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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 225. And today I’m going to be debuting an exciting new direction for the podcast as well as a new FREE program that will help you kickoff 2023 with all the resources you’ll need to make this a banner year. If you’re a fan and follower of this podcast, thanks for returning – you’re likely familiar with my previous format, alternating between interviews and business/marketing tips on Sundays and THE GOLD MINE on Wednesdays. If you’re new, welcome! You’re joining at exactly the perfect time. 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. I’ll continue doing THE GOLD MINE as well, but it’ll be wrapped into the weekly episodes as a brief segment rather than in individual episodes. I’ll also add in interviews as bonus episodes when I meet someone particularly inspiring who I think can offer value to you. I’ll still give a news roundup, but it’ll be toward the end of the episode rather than at the beginning – listen through to the end of this one to get the news! I’ll explain everything you obviously want to know about the six-month “Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart” in just a few moments, but if you want to sign up for the FREE full program right away without waiting another second longer, visit joyjoya.com/jump. Link in show notes as well. That’s JoyJoya.com/jump to sign up for this free six month program.

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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! Stone Cooper says, “I have been listening to Joy Joya for over a year now, and I find Laryssa’s ideas and advice to be so informative and creative. I find myself looking forward to new episodes and sometimes practically hear her advice or action steps in the back of my head when I’m working!” 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 talk about Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart. So as I mentioned in the intro, this is a FREE six-month program that you’ll be able to follow weekly on this podcast in either audio or video format. All you have to do is continue listening or watching as you’ve been doing all along. If you want to dive even deeper, you can sign up at joyjoya.com/jump to get the FREE weekly companion PDF downloads that will complement each episode. Think of them as your roadmap to growth for 2023. Who’s it for? If you say “yes” to one or more of these things, I highly recommend you sign up by visiting joyjoya.com/jump. You’re a jewelry business owner or marketing leader who’s wondering how to maximize your marketing efforts while wearing many hats. You’ve wrestled with social media algorithms. You’ve wondered whether money you spend on ads, PR, or freelancers is worth it. You’re probably frustrated, confused, and uncertain about the future. You have goals for your jewelry business, but you’re not sure how marketing can help you reach them. You’re wondering why marketing isn’t fun anymore. You don’t feel like you have a strategy in your approach to marketing. This free Jumpstart program is meant to show you a new way forward, one that will help you achieve your business goals for this year and beyond – without the frustration. Gain time to be creative in your business, develop new products, and engage meaningfully with your customers and business partners. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to seeing what you can achieve! This episode is mostly to explain what’s to come and to invite you to visit joyjoya.com/jump to sign up for this program and get the first Welcome download. Moving forward, you’ll also get an email whenever a new free resource drops. When I see your name on the signup list, I’ll know that you’re a smart jewelry pro who’s one step closer to success and joy in jewelry marketing. Please stick around for The Gold Mine as well as my jewelry marketing news roundup.

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If you’ve been following this podcast, you know that I launched the goldmine in August of last year as a secondary episode every week. Moving forward, I’m gonna continue doing the gold mine, but I’m gonna move it as a segment to my weekly Sunday podcast. This week’s topic is all about giving yourself gifts in your jewelry business – and how doing so can get you on the fast track to your goals. Now that we’re at the beginning of the new year, I’ve been reflecting a lot on change and how so many people I encounter in this industry kind of sleepily waltz into January because they’re so exhausted from the holidays. I totally get it because I’m right there with them, supporting them with their marketing! The holiday season can be exhausting. So January also feels like a slow start, and I know that many people are even playing catchup on business and marketing tasks that never got resolved before the holidays – and then got completely blown off in November and December. Hey, it happens. But ugh I hate that feeling of being stuck in the past year. I honestly can’t even remember what I was working on, so I can’t do my best work if I’m going backwards. And I bet that’s true for you too. So what if there was a world where you could have an enthusiastic running start into the new year, one where you feel refreshed and motivated and clear on what you’re going to achieve?

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Of course, you should rest, but when the rest is done, you should be able to seamlessly transition into forward-thinking mode rather than playing catchup mode. It’s too late to undo all the catchup you left behind in 2022, but it’s not too late to set yourself up for this year, so you can start 2024 clear-eyed and leave all of 2023 behind. The answer is not sexy, unfortunately. It all comes down to planning! If January is slow for you sales wise, it’s time to start putting pen to your calendar and start visioning out the full year. Your brain is going to tempt you and say, “Oh, you don’t need to worry about this now.” But DON’T LISTEN TO IT! Give yourself a gift and plan further ahead that you think you can or need to. Because you can always go into the plan and revise it. And when the busy season does come, which it will, you’ll be able to look at your content, marketing and production calendars and say in disbelief, “Wow, did I really do all this work already?” You want to get to a point in your business where you actually can’t believe you already did something, and you give high fives to your past self for pushing back the temptation to “not worry about this now”. It’s a great time to assess the performance of holiday 2022 and start planning for the timeline or holiday 2023. You may even want to start doing things sooner than you’ve ever done before, like pre-planning and pre-scheduling content, so you can actually focus December on fulfilling orders, relaxing, and planning for January of next year. Again, the goal is not to be doing catchup in January but to be looking ahead only. Basically, I’m challenging you to timeblock 2-3 hours of uninterrupted time and try to do a preliminary look at the full year if you haven’t already done so. And then I want to resolve for yourself that if you have some downtime where you feel energetic, instead of scrolling on your phone or whatever other distracting thing you do, use that time to do something for the future of your business, so your future self will thank you.

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Okay. Let’s talk about some news related to jewelry or marketing. And you can get the links to the articles I talked about in the show notes. So the first article comes from Neil Patel’s blog. If you’re not familiar with Neil Patel, I suggest you look him up if you have an interest in marketing, he’s kind of a marketing influencer. And he shares a ton of really helpful content. So this article is called “How Marketers Are Spending Their Money in 2023”. And they asked more than 8000 marketers in a in a survey. So if you’re wondering how you should be effectively spending your marketing budget this year, definitely this is an excellent resource because it gives you true insights into how real marketers are reallocating their budget this year versus in previous years. And I just want to highlight some of the stats that I found the most interesting and the most relevant. One of the most striking stats I found from this article was that 68% of companies surveyed, 68% said they’d be increasing their SEO or search optimization budget in 2023. What is the reason for that? The companies polled said that they can count on SEO to provide a higher ROI than paid advertising. Now, of course, to see results from SEO could potentially take a little longer than advertising. But it does these days have a potential for higher ROI. And that’s kind of a theme in this survey about advertising when it comes to organic social media, meaning social media marketing without advertising. 42% of people surveyed are actually decreasing their budget because they don’t believe that social media is providing as high ROI as in the past. 83% are increasing their content production budget, due to a need to create content in multiple formats, including video, of course. 56% of companies that they would increase their email marketing budget, especially email marketing automation. And then when it comes to social media advertising on Facebook and Instagram, most, more than 50% split around the same for Facebook and Instagram, are deciding to decrease their social media advertising budget for this coming year. So my main takeaway is that it sounds like brands are distrustful of ROI from ads, especially social media advertising, and they also don’t believe they can get return on investment from organic social media marketing.

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The next article comes from Forbes and it’s called “How To Reduce E-Commerce Returns After The Holidays With UGC”. UGC is an acronym that means user generated content. So if during the holiday season, you’ve experienced a high or even less than ideal rate of returns for your jewelry business, you may want to try leaning into UGC or user generated content, or even not specific to the holiday season. But just in general, you find that returns are a problem for your business, this could be a good tactic for you. Per the results of a recent report, return rates are growing faster than revenue growth rates for 91% of retailer surveyed. That is very crazy. I think a lot of consumers not that they don’t want to be shopping in store but they found that the in-store experience is changing so much. And they’re not finding enough diversity of product in store. So people feel like they have to buy a lot of things online. But as you know, probably from your own online shopping experience, it can be hard to gauge the sizes of things to know if something will look good on you. And that ultimately can result in you returning more items. And the same is true for jewelry. So for jewelry, some reasons that people return things could be it’s not the size or the scale the person expected from the photos. Maybe they can’t wear the jewelry the way they thought they could wear or style it. Maybe it doesn’t look good on their particular body type or with their skin hair or eye coloring, and it was hard for them to tell that based on the photo or there wasn’t a model who was representative of them. So seeing a product on a real life person, thus the user generated content, can help the customer really be more informed about their purchase before they decide to buy, and then have regret about it and end up returning the product. So one thing you can consider doing is sourcing that user generated content from your best customers, including them on product detail pages in addition to the professional e commerce, photos and videos that you would have on your product detail pages. Definitely showcase that user generated content on social media, in your email marketing campaigns. And make sure when you do get user generated content that you’re representing a diverse range of customers. So people with different body types, skin color, hair color, maybe even like style preferences to really show how one piece of jewelry can look on a lot of different types of real life people. My main takeaway is, returns can be very costly and honestly annoying for jewelry brands. So taking the step of sourcing and then really utilizing user generated content can potentially help reduce this expense and annoyance.

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And then the last article comes from JCK, and it’s called “Jewelry Sales Fell 5.4% Over Holiday, Survey Says”. So JCK recently spotlighted some stats about consumer spending on jewelry over the holidays. This data comes from MasterCard SpendingPulse, which throughout most of 2022 recorded really strong gains in jewelry sales, and they were very optimistic about the holiday season. They predicted that jewelry sales would rise 2% this holiday season. Unfortunately, they were wrong. And jewelry sales ended up falling 5.4%. The other interesting thing about the results of this survey was that consumer spending was up overall with retail sales rising 7.6% this year over 2021. So what exactly were consumers buying instead? They were increasingly spending money on experiences rather than goods. Restaurant spending rose 15.1%. Another really interesting finding from this survey was that Black Friday has reclaimed its title as the busiest shopping day of the year. And consumers were definitely seeking heavy discounts and deals this year. So maybe brands that don’t do that Black Friday discount were at a slight disadvantage, because that was really the consumer expectation in Q4. Not saying that should make you change your discounting or pricing strategy. But I do think that that was the reality for a lot of consumers worried about the economy and inflation. My main takeaway is not really a takeaway. It’s more of a question. So did you experience a similar pattern during the holiday season? I’d kind of love to know your own experience of holiday 2022.

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So what did you think? Did you have questions about Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart? Again, you can visit joyjoya.com/jump. To sign up to get the free welcome PDF and every PDF moving forward through July it’s all free. It will always be free. I would love to see you find success this year. 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. And 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. Visit joyjoya.com/book for more information.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai