Traditional jewellers of the past had an easier time selling jewellery. They would setup a store in a popular spot and they were sure people would come inside looking for their products. Gone were the easy days.
These days every jeweller needs to have a digital presence selling their wares online. Now the same jeweller is competing with local, national and in some instances international retailers. This has made the process of marketing his or her jewellery a bit more challenging.
Hence the need for a proper digital marketing strategy that would enable customers to either buy the products online or visit the shop in person. It is becoming more common to find a customer going into a jewellery store with a picture of gem wanting the same product.
It is no surprise to find that the same customer before going to the shop has spent hours upon hours researching what would suit him or her. This is where there would be a need to be online to provide this kind of customer the information that he or she is looking for.
These days many customers are buying more jewellery unlike in the past where they would need them in special occasions like birthdays or engagements. People want jewellery for their everyday wear or as simple gifts. The jewelry market has grown exponentially because of this.
The jewellers would need to get in touch with a digital marketing agency to help them move their products from offline to online in the modern age. They would need a digital marketing strategy to link customers to the jewellers.
Here are a few things to consider when planning jewellery digital marketing.
- Website
- Search engine optimization
- Google ads
- Social media management
- Facebook ads
- Email marketing
- Influences
Website
This goes without saying that it is the most important item on the list. But the thing is, it should not be just a simple website. Websites are a means of communicating to the consumer what the jeweller is all about.
Like the main storefront, a website should be extremely attractive, user-friendly, modern, responsive, easy to navigate and amazingly fast. People who buy jewellery are fashion conscious and they are moved by the attractiveness of the whole package. A bad or simple website would be a warning sign to them
In addition, the site should have great content that would educate, entertain, and engage users from potential leads to loyal customers. Different pages should provide a lot of information about your business, brands and items being sold.
A good website should tell users the following information:
- Who you are?
- Which products you sell (and services you provide)
- That you are a real (credible) business
- And how to find and contact you.
Here are some items that should be considered.
- Navigation menu
Having a clear navigation menu that separates product pieces is especially important in a website. There should be distinct pages on rings, earrings, necklaces etc. this would help the users to move around the site with ease. Every item should be a maximum of two clicks away.
In addition to primary categories, there could be a web page for new items or favourites that would keep customers who return engaged.
- Product Gallery
Jewellery is visual. The users need to see how the pieces look in different angles and lightings. They know that when the visit the store the jewellery might look a bit different, but they would prefer a general idea of how it would look like.
The images should be taken by a very professional photographer with models in which the potential clients can see themselves. The models should have different body shapes and sizes so that the users can see how they would look.
Many clients will end up visiting the store to buy the products but there are those who cannot travel as far because of distance. They are the ones who would benefit the most from the images.
It would be a mistake not to mention that videos also help a lot in presenting the jewellery.
- Made for Mobile
The web design should be made for mobile phones. Many of the users would visit the site on their smart phones. It is thus important to have clear images, easy to press links and the site should be fast.
Speed is very crucial as many people will not wait for a website to load for them to see what is available. They will tap the back button and Google will penalize the site for that. The ideal period for a site to load should be under 2 seconds.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO determines which position the jewellery website appears on major search engines. The higher the ranking the more organic traffic the website would get. It is said that websites that appear on the first page of Google and Bing take 42% of the searches.
After getting a good website, the next thing to work on would be SEO. This involves tweaking and editing certain aspects of the website for it to be SEO friendly. Also helping the search engines understand what the website is all about.
The website would be based on an ecommerce platform for making it easy for consumers to purchase the jewellery. In that there will be pages for engagement rings and wedding rings in a catalogue manner. As this is great for the consumers it is not great for search engines.
This would mean adding text pages for the engagement rings that would provide more information about the rings. This would help the search engines to know what the website is all about.
SEO ensures ranking above other online jewellers. A few basic things to think about for SEO would be:
- Quality and original product descriptions
- URL building
- Product reviews
- Alt in images
- Keyword research
- Competitor analysis
Jewellery digital marketing Blogs
Creating blog posts helps improve SEO while at the same time shows that the Jeweller is an industry expert and present the business’ unique selling proposition. Blogposts can be in the form of images, videos, articles, and podcasts. The posts should be engaging, entertaining and educational.
All this information is to help potential clients decide on which jeweller to choose from and what products to buy.
It has been said that blogs generate four times more leads than a website that does not use blogs. In addition, websites that feature a blog page have 434% more indexed pages on Google which means they are recognized and ranked easily.
Google ads
As Google is the biggest search engine as we speak, it makes a lot of sense to pay for Google ads, formally AdWords. The benefit of paying for Google ads for a jewellery business is that it gets a chance to showcase their products on the first page of Google.
Getting to the first page or optimizing for SEO is not easy and takes a long while, so the quickest way to appear on the top is to use Google Ads. Google ads provides an additional benefit in that you can choose who you show your ads to, when and where the ads can be shown and lastly you can control how much you are willing to spend.
Google ads appear above organic results and Google maps.
Using a digital marketing agency or by learning to run the campaigns properly, the jewellery business owner can turn profitable very quickly
Google offers different ad types that would be perfect for selling jewellery online namely:
- Search ads – are the type of text ads that can be seen on Google search.
- Shopping ads – these are images that are displayed with the price on Google search
- YouTube ads – these are video ads that are found on YouTube
- Display ads – these are the ones that are seen on various website.
In addition to these types of ads, there are remarketing ads that follow users around the internet to remind them that they visited a certain site.
The only drawback of using Google ads is that it is overly complicated, and a lot of money can be wasted on the platform. For example, without using negative keywords, the business will spend money on irrelevant clicks.
Jewellery digital marketing Social media management
Every jewellery business should have a social media presence. The question most people ask is which social media site should they use? Each social site has its own audience and people are on there for different reasons. So, jewellers should go to where their clients are
With saying that, one would be remiss by not mentioning Facebook and Instagram because they have the largest number of users. Facebook has the biggest audience while Instagram has a higher number of millennials who have the money to buy the products.
Jewellery is more of a visual product, so the users are bound to be where images are favoured. The best examples for this would be Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok. If the jeweller can make high quality videos, then YouTube would be the path to go with.
Social media has the added benefit of letting businesses to naturally communicating with their customers. Sprout social says 48% of consumers buy from business that quickly respond on the social networks.
Using a social media strategy, a jeweller can sell plenty of jewellery. This is done by getting followers, posting the right content, and responding to any requests. This not only connects to current clients but also with new ones. The social media strategy should address the following:
- How to present the brand story
- How the brand should appear to prospective buyers
- What type of posts to be shared?
- Which posts has the best engagement
Social media is not a just a marketing tool but a way to constantly communicate value to the consumer. Putting up content at the right time, to the right audience has shown to be profitable to many businesses. This is because it builds trusts with the customers.
Social media ads
When it comes to social media ads, the only sites to think about are Facebook and Instagram. Mainly due to their large following.
Jewellers are forced to consider using paid ads because organic reach has dropped to around 2%. This is because many companies are competing for the attention of the users and are flooding the news feeds with ads.
This has made it hard for Facebook to choose what to show and what not to show the users.
As a business, it is obvious that you would want your marketing message to be spread as far wide as possible and hence you would pay for ads. The ads are very targeted in that you can be extremely specific and target people of a certain age, location, demographic, likes, interests, and household income.
When done properly, like Google Ads, this can be very profitable for the jewellery business.
Email marketing
Email marketing is not as big as it is in Kenya as opposed to other parts of the world. But this does not mean it still does not have values. With the increased number of smart phone users, email marketing can be a to get a loyal following and increased sales.
It is said that for every $1 spent on email marketing the returns are $48. This makes it a very lucrative channel to work with. This would prompt many jewellers to go buy an email list btu that is not the best thing to do. The reason for this is because the open and conversion rates are exceptionally low.
The best email strategy is to build up a list naturally and organically by asking website visitors to sign up to the newsletter service. This can be done by enticing them with a percentage discount on their next purchase. This takes significantly longer but at the same time its returns are way higher, and you are assured of getting the stated returns.
With email marketing, you are not asking the users to buy anything but informing them of any news that you have from your business.
When an email list is available then this is what should be sent to the community:
- Special offers, discounts, and promotions.
- Sales
- Related topics – matching clothes with jewellery
- Customer photos
- Latest updates from jewellery brands
Influencers
As human beings we rely on the word of the people we look up to when it comes to making decisions. This is where influencer marketing comes into play. Influencers are people who have a good number of followers and when they recommend something to their community action is taken.
There are micro-influencers and macro influencers. Micro influencers have a smaller community, but they have a larger say rather than macro influences who have followers who are in the millions but having less impact.
Influencer marketing is the use of word-of-mouth marketing to influence potential consumers on the jewellery that is on sale.
Influencers can be bloggers and social media personalities with a good number of followers.
With the jewellery industry, jewellers are forced to pick fashion and lifestyle influencers to market their products.
