EP363: How Getting Your Marketing Calendar in Order has a Direct Correlation to Sales

7:24AM Jul 22, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

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sales

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When you are prepared, and when you have thought through your systems and your marketing and everything that you're doing fully, you can fully flush out your marketing plan, you can get ahead, you know exactly what you're promoting. You can budget for marketing if you want to put money into ads or whatever it is. And it allows you to pre launch things and really map out things. 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 can 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 363. Hey there, it's Tracy Matthews here. And I'm super excited to be chatting about just one way, how planning out your marketing in advance can really give you a leg up over the coming months, which is going to be super fun. So raise your hand, fellow procrastinators, I'm raising my hand. Hi, I'm here today to help you really think through what's going on in your head and maybe why you're putting things off and to get you motivated to try to get ahead because it's going to actually help you make more sales in the long run. We are heading in rollin and fast to the holiday season. And this is a really busy time. In fact, just yesterday, I was interviewing Claire manheimer, who I had on the podcast last week, and she was talking about how she's entering her busy season in the summer. And you know what it's like when it's busy, you don't have a lot of time to really kind of think through all the stuff. And so if you wait until the busy holiday season to start thinking through what you're going to do for your marketing and anything else. And this goes for any busy season, I should say, then you're going to be scrambling at the last minute, your marketing is not going to be as effective. And that in turn affects your sales. So I'm going to walk you through some things to think about to get ahead. And with that being said, we're a smack dab in the middle of a three part workshop series called ramp up your holiday sales. If you're listening to this on at the end of July, you still have some time to get in. So you can head on over to flourish thrive academy.com forward slash ramp up. And this whole thing is leading in to our holiday sales accelerator, which is called the train your customers to buy from you online holiday sales accelerator. It is designed to help move you into action and help you grow your online audience of high quality jewelry customers and make your online sales process super easy this year. And my goal throughout the whole T yc. program is to help move you into action with simple strategies that are always work. These are things that will work all the time. So you invest in this program. Now you work with us for 12 weeks, we help get you prepared for the holidays. And then you have a wash, rinse and repeat system that you can use anytime you want. These strategies always work. It's not just for holiday, it is a sales accelerator. So I'd love to invite you to apply applications are free, you can head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com, forward slash T yc. And get your application in today. It like I said it's 100% free to apply. And my goal here is to just get the right people in that program and help you scale your holiday sales. You might have heard me talking about it a little bit more on the podcast. We've been doing rolling enrollment for several weeks now, in particular, because we have been helping those who get in early, get their website ready so that they can grow. So the earlier that you apply and you join, the better it is for you because we're going to be giving you some homework to implement before the accelerator starts. Well, I see you in there. I hope so. And if you have any questions about this, feel free to hit me up on Instagram, I'm happy to chat with you directly. Or you can reach out to our support desk and we are happy to discuss your situation with you. So I want to dive in to why getting ahead of your calendar and getting it all mapped out actually has a direct correlation to your sales. Well let's talk about what this means you are if you're a procrastinator, I guess I should say like me, then you probably wait till the last minute to do everything and it's literally so painful. Sometimes I do this and it makes marketing so stressful and everything on my team is like super stressful when we can't get ahead of our marketing plan. And we have been behind recently because of lack of support on our marketing team, which we're actively looking for marketing manager etc. That's another story but I'm saying this because at the end of the Day, when we are ahead, like things run smoothly, and my life is easier. So as a founder of your company, as the visionary of your company, as the creative leading your company, as a business owner, wouldn't you want to feel more relaxed because you know exactly what you're going to be doing. And feel like you can lean into things instead of scrambling at the last minute. Or just blowing off your sometimes what happens when you don't have your marketing calendar Dialed In is you just blow off the marketing, and you're wondering why you're not getting sales. So I'm gonna walk you through some of the things that the reasons why planning your marketing in advance is going to really support you. And then also, I'm going to share with you what you need to do to plan it out. So let's dive into how getting your marketing done in advance, like the reasons why. So first and foremost, planning in advance helps you collect your ideas, and get all of your thoughts out of your head. Now, who here has like a million great ideas a day?

I bet you do. And I hope that you're raising your hand right now, because we're creative, right? We're always thinking of new things. And being a creative, especially a highly creative, I can speak to that myself, you probably have a million ideas a day. And there's like all these things that you want to try. But if you're not documenting, and getting those things out of your head, you're probably never going to do it. And so then this great idea gets done by someone else. It's the same thing for a design, like I hear people saying all the time, like oh, so and so copied my design. And that's not really how it works. It's like these things kind of in that book, Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how ideas get passed through to other people. And so you want to make sure that you're getting these things out of your head and documented in a way so that they can actually be implemented later. Because there's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, not all of your ideas are good, but the good ones are really good. And those are the things that are going to move the needle on your business. So whether it's a marketing idea, design idea, or whatever it is, this is the same for anything, any idea that you have, those things can get you a step ahead. In fact, I love it because one of our coaches in the T yc. She had this idea for a very long time to do a direct mail campaign that sort of mirrored like one of the brands that she really admired. She finally got that idea out of her head and implemented it and she had her 38% conversion rate with this direct mail campaign, it cost her less than $100. To pull off. And she made 1000s of dollars, just by with $100 investment, and a little bit of time writing some thank you notes. And I want to really encourage you to think through like all the ways that you're leaving money on the table. And so as a side note on is going to be teaching that strategy and the T YC program that I just spoke about in the pre roll this episode. So if you want to learn what it is, I'd be happy to share it with you, we're going to give you the step by step of how you can pull it off yourself. Getting your marketing done in advance or getting your calendar mapped out in advance also helps ensure that you actually do the work, right. Because if you're saying like this is what I need to do on this day, or this is like what I'm planning to do on this day, then you can easily like reverse engineer how to get it done, right. But if you don't have it documented, and you don't have it out, then it's in your head, like if you have people supporting you or a team, or you're just trying doing it all yourself, it's gonna feel stressful. Does that land with you is going to feel stressful. So it's just the truth. So we want to ensure that you're actually doing the work and getting the stuff done. And the best way to do that is to get it on your calendar. I'm going to be releasing an episode in a couple of weeks with clay Flom. She has been on the podcast before she was on in January. But she's like my superstar. She is just someone I'm just so blown away by. She's opening her third retail location. And I interviewed her again, which I rarely interview people twice in one year unless it's one of our experts. And she told me that one of the ways that she's been able was able to work a full time job and grow her business to multiple six figures and run a retail location and do all the things and have a family of six that she's taking care of was that she has her calendar completely mapped out and you're going to be so inspired when you hear that story. So another reason why getting your calendar done in order in advance is that it allows you an opportunity to actually pre launch. So in Episode 359, I interviewed Brenda McGowan. She was a CMO for us over here at flourish and thrive for a while. We hired her on for just a fractional gig for about six months. She's amazing. Listen to that episode. And she talks about the importance of a pre launch strategy. Well, if you don't have your calendar plan, and you don't know what you're doing, that it's really hard to pre launch anything or to think through like how am I going to get people interested in my new collection launch? How am I going to announce my sale? How am I going to get people excited for Black Friday or the holiday offers that I have? How am I going to get people to my virtual event or anything like if you don't know what you're doing and you Just like willy nilly ate it, and doing things at the last minute, you miss this golden opportunity to be able to pre launch. So if you haven't listened to Episode 359 with Brenda McGowan, make sure that you listen to that episode, because that is going to be game changing for you pre launching. Now, another reason why you want to get your calendar done in advance now, especially as you're listening to this is that if you want to do well during the holidays, and you don't want to have to rely on a bunch of discounts or anything like that,

you can see where you can sell throughout the entire holiday season on a big calendar, like what your big promotions are and everything that you need to do. And then basically modularize your marketing around that. This is really important. And then another reason why you want to get your calendar in advance so that it has a direct correlation to your sales is for this, it helps you recession proof your business because you're being proactive, you're ahead of the game. If you know exactly what you're doing in good time, you can create a budget for your marketing, you know exactly how much money you have to spend. Or if you don't have money to spend, you know that too. And it gives you full power and control. I'm going to be doing a recession proof your business series and I've been interviewing people for it quite talks a lot about this. One of the things that she talks about on this episode was how she's using the numbers to make data driven decisions. And that has allowed them to budget to do profit sharing, to help them save for future growth. And to open a third retail location, which is huge. during a recession guys, like it's massive. And when if you would have met Quay in 2017, when she joined our community, she was broke a F she had just lost her job right after she finished laying the foundation, she was only making five to $8,000 a year. And she like was in a really bad situation. And just a few years later, she has a multiple six figure business, it's on track to do seven figures, because she looks at the numbers and can see where things are going. And she's doing that and it's recession proofing her business. Now, let's talk about now. So there's a lot of reasons here. Basically, the gist of all this is that when you are prepared. And when you have thought through your systems and your marketing and everything that you're doing fully, you can fully flush out your marketing plan, you can get ahead, you know exactly what you're promoting. You can budget for marketing, if you want to put money into ads or whatever it is, or budget for time or whatever needs to happen. And it allows you to pre launch things and really map out things so clearly, that it's like makes selling during like a busy season, like the holidays, just really simple. And so that you can focus all that time on selling. And so here are some things that I want you to think about getting on your marketing calendar, I may have missed something. So if there's anything else that you think of, please share this with me, and we can add it to the show notes and all that stuff. So the first thing is like you want to get any live selling or live in person selling events that you're doing on the calendar now. And I'm saying that because a lot of people do pop ups and trunk shows. So if you're not sure when you're going to do those pop ups and trunk shows, it's not to say that you can't have the flexibility to do them at the last minute. But try to map those out. Now like I would recommend if you make a lot of money in in person shows or events or festivals or whatever it is get those mapped out on your calendar, if you're also doing any holiday sales events, like in New York City, they have this these big holiday markets, where they have pop ups over by Central Park in Bryant Park and Union Square all over the city. So if you're doing those types of things, you know, also in Grand Central, whatever, make sure that you have those on your calendar. I mean, that's pretty obvious. A lot of people spend a lot of time preparing for those things. That is super important because you want to be able to market that and get people to those events. If you're going to do any sales, or maybe a sample sale, maybe an online sale or a discount or promotion or whatever, think through like what's a good time to do that. Maybe you do a you know a Labor Day weekend sale, you know or something like that. Or maybe you are going to host a Black Friday event. Or maybe you're going to do some sort of like post Christmas event or holiday event. It's great for you to like get clear that you're going to do that so that you're prepared for in advance. And if you don't do sales, discounts, no worries. One of the things that I really like to do in the summertime and or early fall like nice when I say early fall I think of like September, that to me still is kind of like even though it's summer to me it feels like fall because of the Four Seasons and stuff like that in New York. So let's say you're going to do it like in September, you can have a sample sale and that is a great opportunity for people to get in on their holiday gift giving early and buy things in advance. And so I use used to do like liquidation, I will get rid of old samples that inventory. If I had a bunch of gems and stuff sitting on the shelf, I would make jewelry out of it at a at a lower price point than my regular line. And it was a great way to clear out extra inventory and a great way to get a huge influx of cash in your business, especially if you already have an audience. If you have extra inventory, it doesn't make sense. If you don't have extra inventory, don't do it. But if you do, great way to get rid of it,

then it would map out any virtual events you're going to have. So if you're going to have like an online shopping event, if you do pop ups with partners or friends, then think think about who you're going to partner with. Ask them now get the date on the calendar, map, map out all your virtual events or your live selling events that are online and get those mapped out or think through when do you want to have them, then you want to think through all your big weekends or holiday promotions that you're going to do for the whole holiday season. And this is for any time of the year. But if you're if you're just doing it month by month, you'd want to think about that. If you sell wholesale, you want to definitely have timelines for getting your wholesale in now this is a huge mistake that I see rookie makers do or people who are overwhelmed if they wait too long to get reorders or pitch wholesale accounts for the holidays. And if you start pitching them in October, they're not going to buy from you. Typically what happens this is a well known fact for people who do wholesale. We started the wholesale selling season August. This is why we're when my co founder Robin and I were always kind of focused on getting holiday sales together in August, we would always want to do it, like our promotions and everything in August, because we were always at trade shows in August, as people who sold wholesale, all the buying is done in August for the holiday season from these wholesale accounts. So they do sometimes have a little bit more open to buy left after that. But if you wait till end of September or early October, typically, these wholesale stores are out of budget. And they don't have more money to actually spend on inventory. And my guess is that a lot of wholesale accounts are going to be tightening their buys this year, because they're probably expecting sales volume to maybe stagnate a little bit or maybe go down, which would be smart of them to do. So if you're a new brand and you're trying to get into an account, you want to get ahead of it and start reaching out and meeting up with these wholesale buyers early so that you can be in there open Dubai budget, really, really important. And this is tried and true for anything like the longer you wait, the harder it is. Now the next thing that I want you to be thinking through is like, are you going to launch a new collection? And if so when is that going to go live? Because it's really important to get your pre launch available when that new collection drops so that you can build excitement and buzz and all that stuff. Then if you're going to do some fun, you know, marketing or promotional events with a countdown to Christmas or to Hanukkah, or whatever holidays you want to, you know, experience in during the holiday season. You can also think through like what are some of the fun promotion ideas that I'm going to do there. And then this part is really important, which is often missed, you want to think through your lead generation strategy. The work you do right now, to build your audience for holiday season is going to change the game for you. Three months down the road. So incorporate that into your early holiday marketing plan. Start building your email list, make sure that you are a ninja at those in person shows collecting email addresses, give them an incentive to shop from you on your website at those shows, move the people offer them something after the show is over. Make personalized notes. I talked a lot about this in my interview with Claire Mannheimer. Last week, listen to that audio now, because that's going to be super helpful and how you start building that audience later and getting more people to buy from you online. So at the end of the day, if you want to be really prepared and maximize your sales potential, get your calendar organized in advance, or else you're going to be doing all the things at the last minute. So that's all for today. I wanted to keep this episode short and I hope that a lot of these things were helpful. You know obviously we're going to be helping all of the members of the T yc. Map out their marketing calendars and develop content for those marketing calendars throughout the train your customers to buy from you on line sales accelerator that the starting on August 15. So if you are interested in learning more about that and you want to really ramp up and grow your holiday sales head on over to flourish thrive academy.com forward slash T yc. I will also have a link in the show shownotes you can also feel free to reach out to me on Instagram, or email us at support. We're happy to help any way possible. We are available to chat with you about your situation. We just want to help you grow your sales and build more online sales for you so that you're building a strong direct to consumer business that helps you recession proof your business. Alright, this is Tracy Matthews signing off till next time. Thank you so much for listening to the show every week. I so appreciate you welcoming me into your earbuds or onto your car, speakers or wherever you're listening to it and your studio hopefully. And I hope that this has been helpful. Ciao for now. Have an awesome day.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. It's my mission to help 1000s of creative businesses inside and outside the jewelry space use their creativity to make money. Make sure that you're subscribed to thrive by design on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and wherever podcasts are played. And we'd love to hear what you think. Please rate and review the show and if you're inspired, please share this with your friends. Cheers to seeing you flourish and thrive.