Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there, it’s Catherine Langman here from the Productpreneur Success Podcast, welcome back to the show. Today I’m really excited to let you know that this is our 100th episode. Can’t quite believe that, but here we are. And to celebrate this milestone episode, we decided to kind of shake it up a little bit. And how could we make it a little bit more fun? And so I’m actually sharing the stage today with a few of the members of my fabulous team, who I will introduce to you shortly.
Catherine Langman:
And what we’ve done is, we’ve invited some of you listeners submit some questions that you really would love answered about your business. So what were the most burning questions that you’re really needing help with in your business? How could we help you resolve those questions, or give you feedback on whatever it is that you’re struggling with?
Catherine Langman:
So we have four fantastic, well, actually it’s a little bit more than four. More than four questions, but four questioners and that we’ve chosen. And each of these fabulous brand-owners are going to receive a free Productpreneur success planner in the post as a thank you for participating in this episode.
Catherine Langman:
And so, really great questions submitted by these four women. And I really think that you’re going to find their questions probably resonating a lot with your own situation right now. And I think that you’ll pick up some really fantastic ideas that might help you through those problems, or through the stage of business that you’re at right now.
Catherine Langman:
Whether you are trying to figure out something in your marketing, or figure out how to plan for next year after this crazy year that it’s been, or figure out how to scale your business or all of that good stuff. So tune in. And I really hope that you enjoy this 100th episode.
Catherine Langman:
If you love this episode, I would really love it if you could share it with one or two of your business besties, especially if you know they’re feeling a little bit like they’re struggling with their marketing or with scaling up their marketing, or they’re just needing a little bit of help with how to plan for the year ahead. So to share it with one of your friends, just go to catherinelangman.com/episode-100. And of course, without further ado, let’s welcome the team onto the show.
Catherine Langman:
Alrighty, so here we are live with a few of the fabulous members of our team here at Productpreneur Marketing and I’m going to introduce the ones that we have here live. Of course it’s not the whole team, that would become a bit like some kind of noisy zoo I’m sure. So with us today, we have Sally, who is one of our account managers. Sal, do you want to say g’day?
Sally:
Hi, everyone. It’s nice to be back again.
Catherine Langman:
Sally’s been on the show before. We have Narelle, who is our web designer. Narelle, you want to say g’day?
Narelle:
Hi, everyone.
Catherine Langman:
You’ve been on this show before too, haven’t you?
Narelle:
I have been on before, yes-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Narelle:
But it’s nice to be back.
Catherine Langman:
I thought so. We have Rich, who’s also been on the show, we’ve got to get you back on for a solo episode again too. So he’s our senior Facebook ad strategist.
Rich:
Hello, hello everyone, wherever you are in the world.
Catherine Langman:
And Chelsea, who’s our business development manager.
Chelsea:
Hi everybody.
Catherine Langman:
And Sarah, our content manager as well.
Sarah:
Hi everyone, good to be part of the podcast today.
Catherine Langman:
That’s it, exactly. And so today, we have a really special episode planned, as I mentioned in the introduction. And it’s very exciting to be recording this episode with these fabulous extra members from my team and celebrating this milestone episode and to do so, we’re going to address some really big questions that we’ve been asked, well, many times over. They’re quite common questions I think, in terms of the experience of growing and scaling an e-commerce brand. And so we’ve been asking our audience, what do you want to know, what do you want help with? And do this like a mini coaching session. So the first question that we have is from Jade and Jade has a brand called Little Woods and she’s asking, I’d love to know how to increase my traffic overall, as I currently do Facebook ads, Google Shopping ads, email marketing and organic social media and obviously hoping to increase her traffic volume. So I’m going to throw it open to you guys, I’ve got some ideas as well but I want to throw it open to you guys to kick it off.
Narelle:
I might jump in first then if I’ve got the floor to myself.
Catherine Langman:
Go for it.
Narelle:
So I was just going to say that an easy way for organic traffic with SEO is to go back over old content, all your old blogs and the ones that have been successful with gaining organic traffic, so you could check your Google Search Console to see that data. Go back to that and rewrite parts of it and update it to more current information and that sends a message to Google that you’ve got new content. And we’ve found in the past when we’ve done this with clients, that we get a lot more traffic, quickly it spikes up. So it’s an easy way to get some more organic traffic.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, super. There’s nothing better than the free organic traffic. What about the paid traffic angle, Rich or Sally?
Sally:
Yeah, I was thinking about this and thinking that it’s really easy to fall into that trap of upping your spend and going, I hope that brings more traffic to my website and often, it can but it’s also a really good time to go back to your customer avatar and have a look at what they’re into, what kind of person they are and all that sort of thing. And then how about creating some new audiences or maybe looking at your lookalikes and what you can do with those as well? We know that there’s certain customer audiences that work well with lookalikes, things like video views, lookalikes to video views is often a good one that a lot of people don’t use. Or just using the detailed targeting to create an audience that you may not have used before. Give it a test, give it a bit of a run and see if it’s got potential and try a few new things to see where a new pocket of an audience might be that’s going to respond well to your product and your brand too.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So essentially, getting out in front of new and different audiences, rather than just trying to up the spend to the same audiences.
Sally:
Yeah, exactly because you do see a bit of a drop-off often with audiences when you’ve been using them for a while, so you need to have a few to rotate around regularly. But also, sometimes you get into that habit of just rotating through the same audiences and you forget that there might be other people out there who might be interested as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Rich:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
And what about the actual creative angle in the ads? Because you can’t just keep running the same creative indefinitely with increased spend and hope it continues to convert at the same rate.
Rich:
Yeah, 100% and yeah, I wanted to add on to what Sally was saying, the warmer side of the audiences, there’s so much data that you’re buying from Facebook and from Google and tracking, the way it is now, it’s a little bit more difficult than it used to be but there are so many pockets of audiences that are all segmented in slightly different ways, depending on the action they’ve taken. And really, they are your best audiences to convert, right? If you haven’t converted on top of funnel, you’ve got this really warm audience who are educated a little bit more into what your brand does and what your product is. So just find ways of really appealing to those pockets of audiences. So one thing you can do with creatives, for example, if you’ve got loads of products, like I know [DA 00:06:13] does, is have something like… We call it a digital circular, where you have monthly picks and everyone who’s recently engaged, they see these monthly picks or top picks of the month or top selling or something and they cycle through.
Rich:
You can change them every week, every two weeks, every month, it really depends on how big the traffic size is. And that can be the main driver behind upselling a lot of the other products that maybe don’t get air at the top of the funnel. And then also, you could reengage people who maybe are on the outskirts of that engaging audience. Maybe people who are lapsed email users or people who watched the video 50% but haven’t come through to the funnel 180 days ago or something like that and bring them back in with some education, some USPs and social proof and create it that way around as well. Because I see quite underutilized use of people’s warmer audiences, so don’t be afraid to push that, as long as the content is relevant to them, don’t be afraid to push the frequency quite high. Obviously watch it and make sure we don’t annoy anyone but I think that’s…
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And is that where you would be using all of this awesome user-generated content that has become exceptionally effective lately?
Rich:
Yeah, I guess it can basically be tested anywhere in the funnel. It tends to work better at the lower parts of the funnel because people are in this more product aware stage, so they know about your product or they know about the problem they’re having and the product that will solve the problem and they’re comparing different brands. And usually seeing more social proof from your brand means that they’ll just gravitate towards you. But at the same time, we’ve seen testing, really nice branded, clean content that’s super clean looking and branded against things like UGC and shot on an iPhone over someone’s shoulder and things like that. And they do actually…
Rich:
Interestingly, they compare pretty well to each other, sometimes the UGC works better, sometimes the more branded stuff works better. So it’s really about finding what sort of content, in those respects, hits people at the right angle at the worst stage of the funnel. Because it might be that the branded stuff works better further down the funnel when they’re more used to you and they’ve been hooked in by social proof or it might be that the branded stuff works better at the top of the funnel, pulling you away from dropshippers. And then lower down the funnel, the social proof works because as I said, they’re comparing you with other brands that are similar. So yeah, I guess it’s all about testing but yeah, utilize content in those different respects as much as possible.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Awesome, I love it. I guess the other thing that I was thinking of adding in here as well for Jade and probably Stacy, I think is our next question as well but using things like themed promotions and storytelling, so visual storytelling as well as using words, different formats, video, animated gifs, still images, all of this stuff but theme-ing the promotions and the product launches throughout the year, so there’s always something new and engaging to bring new people in but also, reengage existing customers and get those customers coming back again and again.
Catherine Langman:
That’s the sort of thing that you can have a lot of fun with, especially a brand like Little Woods. So hopefully that’s helpful, Jade and I’m going to move on to Stacy’s question as well, which I think might be a little bit similar here. So Stacy was asking about product launches and do you have any new or current tips that would make a product launch really stand out from the competition, make it really clever and fun to get the hype and build that hype up to absolute max? I reckon there’s a few brands that do this really, really well but anyone here want to jump in on that one?
Sally:
Knowing that Jade has a product launch happening very soon, getting people excited about the product and that sort of thing, getting advanced products out to brand reps and that sort of thing to get that new UGC content, to get people excited about it, is a really good way of launching into something. Because that way, you’re not just trying to tell people, as the brand yourself, how good this product is. You’ve actually got other people who are relatable and very similar to your target customer who were saying how great it is and that is such a powerful thing when it comes to a new product like that. People want to hear from someone who’s relatable, someone who’s just like them. And I think I was talking in one of the coaching calls this morning to a couple of the participants there, about how important it is to be relatable.
Sally:
We were particularly talking about lunch boxes and that sort of thing and how if someone was doing a video, a brand owner was doing a video about lunch boxes, full face of makeup and all done up and dressed beautifully and that sort of thing, talking about a lunch box, that’s so not relatable to how a parent usually is dealing with lunch boxes and that sort of thing. They’ve usually just rolled out of bed and not done up at all, so we were just saying to keep it relatable and make sure that you are talking to your target customer, not necessarily talking to other retail people and that sort of thing, it’s a totally different thing. But yeah, getting your product into the hands of someone who’s going to use it and use it in a way that your target customer is going to use it, to build that hype up and say how awesome it is. And if it’s related to kids, get the kids involved, all those sorts of things. So not just talking about it but actually using it and showing how it’s used and then showing how it could improve that pain point that you’re trying to solve.
Catherine Langman:
And so maybe they can be doing this in a way that’s getting content ready in advance but also, maybe some teasing content, just drip feeding some little bits and pieces in advance, just to really get that hype going do you reckon?
Sally:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Letting people know that there’s something exciting coming to build that anticipation and increasing engagement and that sort of thing too. Whether it’s video or through posts and that sort of thing, getting people used to seeing your brand in their feed, so that they can come and look for it when they know something’s going to be happening
Catherine Langman:
There’s a few brands that do that really, really well in advance. What’s that leggings brand that you always wear, Sal? They do it really well.
Sally:
Oh, BlackMilk, yeah.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Sally:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
They do it super well, don’t they?
Sally:
They do, they do and they have such regular drops and all that sort of thing that people are expecting something new to be coming as soon as… Every month I think they’re doing a drop. So yeah, they know that it’s coming but yeah, they do product launches very, very well. There’s a few brands that do them really well and I love seeing some clever marketing around drops happening.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Sarah:
Cat, I was just thinking about the storytelling side of things, particularly with a lot of our clients who… Mums and bubs brands, where there’s so many pain points in those products marketed to mums and bubs and particularly in product launch, it doesn’t always have to be about the product. In that lead up, in that teasing period before you actually even announce what the actual product is, you could use a lot of stories around the actual problem that you’re trying to solve before you even announce the product. So you could do a lot stories around the situation that… Say for example, it may be a feeding product or something that makes dinnertime easier with the kids, you can actually start talking about that problem quite a bit and get your audience talking about all their problems they have with that similar situation, that creates that engagement. And then feeding in, hey, look, we’re about to release this product that solves all those problems. Not in those words but it feels a lot more organic and natural to have that storytelling through that process.
Catherine Langman:
Yes, yes, absolutely. And so much room to get conversation happening with your audience as well, doing it that way.
Sarah:
Exactly and a lot more fun I think.
Catherine Langman:
Absolutely.
Sarah:
Take some stress out and you can have fun with the product launch because they’re always quite stressful, aren’t they?
Catherine Langman:
They can be very stressful, yes.
Chelsea:
Cat, I wanted to say, something that I’ve seen work really well is the use of the micro-influencers or the brand rep collaborations. The one that comes to mind is a women’s earrings brand called Pink Nade, it’s an Australian brand. And she basically lines up around 50 micro-influencers, they all get sent a pair of her earrings, everybody shares a post on Instagram at the same time for the actual launch but I think she usually gets them to do a story as well. So it’s basically that flooding of people’s feeds all at the same time with different earrings from her collection.
Chelsea:
Usually she will release a dozen or so different styles at once and so you’re not seeing the identical pair on every single person, you’re seeing different ones and you get to know what her aesthetic, her style, looks like. And I’ve actually seen it happen quite a few times and it seems to work really well because you’re getting that reach. You’re getting people actually wearing the earrings, rather than the business owner coming on and saying, “This is our new range.” You get used to seeing her wearing the earrings but it’s really great to see them being worn by people of all walks of life and all the different outfits that they wear it with, whether they’re dressed up, whether they’re casual.
Catherine Langman:
Different hairstyles, face shapes, all of that stuff too I guess.
Chelsea:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Chelsea:
Yep, absolutely and I think it worked really well. And something else that I’ve seen, again, must be that I like earrings because it’s another earring brand but she does limited launches and so leading up to that… Because she hand makes the earrings from clay, so she shares lots of video content of herself literally physically making the earrings and talking about the restock that’s coming. It always seems to be a Sunday night and then when a Sunday night rolls around, she’s already been sharing all the sneak peeks and people are already frothing at the mouth to buy these beautiful earrings.
Chelsea:
And because she only has limited styles, she might only have 10 or 12 pairs of each style, they literally sell out every time and then a month later, she’ll do another restock. So that type of thing is obviously not going to work for every business but if you are a business that has more limited releases, I think that can work really well, really build that scarcity and that excitement as well. And as a shopper, you feel like, wow, 12 other people have this pair of earrings and I’m one of them, so you’re not going to be wearing something that everybody else has.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That would absolutely be appealing to that particular kind of audience for sure. And I guess just generally, as a point to make about user-generated content of any kind, whether it’s these micro-influencers or brand reps or your customers or wherever you’re getting it from, it has a high level of credibility with your customer base because it’s not you, the brand owner or the business owner, always doing the marketing and the recommending. It’s other people, just like the customers, they feel like it’s a bit more relevant to themselves. So that warm-
Chelsea:
Yeah, exactly.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, warm referral has a high level of credibility, so really great to try and find ways to use that. So awesome ideas, guys. All right, I’ve got another question here, again from Stacy and I forgot to mention, Stacy’s got a couple of businesses. So in New Zealand, she has All Natural Mums and also, No Nasties Kids, New Zealand. So thank you for sharing some questions with us for this particular episode. Her next question is, how often should you update email sequences? In fact, she’s got a couple of questions here but that’s the first one. So how often should you update email sequences? And it’s a shame we don’t have Karen on our episode here because she’s our metrics queen of course, our analytics queen.
Catherine Langman:
But I want to give a shout-out to Karen and just chime in here with, we’ve got to be monitoring these things on a regular basis, so that we can actually tell what is going on with the results, what’s actually happening with your email flows, whether they’re the automated flows or your actual campaigns. But with your automated flows, we do need to be really keeping track of that performance and rather than just feeling like we have to completely overhaul them and redo them every now and again, it’s more about those small tweaks and optimizations that we can initially make. Can we increase the email open rate? Or can we increase the click-through rate or conversion rate? But I want to throw this open to the team here, what do you reckon? I need to start handpicking.
Narelle:
Oh, sorry. I was just thinking that you need to be testing your offers and things like that through your email, I think if it’s quick and easy to do, I will just do a discount but at the end of the day, is that the best thing for your business? Could you be doing a gift-with-purchase or something like that that doesn’t cost you as much but it’s very exciting to the customer going through the flow? So yeah, I think it’s worthwhile testing those things out so you can do that on a sporadic basis through the business cycle.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely love that. Yeah, you can test those things out really in your regular email newsletters before you throw them in an automation. So you don’t have to make it too difficult.
Chelsea:
I definitely think, Cathy, the subject line is an important one as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Chelsea:
And that is easy to test, you can do the split testing and you have to find that fine balance between it being intriguing but not spammy because no one wants their emails going to the spam folder, we prefer that they don’t go to the promotions folder as well. So sometimes it can be good just to hop into your own email inbox and go into the promotions folder and see, what are those subject lines and what actually catches my eye and then see what’s actually landed in your inbox as opposed to the promotions folder and see what the difference is. And then even again, going as far as looking in your spam box and seeing, okay, well, what’s actually being treated as spam and what are those subject lines looking like and making sure that you avoid doing something similar to that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, totally. Love it, love it. The second part of Stacy’s question, which doesn’t need to just relate to email but that may be why she was asking it, ideas about increasing repeat customers. Because you do spend money to get new customers buying in the first place, with paying for traffic and maybe some initial incentives but finding a way to have them come back at least… Well, in Stacy’s case, she’s asking for… Four times a year would be amazing and yes, it would be amazing. What have you guys seen that has worked really, really well at encouraging a repeat customer?
Sally:
One of the things that I was just thinking of when you were talking about the emails to send, was that in a post-purchase sequence, you can have information about how to use the product well or how to take care of the product well. Those sorts of things, people love to know about because it enhances their experience with the product and that then puts your brand in a positive light in their mind and so they are more likely to come back. But then of course, you can always follow-up with… If you’re a clothing brand, a children’s clothing brand, then you follow-up with the next sizes. You can follow-up with complimentary products that go well with what they’ve bought. You can follow-up with new product drops and that sort of thing to keep your brand top of mind and to encourage that repeat purchase.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely. Anyone else seen some cool stuff to win customers back?
Rich:
Yeah, I-
Narelle:
[crosstalk 00:23:53]. Oh, sorry, Rich.
Rich:
No, go ahead, go ahead.
Narelle:
A loyalty program, they can entice people to come back and there are a lot of people out there who like collecting points and spending their points. So yeah, implementing something like that could work.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Chelsea, you had a loyalty program for a long time I think.
Chelsea:
I did, yeah, with Smile.io but in the end, it was a bit expensive and I guess this is one of the reasons why you need to track your metrics.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, definitely.
Chelsea:
And that is not actually checking in and seeing if people were using it. So I can’t remember what it was costing me per month but it was a reasonable amount and people were collecting their points and enrolling in the program, which was great and the more people you had in the program, the more the monthly fee was. But I just found that they weren’t necessarily cashing in on the points and also, quite a lot of VIP type programs have the ability to have referrals, so that you refer a friend and then you get a credit or points or something like that and that didn’t work for me either. But I can see that that could work, depending on the type of business that you have. So I think they’re definitely something worth trying but absolutely making sure that you are tracking their performance because if it’s just costing you money and you’re not actually getting more revenue out of it, then it’s not worthwhile.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Chelsea:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
It does depend a bit on the product because I know one of our skin care clients, [Inda Gari 00:25:29], she has a loyalty program and I have been using her oils and it’s a product that you use up. It’s the same with my favorite chai tea brand, you use it up within a not too long period of time, so yeah, a little bit of a loyalty program on those brands works quite well. Rich, what were you about to jump in and say?
Rich:
Yeah, I saw this case study a really long time ago on some marketing conference, I can’t remember which one it was but it’s basically a smoothie brand, they’re subscription based product, so this type of product but I think that the rules can apply to basically any business that solves a problem, which basically should be any business. In that the reason that they came to you and the reason that they bought is because they want to effect a change in their life, in whatever way. It doesn’t have to be some massive dramatic way such as… This was smoothies and it was detoxing and getting healthy and stuff like that but what they did in their email sequences was really interesting because they basically…
Rich:
First of all, based on the metrics side of things, they identified, within the first three months was when people started to drop off. So people would sign on for three months and then fall off. So what they found is they needed to actually have some content around that three month point that kept pulling people through. And really, what it was is trying to retain that mission that they had, why that person came to you in the first place and then attaching your product to the improvement they’re trying to make. And I know it’s quite difficult to use for some products but if we can all think about, what is actually helping them achieve? And just trying to be consistent with that message through a longer period and just use different content to put that across, they’re basically going to feel like the community and they’re going to feel like you’re partly behind driving the change in their life.
Rich:
And it sounds pretty dramatic but that’s really what’s going to carry the relationship forward because you can just keep being there for them basically and that’s why you were there in the first place. So I think we can take a lot of inspiration from some subscription based models. Even if you’re not a subscription based model, I think it’s really important to know if you’ve got repeat customers or if you’ve not, where they’re falling off and what you need to do at that point to keep them going. And then don’t worry about the future because then in the future, you can say, “Okay, now it’s five months. What do we do at this point?” And then you just keep doing…
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, so good and really, none of us are going to figure out what that is unless we start trying some marketing. We’ve got to roll some stuff out, we’ve got to test some stuff and then gather all of that data and all of that metrics. You can’t predict this stuff in advance really, you’ve just got to try. Love it. One thing I just quickly want to add to all of that for Stacy and for anyone else listening who’s trying to increase your repeat customers, I can’t tell you the number of times that I’ve audited an email automation, whether it’s in Klaviyo or Mailchimp or whichever platform they’re using and there’s just not enough happening. There’s just not enough post-purchase stuff happening in there and oftentimes, I think the fear is, oh but I’m sending too many emails and I don’t want to come across as spammy or too salesy or anything like that. And I know that that’s a bit of a fear, Sal, I think you’ve probably coached a few clients through that fear.
Sally:
I hear it all the time. Yeah, all the time people are saying, “I don’t want to be spammy. I don’t want people to get sick of seeing me,” and that sort of thing. And that’s fair enough but if you don’t put yourself out there, they’re going to forget about you-
Catherine Langman:
Yep and go somewhere else.
Sally:
And that’s the reality. Exactly.
Catherine Langman:
So yeah, don’t hold back, just make sure that it is a relevant offer at whatever you think is the best, most relevant time, based on when your customers might be running out or they might need the next step in whatever solution that you sell. So if it’s Stacy with the lunch boxes and other back to school related stuff, what else might they need come maybe the end of the next school term? There might be some other outdoor play or creative play related thing that your customers need for the school holidays, so I’m sure there’s lot of opportunity there. All right. We might dive into the next question, which is quite a big one from Michelle at Curated with Conscience. So Curated with Conscience is a beautiful hamper company, hampers of lots of delicious looking treats and quite a beautiful brand. She has a real passion and mission around supporting eco-friendly and sustainable products and brands and she has experienced enormous growth.
Catherine Langman:
Really in 2020 and 2021, it’s really taken off and shout-out to Michelle, I know that at this point in time, as we record this, you are head down, bum up, really trying to push through to Christmas and get all of your last Christmas orders out the door. It’s been a pretty crazy time for you. And so her question is this, how do I set my 2022 budget when 2020 and 2021 was so crazy and 2022 is such an unknown? Should I be conservative with overheads because lockdown trade was an anomaly? Or should I have the fulfillment capacity in place to handle potential sales growth from increased marketing spend? It feels a bit chicken or the egg as well. And I’ve got a bit to say here but I want to throw it open to the team as well and what have you got to say to Michelle where she’s at? Narelle, I think you had something to say this morning.
Narelle:
Oh, sorry, I muted myself and forgot. Yeah, definitely, I feel like with Michelle’s business, that she’s sitting there thinking that a lot of it is being driven by COVID. Yes, some of it will be driven by COVID but she’s got an amazing website, she’s got an amazing business that is around the socially conscious product, which people are looking for these days. That’s not going to go away. So I don’t feel that she’s going to see this huge drop-off just because COVID is maybe dying down a bit but it may not be. That hasn’t affected her brand, plus, on top of all of that, she’s got all of this exposure during that time, that doesn’t go away either. Her hampers are being delivered to thousands and thousands of people, so people know her now, so they’ll come back.
Catherine Langman:
Absolutely and there’s certainly precedents pre-COVID for some very big hamper and gifting type businesses already achieving massive success, so it’s not like this is the sort of business that has been born out of COVID either and might die when COVID is hopefully a distant memory. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And I think, Michelle, you’ll find that there is a lot of long-term gain from what you have achieved here and aside from all of that, nobody knows what 2022 is going to hold. All we can do is try and set some goals and use the data and the metrics that we have and what we know about our audiences and the contacts and the audiences that we’ve engaged with and built up relationships with. All we can do is to use all of that that we do know and try and work out the best marketing plan to get to a goal, whatever that goal may be. And not everybody needs to set humongous, really ambitious revenue growth targets every year, that’s not everybody’s goal by any stretch.
Catherine Langman:
So don’t feel like just because we’re hopefully coming out of a pandemic… Touch wood, I don’t want to jinx that. But yeah, don’t think that just because of what we’ve just gone through that 2022 is more of an unknown than maybe any other year that we’re trying to plan for. But I do completely understand the situation Michelle’s in now, where she’s moved into a warehouse space and she’s starting to add more team members to her team and there’s extra costs involved as you start to scale like this, overhead costs. And so how ambitious should she be in terms of taking on bigger warehouse space or hiring more help in-house? And all of that kind of stuff. Because there is the concern, if you over-egg it and you get yourself a warehouse that’s maybe the size of Amazon as opposed to where she is right now, that then the costs become something she can’t bear.
Catherine Langman:
And yeah, look, I think if it was me, Michelle, I would be trying to stay as flexible as possible with that kind of stuff, not locking yourself into really long-term contracts with leases and things like that that you can’t get out of. If you can be a little bit nimble on your feet with those sorts of overheads, so that you can scale up or scale down as you need, then that should hopefully take a little bit of the stress out of the unknown and enable you to make those kinds of moves as you go forward. So that’s what I would do and then obviously keeping a track of all of the numbers on a regular basis. So the metrics obviously in your business, in your marketing but also, all of your accounting side numbers as well and making sure that you are staying profitable as you grow. Does anyone else want to chime in with something for Michelle?
Rich:
Yeah. In terms of the paid ad side, I’m not sure about Google but I know that Facebook has this thing called a campaign planning tool. And what you can do is, when you’re in your audience research stage and if you’re testing new audiences or if you’re just looking at new budgets and stuff like that, you can use this campaign planning tool, it’s in Business Manager and you can basically put in the audiences you’re going to be targeting, the demographics, stuff like that and it’ll give you an impression of the CPM, the cost per thousand impressions of that audience. And you can basically buy that to justify how much you’re going to spend in terms of ad spend.
Rich:
It won’t necessarily reflect the results you’re going to get because you’ll need to use your historical data for that but at least you’ll know, okay, to get this many impressions with this audience, which I’ve researched and I know is the right place for me to run ads, it’s going to cost this much. So therefore, you know ad spend should be this much and then it’s about working out what your return’s going to be, what the click-through rate will be, based on the historical evidence you have. And then basically, that’s the most accurate way of trying to work out your campaign budget spend. And it does take into account the times of the year, the saturation, the competition within that space as well. So it’s actually a really useful tool, so I definitely recommend using that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, that sounds like a good tool to get one’s head around. Hopefully with Michelle, once she gets through this Christmas period, she might have the headspace to look at stuff like that. Anyone else want to chime in with anything for Michelle and for anyone else who is really at that point of thinking about scaling up and struggling with the unknown? Chelsea, obviously when people come to us and they book in for a strategy session and they’re looking for assistance to figure out how to get from A to B, you go through a process of a bit of diagnosis really and a bit of auditing to look at what they’ve got going on and spot the opportunities.
Chelsea:
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the questions I’ll always ask is, what are they doing currently with their digital marketing, what avenues are they exploring and using. And not just paid ads, which is always the obvious one that people think of but are they also using email marketing effectively? Do they have the automation as well as sending regular campaigns even if their list is quite modest in size? Are they keeping up to date with their social media? It’s that full 360 approach, which more often than not, there’s one or two of those elements that isn’t being perhaps 100% nailed as it could be. And so that’s always something that I’ll encourage them to focus on. And also, I think when it comes to trying to set a budget, you do need to really break it down.
Chelsea:
You can’t just say, “Well, I want to do $30,000 per month by the end of next year,” you need to actually break that down into, well, how is that going to be achieved and what proportion of that do you expect to come from paid traffic and what proportion would you like to come from your email marketing? And that’s where using something like Klaviyo is fantastic because you can log in to that dashboard, you straight away can see that breakdown of what percentage of your revenue has been directly attributed to your email marketing and of that, what’s coming from flows, what’s coming from your campaigns. And just really being across your current metrics and thinking about how you’d want to get to that goal.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I love doing this exercise and really looking through… And look, anyone who’s been going for a little while, you can do this quite regularly in your business as a means of discovering where the opportunity lies. And if you’re looking forward to the unknown but you’ve got some history, it just takes some of that unknown away. It really can allay some fears around, is there still room to grow this business or not? So yeah, I really love doing this exercise. Now, we have one further question that we are going to answer and I really can’t thank everyone enough for submitting these questions.
Catherine Langman:
So we have [Yana 00:40:27], who’s in our Mastermind actually and Yana’s question is about how to scale as well. And I think this one is probably a fairly common question that a lot of people struggle with. So her question is around scaling, she says, I assumed just bumping up my ad spend would lead to more sales but that doesn’t seem to always be the case, so there must be more to it than that and so how do I go about doing that? And just to give Yana a shout-out, her business is luxecushions.com.au. So seeing as I did mention all the other questioners’ businesses, let’s be fair here. Now, I’m going to throw this open to the team here because there’s always more to it than just one thing when it comes to scaling. I think we could probably all contribute to this one. Who wants to go first?
Rich:
Doing it with Facebook?
Sally:
[crosstalk 00:41:26].
Rich:
I was just going to say, with any paid marketing, what you do is you go into the marketing platform and you press the sales on button and then all the sales start trickling through and then you just take it from there.
Catherine Langman:
Ba-dum tish.
Rich:
No, the processes that we go through to basically refine and ensure that that performance is as best as possible, I think that’s probably the most useful thing that I can go through because there’s so many different areas I can reach into. I’m sure everyone else is going to reach into some of those areas, just not the same one. But really, the first thing is, you can start running ads obviously first before you’ve done all of this but you will find very quickly that the costs ramp up. And the costs are ramping up because basically… Again, I’m speaking in terms of Facebook, not necessarily the other platforms but if Facebook’s deeming your content to be slightly irrelevant or not as engaging as other people’s content, it’s going to cost you more.
Rich:
So that’s really why all the energy from your marketing efforts need to be put in before you’re going to start running ads. And the process we follow is basically a lot of digging into what the customer’s pain points are, what their desires are, who they are, everything about them. Coming up with a persona for them, sometimes even a name, all of those things, they all feed into how you’re going to target people and the sort of content you’re going to use to try and build a connection with them. Basically, the idea is to grab someone’s attention enough to build a relationship with them in six seconds or less, that gives us attention on the platform. So it’s not an easy feat, right? So as long as you’re doing something that’s unique, it’s engaging and it’s… What’s the word? Authentic. You’re not trying to sell people on something, you’re trying to show them that there’s something that you can do to help them or there’s something you can do that’s going to make their life easier or save them time or something like that.
Rich:
So if you find that thing, that’s the most powerful thing you could have, something to start that relationship off. You can go into creative testing and things like that as well because that’s, again, a really important aspect of it but really, finding that audience and finding the way that you’re going to start to build the relationship is the best part. And also, breaking that down into… I slightly went over it earlier but which awareness stage that people are in. So you basically have three awareness stages. You have people who are problem aware, so they know they have an issue but they don’t really know there’s something there to solve it and they tend to make up the biggest section of the audience and they require a lot more engaging content that’s going to help them realize that there’s a solution to their problem, right?
Rich:
So that’s the first stage. The second stage is the solution aware and the solution aware people, who basically know there’s now a product or a service that solves their problem and then they require… And this is what I touched on earlier, they require social proof, they’re comparing different products and all these other things, so that tends to be a bit lower down the funnel. And then you have the product aware people, so they know about your product and maybe at this point, they’re testing other people’s products but they want a bit more information about yours or they need to be pulled across the line if they haven’t been already. So identifying the audience and then also, what stages they are and how to cater that messaging towards them, that’s how you’re going to beat everyone else in the feed. So that’s the easiest way to just get-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I think most of the marketing that I see is really only focusing… And I’m not referring to Yana’s marketing here at all but just generally speaking, I think most people are just targeting that product aware audience and that’s what? Probably 2% of your potential is that ready to buy.
Rich:
Exactly.
Catherine Langman:
But everybody else, they’re not quite there yet. So we need to lift our eyesight up a little bit and focus a bit of the marketing towards them and that’s never going to be, hey, come and buy my product right now.
Rich:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
But they’re like, “What?” Yeah. Sal, what were you going to chime in about before?
Sally:
I was just going to say that there’s so much potential with a product like Yana’s that is built around seasonal trends and changes to that that happen quite regularly. There’s a lot of potential to actually do things around maybe one simple thing that people can do to update their interiors and those sorts of things. And as the trends change and as the seasons change, that can be fresh new content that’s happening all the time and it can be video, it can be image based, it can be gif based, those sorts of things. So you’ve got lots of scope for different content throughout the year, even just taking out those special days and special seasonal things like Christmas and that sort of thing. There’s a lot of scope for fresh new content happening all the time, which is a great way to get new people on board too.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, definitely, definitely. Also, I guess further to that, I just want to add for anyone and Yana, I’m not sure if this will be useful for you but for anyone else who’s really looking at trying to scale… So you’ve launched, you’ve got to a certain point in your business and then maybe things are plateauing a little bit and you want to figure out, how do you get that next injection of the upward trend in your revenue growth. The other thing, I do think that a lot of e-commerce brands, they don’t consider enough when it comes to SEO and also, just tweaking and optimizing your website generally. So again, we do need to be tracking and monitoring our metrics here but for anyone who is wondering what you do need to really focus on, you can actually head to our website and do a free website audit and it will help walk you through what you should be seeing metrics wise from each different channel. But I want to be seeing more e-commerce brands doing a bit more focus on their SEOs, so that they are mixing that earned traffic in alongside their owned traffic, their email marketing and then their paid traffic. Obviously whichever paid platform that you run ads on, hopefully more than one.
Catherine Langman:
And you want to see the biggest proportion of your traffic coming from that organic search, so maybe at least 40% of your traffic and sales coming from organic search and then about 20 to 25% from email marketing and similar from your social media side as well. So it is really, really, really helpful to start, if you’re not already and to keep monitoring those metrics on that regular basis because that’s going to really lead you forward as you scale. But then yeah, definitely as you scale, Yana, you want to get a little bit more testing happening in terms of your advertising and your marketing, so that you’ve got different content going out and you’re also trying to tap into new and different audiences as well and not just trying to get one static funnel in place that works indefinitely because that’s not really how it works as we grow. Did anyone else have anything that you want to add to all of that on our team here?
Narelle:
I was just going to say that it’s also a good opportunity to stop and then maybe survey your customers and get their feedback about your business. It doesn’t have to be necessarily about the product, it can be about your website, it can be about just understanding them a bit better, so that you can then maybe add a new product to your range that they’re looking for. Surveys are really great for getting all this information. We think that we know our businesses really well but then our customers tell us something and we’re like, oh jeez, I never thought about that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, absolutely.
Narelle:
[inaudible 00:49:44].
Catherine Langman:
And you’ve just recently done a survey for one of our website clients, Narelle and that was really, really useful in the end, wasn’t it?
Narelle:
It was because this client in particular felt at the time that the way they were going to scale was by broadening their audience and trying to appeal to the masses. But going through the survey, it really showed that she was in a niche market, that was a passionate niche market and that there were things within that niche market that she could expand upon and they would be more profitable for her, so that she didn’t have to go to that broader audience. Which is hard because it actually was taking her into a direction that was probably more fast fashion, which is not her brand.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, really, really, really useful exercise to do. Some fantastic tips there from all of you today. Thank you so much for jumping on with me on this milestone episode. Thank you to those of you who posed questions for us, I hope that you found that helpful and I also hope that you listeners have found our answers and our suggestions to those questions also helpful in your own situation. And of course, if any of you listeners do have questions that you would love us to address on the show, please pop into our Rockstar Productpreneur Facebook group and pop your questions in there. We love getting ideas from you guys and we always want to be able to tailor these podcast episodes to what you want to know about and who you want to hear from. So thank you again, team, for jumping on and recording this episode with me, we’ll bring it to an end now.