testing as a high priority. It's a key difference between winners and losers in both online sales and increasing... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
This is the second part of a Nugget explaining how you can take tracking results from Google analytics and calculate more than just the return on investment for your retail jewelry store.
It's the end of one year and the beginning of another, and that means it's time for predictions for next year.
