This is the third article in ShelfTrend's Entrepreneur Series contributed by our Entrepreneur of the Moment, Heather Potter.
Growing your business is a bit of a chicken and egg proposition. You need sales so you can invest in growing your audience. But you need an audience to be able to make sales.
Over seven years of running Shoe Envy, I learned that growing my audience was the critical first step to growing my business. To achieve this, I needed to be crystal clear on my audience and make sure I was in front of them all the time.
If you’re joining us for the first time fresh, I’m Heather and I started my own online store, Shoe Envy, after friends and family teased me about my epic shoe collection. Six weeks later I was in China. And just over six months later, I had set up a full supply chain and was designing, manufacturing, importing and selling my own shoe label online.
At its peak, Shoe Envy was turning over in excess of $20,000 a month from my lounge room while I upheld my regular day job. I’m here to tell you, I’m not special. The only difference between me and anyone else is I’m willing to give anything a crack. Most things, once you get into them, are really not that hard.
I am working with ShelfTrend on this Entrepreneur Series because there is opportunity out there to sell online and to make a good go of it. If I can do it, so can you. Follow along the series – I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or two!
I came from old school marketing and PR where it was hard to get reach and even find your audience. Today as a digital marketer, there are so many ways to effectively and affordably connect with your customer, establish a core audience base and more importantly build your tribe – which is the ultimate and most rewarding way to win in digital marketing.
When I first started Shoe Envy, the only people following the brand were blood relatives, a few people I worked with and this one vegan guy who lived on the beach and I’m pretty certain didn’t wear shoes. At its peak, Shoe Envy had over 22,000 Facebook followers, over 8000 customers in its email database and such engaged customers I still visit them when I travel around the country. To save you all the years of trial and error I went through, here are some of the most important things I learned.
1. KNOW WHAT MAKES YOUR CUSTOMERS TICK
In my first article, I talked about going on my first sourcing trip to China, shopping for myself and building a product range based on my tastes and purchasing behaviour. This was a complete error – my customers were not like me at all – and thank goodness I figured that out!
People who were attracted to my brand and had the buying power to pay for my products were older, married, had teenage or adult children, owned their own home and came from a two-income household. They were middle-aged and interested in presenting their personalities vibrantly. They were concerned about looking stylish while still being comfortable during their commutes or during their long hours at the office. They wanted to stand out but in a subtle way. It became obvious my product strategy and the way I communicated and connected with these people needed to change.
I drilled down into my sales data and sent out customer surveys to learn more about who was buying my product and this was helpful but it was a tiny sample size. ShelfTrend can also be really revealing about your customer’s buying preferences and with a sample size of millions of shoppers. If you look through the Top 500 report, the 50 top-ranked products have received the most buyer interest. Go through to the Average Weekly Sales report, you will see that similar products with different prices can have very different sales performance – and you’ll be surprised, the least expensive is not always the bestselling! Doing research on ShelfTrend is a great way of looking behind the scenes of what a person portrays on social media to find out what they’re really spending their money on.
2. USE SOCIAL REACH TO BUILD YOUR DATABASE
Social is a no-brainer. Everyone is on it and they’re highly engaged and interactive – offering a way to connect for even the most reclusive of introverts. It has also been custom-designed to offer detailed audience segmentation to support businesses selling product.
If you want to succeed quickly on social media, you need an advertising budget. Only about 5% of the people who already like your page will see the content you post organically. To scale up – whether that’s scaling up your audience size, the number of people entering your competitions, the number of people buying your products – you need to run ads.
You also must get a commitment. Always put a call to action in the ad or post that leads to making a purchase of a product or joining an email list. Liking your socials isn’t a commitment. I hear so many people say, “But I make heaps of money selling straight from Insta…” Ok, but you don’t own that contact. What if your Instagram profile gets shut down?
I’ve encountered several horror stories of Facebook and Instagram profiles being shut down due to malicious reporting by business rivals or other activity. People I know personally have lost their businesses overnight because they relied entirely on that channel for sales. Some were able to fight the giant and get their profiles reinstated (after several weeks of lost income and sleepless nights) and some lost everything.
But quite apart from this obvious massive risk to your business, social channels are not the highest converting channels. Data indicates that email conversion rates are at least three times higher than social media. So imagine the sales you could be making if you got your loyal social following into an email list and started mailing them regularly!
I cannot emphasize this enough – GET AN EMAIL LIST. And once you get that list, develop a strong email marketing content strategy, don’t just spam them. The goal of your social strategy is to identify and maintain engagement with suitable contacts until you can convince them to buy from you.
3. ENGAGE WITH THEM THE WAY THEY WANT TO ENGAGE
Assuming you have your brand message down pat and you’re already collecting a following and a database, you will want to diversify the way you present your message so that it appeals to your customers in more ways than one. Here are some examples of the type of content you should be building and posting out or sending out:
Product placement – preferable lifestyle imagery that shows your product being used/worn/in situ so your audience can imagine it in its natural habitat (as opposed to in a studio against a white wall).
Stories about you – don’t overdo it but you should include the occasional post about yourself as the business owner/founder that gives insight into what makes you tick and why you’re passionate about this product.
Brand content – this includes things that define your brand personality and can be quite broad. The purpose of this content is to engage your audience in a brand-appropriate way and encourage likes and comments (higher engagement on your page will tell the Facebook bots that your content is strong so your page will get more exposure).
Promotions – this is any content focused on selling – e.g. advertising your latest sale or a new product launch, posting a studio image of a product with a price on it. Again, don’t overdo this content or your newsfeed will feel like one endless advertisement.
Videos – videos still get higher engagement than pretty much anything else. You can use this knowledge in smart ways when building an advertising funnel.
Influencers – Everyone rolls their eyes at this but the truth is, genuine influencers with strongly engaged followers can be an amazing source of growth (and sales) for your database. An influencer once wore a pair of shoes in a photo on her blog, mentioning my brand only in a footnote, and I immediately made multiple sales of that shoe.
It’s important to make sure your expectations are reasonable and that the value of what you are providing (whether cash, in-kind or both) is commensurate with the influencer’s audience size, status and normal charge rates. It is worth starting small, ironing out the bugs and getting a feel for what works before you go after the big fish.
4. CONNECT WITH THEM DIFFERENTLY
A fast way to grow your audience that is greatly under-utilized is collaborating with a compatible business to cross promote or run a joint promotion to a similar demographic. Obviously make sure they don’t sell the same products you have and vice versa - that way you won’t cannibalize each other’s sales.
ShelfTrend is great tool for identifying sellers who sell products that could go together with yours. Just stalk… I mean research… the other sellers to get a feel of their product range and then approach them. So for example, if you sell fishing gear, you could probably find a seller who focuses on camping products that you could work with. You could even research their average weekly sales to assess how engaged their buyers to ensure they are at least the same size or bigger than your own business.
I ran several competitions to “Win your dream fashion wardrobe” which included shoes from my business and clothing from another business. We each promoted the competition to our own databases as well as advertising it on our Facebook and Instagram profiles with paid ads. Anyone entering the competition agreed to share their details with both businesses. At the end of the competition, both businesses got access to the list of all entrants – usually growing their respective databases by several hundred highly qualified people referred by a trusted source. These people proved to be some of the most dedicated shoppers in my database.
5. EXPAND YOUR DISTRIBUTION - SELL MULTI CHANNEL
With over 170 million people shopping on eBay all over the world, it’s likely your target customer is shopping there too. You might think that it’s hard to compete on a marketplace flooded with products probably cheaper than your own, but like any market real or online – there will be bargain hunters, and there will also be people who see value in your product. At least you are in an environment where the shopper is already primed to make a purchase.
eBay has many tools and options to promote yourself above the others. Read about the different techniques in ShelfTrend’s Grow on eBay series. You can promote your listings to boost yourself into the top 5 spots in search results. How’s that for visibility? And there are ways to optimize product titles, categorization and item specifics for wider inclusion in search results.
Once someone’s made a purchase from you on eBay, pop them into your email database.
Having great product and a cool brand are a great starting point for your business. But unless you can grow your audience and get them excited about your product, it’ll become the best idea nobody ever heard of or seen that’s now gathering dust in your garage. Get out there, build a tribe, talk a lot and engage your customer, they’ll reward you with…sales.
Heather Potter
Heather is a journalist-turned-Public Relations extrordinaire to digital communications specialist. Having worked around the world for big brands in the commercial and NGO sectors, she decided to try her hand at building her own ecommerce business - and it worked! Although she had to close Shoe Envy for family reasons, she remains passionate about ecommerce and small business, especially enabling others with the same entrepreneurial spirit toward online success with engaging content and communications. Find her at Chilli Dog Consulting - she'd love to have a chat.
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