Lessons

Lesson Info

Set Your Holiday Goals

Before we go in and actually create your marketing plan, I want you guys to set some goals, and I know you did a lot of this entire spiders class and figuring out how to get more done, but before you create a plan, you need to get clear on where you want to go. We want to have some numbers and some goals behind our marketing so that we know where we should be working on. So what do you want to achieve this holiday season? Sell more is not an answer. What does that look like in terms of numbers? What does that look like in terms of the amount of product that you'd like to sell? Maybe it's the number of orders you want, there's a lot of different ways that you could look at this number, but really being concrete, what revenue streams do you want to focus on? Are you looking to branch out into stores? Maybe you're trying to grow your online following or your online sales don't try to do them all the same mouth, even ho holiday season's all about growing sales. Figure out where you want to...

focus. You know, I spent a lot of years really focusing on growing my wholesale business, the huge part of what I d'oh. Why I taught the class here on creative fill your products to retailers the huge part of my business but for this year I am focusing on online sales because now I'm ready to bring that percentage up so what is it that you want to focus on it's actually won a kind of pull our into your audience just to see what revenue streams are you focusing on this holiday season what's most important to you e think for me it's mostly online yeah yeah and there's no right or wrong answer here so um sorry I want to interrupt you it may also be craft your retail shows that's a very legitimate thing to focus on two so I want to throw that out there it's not just stores or online got perfect because I was just going to say more more very intentional networking on and perhaps conventions definitely online and probably craft shows great wholesale re too so retail three website or through a store card word awesome street to the perfection I'd like to definitely improve my online presence my my etc shop and and get the newsletter only what awesome craft shows and online great online and crashes last year I was all retail so I want more of it to stay with me this year yeah yeah and that's the thing you know you always kind of work for that balance of you know I love working with my stores and it absolutely reflects my customers are buying but you can't be when someone buys on your website and you get to keep the full purchase price it's always really nice so we get any from our land we are we have audrey luna who sells I want tio cell reproductions of my prints and stores and craft fairs paintings by a cagey gilmore luxury gift cards for custom paintings I'm seeing several people who have like custom order perfect coming through a cz well awesome and I will say you know, for those of you who do custom work you know I know that sometimes you have a lot of questions keepem coming with a past button so that if you're like I'm not sure how this applies to me keep those questions coming we'll make sure we answer him and one I think that's interesting actually that a question that did come in to do all of this was there are a lot of people this week who create the products that other makers used teo create their holiday ok the new streams and so they're wondering you know how does this apply to me in terms of how far her four back do I need to go if I'm the supplier for those purposes so I would say that you want to shift whatever we were doing you want to be with them at the start so if they're looking at september and october and I'm talking about using september and october to build kind of awareness and then pushing sales in november december you're going to slide that really far back so you know it might be june and july your building awareness august and september is when you're really trying to sell on again there's always the good news is that there's always people who are last minute so even if you're hearing these dates you're thinking oh no I'm so behind that doesn't mean that you have to wait until next year to implement because there are always people who are behind you know we all know those people who shop for their gifts on christmas eve it the same kind of thing they're still an opportunity to make things work and then you start now and then if you now is late the next year you know to build it in a little earlier in a little earlier awesome then you know what do you want your work life balance to look like? This is important when you're setting your holiday sales goals if you have a family if you have young kids you don't want to be shipping orders the week of december twenty first but you might I don't have a problem shipping orders december twenty first I don't know I like helping those last minute customers oh yeah I'm still here you can order for me that's great, I'll get it out the door but quite frankly I want to relax on black friday weekend so know what you want that to look like one or you're shipping cut offs going to be one or you're going to stop serving your stores when I was really one hundred percent focused on wholesale and even now still I would get to the second week in december and all my friends are scrambling at their craft shows my feet up my hot cocoa or my glass of wine and relax that's what I want my life to look like it's it's push a little further back but I don't want to do a retail show in december but you may love that you may love that part of your things they're thinking about what you want your work life balance to look like so you can build those dates into your marketing plan and then also what challenges will you face this holiday season? Do you have kids? Do you have family travel commitments if you build if you know these things you can build them into your marketing plan and make your customers aware you could even use them to drive sales you could be like hey guys, I go to hawaii all of december so if you want it buy in november I don't do that but now that I just said it out loud, it sounds really good oh so thinking about you know not saying oh I feel so bad this is what my life looks like but actually using it to drive sales and get your customers to engage with you because your customers know you're not amazon and you shouldn't pretend to be she'd be like I can ship it on december twenty fourth it's fine, I can run that out to your office I mean if you want to do that you can but that seems insane your customers know that you're a person that you have a life and so you can use that to drive sales so I won't have you guys set just a couple of quick, specific and measurable goals this is what I mean by that so you might say I want tio increase my fourth quarter sales by twenty percent over last year I'm a big fan of using my previous year's numbers to set two cycles how many of you guys do that we're gonna work on? We're gonna work on that so if you haven't pulled your numbers from last year that's a great place to start with gold setting look everyone looking a little uncomfortable in the audience go back through pull those numbers because that's going to give you a benchmark and it's also going to tell you sort of where you where you make your most money I know because I look at my numbers for every year that my wholesale orders our heaviest in september, october and november and that they drop off but I also know that if I could get a store product in september, they are way more likely to reorder in november it was at that trade show last week and every person who wanted and I was like I get it you two weeks three weeks is giving everyone the earliest shifted I could because I know from looking at my numbers that those are the people who will reorder again usually sometime in november I also know from looking at my numbers that my november sales online are actually really low unusually low for holiday season that's because I run a big birthday sale my birthday happens to be october twenty ninth people actually use that birthday sale to shop for the holiday season right before people kind of starts if you remind them they do with that so I know that my numbers are always going to be low in november and I don't try to push that. So I said my biggest holiday sales goal in fact, for october my biggest sales the month is october because I do that big sale once a year and then I set my second highest holiday sales go online for december because I know there's enough time between the birthday sale people missed that now they're buying their last minute gifts and then my november goals a little lower so I know not to stress out in november when my numbers drop off so that's what that information can give us so that's a good place to start with your goals and that that increased could be anything you want twenty percent fifty percent you wanna triple triple my holiday sales from last season those are all great goals you might also set goals that are more focused on your revenue stream so I want to get orders from eight new stores in october that's a great goal trying to pick up any retailer even better is I want to get them from eight new stores in september so that those stores reorder again through holiday you know again it might be very specific I want to do ten thousand dollars in sales in my online store in november and december or if you're thinking about shows set specific sales goals for the markets that you're doing the retail shows maybe it's I want to do two k day at my winter holiday market or I want to do five thousand dollars in a weekend at this holiday show and I get any time you can go back and look at last year's numbers for any of those things those really work so making we do have some people were asking what if I don't have holiday numbers here a lot of new people what would you suggest in terms of china set these goals or yes, that is a great question, so what you can do is go back through this year and if we know that november and december sales are about twenty to twenty five percent of your total revenue, you can take what you've done so far and kind of add that up so you might say all right, you know, for six months I sold five thousand dollars this year, so in the holiday season, you know, I want tio another, you know, I think I could maybe double that for the second half of the year, so I want to do it ten thousand and I think six thousand that is going to come in the last two months, so that's a good way to start, but if you really don't know, set some goals and reach from it's better to make them a little higher and not get there, it might be I want to sell one one thing a day or one thing a week or whatever it is so it's okay to make him up if you don't have old number, so I want to actually go through and I want to have everybody share so online we're gonna pick on our in studio audience first, I want you to come up with one concrete holiday sales goal you have for this year and I know that you guys don't have your numbers because you all cringed when I heard you but it's fine if you're unsure just pick a revenue stream, pick a date and then set a sales goal whether that's a number a percentage increase or it could be you know a number of product or a number of stores or something like that who's got one all right, we'll work this way I want to increase my online cells by double this year double from last holiday season perfect get work get orders from two stores in october perfect yeah I'd like to increase to three boutiques by october I would like tio lock in ideal for one company that has thirteen stores are perfect I think the lock in that deal I would like to get orders from five to ten new stores by october perfect so what I would actually d'oh it's just make it ten stores so when you have a range then you always that I've just sort of shooting for the lower shoot for the ten right away and then if you only get to five that's okay, but you're shooting for the higher number of start I'd like to make five thousand sales by december thirty first perfect I'd like tio work with five new clients by december great by the end of december I think I'd like tio quadruple online that would be great I love it from the last year's holiday period perfect I think we're getting I think I'm like we dio we have molly vanroekel who says, I want to reach my goal of seventeen thousand seven hundred ninety six specific, perhaps she's monday, how to price their products and what that was going. Tio you have genius, watts, who's been here a week, six thousand by december thirty first read scorpios. Going with triple my sales from last year are shell you shout out my cambodia and sandra glover clark, five hats from my new email aetna's newsletter before december thirty thirty I'm sorry before december first off, so they're coming in good, perfect. Okay, so now that you have those goals and it's okay to set more than one, so if you if you have a couple of revenue streams, you could set multiple targets and you could set kind of an overall target, and then this is how I'm going to do it in this revenue stream in that revenue stream, but we want to at least give you a goal to start and moving. Move forward because that's gonna influence how and where your marketing.