Meet Kevin Metz, CMO
In my role as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Stuller, I’m exposed to thousands of customer websites each year. Time and time again, I’m amazed by what jewelers are able to accomplish through their individual websites and unique digital experiences. Top-selling superheroes are able to garner significant online sales while identifying and generating new customers via digital avenues, then drive them straight to their physical storefronts.
So, I thought it’d be interesting to create a series of blog posts over the coming months to offer some digital direction and point out a few specific Stuller customers that I think are offering an amazing digital experience.
KABANG! Behold your newest superpower:
CMO vision
Have you ever heard the phrase, “If you build it, they will come”? If you’ve seen the 1989 movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner, you may recall the story of his character hearing a mysterious voice one night telling him to build a baseball field in the middle of a cornfield after which the ghosts of many great baseball players show up to play ball. If only it were that easy in the real world.
In my last CMO Vision post, I discussed key areas of focus when building your brand’s web presence. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is only half the battle. Creating an awesome web experience — complete with all the bells and whistles — will generate sales and benefit your brand only IF folks visit your site.
CMO Flashbacks
A few years ago, I worked for a large national beauty retailer who wanted to significantly enhance their web presence with a state-of-the-art website to offer customers the ultimate online buying experience. The company was willing to make a significant investment in technology and consulting services to bring their dream to life; we’re talking about a few million dollars here. They believed that this NEW website would immediately drive online sales to a whole new level. They fell into the build it and they will come trap.
So, I faced a new challenge: convincing management they must spend significantly more dollars to create awareness and drive customers to the company’s shiny new website. It took some convincing as a result of the company management’s lack of prior digital experience at the time. I emphasized you must feed the beast (this powerful new website) if you want to reap the benefits (sales).
Ultimately, I was able to convince the company that establishing a new online presence required not only a great website experience but also an investment in marketing— online and offline.
Let All Roads Lead to Your Site
My work with customers at Stuller hasn’t differed much from my previous experience. Folks spend a lot of time and resources focused on what it takes to create an awesome website but fail to think about or realize the associated marketing plan, resources, and budget to drive awareness and traffic to new web presence.
Driving traffic to your new website doesn’t necessarily necessitate the need for a large marketing budget. There are a lot of options available to you that won’t necessarily require you to break your piggy bank.
Here are a few low-cost tactics to drive traffic to your jewelry website
1. Take Advantage of Your Physical Location Traffic
If you have a storefront, make sure you promote your website URL (or web address) with signage or a takeaway business card. You want to make sure that your customers are aware they can shop your assortment once they get home via your website. If you don’t have a website, send them to your Facebook or other social media pages. This approach is a virtually FREE method to drive traffic to your jewelry website.
2. Create an Email List
This will take a little more time, effort, and budget-planning on your part. However, there a few low-cost, easy-to-use email tools out there like Mail Chimp and Constant Contact. If you already capture customer information like addresses and phone numbers, ask for email addresses too. Just make sure you get folks’ permission to send emails. This is a great, low-cost alternative to snail mail while still informing customers of new products and special promotions, all while you drive traffic to your jewelry website for details.
3. Google Business Listing
Listing your business on Google is not only a great free way to expose your store and brand locally to potential NEW customers, it’s also an opportunity to promote yourself and drive traffic to your jewelry website. Visit google.com/business for details. This is a must for every business.
4. Leverage Your Social Channels
As I mentioned in my last post, establishing a social media presence for your brand is extremely important. If you aren’t already promoting your website in posts, start doing so. Social media is a great way to tease and entice followers with additional content and new products available on your website. Facebook offers relatively low-cost options to boost or promote your Facebook presence based on a variety of criteria like geography and certain demographics — read more here. Raise your awareness on Facebook as a means to ultimately drive traffic to your jewelry website.
5. Use Your URL
If you don’t do any of the other things listed, do this one. Place your website address (www.joesjewelry.com) on everything and make it highly visible and prominent. Put it on your door to your store. Add it to your billboards. Put it on your receipts. Put it everywhere.
These are just a few relatively low-cost ideas to drive traffic to your jewelry website. There are other approaches and ideas out there that require a bit more time, effort, and budget like Google paid ad word campaigns, digital display advertising, affiliate marketing, etc., all of which can be very effective. I hope to cover some of these in future posts for the readers who aim to become digital advertising experts.
Just remember, when considering creating or overhauling your website, we, unfortunately, can’t always take the Kevin Costner approach. If you want to invest in a new digital presence, don’t forget to set aside some time and funds for marketing.
Read Kevin’s first CMO Vision post here
