If you’re just starting to launch your collection and want to attract your first sales, or you simply want to grow your brand and reach a wider audience of potential customers, it’s important to focus on your online marketing efforts. This can be a confusing topic and it can be a little daunting to get started, but with this easy 5-step guide, you’ll have a better idea of how to succeed with marketing your jewelry online. Who knows; you just might become the next Alison Lou!
1. Get Your Jewelry Featured Online
Although steadily building your brand’s social media accounts and web traffic is important, it’s just as essential to have your jewelry featured on other websites, namely popular and trendy media outlets and brands. Ideally, unless you’re leveraging the audience of an e-commerce giant like Etsy, you’ll want your designer jewelry featured on the top online jewelry marketplaces, like Net-A-Porter and Gilt. Unfortunately, these huge marketplaces have hundreds of requests from new jewelry designers every month, and aren’t likely to bring your collection on board unless your brand is already well known.
Therefore, it’s best to start with the smaller jewelry e-commerce platforms. You’ll need to create a line sheet with all of the specs and info on each piece in your jewelry collection, as well as a lookbook to showcase your collection on beautiful thematic backgrounds and with professional models.
The agreement between you and the marketplace on how the jewelry is sold can vary. Some shops simply bring the customer to your e-commerce store’s checkout when they’re ready to place an order. Others have the checkout process on their page, but have you ship the jewelry to the customer. Finally, some marketplaces store your jewelry, either on consignment or wholesale, and ship the jewelry to the customers themselves. Regardless of the store’s setup, having your jewelry featured on one of these marketplaces is one of the most effective ways to generate sales from your jewelry. The more popular and respected the marketplaces you land on, the more popular and respected your brand name will become.
Aside from having your collection listed for sale on these e-commerce giants, you’ll also want some good PR on popular and relevant fashion media outlets, or shoutouts on Influencer social media accounts. Of course, it’s ideal if you’re able to garner this media attention for free, but more often than not you’ll have to hire a PR agency, or simply contact your chosen influencers, blogs, and media brands yourself.
Out of all of your marketing efforts, generating buzz via PR and influencers is usually the most expensive element, so you’ll want to allocate your budget wisely, and only partner with agencies and accounts that have a proven track record of growing exposure for up-and-coming jewelry brands. Also, if you’re considering paying to be featured on a jewelry or fashion blog or media outlet, research the brand’s web traffic using a third party tool. You might not want to shell out thousands on an online promotion if the site only has 50 visitors a month!
2. Build Your Jewelry List
When social media and texting became popular, some claimed that email is dead. That’s not quite how it turned out. Even today, email lists and newsletters are one of the most reliable ways to communicate with your customers and create repeat sales. Make sure you have an easy email list sign up form on your website, and encourage your followers to sign up via social media. You can always offer an incentive, such as access to exclusive content or sales.
Email newsletters often have much higher clickthrough rates when compared to Facebook or Google ads. The reason is simple: your email audience already knows your brand and has already proven their interest just by signing up. Another useful element of email marketing is the ability to separate your lists. You can have one list for customers who have already converted, another for those who are still in the “window shopping” phase, and another for your most valued customers who might be eligible for special discounts. Take note of what subject lines and pitches get the highest clicks and sales, and you’ll be on your way to crafting a successful email marketing campaign.
3. Use Social Media to Spread the Word
Everyone knows social media is crucial for most brands. There are three main objectives you want to achieve with your social media channels: The first is to increase brand awareness; if your brand isn’t known in your niche or demographic, it’s a lot more challenging to make sales. Facebook is a great platform for reaching a large audience with your advertisements who might not otherwise ever hear of your collection, as are Instagram and Pinterest.
While it’s usually a must for brands to have at least a Facebook and Instagram account, test out advertising on each platform and see which gives you the most exposure for your money. Using advanced targeting parameters, most platforms allow you to focus on reaching only the people who would be the best potential customers for you.
Aside from paid ads, you’ll also want to leverage your organic social media feeds to engage with your audience and keep your brand as a continued presence in their online life. Use hashtags, and if you have the budget, influencer and celebrity endorsements to widen your brand’s exposure exponentially.
The second objective is increasing social proof. If new potential customers stumble on your site from a Google search or from a PR article in a magazine, they should be able to see that your brand name is well known and has an active presence online. Imagine finding a jewelry collection on Instagram that only has 30 followers, or who hasn’t updated their account in four months. Would you be as inclined to look at their collection? For this reason, it’s a good idea to gather a certain number of initial followers and a good amount of engagement before doing an official PR launch of your brand.
The third crucial social media objective is, of course, to increase sales. While the more subtle and nuanced content marketing of the 21st century has replaced the pushy sales pitches of the 20th century, marketing jewelry on social media is still relatively straightforward. The most important thing is to post high-quality, beautifully composed photos of your jewelry on its own, and worn on professional models. You’ll need a large backlog of visual content to post once a week at a minimum, and ideally more often on the highly visual platforms like Pinterest.
Aside from this, it’s great to post a variety of interesting content, whether that be blog posts, behind the scenes shots, influencers with your jewelry, etc. This kind of content should make up the bulk of your social media feeds. For the rest, you can post direct pitches to your customers inviting them to browse your collection or buy your product.
4. Use Remarketing to Convert Potential Customers
While social media is great to build your brand and attract visitors to your site, you’ll want to leverage paid advertising and remarketing efforts to lead specifically to sales. You’ll likely need to hire a digital marketing pro to set up data tracking on your online store and social channels, but once that’s complete you’ll be able to hone in on targeting your past visitors and tailor your content specifically to them. It’s important to remember that most people will not buy your jewelry after only seeing it once or twice. Instead, they need steady, consistent marketing to slowly warm them up to the purchase. That’s why remarketing is so crucial for e-commerce jewelry brands.
You can develop a successful remarketing campaign both on and off social media. For customers who clicked on your link on Google, you can target them later with a banner ad on Google’s ad network encouraging them to visit the store with a sale or other discount.
For customers who interacted with your brand on Facebook or Instagram, you can start with advertising your collection in a subtle way, perhaps with a beautiful video introduction. Now that they’ve seen your brand and it’s in the back of their mind, you might target these same potential customers with a photo of an influencer wearing your jewelry or some other entertaining content. Now that you’ve successfully showed what your brand is about, you can target this same audience with a direct pitch to explore your collection or take advantage of a sale. Once you learn how to leverage remarketing successfully, you can develop a steady stream of repeat customers.
5. Develop Your Search Engine Presence
You’ve probably heard the acronym “SEO” at some point; it stands for Search Engine Optimization, and there are digital marketing specialists who focus solely on one discipline: perfecting practices and techniques to boost a website on Google’s search rankings. The goal is to get your website to be on Google’s first page for as many high-volume and relevant search terms as possible. Since people rarely go beyond the first page when making a search, it won’t really matter if your website is #50 out of 200,000 search results. Ideally, your site needs to rank within the top ten to get any consumer attention.
Like most marketing efforts, SEO takes time, and you likely won’t see real results until at least 6 months in. Whether you hire an SEO agency to execute your campaign, or do it yourself or with the help of your employee, you’ll want to make sure all of the proper research is done ahead of time. First and foremost, you need to do some market research and brainstorming in order to get inside the head of your potential customers.
Once you’re clear on who exactly you’re targeting in terms of their demographics and desires, you’ll want to identify the search terms that your target niche is using. You can use software like Moz or SemRush to research high-ranking keywords that generate hundreds or thousands of searches per month.
Once you’ve chosen the most promising search terms, you then create content around these phrases. Usually, this means developing a blog that uses these keywords in articles. For example, let’s say you want to appear in searches for “18k gold enamel bracelets.” You’ll want to add this phrase to the title of one of your blogs, and also in the body of the article. If a blog doesn’t really match your site, at least try to incorporate your chosen keywords into your homepage, product listings, “About” page, gallery and media sections.
While adding popular keywords to your store and blog will help, that’s only half the battle. You also need to indicate to search engines like Google that your site is popular and relevant to your industry. How do you do this? Getting related sites to link to your online store.
One great way to accomplish this is getting PR on well-known online fashion magazines and blogs, as noted above. And if an influencer or blog really loves your jewelry, you just might be featured on their site for free! Having links to your store on online jewelry marketplaces wouldn’t hurt either. As you can see, your brand’s digital marketing efforts in other areas will also have the added benefit of helping you to rank higher on search engines.
While ranking high on Google for related keywords is great, it’s still possible to generate sales by only using social media, your email list and PR. The only keyword you absolutely need to rank for is your brand name. If you check your data and you notice you’re still not ranking for your brand name after 6 months, there may be something wrong with your site; if that’s the case, it’s best to get in touch with an SEO specialist. If a customer searches for your brand by name and can’t find it on Google, this could cost you some serious brand trust and loyalty.
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Although these 5 steps are crucial to building your brand, the digital marketing landscape is always changing. In the next decade, expect to see technology such as augmented reality and AI influence online promotion. For now, keep this blog handy and use it as a blueprint to help you structure your marketing activities. As long as you stay consistent and invest part of your budget into digital marketing and social media, you’ll be able to steadily grow your brand’s online presence (and sales).
