Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there. It’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Productpreneur Success Podcast. As you would know, if you’ve been listening to the last couple of episodes, I’m dedicating this month all about planning. It’s January. It’s definitely the time of the year where you want to be knowing, figuring out what you’re going to do and achieve this year and the outcomes, I guess, that you would like to have by the end of the year, and so I wanted to walk you through a really simple planning process. This is about really figuring out the kind of business that you want to be growing and being very intentional about that. It’s also about working out the specific goals that you want to achieve, and then how you are going to achieve those, and putting it together in a plan format that you can actually use and having some strategies in place, I guess, that will help keep you on track.
Catherine Langman:
There’s nothing worse than putting the time and effort into creating a plan, and then putting it on a shelf to gather dust somewhere, and then getting to the end of the year thinking, “Oh, what was I supposed to do this year?” and finding that it’s completely different to what actually happened. We don’t want to set ourselves up for failure in that way. We want to put together a way of working that is manageable and that helps keep you on track with doing what you want to do. Obviously, pandemics can sometimes come along and throw all of that out into disarray. I’m not planning on having a pandemic this year. Are you? I don’t think so. All right. So without further ado, let’s dive into these five exercises, five steps to putting together an effective e-commerce marketing plan for your 2021.
Catherine Langman:
All right. So the first exercise that we’re going to go through is what is called your vivid vision, and the vivid vision exercise is not something that I made up. It was taught to me, but I really love it, and I think you’ll understand why after I told you this story. A few of you probably heard me tell this story before, but it’s a good one, so I’m going to share it again, and it goes like this. Imagine you’re on a plane traveling to a holiday destination overseas. I know we’re all only imagining that right now, and it’s a nice dream and nothing more than a dream.
Catherine Langman:
However, let’s imagine that. But midway through the flight, the pilot addresses the passengers and crew over the PA and says, “We have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is we’ve lost all our instruments, so we have no idea how high we are, how fast we’re traveling, or which direction we’re going in. We also don’t know how much fuel we have left in the tank, but the good news is we’re making fantastic progress.”
Catherine Langman:
So this is the way a lot of people operate in business. So if you’ve ever felt a little bit like you’re flying by the seat of your pants, maybe just quietly put your hand up there wherever you are listening. It is pretty common, but clearly, if you don’t know where you’re going, you are seriously limiting your chances of succeeding, right? So the task for this first exercise is to describe in as much vivid detail as possible exactly what your business will look like in three years’ time. You can set that timeframe out further than that if you wish, but I find three years’ time is something that… It’s close enough to feel tangible and achievable, and we can imagine it, and not so close that we feel like we don’t have enough time to do things. But certainly, look further ahead if you like.
Catherine Langman:
So yes, you do want to set yourself a revenue target, but I don’t want you to just limit your vision to that. In fact, if you only are targeting a revenue target, I think you’re probably going to find that the minute things get a bit tricky, or difficult, or uncomfortable, or frustrating, or overwhelming that that revenue target is not going to be meaningful enough to keep you motivated during those tough times, right? You need to have something that’s a little bit more worth putting the hard yards in for.
Catherine Langman:
So what I want you to think about is a bit broader than that. In fact, I like to think of it a little bit like what your business universe looks like, and I guess I’ve come up with that approach because I have kids and my two boys are completely enamored with the whole Marvel universe, any single Marvel movie or DC movie. They’re not that fuzzy, but anything that comes out from those two movie production houses, they are all over those movies like a rash, but they… It’s a universe. The whole universe, the characters, the environment, the storylines, the look and feel of it. It’s all very familiar once you’re into any of those movies.
Catherine Langman:
So you want to think about your business like that too, but what you want to do is to start describing in detail things like who are your ideal customers. So who will you be serving? Who will you be working with? Your team, your contractors, anyone else that you’re going to be working with, suppliers. What media you might be featured in? What brands you’re going to stock it, or what products you’re going to create, depending on what your business model is? What retailers you might be stocked in if you wholesale? What impact you aim to have on your customer base or on your audience who are on your community or the world if you’re aiming that big? Anything else that you can describe about your location, where you work. what does your business look like, sound like, feel like, taste like? Describe it in as much detail as possible, and then at the end, you want to be able to describe your e-commerce brand as “the go-to online store for…” and really be able to say succinctly what that is.
Catherine Langman:
So that’s the first part of the exercise. Then, once you finish that exercise, we want to move on to step two, which is really setting some tangible goals for this year, so 12-month goals. So the first exercise is the big picture goal and really giving yourself that tangible detail and the emotional attachment to that vivid vision that you’re going to need so that you are motivated to really do the hard yards, right, and keep working when things do get a little bit tricky.
Catherine Langman:
But now, we want to set some really specific 12-month goals, so really setting the right goals for the next 12 months. This is what’s going to really help drive your business forward this year. So what I recommend is to think big, but maybe not too big because there’s this weird phenomenon that happens where many people… and I’m guilty of this at times as well. We completely overestimate what we can achieve in 12 months, and we totally underestimate what we can achieve in three to five years. So you want to think big, but maybe not too big. You want to keep it within the realm of reality, right?
Catherine Langman:
So, for instance, a personal goal of mine is to get back into running and to really build up my running stamina and running fitness. But if I set the goal of being able to run a marathon this year, that would just set me up to fail because I can hardly run to the letterbox without coughing up a lung. So think big, but not too big. What I want you to think about here is what would you do in your business this year, in the next 12 months if you couldn’t fail? Like I said, you want to be able to keep it within the realms of possibility whilst still being ambitious. That way, you can proceed with confidence and without that fear of failure because fear of failure is a really big one for us entrepreneurs. Too often, fear of failure really holds us back and stops us from pursuing those dreams.
Catherine Langman:
Now, the next part of goal setting is… and this is for those of you who are not brand new. If you’re launching, then you can skip this bit. But if you have been in business for any amount of time whatsoever, the next part of the process is to look back before you can plan ahead. So what you want to do is sit with the… or pull up some of your goal… pull up some of your results from the last 12 months and review the past year’s performance. So this can feel a little bit tedious. I know, and sometimes it can also feel a bit scary, especially if you are still in the early days, early stages of your business and you’re not turning a profit yet.
Catherine Langman:
Please take heart. Everybody starts like this. It’s completely normal, but with a good plan, you will be able to get ahead. So what you want to do here is to dig into your website reports, your accounts like PayPal, bank accounts, et cetera to looking into Google analytics. All of that good stuff. Email platforms, Facebook ads, if you’ve been running them. Anywhere where you’ve got documentation of some of your results, and find out exactly where you are and what’s happened over the last 12 months.
Catherine Langman:
So you want to answer questions like, how much revenue did you make in the last 12 months? How much did you grow from the previous year? If you have a year-on-year results, what is your current average order value? How many website visitors do you need to get each month? What is your current website conversion rate, and how many email subscribers do you have right now? There might be some other important metrics that you like to track, but that’s at least a guide of some of the really important ones to go through. Then, once you’ve got those numbers written down, you can go about setting your 12 months… your goals for the next 12 months, so for… between now and this time next year. Really, what outcomes do you want to achieve in the next 12 months or this year?
Catherine Langman:
So without thinking about the how just yet, don’t worry about that, you want to set some goal. You definitely want to set some goals around what revenue you want to make this year and what percent growth this represents. Then, you might want to start setting some goals around your average order value, around how many website visitors you’d like to get each month, whether you want to improve your conversion rate, whether you want to grow your email list, so these are… and I’m giving you these specific ones to focus on because they are really important growth levers in an e-commerce business.
Catherine Langman:
So have a think through that list and start setting yourself some goals. Like I said, you might have some other goals as well, but just keep in mind that your goals should be specific, and measurable, and time-limited. I want you to not think about goals that are actually strategies. So these goals are the outcomes that you want to receive and… to experience and achieve in this year, but they’re not the how. So we’re going to talk about the how in a little bit. Don’t worry, but this is the outcomes that you want to achieve.
Catherine Langman:
You do probably also want to have a think about some of the other elements that you need to have in place at the end of this year to be on track to achieve your vivid vision. So do you need to hire staff? Do you need to source or launch new products? Are you aiming to appear in certain media or work with certain influencers, or collaborate with any other brands, or be stocked in any particular stores? So this, I guess, crosses over a little bit in terms of the how, but really keep that vivid vision in mind is the important message here. Try and work back from that three-year vivid vision to the 12-month mark and figure out what you need to have in place in order to be on track for that.
Catherine Langman:
So, for instance, one brand that we were working with the start of this year or rather this time last year is… I have to get used to the fact that it’s 2021. So this brand that we were working with, we went through this exercise, this planning exercise, and their three-year vision, vivid vision included having their own property. So they were a skincare and body kind of product brand, and it was all natural.
Catherine Langman:
One of their goals was to have their own property, which was like a farm-based property where they could actually grow all of their own organic, natural ingredients, and it would also have a space and a property there for their customers to come in. So like a storefront, I guess, as well as offices and workspaces, et cetera, et cetera. So that was a pretty big thing to try and aim for for three years. It was an awesome vision though, and it really meant a lot to them. So being able to at least have started to look at purchasing a property in 12 months was one of their 12-month goals. So that was going to set them on the right track to achieving their vivid vision in three years.
Catherine Langman:
All right, so that’s exercise two. The third step in this process and the third exercise that you want to be doing is to really start trying to identify any particular problems or opportunity areas that you could address or take advantage of. So this is about looking internally into the business. Do you have the right capabilities and skillsets internally, or are there any specific issues that you need to overcome? Then, also, looking externally into the competitive landscape and trying to identify any areas of opportunity that you could take advantage of or any potential threats that might impact your ability to achieve your goals. Okay?
Catherine Langman:
So for any of you listeners who’ve ever done a marketing degree or a business degree, you probably recognize I’m talking about a SWOT analysis here, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. It is a really useful exercise to do. It’s a useful exercise to do every year when you go through this planning process because things do change. Certainly, over the last 12 months, things have changed enormously, and that has certainly changed the competitive environment that we will operate in. So let’s do this SWOT analysis.
Catherine Langman:
Basically, I really want you to get real with yourself here, so this is… There’s no benefit to you kidding yourself about how things really are. So when we’re looking at strengths and weaknesses, this is what relates to your own personal abilities and that of your team internally. So they’re internal to the business. So are you fantastic at social media marketing, but you absolutely suck at writing emails, or are you brilliant at driving sales, but your order fulfillment or customer service really lags behind? So internal-related things, and then opportunities and threats are what’s going on out in the competitive landscape. So it might be industry-related, or it might be something else.
Catherine Langman:
Fingers crossed there’s no more global pandemics going to come and hit us. Hopefully, we’re on the way to being through the worst of that or at least getting the hang of what we’re dealing with here, but there might be other things as well, right? So are there any new competitors that you know of that are coming to market? Potentially, an overseas brand that’s going to come and launch in your local area, or have you identified a fantastic new product opportunity that you reckon would be an absolute killer? So really try and think. Think. Think through as much of this as you possibly can to identify as many opportunities and threats that are out there in the marketplace.
Catherine Langman:
So, really, it’s about sitting with pen and paper here, and literally what you do is to draw up a big sheet of paper, and you put a cross in the middle. So you’ve got four quadrants, and it’s one quadrant for each SWOT, each strength, weakness, opportunity, and threat. You just go through and write it all down. Hopefully, by the end of this exercise, you’re going to have a little bit of a to-do list. Some of it might be stuff that you really want to prioritize.
Catherine Langman:
For instance, if you’ve been really growing and your sales are growing, but you don’t have the customer service and the fulfillment side of things buttoned down, then that’s really important. You can’t keep growing without getting that stuff sorted, right? So go through that exercise. I can’t tell you what it’s going to look like or what to-do list is going to come out of it, but you will need to sit with that, and try and figure out the priorities, whether something is a now thing or a later thing. Is it really important, or is it just something to keep at the back of your mind or keep on your radar? So really try and work out what the priorities there are for you at the end of doing that exercise. So that’s that particular exercise.
Catherine Langman:
Once you’ve gone through that area or that exercise, I do also have another tool for you, which is about trying to identify the area of focus for you that you ought to be prioritizing in terms of your marketing and in terms of scaling and growing your e-commerce store. So what I have is a quiz that you can go through that will really identify what the biggest problem is that’s impacting your growth with your e-commerce sales and what marketing initiatives that you really need to prioritize sooner in order to address that problem and in order to move forward, and scale, and grow. So I’m going to link to that quiz in this podcast show note. So you can just head to the show notes and take that quiz exercise yourself. Hopefully, that helps you work out what you need to be doing.
Catherine Langman:
All right. Beyond there, what we need to be doing next is planning things out, so this is… What I usually find is people go… When they decide to do a marketing plan, they start with their goals for the year, and then they jump straight to the strategies. So we’ve gone through a few other exercises for you to include before you get to this point, but now it is definitely time to decide some of your strategies, and ideas, and promotions, and things like that that will actually get you to your goals. So this is the how part, addressing… achieving your goals, addressing your problems, taking advantage of any opportunities, and figuring out what you’re going to do and when you’re going to do it.
Catherine Langman:
So when it comes to your growth strategies, you really need to consider always having one of these two things in… or both of these two things in place rather. You always need to have potential new customers coming into your universe and coming into your radar. So you always need to be building your audience and increasing your brand awareness. So the sorts of… I’ll give you some ideas for strategies and promotions, et cetera in a minute. The other thing that we always need to have in place is something to convert new and repeat sales. So we always need to be converting new customers from the audience that we’ve been building, and we also need to be converting repeat sales because that is what drives profit.
Catherine Langman:
But before you get to those audience building and sales generating strategies, you also want to consider just from the SWOT analysis and also from the quiz link that I give you in the show notes for this episode, what else have you identified? Right? So is your conversion rate really, really low? If so, then you might need to work on website optimization so that you can improve that conversion rate, or are your website visitor numbers really low? In which case, you really need to be working on being found by Google, so search engine optimization and maybe some paid advertising strategies.
Catherine Langman:
I just want to give you a tip here. If you have really low visitor numbers, so what I would consider low visitor numbers is anything under a thousand visitors a day. Even if you have a low conversion rate, you want to focus on traffic volume first because… Basically, you need to get enough traffic to your website in order to expect those conversions to happen. I always… not always, but I frequently get asked the question around, “I’m getting visitors to my website every day, but I’m not making any sales. What’s going on?” I’ll ask how many visitors they’ve had, and it’s like, “16.” It’s like, “It’s just not enough. You need to get more traffic.”
Catherine Langman:
So if you’ve got anything less than a thousand visitors per week coming to your website, you need to focus on traffic first. Beyond that, if your conversion rate is below 2%, which is the benchmark average for e-commerce, you need to work on website optimization before you start really driving a lot more traffic, especially if you are spending money on advertising to get that traffic, or you might decide that you need to up your game with more consistent email marketing if you really need to drive repeat sales potentially, or you might need to think about a promotional calendar so that you have something to go out with each week and each month. So really go through the SWOT analysis and also the results from taking my quiz, and you will start to see what needs to happen here and now. Then, beyond that, you definitely need to have strategies in place all the time for, like I said, building your audience and increasing your brand awareness, and then enticing the new and repeat sales.
Catherine Langman:
So let’s go through some ideas here. So when it comes to building your audience and building your brand awareness… At the end of the day, it goes without saying, if you don’t have an audience, you’ve got no one to sell to, right? So we definitely need to be always focusing on building our audience, and you’re not going to do that literally just by putting a website up or by spending a bit of money on ads. It’s not enough. So you do need to be doing some other things as well.
Catherine Langman:
Certainly, focusing on any kind of publicity-related stuff, so working with influencers, if you can line up some collaborations with other stores or other brands. Definitely doing things like big product launch or promotional campaigns that it’s a bit of a song and dance. That helps to really generate word of mouth marketing. It helps generate excitement, so people are more likely to share your content. That sort of thing. Other things like doing competitions and giveaways. If you do them the right way, you can definitely use that to help build your brand awareness and build your audience size.
Catherine Langman:
You can do things like really get involved in groups, social media groups, where your audience is hanging out in good volumes. You’ve got to be careful with that because, of course, a lot of Facebook groups do have rules that you have to go by. Often, that means you can’t be promoting your own business. But with the right group and following those rules, you can often gain an audience that way as well.
Catherine Langman:
Then, certainly, you can use paid advertising. So when you’re using paid advertising to build your audience and increase your brand awareness, we’re talking about advertising to a cold audience here. So this is top of funnel advertising if you use that kind of lingo. If you ignore spending money in that area, your other advertising is just going to die in a hole. You’ll burn out your existing audience. So there’s a variety of different ways that you can go about building your audience. You might want to use a few of them, and plan them out. Plan some different activities out throughout the year.
Catherine Langman:
So then, the other part of the puzzle is that you always need to have something in place to convert new and repeat customers. So this is about having some other advertising in place like your middle of funnel and bottom of funnel. So this is where you’re retargeting your warm audiences to try and convert those sales. Also, things like automated email marketing, which you guys all know that I’m a massive fan of. I like using email automation in conjunction with paid advertising because it helps get you a much better overall results. But also, things like regular promotions, launching new products, other special offers, regular email newsletter marketing, focusing on your search engine optimization so that you can really keep bringing traffic as well as sales, Google Shopping. All of that kind of good stuff definitely helps as well. So this is about converting new and repeat customers.
Catherine Langman:
I guess if you are planning out your marketing calendar, just… When I’m talking about regular promotions, just make sure that you’re not always just running a sale or a discount because that is also going to be the fastest way to burn out your list and to make little to no profit. So you really want to be coming up with some other creative ideas for promotions whether it’s putting bundles together or just finding a reason to make a song and dance about things. It might be a time of the year. Obviously, in January, for those of you who sell kid-related products, there’s back-to-school promotions and that sort of thing. So, really, think about times of the year and themed dates, whether it’s Easter or World Environment Day. There’s a lot of different times of the year that you can also use as a reason for running a promotion, and that can help with converting new and repeat sales. You can use that sort of content in your advertising, in your emails, and all of that good stuff.
Catherine Langman:
I guess just at the end of the day, just remember, without that constant stream of potential customers, building your audience, and then the mechanisms to convert them into buyers, preferably people who buy more than once, then you don’t have a business. So once you’ve written out a whole bunch of ideas there, then you want to map it out. You can use my Free Action Planner. I will link to that in the podcast show notes as well. It’s a spreadsheet-based thing. You can use Asana if you like or Trello. Whatever floats your boat. You could also use my planner book if you wish because that is designed for e-commerce business models, and we have a great special running for that at the moment as well. So you can grab that with a whole bunch of freebies, and extras, and so on, and so forth. So definitely check that out if you’re a pen and paper kind of person.
Catherine Langman:
All right. So the next thing that I really want to go through is a fairly simple one, and that is how do you keep on track, right? It might seem like an afterthought. Hopefully, it’s not though because really, the success of your plan, your success in implementing your plan will rely on your ability to stay on track with it, right? So what I recommend is planning in detail for 90 days, and then having some time built in at the end of the 90 days to review your progress, and then plan again in detail for the next 90 days. But additionally, having touch points and… touch points on a weekly and monthly basis where you can also keep track of your progress.
Catherine Langman:
I guess you want to think back to that story that I mentioned at the beginning, where I was talking about the on-the-plane trip going overseas and et cetera, et cetera. A pilot should hopefully have their dashboard like when you’re in a car. When you’re driving a car, you have a dashboard. You can see how fast you’re going. You can see how much fuel you have left, et cetera. So when you have a method for keeping track of your progress on a weekly basis, it’s like you’re checking those dials on your dashboard on a weekly basis versus if you just think about this plan once and then not again until this time next year. Then, you’re only looking at that dashboard once. If you’re looking at it on a weekly basis and you have a simple method for keeping track of that, then that… You’ve got 52 opportunities to adjust course if you need to. If you discovered that you’re heading in the wrong direction, you don’t want to find out the bad news when you’re 12 months down the track. That’s 12 months’ worth of going in the wrong direction versus keeping track of things on a weekly basis.
Catherine Langman:
So again, you can definitely use our planner book to help you with that. It’s got all of that built-in. But if you’re not a pen and paper kind of person, what I would recommend is just putting together a pretty simple spreadsheet where you can actually keep track of your metrics, your performance metrics. So you’ll have your plan. Like I said, you can download our digital version of that plan for putting all of the detailed strategies and tasks, et cetera that you need to carry out to implement each strategy. So you can use that, and then put together a simple spreadsheet to track your metrics. Those will be the sorts of things that we talked about in the goal setting, right? So conversion rate, average order value, how much traffic you’re getting each week, et cetera. By keeping track of that and keeping track of your progress, of your metrics, you will be able to tell very easily and very quickly whether the strategies that you are working on and implementing are having the right effect and taking you in the right direction. So hopefully, that makes sense.
Catherine Langman:
All right. So there we have it. We’ve got the five steps. They’re pretty simple. They’ll probably take you a good couple of hours to go through the first few exercises. It might take you a little bit longer than that to go through a detailed 90-day plan because in that plan, you’re going to be putting, “Okay. So maybe one strategy is to do a big promotion on this product range. What’s involved in that?” So you need to maybe do a photo shoot, and you might need to do… create all of the bundles for the website, or you might need to create coupon codes. You might need to write emails. You might need to write Facebook ads. You might need to line up a collaboration with a brand.
Catherine Langman:
So you’re literally itemizing all the different tasks that go into implementing that particular strategy, and you’re timelining them out in the planning spreadsheet or in Asana or Trello, whatever you use, right? Then, if you’re not the one who’s personally executing all of those tasks, you might have some names against who you’re going to get to do different tasks in the plan. Then, once you’ve got all of that down, obviously, you want to have your method for keeping track of that progress.
Catherine Langman:
So there you have it. Now, to find the link to that quiz and also the link to the planner, the planning spreadsheet to download as well as to the planner book special, all you need to do is head to the podcast show notes for this episode, which is catherinelangman.com/episode-52. So head to the show notes to grab all of those links. Basically, all I would say to you is find some time. Schedule some time. Don’t let the time skip away. I know it’s tempting to be distracted with other things, whether you’re distracted with kids and family or with other fun things in your business. But really, there is nothing more important than working on the plan for your year before the year gets away from you. All right, guys. That’s what I have for you this week. Next week, we are going to have a guest back on the show, and I look forward to sharing that episode with you as well. Bye for now.