If you give your promotions just 15 more minutes of brain space, this method will deliver more powerful results.

Consider Your Audience

Spend just three minutes considering your audience for this promotion and define them. If the promotion is for an event, you may be speaking to women who have free time in the evenings. If the promotion is for Valentine’s Day, you may be speaking to men who are married or seriously involved. If the promotion is for a sale, you may be speaking to the younger members of your audience who are more sensitive to prices. Frame the audience in your mind, because the next step requires you to be clear about it.

Consider Motivation

The next step is to ponder the core motivation of your targeted audience. There’s superficial motivation, and there’s core motivation. Let’s use the example of the Valentine’s Day gift buyer.

The superficial motivation for purchasing a Valentine’s gift is that to do so is expected, and to fail to do so might land someone in the doghouse. But there are deeper motivations to be considered. Let’s consider two very different motivations for the purchase of a Valentine’s Day gift.

For some people, being able to purchase an expensive gift also makes them feel good about themselves. The core motivation is related to self-worth — an intrinsic motivation.

Some people like how it makes them appear to others when they purchase expensive gifts. The core motivation is related to social status — an extrinsic motivation.

These two types of motivation respond to very different messages. The intrinsically motivated buyer responds to messages that focus on emotional connection, which is best accomplished through stories. They care about craftsmanship and quality, individuality, and self-expression. The extrinsically motivated buyer responds to messages that highlight prestige and exclusivity. They look for social proof, seek validation, and respond to aspirational content.

It’s nearly impossible to craft a single message that communicates effectively with both audiences, and if you try, you’ll end up with a message that speaks to neither.

When I share this advice with business owners, they often react with, “But I want all my customers to respond to my ads!” That’s understandable, but impractical. A broad message might reach more people, but it doesn’t guarantee greater results. Focusing on a narrow, targeted segment of your audience allows you to deeply resonate with their specific motivations, and this precise alignment will drive meaningful engagement and higher conversion rates.

The post Make More of Your Marketing by Targeting Motivations appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Also true is this: You cannot ignore what is happening in search and how it will affect your online visibility in the near future.

Your online visibility matters. Consumers rarely just wander into a store. They visit your website to see store pictures and browse products. They check your store hours. They read reviews to learn how others feel about the experience you offer. If any of those online reference points don’t exist, trust that one of your competitors has scooped you and the consumer’s attention is now theirs.

Those who’ve exploited SEO as a source of website and store traffic have had a competitive edge, but that edge was slipping even before the AI excitement.

Surely you’ve noticed that Google’s results have become increasingly structured. You might see a complete recipe card at the top of your search for banana bread, a bulleted list of answers to your query “key events of 1959,” or a list of places next to a map when you search restaurants near me. Google has more than 20 different types of structured links, and their intention is to make it easy to find answers without ever clicking a link.

The whole reason most companies focus on SEO is to get people to click a link.
So what happens when AI-driven search makes it possible for searchers to simply ask questions, get answers, ask clarifying questions, and get more answers without ever being sent to a website or Google Business page to explore further? How can your business maintain its online visibility in this new search experience?

1. Focus on user experience and intent. Be clear about what prospects and customers want and need from you and create content that clearly addresses those needs. Make sure your website isn’t just another cookie cut from the same cookie cutter as all your competitors’ websites.

2. Optimize for voice search. This means providing blogs or knowledge-based articles on your website that use natural language to provide thoughtful, concise answers to common questions.

3. Local optimization. Maximize your Google My Business presence. Regularly manage your profile, update business hours and holidays, answer questions, add updates, and promote your most popular/evergreen products.

4. Make your website accessible. If your website isn’t fully accessible to people with disabilities (perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust, or POUR), it’s not only illegal, it also will not be indexed or shared by search engines.

We don’t know yet what SEO 4.0 will be, but you can have confidence that these four things will matter. So start working on mastering them now, and watch this space. Because change, it is a comin’.

The post What Does AI Mean for Your SEO Strategy? appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

The alternative is to divert some of that marketing energy into the direct service of your sales.

The highest-end luxury retailers have long engaged in sophisticated sales techniques to bring target customers to their stores, knowing that foot traffic and broad advertising alone could not be relied on to deliver the qualified customers for their lofty price points. Increasingly, these methods are being used by the broader retail community, particularly as the technology necessary to execute them becomes more affordable and easier to implement.

If you think I’m talking about clienteling you’re right … sort of. But what Nordstrom and Ralph Lauren are doing with wish lists, reserved dressing rooms and virtual appointments goes beyond little black book versions of clienteling. These retailers are using sales techniques taken straight from the technology sector sales playbook.

That’s a phrase you need to know: Sales Playbooks.

You know how you have a clear, manageable, measurable process for accepting repairs, creating a custom design, and checking out a paying customer? A sales playbook is a clear, manageable, measurable process for creating sales, which is very different from hoping a sale will walk through the front door.

A sales playbook breaks down the sales cycle into a step-by-step process that starts with identifying leads and then turns them into clients, and finally turns clients into repeat buyers. It is a system that describes your various buyer personas and provides templates and guidelines for effective communications with each persona, including scripts for calls, email templates, and value propositions tailored to each persona. This system includes prompts to properly qualify customers and includes strategies and responses for addressing common objections and concerns.

What’s that you’re saying … that your sales training already covers these things?

Sure it does, in a “here’s-a-closet-full-of-clothes-please-pick-something-to-wear” kind of way. Sales playbooks lay out the outfits for you, keep track of what you’ve worn and what you haven’t, and make sure each selection is perfect for the weather, social, and business conditions of each day.

As a sales manager, you get complete visibility of your sales pipeline status when you deploy sales playbooks as a strategy. How many customers are in each selling stage (prospecting, meeting, design/proposal, negotiation/commitment, ready-to-close)? What is the potential value of each customer and each pipeline stage? Why hasn’t this customer been contacted for 15 days?

If you have a CRM system that doesn’t provide you with this kind of sales process control and visibility, you are missing out on one of the most powerful tools for cultivating sales with your ideal clients. Sales and marketing automation should be a given in your choice of CRM today. From booking custom appointments to making sure your events are packed with motivated buyers, sales playbooks are a key to increasing retail sales.

So take some of that energy you’re throwing at social media and devote it to supporting your sales pipeline. Your bottom line will thank you.

The post Here’s Why You Might Need to Move Marketing Dollars into Your CRM System appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Always-on-marketing (AOM) is the name for continuous marketing strategies designed to maintain constant awareness and deep engagement with a target audience. AOM takes a long-term approach rather than short-term bursts of marketing activity. Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is to contrast AOM with campaign marketing, which is short-term and intensive. It focuses on specific events, seasons, or products, whereas AOM is about relationships.

While both AOM and campaign marketing have their own complexities, planning and launching promotions make it easier to measure the success of campaigns, and you don’t have to maintain consistency over time as you do with AOM.

Campaigns certainly have a role to play, but the bread-and-butter of jewelry stores is engagement rings and sentimental gifts, and campaigns don’t work as well as AOM for staying top-of-mind with would-be engagement ring, anniversary, and birthday buyers.

You’re probably already doing some elements of AOM. Paid search, SEO and social media strategies are the most common forms. Other AOM strategies include thought leadership, content marketing, email marketing, customer relationship marketing, and community-building.

Thought leadership is the marketing strategy of positioning yourself or your brand as a trusted authority and expert in your field. The goal is to establish credibility, build trust, and differentiate from your competitors, so you are the one people remember when it’s time to buy.

Content marketing includes sharing relevant, consistent content through many forms, like blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, social media posts, infographics, and events. The aim is to provide information, explore problems and solutions, and build relationships.

Email marketing in an AOM strategy is less promotional, more communicative than campaign emails. AOM emails feel more personal, written like one-to-one communications. The best AOM marketers have a constant flow of conversational emails scheduled and automated.

Together, email and social media should function as the connective tissue of the store-customer relationship, sharing details about what happens in the store and celebrating customer, employee, and community-member milestones.

AOM cannot be done on an ad hoc basis. These strategies require long-term planning, writers, designers, and a full-featured CRM system to schedule, automate, and analyze every effort. Your message must be delivered every day, multiple times per day.

Adopting an AOM approach has a learning curve. But the more you focus on nurturing your customer base, the more likely prospective jewelry buyers will be to remember you when they’re in the market for jewelry.

The post Here’s How to Be the First Business Your Clients Think Of When They Need Jewelry appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

These processes consume most days. After a while, it begins to seem like the whole purpose of work is to create days with just the right balance … the right number of tasks to fit the number of hours and people available.

Which is when we begin to lose the throughline of our business.

A throughline is a concept normally applied to writing stories. The throughline is the thread that binds the story together. When you read a poorly constructed story, the first things you notice are events or details that don’t make sense, or that distract from the main point of the story. In a well-written story, each detail makes sense in the context of the whole and helps bring the story to life.

If your brand lacks a throughline, then all those processes are being done without a central theme binding them together. To the people experiencing your brand, everything will seem transactional. Pleasant? Sure. Satisfactory? Of course. But still transactional, because they will fail to be connected by a single, meaningful thread.

So how do you create a throughline for your business? It starts with your business culture.

Your business culture sets the tone for what you prioritize and how everyone in your organization communicates and behaves. What do you value, why do you value it, and how do you express those values? Most people think the story of a business starts with brand, but brands cannot be sustained without attaching them to intentional, nurtured cultures.

Your brand is where the throughline of your values turns into stories. It is how you weave the story of your values through everything every employee does.

As a brand ambassador for your business, ask yourself: “What do our culture and brand tell us about how the merchandise should be displayed? How do we answer the phone relative to our brand story? How does every surface in our store, from the floor to the ceiling, reflect our brand story? How to we treat customers according to our brand? What about our vendors and other community members? When customers listen to the way we communicate with each other, is that consistent with our brand story?”

If you’ve been focused on weaving your brand story through every social media post, blog, photograph, and web page, that’s good. But it’s not enough. Your business is literally a marketing machine, churning out messages from every surface, from the fixtures and flooring to the trays and display forms. The throughline of your brand story is conveyed in the sound bites of conversation among your employees and the clutter (or not) on the counter behind your register.

Take the collection of processes that make up each day and thoughtfully integrate them as part of your brand’s throughline. This is exactly what your customers are looking for, and the ultimate goal of marketing.

The post Why Everything You Do in Your Business Should Start with Your “Throughline” appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Marketing and sales automation are the use of technology to automate marketing and selling tasks, using customer journeys and data for heightened relevance.

The most effective tools for marketing and sales automation are CRM systems like HubSpot and Keap. Here is an example of an automated marketing and sales workflow.

TRIGGER: A visitor submits a form asking to be added to your email marketing list or requesting to download an e-book about building a jewelry wardrobe.
ACTION: The visitor’s information is checked against the CRM database. If this is a contact that has been identified as a high-net-worth (HNW) prospect, the contact is delivered to a salesperson for follow-up.
ACTION: If the visitor has not been identified as a HNW prospect, the request is fulfilled and the visitor is added to an email drip campaign that delivers three introductory emails over the next two weeks.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a retargeting campaign that displays targeted ads to them across social media and news feeds.
ACTION: Following the introductory campaign, the visitor is added to a nurturing campaign that delivers relevant content and offers to them for the next four months.

TRIGGER: The visitor opens an email from the drip campaign.
ACTION: The visitor’s lead score is increased, indicating a higher level of interest.
ACTION: When a lead score reaches a pre-determined value, the lead is assigned as a task to a salesperson to follow up personally.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a sales follow-up campaign that includes a series of emails and phone calls from a sales representative. The emails include a meeting link to book a private consultation.

TRIGGER: The visitor schedules a consultation.
ACTION: The visitor’s lead score is increased, indicating a higher likelihood of conversion.

TRIGGER: The visitor places an order following the consultation.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a customer onboarding campaign that delivers helpful resources.
ACTION: An email is sent at 14 days post-purchase asking the customer if they are satisfied and requesting that they provide a testimonial.

TRIGGER: A testimonial is provided by the new client.
ACTION: The testimonial is automatically fed to both Google and Facebook, while simultaneously being queued for display on the website.

As you can see, the system handles repetitive tasks that would have otherwise been done by a human. Automation systems can track, respond to, and score volumes of individual transactions in a way that store personnel do not have time (or will not remember) to do.

The post Here’s How Automated Marketing Can Help You Close More Sales appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Barely 20 years ago, marketing a small business was much easier.

Today’s small-business owner faces the same marketing complexity as any consumer-goods conglomerate, but without big corporate marketing teams and outside advertising agencies. To make the best use of limited time and staff and all the channels and media begging for attention, it’s vital to develop your marketing plan through the lens of campaign planning.

Assuming that you have analyzed your market and customer behavior, reviewed last year’s marketing performance, identified customer needs and wants, and set goals and budgets for the coming year, the next step is to do top-down marketing planning.

Develop a Theme

Start by defining a theme for each year. This can be based on something tangible, like a new store opening or major new product or brand releases, or it may be more conceptual. During the pandemic, businesses made good use of themes, embracing messaging about diversity and inclusion, tradition, or environmental sustainability.

Coming out of the pandemic, we see other themes emerging around being more social, having fun, and gathering for experiences. An overarching theme helps focus attention and energy and gives you the opportunity to create trust and brand recognition through repetition and familiarity. Even promotions that do not refer directly to the theme should echo the theme in some way. A good theme is like a mini-brand within your brand; it will have its own messaging, graphics, and a color palette.

Populate the Calendar

With your theme established, the next step is to create a broad calendar of promotions. I like using an annual calendar layout so I can see all 12 upcoming months in one view.

Start by penciling in all the usual promotions: holidays, events, seasonal experiences, and promotions that your customers have come to expect and support.

Next, look for the empty swaths on the calendar. How can you fill in the blanks with something interesting to promote each month? Your theme functions as a guide, helping you come up with ideas for promotions that are consistent with each other and that will help you achieve your marketing goals.

Turn it Into Campaigns

Once you have a promotional focus for each month, it’s time to turn the events on your calendar into campaigns. It might look something like this:

Theme for the Year: Celebrating Women

• January: New Year, New You
• February: Be Your Own Valentine
• March: International Women’s Day
• April: Make Your Own Luck
• May: The Nurturing Month
• June: New Fashion Brand Launch
• July: Bite-Sized Summer Adventures
• August: Rest & Rejuvenate
• September: Never too old for back-to-school shopping!
• October: Women’s Health Awareness
• November: The Gratitude Month
• December: Making Memories

In this example, calendar events like holidays are wrapped up in the monthly themes, ideally in unique and interesting ways. I once had a client say to me, “But we’re just making stuff up here!” Well … yeah. And he who makes the best, most interesting, most consistent stuff up in retail wins.

Apply Goal Metrics to Campaigns

Apply performance metrics to each campaign, making sure the sum of your campaign goals adds up to your strategic sales growth ROI goals for the year. Now you know what each campaign must produce to be successful.

Break Campaigns Down to Tactics

Next, brainstorm the types and quantities of promotions you need. For example:

• What are your instore and online traffic conversion rates, and how many ads, social posts, organic search results and radio spots do you need to drive sufficient traffic to your website and store to achieve your sales goals?
• Which types of promotion lead to higher quality customers and higher margin sales sufficient to achieve your margin goals?

Your monthly themes will help you frame the tactics, and your annual theme will continuously tie them all together.

You still have nine months left in this year to get your marketing plan on point. Get out there and make some stuff up. Your marketing results and budget will thank you.

The post Here’s How to Construct Your Annual Marketing Campaign Plan appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

AI writing is not new. During the past three years, dozens of affordable AI-writing software programs have hit the market, and the internet has been filling up with AI-generated content ever since. So if the software is readily available and small-business owners need help generating content, is AI the solution?

The answer is … sort of. AI writers may be beneficial to you if you know what they are suitable for … and what they are not.

Let’s answer the big question first: No, the output from AI writing tools should not be used for your blog or newsletter. Google is already crawling online content with tools that can identify AI-generated text, and we expect that Google will soon be devaluing content that is not disclosed as AI-written. No sense producing more writing just to damage your SERP (search engine results page) results.

Besides, AI may spell correctly and use good grammar (mostly), but it cannot infuse writing with an authentic voice that sounds like your brand.

So if it is inadvisable to use the outputs of AI for your marketing, how can it be helpful?

A well-managed blog strategy involves planning content that suits your brand and promotes your products and services while increasing your SEO performance. The most challenging aspect of blogging is not the writing: It’s figuring out how to write endlessly on a limited set of topics. With software like ContextMinds and Frase, you enter a topic description and the program spits out lists of related topics, questions and answers it found online for each topic and can even create outlines for articles. These programs also display the value of search terms related to the topics and make it easy to pin or save reference articles.

In less time than most marketing writers take to produce one article, an AI software program can help you plan many weeks of writing, with confidence that the content you are planning will contain information that is popular or that is underrepresented. It’s simple to use the outlines you’ve created and the research sources you’ve pinned to write an article for each topic. In addition to saving time, every article will be in your brand voice and will improve your SEO ranking.

AI tools can significantly speed up the brainstorming, planning, research, and outlining tasks required in marketing writing. Use them for this purpose, and you will reduce the time involved in producing content while increasing overall quality. Still hate writing? No problem. Hire a writer to do the writing for you, with full confidence that when they ask the dreaded question, “So what do you want me to write?” you can hand them your AI-assisted planning output to direct them.

The post Here’s How Artificial Intelligence Can Help with Your Marketing appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

He treated the word exercise with disdain. But I’ve always thought of exercise as a way to improve strength, hone skills, and achieve results.

In business, the word for exercise is process, and like exercise, we use processes for stability, longevity, and muscle-building. The problem with most marketing planning in the small business sector is that it isn’t done as a process, so its output isn’t predictable.

The Process

Step 1: Assemble the following data for a comprehensive understanding of your facts:

• Market data. Review industry performance overall and by category. See how your business compares.
  Competitive analysis. How many employees do they have? What are their operating hours? What brands do they carry? What price points do they advertise?How do these details compare to previous years?
• Behavioral data. How did your customers respond to your marketing and sales efforts, including email and social media engagement, website visits, store visits, purchases, purchase sizes, margins, repeat orders, returns and referrals?

Step 2: Analyze. Rate the tactics you used in the prior year relative to results. Note which of your story elements are factual and which are assumptions. It is acceptable to use assumptions, but you must highlight them so you can monitor any decisions based on assumptions.

Step 3: Review and (if necessary) update your target customer (also known as Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP). Reviewing your ICP focuses you on weighing each marketing idea against your ICP’s interests and needs.

Step 4: Commit to a budget and set goals. Set spending, sales, revenue and margin goals. This will help to ensure each plan is weighed against its ability to deliver the desired results.

Step 5: Develop marketing strategies. These include messaging, campaigns, media … all the combined tools you can use to achieve your marketing objectives. Steps 1 through 4 will provide insight into which strategies you should pursue.

Step 6: Establish metrics. These metrics should align with achieving your goals and staying on budget. Comparing plans to actuals will help you know if you are staying on track from day one.

Step 7: Make a plan and a schedule. Q1 schedules should be highly detailed; actual results and market conditions will lead to modifications and new opportunities throughout the year.

In that old company, I did implement marketing plans (and all the other exercises). The company grew profitably and significantly. You can fill a library with books about all the different ways to market, but if you overlay this outline of process, you will get it right more often than not.

The post Follow These Steps to Streamline Your Marketing and Achieve Higher Sales appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Every luxury business needs its whales. I’m not being disrespectful! A whale is any customer with the potential to bring in extraordinary sales revenue. Like whales, these clients are large (in the pocketbook), elusive, and uncommon.

Clienteling is the traditional method of luxury sales whale hunting. Network extensively, build a book of contacts, nurture relationships, and become their go-to. Those are all still important practices, but they have become more challenging.

At one time, local networking was the bedrock of retail relationship-building, but today’s whales are harder to find and meet. The social fabric built around service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis), social and country clubs, chambers of commerce, and church memberships is fraying as such memberships have dramatically declined. In days gone by, networking was the top of the sales funnel for whale leads, the middle of the sales funnel for nurturing those leads, and the relationship grease that continued those relationships over time.

Today, if you tell a new salesperson to “get out there and network!”, you’ll just get a blank stare.

So, what’s a whale-hunter to do? Get skilled in Account Based Marketing (ABM). ABM has been around since 2003 and is a highly successful B2B marketing and sales strategy. But with a tiny bit of adaptation, it also works extraordinarily well for cultivating high-end luxury retail clients.

Let’s start with a caveat. ABM is not the right marketing approach for marketing to the occasional $2,000 client. Your regular inbound marketing and advertising strategies are the best way to drive a steady stream of foot traffic. But for finding the regular $25K, $50K and higher clients, ABM is a method that pays.

ABM starts with defining your Ideal Client Profile. When we’re implementing in a B2B environment, we call this the ICP, but for luxury retail, we call it the WCP (that’s right … Whale Client Profile). Because this client is different from the rest. You may have hundreds of regular clients, but only a dozen WCPs. The way to create this profile is to do some research and look closely at the whales you have. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What are they involved in? How did they find you (or you them)? How often do they buy from you and for what reasons?

Once we have a solid WCP, we create a Customer Journey map, which documents what is happening at each point in the sales journey from Awareness & Discovery, to Intent, to making a Purchase Decision and beyond to Loyalty and Referrals. The customer journey process evaluates what is happening in each stage: the activities the WCP is engaged in, the touchpoints for each activity, the problems the WCP is trying to solve or the challenges they face, and importantly, what we might be able to do to solve the pain points and meet the needs in each stage in order to move the WCP on to the next stage.

The work of ABM is to take that WCP and customer journey map and create highly personalized campaigns to engage each lead based on their specific needs and using the right marketing messages and channels for them. It is an incredibly personal form of marketing that, when it’s done right, builds trust and relationships.

In ABM, you monitor your WCP leads’ behaviors as they interact with you on your social channels, visit your website, open and click on email communications, and communicate via email, text and phone with you or your staff. An ABM play requires using a system that can centralize all these communications, and involves creating a separate set of carefully curated marketing materials that help you support the sales effort at each stage.

Some folks are saying that clienteling is dead. It is most definitely not dead. But the way to do it has changed. If you’re worried that your current whales are aging out and struggling to new ones to take their place, consider giving ABM a try. Today’s digitally savvy whales are incredibly receptive to being cultivated, but your old black book technique is no longer capable of engaging them.

The post Fishing for Whales? It Takes a New Method of Clienteling appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.