Whether you’re just launching your jewelry business or looking for opportunities to raise it to new heights, your expenses will always be one of the biggest hurdles to success. High costs can easily eat away at your plans for new designs, expansion, and building a prosperous business. Hopefully, today, we can help with that by offering up 5 tips on how you can potentially save your business thousands of dollars annually.
5 Ways To Save Thousand of Dollars Annually in Your Jewelry Business
1. Get the most out of social media
Social media can be a powerful tool for reaching new customers and promoting your business, but it can also be costly if you’re not careful. Instead of going “all-in” on paid social media advertising campaigns, look into what you can do to create genuine interest and an organic (and free!) following on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to promote your business. By creating engaging content and actively connecting with your followers, you can quickly build a supportive and loyal community of customers, who will eagerly support your business and help you to get the word out for years to come.
Also, actively educate yourself on the crucial differences in functionality and user behavior between different platforms. The strategy that might get you huge amounts of reshares on Facebook could fail completely on a different social media channel.
Last but not least, make sure you’re aware of new and emerging social media platforms. Oftentimes, it can be easy to only focus on the platforms we’re already familiar with. Instead, actively listen for the rise of new, trendy alternatives; being one of the first “early adopters” in the jewelry space can potentially offer you a wide audience, lower advertising costs, and a significant advantage.
2. Outsource services
We’re living in an international world. Too many new business owners ignore the simple reality that incredibly talented professionals are available outside of their own backyard, and often at significantly more cost-effective rates. It can be easy to maintain the false stereotype of low quality overseas output, but the reality is that, as a business owner, you’ll get what you put in: if you take the time to hire carefully, and actively test for ability and competence, you can find world class talent at incredibly affordable prices.
Outsourcing doesn’t just come down to lower costs, though. It’s also important to recognize that outsourcing can be a fantastic way to spend more time focusing on your strongest skills, and on the most critical aspects of nurturing and expanding your business. If you monitor your time and your resources well, you’ll be guaranteed to find any number of “time sinks” — areas that may not be your strongest suit, but that take up valuable time and energy, while often only producing a sub-par finished result.
By spending on extra help to “share the load,” you can often ultimately save more money in the long time, by giving yourself the time and bandwidth to have a sharper focus on the aspects of your business that will generate you the highest returns.
3. Stop paying for things you can get for free
It might sound ridiculous, but it’s almost certain that you’ve wasted significant amounts of money since the launch of your business on resources that are readily available at no cost whatsoever.
Beautiful adverts can be designed in minutes using tools like Canva, at no cost. Photography websites like Unsplash or Pexels, offer up a huge array of photos you can use for free on your website or advertisements. WordPress and Wix offer ultra-low-cost solutions that allow even a novice to build a site that can be confidently shared to customers–with tools to allow even a beginner to easily operate and maintain them.
Likewise, before you rush off to pay for expensive online training courses to improve your skill sets, remember that there are countless hours worth of tutorials and training videos freely available through youtube and other portals. With a bit of searching, you can easily find world-class professionals to learn and grow from.
4. Get Uncomfortable
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make, that lose them money and opportunities year after year, is sticking to the advertising that they themselves are the most comfortable with. You can see it in introverts sticking with often expensive paid online advertising, as a means to avoid making cold-calls with potential partners and distributors; (or–God forbid–speaking at events). Conversely, you can see exactly the opposite in the extraverted “people person” who perpetually puts off investing the time to explore how best to optimize the digital side of their business, because “they can already earn enough connecting with people the old fashioned way.” All the while, they may be losing out on thousands, if not more, in customer lifetime values, lower online store conversions, poorly performing websites, etc.
Instead, if you don’t want to lose out on the money you should be making from your jewelry business, you need to give yourself a good, hard look and be honest about the areas you know that you’re actively avoiding. Ultimately, even if it’s a little uncomfortable, you need to find a way to maximize your brand and your sales through as many different channels as possible.
If you find that you absolutely cannot overcome certain dispositions, fears, or other roadblocks–that’s ok too! However, in those cases, the answer isn’t just ignoring them; it’s hiring or outsourcing someone to fill the gap in your business. However you solve the issue, though, you’ll find that branching out your focus and your advertising has the potential to offer rich rewards, and is well worth pushing yourself out of your comfort zone for.
5. Network, Network, Network
It’s often been said that, in life, it’s not “what you know, it’s who you know,” and that is possibly the truest of all in the business world. The more you expand your circle of contacts, the more opportunities you can find for customers, partners, collaborations, and exchanges that create “win-win” opportunities that have the potential of saving you (and earning you) thousands of dollars–or much more.
People love to do business and support someone they know and like. This connection can be even more powerful for you, especially in an industry with as much of a “human touch” as jewelry. So, even if you’re the natural introvert we touched on earlier, it’s crucial to do everything in your power to attend events, meetups, shows, and other opportunities to introduce yourself and build connections.
At the same time, you also don’t have to limit yourself to connecting with others offline. Reaching out to everyone from small youtube or social media channels in the jewelry space, emerging “influencers,” online storefronts, and others with “win-win” collaboration propositions can frequently result in you scoring advertising and distribution deals at a far lower cost that you would have through traditional online or offline channels.
Conclusion
Launching into the jewelry world can be a pricey and challenging endeavor. Every dollar you can save is an extra dollar that can be spent on the growth and development of your business moving forward. Hopefully, by following these tips and tricks, you can potentially save yourself thousands of dollars, while also earning yourself additional money and building new marketing channels in the process.
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