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Ready to break free from algorithms, vanity PR, and money-sucking ads? My name’s Laryssa Wirstiuk, and I’ve learned in 7 years of jewelry marketing that content is the crown jewel. My agency Joy Joya takes a holistic approach, leading with laser-focused storytelling, impactful content creation, and strategic content distribution. This method has worked for the solopreneur as well as the multi-million-dollar company, and now I’m sharing these systems and tactics with you. Here’s to standing out in the Sea of Sparkle.

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This is Episode #229, and today I’ll be building on the episode on content marketing in #228. I’ll be explaining how you can generate audience personas to help you create the content that will naturally attract your target customer. As I mentioned in the last episode, content marketing is all about captivating the target customer right when they’re in the right mindset to learn about your brand and your products, so you’ll be learning how to identify who that person is (and how to document their characteristics and needs for yourself and your team) by checking out this episode. I’ll be covering: How is the audience persona different from your target market, and how many personas do you need? What should the audience persona include? How can you get this information? How will you be able to apply these personas in your marketing? From now through early July of this year, I’ll be rolling out a free (yes FREE) six-month, podcast-guided program called “Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart” which will involve weekly audio and video lessons as well as companion PDF downloads for each new episode. If you want to sign up for the FREE full program right away and get the companion PDF download to this episode, visit joyjoya.com/jump. Link in show notes as well.

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But before we get to the solid gold, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that this podcast has both audio and video – so you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube by searching “Joy Joya”. You can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe but also to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. I want to read my favorite review of the week! JFordJewelry says, “I’ve just started listening and have immediately absorbed so many actionable points to help me navigate as I venture into opening a new business.” Thank you! If you leave a review, I might read it on a future episode – please let me know what you think about this episode or about any other major takeaways you’ve had recently.

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Okay, my sparklers! Let’s get into the next installment of Jewelry M<arketing Jumpstart. And this one is all about audience personas for content marketing for your jewelry brand. If you want the companion PDF download for this episode, which is totally free, and you’ll get all the other companion PDF downloads for this program visit joyjoya.com/jump. Alright, let’s answer the question. How is the audience persona different from your target market? And how many personas do you really need?

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So when you first sat down to write your business and marketing plan, hopefully, you likely came up with or had an idea about your target market, which refers to the group of customers who share demographic similarities that you’ve identified is the group of people who would be most likely to purchase your product. So you probably said something like women between the ages of 40 and 50, who make a certain amount of money every year and they live in like this part of the world, something kind of general like that. So how is that different from audience personas? So audience personas, which are also sometimes called buyer personas or customer personas, all the same thing, just slightly different terminology. They zoom in very specifically on one individual in your target market. There are more like archetypes of people who represent this greater target market that you hope to be serving. I personally like the term audience personas out of those three terms I mentioned when I’m talking about content marketing. Because when you’re making content for your target market, like blog posts, video, audio graphics, email campaigns, etc., they are really your audience in a way, the same way they might be an audience, in a movie theater or at a concert, because they’re consuming your content. And you also have to focus on doing things like entertaining them, informing them, building trust with them. So I particularly like thinking of them as audience personas.

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When you’re creating your marketing content, you always want to be creating for an audience of one, not an audience of many. That is really hard for a lot of jewelry business owners to wrap their head around, because the first like, doubt, or objection, or fear that comes up when I say you need to be creating content for an audience of one is, but then I’m excluding so many other potential people who could be buying my product. But if you’ve listened to this podcast, you’ve probably heard me say this before, it’s not my original quote, but it’s very common, commonly said, in marketing. When you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one. So you really need to zoom in on who you want to be speaking to, who you think would resonate the most with your brand’s story and with what you have to offer. Without this level of specificity, you’ll just never really understand how to speak in your marketing. If you struggle with storytelling in your brand. If you struggle with knowing what to say in your content. If you struggle with knowing what types of emails to send, or what kind of content to post on social media, it’s likely because you have not gotten clarity on who this audience persona is. And you’re not imagining them in your head, every time you sit down to create a piece of content. That is typically the biggest challenge or mistake.

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And here’s the thing, you can absolutely have more than one audience persona. So it doesn’t have to just be one person, you can have a couple or a dozen, or even more than that. And they can evolve over time. Or you can add to your collection of audience personas over time, adjusting them and refining them as you gain more information in your business. But when you’re just starting out, or you’ve never done this exercise before, I’d try to really limit yourself to three, so that you really can get that specific and focus and know exactly who you’re speaking to try not to make more than that. Usually, if you have an impulse to want to make more than that, then you’re falling into that trap of trying to have broad mass appeal as a brand. And you’re not focusing specifically enough on the people who matter and who will absolutely be attracted to your brand and your products. Okay, so now that you understand why audience personas are so important, and how many you should kind of focus on and how they need to guide your marketing, you’re probably wondering, what should an audience persona include? And then absolutely, one of the most common questions I get is: “How Laryssa, do I get this information?” I will tell you all the secrets.

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So personally, in Joy Joya, when I work with clients on audience personas, I have a specific list of things that I include in there. They’re pretty standard. I would say if you Google audience or buyer or customer personas, you’ll find some kind of variation of what I’m about to say. And you may even want to do a Google search and look at other examples because maybe there will be things that resonate more with you. So don’t take this as a be all end all. But I think this is a really great start, especially if you’ve never done this before. So of course, you want to have basic demographic information, things like age, usually it’s a range or maybe it could be one specific age, but if it’s a range, I would keep it small like five years. Family status. So are they married? Are they single? Do they have children? What is that family dynamic like? Where are they located? What’s their education and occupation? What is the combined household income. I then like to just have like a three to four sentence like paragraph ish, long summary that gives an overview of this person. So if you were going to invite them with you to a party, and you’re going to tell the host “Oh, I’m bringing my friend so and so”. And this is what you should know about them? Like, what would you tell another person to introduce them? That I really like to put in the summary. Then I usually have three to four bullet points about their interests and values. So like, what are their hobbies? What things are really important to them? What is their passion? Like, what lights them up? What keeps them up at night. Just have some summary bullet points of that. Then maybe some four to five personality traits. So these are usually just adjectives that describe how this person is like, introvert, introverted, extroverted, passionate, family oriented, things like that. A really brief description of a day in the life of this person. So like, from the beginning of their day to the end of the day. What is their typical routine? Do they go to the gym? Do they spend their day in an office? Are they at home? Like caring for children? Are they traveling a lot? Some things like that. Their social media and digital habits? So like when they do take out their phone, for example? What’s the app that they immediately open? How much time do they spend on it? Are they on email? A lot? Do they check email on their phone? Or at a desk? Do they sit at a desk all day? So that’s where they do most of their digital interactions? Also their influences? So do they pay attention to trends? Are they influenced by their coworkers, their family members, their friends? Do they read magazines? Do they like follow people on tick tock? Do they pay attention to advertising? Who is getting them to buy things or maybe they are just marching to the beat of their own drum?

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Also their shopping habits, their needs and their frustrations? So when it comes to shopping for jewelry, and accessories, or anything at a similar price point to what you sell? How often are they shopping for these items? Once a month, once a quarter only around special holidays or occasions? How are they shopping? Are they going into a store? Are they buying online? Do they tend to buy a lot of stuff and then return some of it? What are the common habits this person has with shopping? What do they really need? Do they need to interact with the salesperson? Do they need to have a great like return or shipping policy? Are they interested only in like legacy brands? Whatever you think that person needs to make a purchase. And then some frustrations? So what are their like pet peeves about shopping? Do they hate when a website like doesn’t work well on their phone? Or when things are listed as final sale? Or something like that? What are the things that really “peeve” them about shopping, and will keep them from buying or possibly make them change their mind about buying something? And then if this person was to buy from you, which products or collections would they gravitate to the most. And why this is important to have? Because if you have multiple audience personas, like let’s say three, all three of those people might gravitate toward different things within your assortment. And then lastly, I like to put brand affinities. So what are the brands that this person loves, is super loyal to they love getting their email campaigns like very regularly there, they’ll treat themselves to something new from these brands. They like know and trust these brands. I think it’s nice to list about three or four of those. So when I’m going through all these points, it probably sounds almost like I’m building a character for a book or a movie. In some ways it might even feel fictional, like a creative writing exercise.

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So you probably want to know: where do you get the information or the data to kind of create these personas? How do you make them up without just creating them out of nothing? Out of your imagination? So definitely through data that you already have available. It could be demographic info that you have through your sales platform through Google Analytics, web traffic, and through social media analytics, any info that you have from any past sales data, it could be anecdotal data from any in person events you do like trunk shows, or other events, or from your sales team. If you have that. If you also have retail partners, it would be great to speak to them about the types of customers on their sales platforms or in their stores that are gravitating toward your products. You can do surveys, you can do interviews with your best or VIP customers. Or you can work with like a market research firm to conduct some more in depth research.

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So what should you do if you’re truly starting from scratch? And you don’t even have any of that data? Which is totally reasonable question if you’re a startup, and you got nothing to work from. How are you supposed to create audience personas? Well, first, you should definitely still do it. And there are ways to do this without just totally guessing. You can make what I think are more educated guesses. And there are some ways to get data that will help you. You could read market research reports related to the jewelry industry, you can find influencers or other people on social media, who you think would represent your target customer, and then build your personas around them and what you see related to their behavior and their traits. You can ask friends, acquaintances who may represent your target customer, you can look at competitors, especially at competitors’ social media presence. Who are the people following them? What do they look like on social media? What do you kind of see what their behaviors? You can attend different industry events, go to trunk shows, go to retail partners who may potentially carry your product and spend some time there and see who is shopping. So it’s definitely possible to create audience personas, even if you think you have nothing to work from.

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So once you have these audience personas made, how can you actually apply this to your marketing? So definitely, in future episodes, I will be very much deep diving into this, I will be referring to audience personas again and again very regularly because they really are the foundation for all your content in your marketing. Basically, any time that you create a new content asset or any type of marketing campaign, you’re going to think about how it speaks to the audience personas. And if it’s going to be effective in getting that specific person to take the action you want them to take, whether that’s to look at your new collection, place in order for a holiday, schedule an appointment to design something custom, visit you at a trunk show, etc. You’ll also be able to use data from your marketing in your sales to go back and refine the audience personas as you move forward. So ultimately, the two are like a feedback loop that will help you continually speak more specifically to the person who absolutely matters, the person who will adore your brand and products. Okay, that’s all about audience personas for now. Much more to come in future episodes. Go to joyjoya.com/jump for additional info action items and exercises related to this episode, including a template for creating your very first audience persona.

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Before we get into the goldmine as well as my jewelry marketing news roundup, I want to share a case study of a jewelry brand that I think embodies everything I just spoke about. So these are my thoughts about how I’d apply this lesson to a jewelry brand in the wild. Disclaimer this brand is not a current client. This week’s case study is Katie Dean Jewelry, a US-based jewelry brand that specializes in delicate jewelry that’s perfect for layering. So I’ve been looking around for jewelry brands that are effectively taking advantage of content marketing, and I stumbled upon Katie Dean. Since Joy Joya doesn’t work with this brand, I’m only speculating on their Audience Persona, but if I had to guess based on the product and the marketing, I’d say this is an older Gen Z or millennial customer who has laid-back, minimal effort glam style an appreciates delicate pieces that offer just the right amount of sparkle and polish for everyday wear. This person’s very social and loves going out with girlfriends for brunches and happy hours. She also loves being creative, whether that’s in her creative career or after hours with a creative hobby. Three things she’s always seeking in life are comfort, ease, and sophistication. What kind of brands have you discovered as a result of their content marketing? Again, you can visit joyjoya.com/jump for more resources on this topic as well as access to future resources that will be released every week. I came upon a recent blog post the brand published on their website (and I’ll link in the show notes if you’d like to see) about Galentine’s Day and how to plan the perfect party to celebrate your favorite galentines. They shared photos from a Galentine’s event the brand had hosted in 2017 as inspiration. They advise the event should have florals, beverages, sweet treats, handmade touches, gift bags, and more. At first glance, the post has nothing to do with product and only about providing readers with a fun party idea. But actually, product and brand are referenced a number of times throughout the post, including as an idea for a gift to put in a Galentine gift bag. I thought the idea was very cute and perfect for the Audience Persona, who may be inspired by this instructional blog post. If I had one suggestion, I’d make the post even longer and more in depth, but maybe that’s something they can do in the future, updating and adding to it – and then repurposing it for future Galentines Days. Again, you can check out the link for yourself in the show notes. Okay, let’s get into THE GOLD MINE!

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If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that I launched THE GOLD MINE in August as a secondary episode every week. Moving forward, I’ll be doing THE GOLD MINE as a segment in my weekly Sunday podcast. This week’s topic is all about reframing your complaints to have a more positive and fun experience in your business overall. I thought of this topic last week because it related to something I was also going through in my own business, and I wanted to share my personal experience, which will hopefully resonate with you. So depending on how much of the sales you personally handle in your own business, you may or may not be able to relate. Maybe you take on a lot of custom work, so you have to do 1-1 sales with custom jewelry clients. Or maybe you sell to retail partners, so you have to conduct sales correspondence with buyers and jewelry store owners. Do you ever have to followup with people? I have to followup A LOT! I joke that at least 50% of my work is just following up with people, whether that’s current clients or prospective clients. It’s part of project managing and moving forward with sales. And I gotta say, even though I’m super organized and don’t have any qualms about checking in with people, I do get very exhausted by it. It feels like I’m in a big room with lots of people, and I’m just walking around tapping everyone on the shoulder, like “Excuse me, I need this.” “Excuse me.”

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So anyway, last week I found myself getting really grumbly about it, like ugh why do I have to followup so much? Because it can be kind of tiring to stay on top of that. It requires me to be diligent and proactive and laser-focused. And I realized in that moment of complaining to myself in my head, that I’M the only one responsible for putting myself into this frame of mind right now. Because I’m complaining and getting into a bad mood about it, I’m taking joy and happiness out of my work day that could easily be reclaimed if only I could change my attitude. Someone once said to me, “By following up, you’re providing a service because you’re reminding people of something they need or could benefit from.” Sometimes people even thank me for following up. So I had to take a moment and sit back and realize that even though yes, it can be tedious, I’m doing something good, I’m offering value. I decided I don’t want to feel annoyed about following up anymore, so I got out a post-it note and wrote, “I’m providing a valuable service by following up, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to connect with people in this industry with the goal of helping them grow their businesses.” So now the post-it note is taped up on my computer, and I’m going to repeat this to myself every time I have to email or call someone.

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If you don’t do sales, and you don’t have to constantly followup, what’s something in your business that really makes you grumble? Like every time you sit down to do it, you whine and complain to yourself and wish you didn’t have to. Try to reframe the thought by rewriting it in a positive way. If it helps, think about being grateful for the task – is there any way you can find gratitude for it? Write it on a piece of paper and put it somewhere you can see – and then let me know if it makes a difference in eliminating a tiny bit of annoyance in your business life. Tell me in a YouTube comment or podcast review if you can relate to this. Do you let yourself get caught up in the cycle of complaining about things in your business? Do you think you’d benefit from some reframing?

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All right, let’s talk about some news related to jewelry, or marketing. And you can find the links to these articles in the show notes. So the first article comes from the verge.com. And it’s called “BuzzFeed says it will use AI tools from OpenAI to personalize its content”. So in last week’s episode, I mentioned chatGPT, which is a free AI tool that writes authentic and sophisticated content for pretty much anything you might ask it. And I’m bringing it up again because I think and I said this last week, too. I think it’s going to be very relevant to the future of content creation very soon, like yesterday, so you need to be paying attention to it if you’re going to move forward on this content marketing journey. And I will continue talking about these things in future episodes. So the media organization BuzzFeed recently announced that it will leverage tools like chatGPT to enhance and personalize its content. According to the CEO Jonah Peretti, quote “enhancing the quiz experience, informing our brainstorming, and personalizing our content for our audience”. He says it “opens up a new era of creativity, where creative humans like us play a key role providing the ideas, cultural currency, inspired prompts, IP, and formats that come to life using the newest technologies”. My main takeaway is that I completely agree with what he said, I think tools like chatGPT open up a world of possibility for marketers who constantly need to generate creative content and come up with new ideas that can be super time consuming. Think about it. If an AI tool can help you save time and say the brainstorming process or even in the refinement process, then you can become a better brand storyteller and improve your success in reaching your target customers with your marketing.

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The next article comes from Skyword, and they are a really major marketing agency that specializes in content. So they shared a blog post called “The Risks and Rewards of Using Generative AI for Content Creation: What Brand Marketers Need to Know”. Speaking of AI, I wanted to go through this article because even though you may not be at the point where you feel comfortable using AI in your marketing, it’s really good to inform yourself. So by AI, I mean chatGPT, which I just mentioned, and other tools like DALL-e, which specializes in generating images based on text prompts. What are the limitations of these tools? Where can they maybe not be perfect. So it can potentially make up facts that it presents with full confidence. It does not cite sources. It doesn’t work with real time information, it can potentially present bias, present prejudice and misinformation. And it cannot apply critical thinking like human beings. So it’s not perfect by any means. But those things shouldn’t deter you from finding ways to make those tools work for you. So then what are the good things? You can use these tools to generate ideas and topics. You can use them to to help you with an outline of subtopics. You can get a quick draft of something to kind of help you get started in the writing process. You can find alternate ways of phrasing that would be great for email and social media copy. You can use these tools to help you write something in a specific tone. So let’s say you need to know how to write this email. But I need to speak to like Gen Z women. It can potentially help you achieve the tone that will best resonate with the target audience. And it can help you refresh content for readability and engagement. One super interesting point in this article is the prediction that in the future, consumers will expect and want even more tailoring and personalization and marketing since it will become more normalized thanks to AI technology. So what’s my main takeaway? Hey, just try the tool chatGPT for yourself, it’s free. It’s relatively easy to use and see what you can come up with. Experiment with having it optimize some email marketing or social media copy for you. And then you can get an idea of what it’s capable of doing.

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And the last article comes from CMS Wire and it’s called “5 Ways to Make Your Marketing Emails More Personal — Without Personalization”. So if you are not ready to embrace personalization, or you don’t have enough data about your email subscribers to fully personalize your emails, or you don’t want to take advantage of the technology you would need to do so, you can still take steps to make the emails feel more personal. I really loved these tips, and I think they’re easy for brands at any level to implement. So the first tip is write from your customer’s perspective. That means avoiding the “me, me, me” sentiment and focusing on what the customer would want or benefit from. Even the language you’re using in an email can reflect that. So try to skip to the benefits the subscriber will get rather than pushing your own agenda and always just talking about your own brand. Use connection based language which means using words like your you, we and our helping build stronger relationships with the people on the other side receiving your emails. Do the exercise, the exercise of counting how many times you use I mean our us our product, our company name, etc. And try to cut down on having such a strong focus on your own brand, or at least balancing it out so it’s between us and you rather than just me me me all the time. You can also make the subscriber feel like they’re part of a group or community and be more conversational in your language. My main takeaway is leading your emails with content can help you naturally get away from that me me me approach because then it’s not always so focused on product product product by me by me by me. So doing things like linking to blog posts in your emails or mentioning text from a recent piece of content in an email is more focused on delivering value to the subscriber rather than on sharing your own agenda.

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Did you have any questions about Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart? You can always email me Laryssa that’s laryssa@joyjoya.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with a friend who’d appreciate it. Don’t forget to subscribe as well as leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’re completely new to digital marketing, then you’ll want to purchase and read a copy of my book Jewelry Marketing Joy. You can visit JoyJoya.com/book for more information.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai