We are consistently impressed with the brilliance of our community and the knowledge every member has to offer. That’s why we asked our members to share their knowledge with everyone! This Member post is brought to you by Patrycja Szuscik, Co-founder at Les Goodies.
It is the end of 2019 - to be exact, the day after my 27th birthday and I am officially launching my sustainable fashion business Les Goodies. It is actually a gift from myself to myself. Since I have always had this deep calling inside me to build something meaningful, authentic & with the right values, I had realized it was the perfect timing. On top of that, I am a big fan of symbolism, hence it was an apt occasion - time to finally conjure up a sufficient amount of courage and go for it. As the great writer J. W. von Goethe once wrote: “What is not started today is never finished tomorrow”, and thus I took the leap.
Les Goodies took close to an entire year to put together. Its very core concept, products’ selections, marketing & branding strategies, as well as the consequential execution, had to be very clearly outlined and comprehensively formulated. More importantly, the whole business model had to make sense from the financial point of view. Quite frankly, Les Goodies, as small a business idea as it was at its very early beginnings, eventually required an insane amount of energy, time and self-motivation to put it together, revise it and finally release it to the wild world.
Therefore, in this article, I would love to share with you my 3 tips that can potentially help you with starting your very own e-commerce business. These tips have originated from my trials & failures I experienced during the entire process of building Les Goodies as well as the online store operations, business development, communication & last but not least Les Goodies branding.
Mindset is everything. It is our perception of the world. It is the perceptions of our very own potential as well as all the limitations and reasons why something will not work out.
Thus start daily training yourself to open your mind to all the great possibilities & options. Know that anything can be done and later on your subconscious will reward you with ideas, solutions & answers you would not discover otherwise. For example morning meditation routines, visualization or mood boards are very much helpful.
Once you see the bigger picture of the things, the world, the market, you will actually understand one very substantial fact. To be truly successful you need to be something more than just an e-commerce platform offering goods or services. You need to be a brand with true authentic values. Why? When you look at the statistics of e-shop just in the Czech Republic, an insanely large number will pop up on your screen. For this very reason to be different, to be something more, to stand out, you need to create a persona aka a brand. Your business brand makes you upgrade the entire game you are in. Now you have a specific tone of voice, recognizable visual presence, and authentic values.
A brand is built from visible & invisible components that complement each other. For the visible part you create and possess a very specific pool of visually cohesive characteristic exclusively associated with your brand:
E-commerce platforms such as Shopify offer a decent amount of free design templates to build your base on. Furthermore, if you sign up for Adobe, you can find very useful tools such as Adobe colors program to discover a perfect palette that fits your brands. Or Adobe Fonts serve fantastically to find free signature styles for logo and text. On the other hand, the brand’s invisible part consists of the voice, the values and the emotions you are associating with who you are. It is the trigger for emotional relations with your target audience.
It is a well-known fact worth repeating - know who you are serving. Who are the people that will find help and benefits from using your services or products? Apart from the basics - gender, age, occupation, location, try to define more specific parameters, for example, places where they like to eat, bloggers they might follow, magazines they might read, what other brands do they follow and so on. Make the descriptive list clear and very-well defined. Once your tribe is specified, you know for whom you are building your brand. You turn and spin around them - content offline/online, participations on events, festivals, corporations with target audience bloggers & influencers, etc. Your target audience is your tribe, your community you are serving to. Approach it this way.
A group of well-connected people can save you a lot of time and grind. Luckily for us, we are living in fantastic times, when significant people or decision-makers can be reached out extremely easily. So make good use of social media - swop content consuming for networking. Like, comment, follow and DM any figures important to your business: journalists, bloggers, influencers, public figures, YouTubers. Live by the saying “you won’t get what you have not asked for.”
Facebook & Instagram ads are a fantastic & cheap way to get yourself in front of the right people. But bear in mind these platforms are becoming progressively more and more saturated with every passing day. For this reason, you need to be creative. Have good visuals. Short & sweet lines. And above all do not sell. Tell a story. Say facts. People are sick and tired of being bombarded from every corner by sales propositions. So take the time, do some research and pile up well-working ad copies that you can be inspired by. For example, short videos work wonders. Infographics are great, as well.
Before setting up any IG or Fb ads, set up a google search ad. It is essential that your name pops up the moment someone is searching for it. Equally, put together a list of keywords related to your business, products, services, etc. In the beginning, it is sufficient to have just the main basics your brand will be related with. Later on, you can work on the more elaborate lists. For the present moment, it is crucial to be discovered if someone is looking.
Running all kinds of ads is extremely useful for many goals such as web traffic, leads, conversions, etc. However, we must not forget that we are still at the mercy of algorithms. We have no control over them. There is nothing we can do if they shift, change and consequently the whole media bundle starts running according to different rules. Consequently, we can end up being thrown out of the game. So how to deal with this? Branding. Take any opportunity to get your brand out there. Partnerships, event co-hosting, interviews, podcasts, festivals, etc...Get your brand out there. Don’t be shy.
Let’s be honest, starting any business or project is always a challenge. Rome has not been built in a night. Thus it turns out to be very useful to brace yourself with patience and keep in mind a few tips. Thinking big and stretching your mind horizon is one. Think brand - create an entity that builds emotional relationships with its target audience. Serve first. Sell later. More importantly know the people you are serving. Know them extremely well. They are your tribe and in a bigger picture, you are together parts of the same community. Lastly, communicate ceaselessly: network, brand, make yourself discoverable via search engines, and lastly remember to go beyond the algorithm. All in all, I hope that these tips & tricks can help you out in your professional or personal endeavors.
