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Lesson Info

Consider Your Branding

Let's, figure out and this is also a photo I'm sure you know by now, but I took this one from alana's website, and I really just liked how it looked. I feel like her branding matched the the branding of my keynote a little bit there. So speaking of branding, I want you to consider your branding and where you want to be and in the next five years or so the next two years, the next five years, because I want you to know that the choices that you make now aren't going toe have as much of or as important of an impact on where your business is in a few years from now, if if you see any chance for growth or change in your future. So what I mean to say is as don't stress you out, don't stress yourself out right now trying to make all of the exact rate decisions when it comes to your branding, because you can always change your mind. And I think that that is really, really, really important to know the first web site that I had a long time ago looks nothing like the one that I have now, um, a ...

lot of shared with us that her her branding recently changed in two thousand eleven, and when she did that, she saw her whole business tip. But if she had stayed where she was when she started, she probably wouldn't be in the same place that she is now. So while it's important to have a cohesive branding scheme across the board for your business, it's nothing that you should let really stop, you are way lay you from getting started. Um, so keep that in mind, how's it going over there with you, it's, good to have you got a really great common there. I think here I'm just honored that she says is emily dickinson? I don't I doubt it's the emily dickinson, but you never know, she says this. I want to thank carry for all of this great information, my beauty business and I feel pretty already, so that's a great start, I would like to know emily, what you'll be to businesses a piece go to share with this event, it's knowing the challenge exactly what line you're going to hear. Yeah, I happen to know a lot about emily dickens, so I can't imagine what she would have done for a beauty business. You probably was very interested night creams that she didn't sleep at night only slept during the day, um, what state so yeah, consider your branding where do you want your business to be in two to five years and try to stay within that general outlook? But you can have a goal for what you want your branding toe look like and work towards that slowly you can add element and you can change your mind you can work toward that as long as you start with something that speaks to who you are now and also speaks to where you think you might want to go, then then you're going to be all set don't let that really stress you out and cause a lot of concern about starting your business in the beginning because you don't have to know everything now about your business, you just don't you're going to change your mind and just in fact it would be an interesting exercise to take no as you continue on with your business journey to take or look back if you've had a business for a while and just take stock of like what has never changed about your business and I bet the answer will be nothing. You know everything has probably changed and that's just the way it works, so one thing that we got was made really clear from alana is that your camera it's really you need to become best friends with your camera? You need to really understand how important photography is and it is high. I highly suggest that you set aside some time each week to really monitor the trends in your community. And I'm going to talk a little bit about what that means. But to experiment with your photographs and to really know that the quality of your photographs are justice. Important us, the quality of your ingredients, particularly when you are selling something that is based on sent, you need to really be able to exit there's so many things that people need to know about your products that need to come through in your photographs and working on that and striving to be better at that, and making that investment in high quality equipment and probably, in your case, some sort of props to use this styling in your photographs it's going to be really important. And there is not there's, not there's, not a reason for you not to get better and better and better at photography all of the time, which I realize that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense there. But there's no reason why you can't make your your products really stand out and be the best that they can be when people ask me during council teaching sessions or send me email and say, I just can't drive, I'm not getting people to my store, I'm not getting traffic to my etc store it's just not working out and I see traffic is going a lot of times to these other stores and they're doing somebody more sales to me, but I feel like my product is different, better, whatever it as my first suggestion to them is always to look at the photography of the other company photos, sell product and that's just effect. So research shows time and time again that the number one reason where how people feel comfortable buying things online is because of the quality of the photographs. If somebody needed to choose between two items in one cost, five dollars in one cost, ten dollars, and the ten dollars one has a really a much, much better photograph, people always go to the ten dollars, product, then they do the five dollar product because they've just feel more comfortable with what that product is about. It gives you a sense of feeling about the business that you wouldn't otherwise get, and people understand more where their money is going when there's a really good photograph attached to it, so really taking the time, tio improve and enhance any kind of photography that you need for your business if you're doing it for yourself is really important. If you're interested in growing your business really quickly and you have some honestly, some good leads, or you really want to go into wholesale, you want to work on mostly a wholesale marketplace, then professional photography is actually going to be a must for you, something that you really need to invest in when you are sending digital catalogs out to other stores, hotels or spas, particularly if you were trying to reach a more higher under marketplace. Your photography needs to reflect that. The kind of photographs that you have that represent your product in your business are the impression people are going to walk away with how they feel about your business, even if it is somebody local to you in town. What is the first thing that you do when you hear about a business that you might want to investigate our product that you might want to have? I mean, almost all of us goes straight to the internet, and we look it up even if it's just right across town. And that is something that you need to keep in mind when it comes to your own business if you want to be a high end beauty business than you need to look like a high end beauty business and that comes back to your branding into your photographs so if you need to get a photographer than that's just what you need to dio an order to elevate your business so that becomes one of those investments that you need to absolutely make um so really getting clear on your photographs is imperative and then we're going to go teo where do you really want your business to go? Where do you want your business to end up? What are your hopes and dreams for your business? What how do you know that you want to make this a success like what do you want your business to give back to you which we talked about a little bit but defining what success means to you and what is going to work for you as one of the ways that you're going tio either be able tio build a stronger business or you're going to have a weaker business so you really need to know where you want to end up so that you know how to get there so what everybody to think think about that for a second so where do you want your business to end up that is really going to be a key element and where you decide to take it so again, if you need to go back into making bigger investments or do a different kind of photography or experiment with your ingredients, knowing all of that from the get go was really going to help you with that. So I think that we need to talk about how are you going to spread the word about your business? Eso everybody I know that has a very successful beauty business really started out by taking their business to their local craft shows and that's part of why I wanted to wanted to be here today, because I really wanted her to talk to us about what that was like to bring her to bring her business to the shows and how she started to get customers that way. But once you get these customers, one thing you need to do right away is put them on some sort of mailing list or asked them to sign up for your mailing list so that you'll be able to better communicate with them. I personally recommend male chimp as far as a newsletter service goes, so you think you could start there and there's also a couple of other companies that do email newsletter lists as well. But growing your list is a really great way to not only get your products to build up the wholesale side of your business, because you'll have some proof about how many people are actually interested and what you're selling. But you'll want to share that with potential wholesale accounts is to say, you know, I have a lot of people in your area that I can direct towards your store to come and buy my product from you if you're carrying it. So figuring out how to stay in touch with your customers when you can't be around them all the time is a really great way to grow your business. Also, some other ways. Tio market your business and to be in touch with your customers. All a lot of the time is to share with them on social media. So we talked a little bit with a lot about how she likes it. Instagram and I think that one way that's really great to utilize instagram if you had a beauty business is to use it for research purposes, which I don't think we talked about earlier, but I think it is one of the best ways to reach out to people to find out what they really liked if could you imagine the response that she could have gotten if she was instagramming or tweeting about wanting to make something with eucalyptus? And she had a photograph of eucalyptus or of a spot sighting or something like that and ask people for suggestions of what they felt would go with eucalyptus as faras sons go? I mean that's one way that she can interact with her audience and build that up that would take take your customer engagement into a whole new direction, and it also helps get people on board to buy your product before you're even ready to sell it. So if she were to come out two months from now on say, ah, you know, thanks to your suggestions, I made this eucalyptus and rosemary soap or whatever it is that she decides to d'oh she has really ah that's one way that she kept in touch with her with her audience and was able to market her business and her efforts with doing very little work actually, you know they're actually kind of helping her to do her to do her work and make her decision so there's a lot of great ways to utilize social media if you want to build up your audience for your beauty business and to even test things like sense or colors before you actually make them a friend of mine named kim. Worker lives in toronto, canada, and she's just started making handmade soap recently, her company is called piper soap works because her last name is piper worker, so it was it was actually kind of interesting, but she shared on social media a batch of soap she made where the olive oil turned a color that she wasn't expecting, and she had these really funny pictures that she was tweeting out and instagramming about the soap. The soap itself was ok, but the color was just coming out really, really wrong. It wasn't what she was expecting at all in the response she got from that was amazing, and I think she was able to sell that soap really quickly because people knew the story behind it, so people were really attracted, so sort of that whole concept of what she had going on, which was really great s o figuring out ways to communicate with their customers are just going to help your business grow and it's going to help you get the wholesale accounts that you really need as as you move forward, if you decide to go in that direction. Also applying to shows, as we discussed earlier, is a really great way to get business started and also going to any sort of local markets that you have that cell bath and beauty products, those kinds of stores and even larger chain stores are now looking for more and more ways to connect with their local artisans. Is particularly, is handmade, becomes more and more popular. Lots and lots of bigger businesses are trying to figure out how to incorporate that more into what they, what they're doing. So, for example, when I first matt alana's, she said, where do you buy your handmade soap? And I said, for a large a large part of it, that's not give t actually buy at the grocery store because my local grocery store, even though it's, a national chain, has a really big selection of locally made and regionally made, even beauty products that are are right there in this national chain grocery store, and if you're interested in getting your goods into a store like that, it's a simple is finding out who the buyer is for that particular department within the store and then trying to set an appointment with them. When you go to the appointment, you bring a sample of your soap, you bring information about your business, and you actually presented to them with your line sheet. How much would they need to order? What are your wholesale costs and what are your terms? And then you wait for them to call you back, but it is a really great way, tio x suppose your local community more to what you're doing and what you make, and it it's it's a lot easier than you would think, but you go back to needing that courage that we were talking about a few slides ago, so it does take a lot of guts to go into a store and say, I make this, and I want you to stock it in your store, so but you can absolutely do it. It is entirely possible. Are there any questions about anything or about that? You know, I think people are pretty clear right now, it seems I'm seeing some of the chaplain that this injury following along, and they talk about how live already implemented some of the things that you've been sharing, so I think that people have been talking about, you know, how they got their goals, how they pursued them, how they got going. So I think what you're talking about who is really resonating with the online audience carries that thank you very much. You're very welcome. You are welcome. So I think that it's interesting when that so people are in the chat room and they're talking about their intentions and their goals? Absolutely, yeah, they're expending is actually what happened? Locks histories, for example, they've been talking about some of their different things. I doesn't have actually outlined what their product is, but they said they really decided in the very beginning they wanted to be like like a martha stewart, they want to be known for one thing and that's how they that's what that was all their inspiration was to get going and healthy, and they're sharing how they pursued that in red scorpion, who you were talking about earlier on as well has been talked about how she developed her branding s sector, always sticking to the same colors, always sticking to the same ideas and how she really build the brand from there. Yeah, so and my brand, I try toe have a handmade element incorporated into everything that I d'oh, and that is, you know, the one thing that has remained consistent for me throughout, like businesses. I try really hard to keep that in mind. Um, being known for one thing is a really great place to start, and I think that particularly in the bath and beauty industry, it's, it could be hard to lose. T keep that in focus, because there's, just so many choices, there's so many different things you could make, and so many different things that you could create, that it seems hard to hold yourself back. Click. Maybe you want to do all of them at once, or make everything at once, or try everything at once, rather than limiting yourself to a few things that you can do really? Well, then you can even further narrow that down by bringing it into this season. Like how long ended with her? So she had to chive in the sort of the holiday months on lee for her, because that's what that represents to her so there's a lot of different ways that you can filter through your business to keep yourself tight and on track as you move through the year, and that requires a lot of foresight and planning. I know a lot of people right now are already talking about, you know, holidays that air six months from now. And they're working on their sort of business practices for what's coming up down the line. And and a lot of that work would need to be pre done when you're working with sense, because you obviously wouldn't want to sell a winter sent in the summertime. Like we don't see products marketed to us with pine tree, you know, pine soap or whatever is not really heavily marketed to us in the middle of the summertime. Instead, we're getting things like citrus and lime and things that remind us of the summer months.