EP378: 3 Overlooked Website Traffic Sources to Grow Your Online Sales

5:04AM Dec 2, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

pinterest

ads

strategy

people

jewelry

traffic

advertising

business

lead magnet

running

google

rank

accelerator

money

shopify

thrive

customers

website

retargeting

keywords

The thing is, is that most people who start running ads who don't know what they're doing, they try to run ads and they're unsuccessful. They spend a lot of money, they don't get any sales, because they're approaching their advertising the wrong way. Welcome to thrive by design, the podcast for ambitious independent jewelry brands, looking to profit from their products, get ready to make more and sell more doing what you love, without spending every single waking minute doing it. Hey, and if you're a creative fashion or product based business, I want to welcome you to the show. I'll be dropping big tips on launching, growing and scaling your business. So you could spend more of your precious time using your creativity to make money. You ready? All right, let's do this. Welcome to the thrive by design Podcast, episode 378. Hey, there, it's Tracy Matthews, chief visionary officer of flourish and thrive. And I wanted to just say thank you to all of the makers out there, the jewelry designers, all of you brands who have been reaching out to me and sharing your stories and telling me just what you're enjoying about this podcast, it means a lot to me. And so as I was preparing for today, I changed the topic of this episode or moved them around quite a few times. Over the last week, I wanted to talk about three overlooked traffic sources, because these are a couple of things that you can probably get up and running throughout the holiday season, if you have to know how or if you want support, and then you're not sure you don't want to waste money, we would love to help you do that I'll share with you a way that we can help you do that in a minute. We're in the thick of it right now, holiday season is here, this end is going to be over before we know it. And this is your time to make sales. And I want to give you everything that I can to help you get your website working for you so that you're getting traffic to your website, especially if you're selling online. And if you're selling in person, and have the capacity to meet with customers in real life, then I want to give you some strategies or a strategy that will help you get more local customers. Now, one of the things that I think people overlook is like how to get traffic on their site, they post on social media, you know, the shelf life of a social media post is 24 to 48 hours, as opposed to different strategies that I'm going to talk about today. What we want to be thinking through is like how can I get the maximum amount of effort for, like the work that I'm actually putting in. And that's one of the exact reasons why we are launching a traffic on fire accelerator in January. Now this accelerator came out because in our T YC program trained your customers to buy from you online program, a lot of people were asking about running ads for their business. Now, the problem that many people are having is that they can't afford to hire an expensive ads agency. But they want to either be able to train someone on their team or to be able to run them themselves on a lower budget. Because ads will work if you have a lower budget if you're consistently putting them out there. And also, if you have the right strategy. The thing is, is that most people who start running ads who don't know what they're doing, they try to run ads and they're unsuccessful, they spend a lot of money, they don't get any sales, because they're approaching their advertising the wrong way. And when you have a small business, and you don't have money to waste on marketing, meaning like if you lost $5,000, spending money on ads and didn't get a return on investment, and it didn't work for you, then, you know, that's just some cost, right? And you don't, you're never going to get that money back. And so we want to help you get in into the game in a way that's going to help you create longevity for your efforts, and also do things that are actually going to be more cost effective to start running ads. So what most agencies would do is just start putting your product out there and trying to get you to buy a product from an ad. But that's not really the best way to do it for most small companies. So unless you're doing over a million dollars in sales, you probably don't have a lot of money to just experiment randomly with advertising. So we want to support you in that. So we're hosting this traffic on fire accelerator, we're going to walk you through over the course of 10 weeks, advertising strategies, SEO content, setting up your Google Admin, the right way for tracking, also creating a content strategy for your business. And helping you think through the lens of how does the content that I'm creating complement an advertising strategy so that I have longevity with the work that I'm putting in. Like I said, most people just focus on social media and hope for the best and sometimes that works great, but if it's not working for you in the way that you need it to, then I want to encourage you to do something more. In fact, one of our private coaching clients just started running this ad strategy that I'm going to be sharing with you today and she's getting a 10x row as return on adspend for her investment which is Huge, it's amazing. So let's dive in. Oh, before we do, if you want to join us for the traffic on fire accelerator and you'd like to apply, here is your official invitation, you can head on over to flourish & thrive academy.com, forward slash t o f, I will also have a link in the show notes. And you can get your application in right there. Or you can also shoot us a message or a direct message on Instagram, and we'll send you the link to apply right there. Now let's talk about advertising. Because what used to work in advertising, especially for jewelry is no longer working. And, you know, the industry standard and best practice was that you should expect a 90 day window to see a return on investment for ad spend. And the reason for that in the past, is that it takes time for someone to see your ad and then want to buy from you, right, because you're warming them up jewelry is not something that like someone always will just see it right away and want to buy, they might be considering options and stuff like that, especially when it comes to cold traffic. So we want to be thinking strategically about who we're targeting, and all those things. So we'll go in depth on this and our traffic on fire accelerator, but we want to be thinking through the lens of like, okay, what are the segments of my audience are these people who know me, or these people who don't know me and who I'm trying to get as a first time customer. And so you need to be thinking through that lens. And what I'm going to talk about today are primarily strategies for people who do not necessarily know you yet. So obviously, content marketing helps a lot when it comes to SEO and getting traffic to your website. I'm not going to talk about that. But that is the strategy that can work. It is a long game, but also awesome for long game plan if you plan on being around for a long time. One thing that I feel like a lot of businesses forget about is Google and Google My Business, there's two things that you want to be considering when it comes to Google. First set up a Google My Business account. If you have a physical location, where you can see customers like a studio space or something along those lines, or you have a way to travel to customers to come see them in their physical space, you can do that. But you can also hook up your website there. And it is a great way to get local reviews and to rank in local search as well. So when someone says like jewelry designer, jewelry brand in or jewelry store in your town, then your business will pop up. And then what you want to do is start getting Google reviews. So you can ask your previous customers to review your business on Google, which is a great way to keep ranking and Google. Now another thing that you want to consider that is affordable is setting up a Google Performance Mac's account and starting to try to rank on jewelry keywords or search terms for paid search. So you can set up your Google AdWords accounts. And they now have a new part of Google called Google Performance Max, which is great for retargeting your website visitors as well. And you can start ranking for keywords, and especially in your local area. So you can say you know, find jewelry store or find jewelry designer in your town, etc, and start ranking for those keywords, etc. And the brilliance of this is that it helps position you on the top of the page, and also starts getting more traction for your business and brand. Now, you might notice that whenever you search a keyword term for jewelry, brilliant Earth pops up, they spent the time to rank on Google search. So keep in mind that this might take time for this to work. But over time, it will have a big benefit, especially if you start leaning into the Google Performance Max tools because you can start retargeting website visitors, those people who land on your website, which aren't necessarily cold traffic, but you can start getting people back to your website and warming them up. So all these things kind of work in conjunction. Now the next overlooked traffic source is probably something that you're thinking about, but in the wrong way. Now one of those things that I'd always been taught in the past is that you want to retarget website visitors with ads on Facebook and Instagram. And but front facing advertising is very expensive and takes a long time to get people to convert for jewelry. But if you think about your strategy in a different way, then it won't. And so we learned a strategy from Nicole who was going to be one of our teachers in the traffic on fire accelerator. And that is to create a lead magnet that you run ads to and that lead magnets will be delivered through email. So once people opt in to your lead magnet, so maybe it's like a styling guide, maybe it's like the energy of crystals. Maybe it's how to pick the best engagement ring for your personality, whatever it might be a lead magnet can be a quiz, a download a resource PDF, lots of different things.

The key is is that on the back end of that is that you have an email sequence that actually sells, right? And that's really where are the nuances. And that's why this strategy is getting her such a high return on investment. Because when it set up, right, and you're actually measuring the results, and you're paying attention to the volume of people going through that, then and you're measuring, like, is this working? Are people opening the email? Are they clicking through? Are they actually buying the product on the page, that's where you start to see a serious return on adspend. And that's what we want to get for you is to help you use your dollars in the right way. So that when you're investing money in your business, that you're getting that return on investment that you actually need, which is incredible. And if you want to listen to my interview with Nicole that I did in November, I will link that episode in the show notes. Or you could just go back a couple of episodes, and you'll be able to listen to it as well. Now the next thing I want to talk about Pinterest, because this is sometimes an underutilized strategy. And we teach it in our programs over at flourish and thrive. We have an amazing trainer, Andrea, who is a former student of flourish and thrive, she's just awesome at Pinterest. She's one of their partners. And we have an amazing Pinterest ads person who's coming to teach that's Louise in our traffic on fire accelerator. Louise is one of the smartest people I know and she is brilliant. She'll be teaching tick tock ads and Pinterest ads. And she is just brilliant at marketing strategy. She sold her ecommerce business for a ton of money, I'm not really allowed to disclose that information here. But she did it all through running successful advertising campaigns. And one of the things that she and her husband Jeremy have been focused on is being thoughtful and smart about how they create a 360 advertising strategy by using Facebook, Instagram, and then backing it up with Google, Bing, Pinterest and tick tock ads so that you're have this everywhere strategy. Now there are a couple of cool things about Pinterest that I want to mention here. When you're running like rich pins and ads, I think for the most part, you can get in on Pinterest with a fairly low budget. And especially if you're using it as a retargeting strategy or a front end strategy. There's a lot of information that you can actually put on a pin, unlike some other ads. So it's a very visual platform. So if you you're using the right keywords, and you're getting in front of people the right way, that pin can be saved in and the lifetime of that pin will last on even after your ad is turned off. So if someone has pinned it to a board or that pin goes viral, and it continues to go viral, even though you're promoting it, you have longevity with that ad, which is unlike other advertising platforms, you stop putting money behind it, it goes away. Now one of the things that I've always loved about Pinterest in general is that it helps you rank on Google so the content can be indexed and found in SEO and rank there for a really long time. And this is great, because once again, you put some money behind an ad, you run it for a period of time, that content is still indexed. And if you have your links set up properly, and in a way that that can be redirected. If somebody finds it later, even if the product is sold out it you can still drive traffic to your website, which is a huge driver. You know, think of how we're trying to rank and get people to our websites, if we were just strategic about it and use a little bit more Pinterest, how would that increase our sales, right. The other thing that I love about Pinterest, and that is sometimes often overlooked is that it was really designed as a shopping platform. It's a place for people to find wonderful things that they love. And Pinterest is made for E commerce. So make sure that you have the Pinterest tools integrated into your website and that you're fully utilizing this as a strategy. So if you have Shopify or Squarespace or even WooCommerce, make sure that you have your Pinterest plug in. Right on there. You know, I'm a big fan of Shopify over here. It was funny. I was this is a little bit of a sidebar, but I was moderating the jewelry industry event. jewelry industry Summit, excuse me, in New York City a couple of months ago. And a couple of people were like, Oh, I know you love Shopify, but I love Squarespace. So if you love your platform, and it's working for you stick with it. I just love Shopify, because it is so robust and integrated. I'm sure they're getting a lot more competition now and other platforms have had to adapt to become better. So you do you I just love Shopify, for the robust nature of it and everything that you can do with it. And it really has been the best for many, many years. So point being make sure that you have your Pinterest plugin on your website so people can share your content but also works well with the content that's being driven to the storm. With this is comes it leads into my next talking point about this is that you can really align the imagery in your Pinterest with the images in your store. So you can literally just post the same image that's that's the front facing image and you're like each category and optimize those keywords for search the product name for search, and have those two things like basically backing off each other to get more traffic to individual products, as well as collections and categories. And I think I mentioned this earlier, but it is in my bulleted notes that promoted pins just like any other pin can go viral. So if your pin goes viral, it will continue to go viral once again, even after the ad is turned off, which is incredible for you. We've had people who've had viral pins, including one of our students, Erin Pellicano, she has a generational jewelry company where she designs jewelry that's made for moms, daughters, mothers like generations. And my sister even bought something from her, which is awesome, so shout out to you, Erin. But the cool thing about that is that she had a pin that went viral that drove so much traffic to our site that like literally like helped grow her business to over six figure company. So now she's I'm sure she's doing much better than that now. But this was back when we were working with her. Pinterest does work if you're using it the right way. And then one of my favorite things about this is how you can use both successfully use video and graphic imagery. So you don't necessarily have to only do video, you don't necessarily have to do only graphics. Both work great, just like other advertising platforms. So it's almost like in a way, you don't even have to necessarily do double duty. Obviously, we would always recommend that you design the creative for the platform that you're on. But now there's so many ways that you can repurpose with Pinterest story ideas and stuff like that repurpose content from different platforms onto the Pinterest platform, and test running ads to those things. So I wanted to just jump in here. This is a short and sweet episode about three overlooked traffic sources. So if you haven't done so yet, get your Google My Business app, if that makes sense for you. And then maybe trying to play around with putting a little bit of money behind Google AdWords and see what kind of result you get. My big recommendation there is that you focus on your local area. Also using a lead magnet for Facebook and Instagram to drive traffic and sales. And having that nurture sequence and funnel setup to sell your products can be a great resource for you to get off the ground, might be a little too late for the holiday season. But if you'd like support with that, please apply to our traffic on fire accelerator, we would love to help you set that up and make sure that it's done really, really well. And then I think all of you might want to consider getting a Pinterest strategy up if you don't have it yet. Paid pins, or even just an organic strategy, get started now and if you're not sure how to do it the right way, we would love to support you. So once again, we are in enrollment for our traffic on fire accelerator, which starts in January. And it's a great time to participate in this because January for most jewelry brands is a little bit more of a downtime. And it's a great time to implement new marketing that can actually scale your sales for the long term. So if that's something that you want to do, and you're focused on longevity, not what's right in front of you, please apply. We would love to support you in this and helping you get a robust advertising strategy up by you know, within a couple of months, but then definitely by this time next year so that you have all the leads and everything that you need to crush it next holiday season. Because I will tell you that running ads is a long game. It's not a fast, short and sweet thing. What you want to be thinking about is how are my advertising efforts impacting what I'm doing later down the road? Alright, that's it for me. This is Tracy Matthews signing off. If you'd like to apply to that traffic on fire accelerator head on over to flourish & thrive academy.com forward slash t o f and apply today. Thanks so much. Tracy Matthews, signing off till next time