Jewelry Marketing 101

Get your jewelry business off the ground with a marketing mix

By now, you have probably taken a few beginner steps to launch your new business. There is so much to do; finding materials, improving your crafting skills, developing your artistry, setting up your workshop – even teaching your family that you have a business and you are actually “working”.

What good will all this effort do for you, if no one knows you have a product to sell, and that the product you offer is just the right product for them?

Your journey must include some marketing. I think of the marketing process as a courtship. You introduce yourself, you make sure that you “run into” your prospect consistently, finally, you go for coffee, you follow that up with a card or note, and before you know it, you have a date. Or in your case, a sale!

Marketing and sales are not the same thing. Marketing can be defined as the environment you create that helps sales to evolve.

So where do you start? Since marketing is an extensive discipline, we certainly cannot exhaust the topic in a lesson, but we can introduce you to some ideas.

Where to start?

Do you remember the chapter that discussed your USP or what makes your business unique amongst your competition?

That helps you define what you want to do or be.

Now, we look for the reason your customers want you to go into business. It.s called market research. In this phase, you want to talk to as many people as you can and find out what they like or dislike in artisan jewelry.

You can do that by using:

. Personal interviews
. Focus groups
. Surveys you pass out to people
. Surveys you conduct
. Online surveys (check out: www·surveymethods·com)
. Talk to suppliers
. Read magazines. Look for the people who are advertising regularly. They are making money, or they could not afford the ads. What do they offer? Visit their websites.

A successful business model provides solutions, solves problems and meets the needs of their customers.

A business model that fails builds the business of the whims and preferences of the owner and not the customer’s needs/wants.

There is a lot of helpful information online to teach you how to do some elementary market research.

Here are a few references to check out:

http://en·wikipedia·org/wiki/Market_research
http://www·self-counsel·com/samples/9781551806761·pdf

Once you have completed your basic research and you can identify who are your target customers, what they want, and what will they pay to purchase what they want/need, it.s time to begin the courtship.

We call it the Marketing Mix

The marketing mix is the combination of disciplines you use to create the environment that is friendly to sales.

When you are determining what to use in your marketing mix, you need to remember:

. Where are your customers looking for products or information right now?
. How they prefer to shop? Are they online buyers, or do they shop at tradeshows or fairgrounds?
. What budget you have allotted for marketing?
. How consistent can you be with the methods you choose?

REMEMBER: Typically, people become customers AFTER they have been involved in your marketing efforts 9-11 times. One ad in the local paper or online directory will not produce the sales you need to keep your business door open.

Here is a list of several popular methods. You will need to use the criteria listed above to help you determine which ones are right for you. You should have a minimum of 3-5 in operation at all times.