Metrics that Matter: KPIs for Jewelry Marketing Success

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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 #233, and today I’ll be talking about common key performance indicators or KPIs for jewelry marketing content. In last week’s episode, I shared the importance of setting SMART goals, which pretty much always need to involve a quantifiable number, whether that’s a dollar amount, website traffic goal, email subscriber goal, whatever is relevant to your business. But I didn’t get into the specifics of key performance indicators or the metrics you’d use to monitor progress toward the goals because I felt the topic deserved its very own episode. Without one or more key performance indicators, you won’t be able to measure your success, which means you won’t be able to celebrate when you meet your goal – and have a slice of cake or glass of champagne, however you like to celebrate. Don’t you want that satisfaction? Then you’ll definitely want to listen or watch. In this episode, I’ll be discussing: What’s a key performance indicator, and why do you need to have KPIs? What are some common KPIs for jewelry marketing content? How do you choose the KPIs you should be monitoring? From now through early July of this year, I’m offering 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. Jumpstart members will also get a BONUS video walkthrough of how to find the KPIs mentioned in this episode in Google Analytics 4. That’s some invaluable stuff! 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. 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. Speaking of podcasts, did you know I also co-host another podcast with jewelry marketer Liz Kantner? It’s called Success With Jewelry, and we’ve already released 25 free episodes everywhere you listen to podcasts as well as on YouTube. We also have an Insider community, where we share extended episodes, hands-on guidance, and a plethora of resources. Visit successwithjewelry.com to learn more.

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Okay my sparklers, let’s get into the next installment of “Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart” all about key performance indicators or KPIs for jewelry marketing content. Again, you can visit joyjoya.com/jump for the companion PDF to this episode and a bonus video walkthrough only for members of the program. So the first question I’m going to answer is what’s a key performance indicator? This like scary marketing jargon phrase that you may or may not have heard before. So I sort of said it in the intro, but a KPI is a metric that you designated as the metric that will help you determine that you’ve found success or have met your goal. So here’s a very general example that’s not related to marketing at all but may help you kind of be able to wrap your head around what a KPI is. So let’s say you have a swimming pool in your backyard, but you personally only want to go swimming when the water is warm enough for your liking. And that happens to be exactly 72 degrees. You’re like very particular about your swimming pool water. So you’ve turned the heater on, and you’re waiting. And the key performance indicator or the KPI for your goal of going swimming at your perfect temperature is going to be temperature in degrees. That’s the KPI. That’s the metric that’s most relevant to your goal and will determine whether or not you have achieved the desired outcome. Now, if you know anything about swimming pools, which I’m sure most of you have been in one before, there are a lot of other things you could be measuring, like the depth of the water, the percentage of chlorine content, etc. Those are all data points related to swimming pools, but they’re not going to be your key performance indicators. Because right now, the only thing you care about related to your goal is temperature. Maybe in the future, you’ll care about those other pieces of data, but not right now, as you’re only focused on your temperature goal. So it’s really the same thing with marketing. At any given time, you’re gonna have access to a ton of data, more than you’re going to know what to do with, more than you’re going to want to see. But you need to know your goals, the previous episode for more information, and then laser focus yourself on just the data, just the metrics that will help you understand your progress toward your goals. And those will end up being your KPIs. And for the sake of your goal setting journey, just know that none of that other data matters right now. So don’t get distracted by it, and put your blinders on to it.

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So let’s talk about now why do we even need to have KPIs? Why do they matter? So in order to have those SMART goals in the first place, you have to have KPIs. They are integral to having goals because one of the qualities of a SMART goal, if you remember from the last episode is that it’s measurable, that’s the M in smart. So one or more KPIs will be able to give you the insight you need to measure what you need to measure. Otherwise, your goal is not a good goal. I hate using the word good, but let’s just call it that it’s not a good goal. And then you need to refine it or start over so that it has a measurable element to it. KPIs can also really end up being these amazing levers that you can pull in your business. And they can also help you gain some perspective, when you’re trying to achieve a goal that maybe something is just not working. And you’ve been going down the wrong path without realizing it. Here’s one example. That honestly when I first kind of learned about this and encountered it, it felt like a magic trick to me. But it’s very real and very doable for a business of any size. So let’s say your goal is to get more sales, obviously, the SMART version of that goal would be more specifi,c would have a number attached to it, etc. I’m just gonna keep it general for the sake of the example. So you think or your like hypothesis is, in order to get more sales, the one thing that you really need to be focusing on is increasing website traffic dramatically, because you just you need to get more eyeballs on your product.

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You just need more people to be on your website to see it. And to kind of measure the health of your sales you also have some other sales-related KPIs like average order value. So that is the average dollar amount that customers spend each time an order is placed. And then another sales-related KPI is conversion rate. So that’s the percentage of website visitors who make a purchase. So you have these three KPIs, let’s say at least at the beginning of your exploration on your way to your goal. And these are what you are using to see the health of your current like shopper behavior on your website. And actually, if you’re paying attention to the patterns, and you kind of use them very simple like ecommerce math, or even just logic, kind of when you see what’s going on on your website, moving forward, you might even realize that your problem, or the thing that you need to focus on is actually not getting more website traffic. And this is kind of the magic part, you can go in with an assumption. And then noticing patterns over time, realize you were totally wrong. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with that, because now you actually have more insights and can make decisions more intelligently. So maybe the problem isn’t that you need more website traffic. And actually, now that you’ve kind of seen your average order value, it’s super low compared to the average price point of your products, like if you sell on average, or your product price point is $1,000. But your average order value is like $500. And most people tend to gravitate toward like the very low end of your price point. That seems like a little bit of a problem. And then you also see that your conversion rate is super low, like you are getting traffic, but only a teeny tiny percentage of that is converting. So you notice that you were kind of looking in the wrong place, when the problem was actually over here. So by focusing on the tactics that would help you increase those two pain points, you can pull different levers, knowing your KPIs, knowing your areas of focus, instead of spinning your wheels, you’re going to be over here, trying to get new people on the site until you burn yourself out, your head spins. Why is that not increasing sales, when actually over here, there could have been levers to pull that would have made a greater impact? And that’s the kind of magical power of KPIs and what you need to be open to when you are going on this journey of tapping into the data that matters. So if you’re more curious about like the example I just mentioned, there’s a really great article about it on BigCommerce. And I’ll put that link in the show notes if you want to like do a deeper dive.

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Now, if you’re listening or watching and that all sounds like gibberish to you, and you’re like, ah, average order value conversion rate, what the heck is she talking about? Please don’t worry. Just know that KPIs can feel like magic. But really what they’re doing is taking away your blind spots. So you’re not guessing anymore. Growing your business really comes down to looking at patterns and not being afraid to make change based on what you see in those patterns. And thankfully, you don’t even have to be that good at math. And I’ll be talking more about that later in this episode. So stick around for that. So what are some common KPIs for jewelry marketing content? There are really like endless KPIs that you could be measuring in marketing. That’s what makes it so interesting. And what makes marketing so nuanced, and never a checklist. And because there’s so much personalization that needs to happen from business to business. But I can also tell you some common KPIs, so you have an idea of somewhere to start. And I’m going to break these KPIs up by a general goal into four categories. That would be brand awareness, two would be engagement, three would be conversion, and four would be retention or repeat customers. So every business has at least one of these, like general objectives in mind, bigger businesses would probably have more than one happening at once.

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But brand awareness, it kind of means what it says is to just get more of your target audience aware that you exist, that you’re a brand. So if that resonates with you, you’ll want to pay attention to the brand awareness KPIs. Engagement means you already have some brand awareness. But now you want to get those people to be like fans of your brand to really bring them in, and to build relationships with them. So if that resonates with you, you’ll want to pay attention to those KPIs. Conversion is related to sales. So you already have those, like loyal fans, people are hungry to see your content, they’re visiting your website, you’re getting a lot of good feedback. Now we want to increase sales. So that would be another objective with its own KPIs. And then lastly, retention and repeat customers. So that’s like, you’re good with brand awareness, you got some engagement, your sales are in a good place. But now you want to be focusing more on like keeping your existing customers coming back for morem on retaining themm on having those like true fans.

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So for each of those goals, I want to share some common KPIs. And I’ll briefly say what each one is. So for brand awareness, some common KPIs would be website traffic, so just like getting people to your site, making sure they visit and learn about you. So that could be one social media engagement. So that could be like number of new followers, number of likes, reactions, comments, saves, shares. That’s about kind of just getting people to know you for the first time on social media. And then also perhaps search volume traffic. So that means in like Google search, let’s say, the number of people who are like searching for your brand name in Google, if you’re a totally unknown brand, that’s probably gonna be like close to zero. But then as people start to get to know you, and your brand becomes more familiar, you’ll find that more people are searching for your brand name on Google, or let’s say, you sell like a very specific niche kind of jewelry that people don’t even know about. So you might focus on the search volume traffic, to like spread awareness so that people are actually like searching for your specific product, and it’s a destination, they want to find it. So those are some KPIs for brand awareness, not an exhaustive list by any means. And none of these will be an exhaustive list, but just giving you some ideas.

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So if your goal is engagement, then these would be some examples of KPIs for jewelry marketing content in the engagement kind of stage. So number of email subscribers, so you got people coming to your website. Now to make sure they’re engaged. You want them signing up for email, or the conversion rate for your signup form on your website would be another KPI. The click through rate on your email. So you got people now on your email list, are they actually engaging? Are they taking action? What is that click through rate of people coming through the email onto your website, the time spent on your site, the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who visit your site, and then immediately leave, you don’t want that you want people to spend time. So you want that number to be low. Also, number of pages per session on your site, maybe the traffic that’s coming from social media, or the click throughs from social media. Also, the demographics, KPIs. Are the people engaging with your social media and/or your website, the intended ones? Are they part of your target audience? And you may also want to look at something like device. So are they looking at your store on mobile from a desktop on a tablet that can help you understand like how they’re engaging with your content and your products? If your overall objective is conversion, of course, you’ll want to look at conversion rates. So I mentioned that earlier, the percentage of people who come to your site and then place an order, you’ll also want to look at the average order value. So on average, how many how much money are people spending in the orders that they place, and is that aligned with your average price point? And then your abandoned cart rate so that refers to the percentage of people who add something to cards, and then do not end up making a purchase. Just a few examples of conversion KPIs. And then lastly, I’ll just share one if your goal is for retention or getting repeat customers, then you’ll definitely want to look at the percentage of returning users on your website. Or similarly, like with your total sales? How many of those are repeat customers versus new customers?

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So where do you find these? So most of them are in Google Analytics. And if you sign up for Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart, you’ll get a worksheet with a bonus link. I’m doing a video walkthrough of GA 4, Google Analytics 4, and I’ll show you where to find the ones that are in there. Some of them you might be able to find in like Shopify, for example. Some of them like the email marketing ones would be in your email platform, and some on social media, like in your Meta Business dashboard. So how can you choose the KPIs that you should be monitoring for your business? Again, it goes back to being crystal clear on your goals, which means knowing where you are in your business, what you want to be focusing on, what’s realistic given the resources you have available, and what’s possible given past performance in your current conditions. The ones I just mentioned are very commonly used, and they’re kind of general. But if you have a super-specific goal, then you’d want to get even more micro focused on the KPIs related to it. I really believe that maintaining a central dashboard where you kind of monitor the progress toward these goals on at least a monthly basis, can help you keep the pulse on your progress toward the goals. So if your timeframe is six months, for example, then you’ll be able to see at the end of six months, whether or not you’ve achieved your goal, and over time, what you can adjust to keep you on track. Okay, that’s it for now, much more to come in future episodes. Again, go to joyjoya.com/jump for that additional information and the Google Analytics 4 KPI walkthrough.

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Before we get into The Gold Mine 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. All right, These are my thoughts about how I’d apply the lesson to a jewelry brand in the wild. So this one’s probably the hardest case study to do because I don’t have access to KPIs of brands that aren’t my clients, and I also can’t share specific KPIs about my current clients. So I found a really great example from the Internet.

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This case study was directly from TikTok for Business for Kay Jewelers. The general goal was to develop “unskippable content and contemporizing a classic brand sound to drive awareness and engagement during important cultural moments”. For Pride 2020, they have launched #EveryKiss campaign but wanted to find another high impact, culturally significant moment in 2021 that could expand it. With the help of TikTok, Kay wanted to boost organic and paid visibility, brand awareness and engagement by inviting audiences to collaborate in the creation of one-of-a-kind content. To do this, they partnered with Time Square Alliance as the Official Sponsor of the New Year’s Kiss and partnered with TikTok to launch a Hashtag Challenge inviting creators to post “#EveryKiss.” They worked with key influencers to lead the charge on it. The campaign gained 3.3 billion views in 3 days and currently over 13 billion views and counting. Over 83.1 million unique users were reached as 1.2 million creators participated in the challenge with over 2.3 million videos created. So again, I don’t have access to the specific data they’d be measuring internally, but I would guess these KPIs were important for them to determine the success of this campaign: TikTok views TikTok reach # of creators participating in the challenge # of user-generated videos created They pretty much knocked it out of the park with this campaign, regardless of what they were measuring. There’s no bad way to spin it. But how could you quantify the success of them achieving their goal of “boosting organic and paid visibility, brand awareness and engagement by inviting audiences to collaborate in the creation of one-of-a-kind content” if you didn’t have any way to measure it? Kay has access to a truckload of other data points that they can be measuring at any given time, but those four that I mentioned, specific to the TikTok platform were the only ones that mattered for determining whether or not the goal had been met. What do you think? Let me know in a podcast review or YouTube comment. 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. In this episode, I’d like to discuss the importance of recognizing patterns and how it can unlock the full potential of your KPIs. I must admit, I’m not a math enthusiast. Acknowledging my weaknesses is important to me, even if it may sound like a limiting belief. When I first ventured into marketing almost 15 years ago now, I was attracted to the creative aspects such as copywriting, visual asset creation, and campaign ideation. The mere thought of numbers and data made me cringe. However, data is an integral part of marketing. It took me a while to embrace it, but as I progressed in my career, I realized that understanding data is essential to succeed in this field. Surprisingly, I learned that being proficient in math is not the only way to excel. Observing and recognizing patterns, as well as comprehending what they signify, can be just as valuable. While being proficient in chart reading and Excel formulas is helpful, it’s not a prerequisite. In essence, this episode may seem to be about math, but it’s not. Although numbers may be involved, they are simply a language used to express patterns that indicate the well-being of your business. Intuition plays a role in this as well, and becoming intimately familiar with your data requires time and attention. Awareness and attention are key, and understanding your objectives enables you to detect opportunities for growth while also identifying areas that hinder your progress or move you further away from your goals. Tell me in a YouTube comment or podcast review if you can relate to this. Do you feel intimidated by data? Does this offer any relief?

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Okay, let’s get into the news roundup, where I share three relevant articles related to jewelry and/or marketing. So this first one comes from Digiday. And it’s called “As influencer marketing continues to mature, here’s why brands are hiring creators as ‘creative directors’”. So I’ve talked a bunch about collaboration on this podcast, it’s really the name of the game in marketing marketing these days. And many brands are actually taking that to the next level by choosing to no longer just hire influencers, for like one-off campaigns to show off their products. But instead bringing them on to bring them onto their own teams. So they have a more active and participatory role, even to the point that they are hiring influencers as creative directors of the brand. And one really powerful thing about this is that brands can, this is a quote from the article, “use the insight influencers have about their audience almost like that of market research”. So we talked about like, figuring out your customer persona, your audience persona, and even big brands struggle with that. So they’re looking for these creative ways to really tap into what their audiences want. They’re also looking to influencers for creative ideation, and thoughtful strategic direction, so that you can make content that is durable, lasting and impactful. So just like you brands of all sizes, are focused on content, and finding ways to make the content the best it could be. My main takeaway about this is, this is not about influencers, people. This is about brands and marketers and business owners trying to figure out ways to, one get the content to resonate with their target audience. And to make content that’s impactful, unique, and value driven. So they’re thinking outside of the box, to find ways to do these things. And creators are already or influencers are already very talented at doing that. So brands are looking to them to have fresh perspective, yet and unique new insights.

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The next article is from CEOWorld.biz, and it’s called “Email Personalization: The Forgotten Art of Making People Feel Heard”. So this article is highlighting the importance of email personalization, that it has the power to improve customer engagement and loyalty. And what the author is really emphasizing here is the need to go beyond basic personalization techniques like just using the recipient’s name, and instead, taking it to the next level and folk and trying to understand their interests, preferences and behaviors, which is way more impactful. So to initiate true personalization, they suggest listening to your customers and their needs, understanding their motivations, and walking in their shoes through the entire customer experience. But really, there was a quote in the article that was my favorite part. And I’m just gonna read it to you because I thought it was excellent. “Being personal is all about honesty. Putting in an honest effort to get to know your customers helps you speak to them and their needs, but it takes discipline. Even when some of your campaigns don’t lead to direct sales, you’ll be building a brand that people care about and are happy to listen to. This paves the way to stronger communication with truly engaged subscribers. The harder present-you works on today’s strategies and campaigns, the easier it will be for future-you to market to your list, cut through the noise, and get results.” My main takeaway is, I so agree with this. It’s not the job of the email to convert, actually, it’s the job of your product page to do that, since that’s the last step before someone adds to cart and completes the purchase. The job of email is to get intimate with these people who have given you permission to contact them and use that as an invitation from them to deepen the relationship.

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And the last article comes from the official Substack blog and it’s called “A new economic engine for culture: What comes after social media as we know it”. There’s proof that business owners and even consumers are looking for an alternative to social media and new ways to connect and interact, there is a true craving for it. So you, as a business owner need to seek alternative modes of connecting with your target audience. How do I know this? If you haven’t heard of Substack, it’s an email newsletter platform that allows creators and writers who are trying to build audiences and brands to publish directly to their audience and then get paid through a subscription model. And on their news page Substack recently released an update saying they’ve reached the milestone of more than 20 million monthly active subscribers and 2 million paid subscriptions to writers on Substack. And what they’re hearing from their users is the refrain of “please save me from social media”. And their mission as a company is to give power back into the hands of creators and to, “create the conditions for culture makers to produce amazing work that would never have been possible under the old systems”. So my main takeaway is, it might not make sense for a jewelry business owner to have a subscription only newsletter, okay. But maybe it would. Maybe you have some really amazing insights on the creation, design handmaking process where you work in a specific niche, you can build a community and a loyal audience around your content. But more than that, the reason I’m sharing this article is because it’s proof and a clear sign that people are sick of social media, they are so burned out on it and the messaging there. So if you’re burned out on social media as a mode of selling your products, go find the thing that’s going to help you share your content and create a community filled with members of your target audience because there is a deep, deep craving for this.

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What do you think about this episode? 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 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