Pro tips (episode #7): Communication

How to make a good communication for your company?

Welcome to the seventh episode of our video series produced in partnership with Mélanie from the blog Les Pies Bavardes. In this monthly series, Mélanie shares her tips and tricks to help your business grow and to accompany you on the road to success.
This month, she talks about the communication of your creative business. Because taking care of your visibility is very important for the viability of your business.

What are the objectives of communication? To make known its creations and to develop its craft company. That's why it must be authentic, written from the heart, without frills.
If you are a new professional, don't wait! You already have the opportunity to communicate before you even have products to sell. Your products will be expected and you will build a community before you even start selling.

There are different ways to communicate, some of which are very advanced. But there are three primary ways to communicate when you are a small craft business: writing a blog, sending newsletters and posting on social networks.

1. Write a blog

It is important to create a blog/website, which looks like you, which includes your brand image: it will serve as a base, a reference, to your communication. It will be the source of your communication.

When you communicate, you must always turn the discourse towards the customer, towards the customer's advantage. It is absolutely necessary to avoid self-centered words. That's why it's imperative to know your target audience well so you know who you're talking to and what you're going to talk about.

What kind of content should be included in a blog? You have to talk about your products, but also, and above all, about your why. The why is the basis of your communication. Talking about your why means talking about your life experience and your values, and it also means asking yourself the right questions: what do I want to bring with my work? What do my creations represent? Because people need to understand why they should buy your creations. If it's not clear, people will turn to the work of another designer.
If you're afraid of getting it wrong or even if you're running out of ideas, you can ask people in your community for their opinion with little MCQ questions asked in your social networks. They will direct you to the topics they want to see on your blog.

You must publish articles on a regular basis, even if it is only one article per month, structured and well written (beware of spelling mistakes), with links to your products.
On the other hand, you don't have to look for new topics and write all the time. You can just update some of your articles. This is great for Google's search engine optimization.

Need some tips on how to write your blog posts? Find out our pro tips to write well and boost your blog's audience

2. Send newsletters

Find a system to encourage your customers (or potential customers) to subscribe to the newsletter and stay in touch with its community. This can be a newsletter subscription form located at the top of the homepage or in the footer, but you can place this form at the end of an article, for example.

There are free solutions to help you manage your newsletters, like Sendinblue. It's up to you to find the best time to send them!

3. Publish on social networks

Of course, social networks have become essential and are a great communication window to exploit, but you should not focus only on them. Indeed, accounts on Facebook or Instagram can be closed and blacklisted. If this happens to you, you will lose everything you have published overnight. It is better to focus on the blog!

What content to publish on social networks? You can extract from your blog post the elements to put on social networks by adding nice images. The important thing is to redirect the social networks to the site, and not the other way around. This is what we call cross-channel.
Again, on social networks, you must publish regularly to increase your popularity.

4. Define an annual communication plan

Melanie recommends making an annual communication plan for the blog and social networks, with one theme per month. From each theme, she defines four topics, which makes one article per week to be published.
If this rhythm seems too intensive, settle for one article per month. Once you find your rhythm, you can increase the pace.

How do you make a communication schedule? The idea is to keep it simple and extremely visual. Make a calendar with colors (one color for the blog, one color for Facebook, one color for Instagram). In the blink of an eye, you'll know what you have to do.
Although the communication is done upstream, that it has been prepared several months in advance, it is always time to adapt it to the products you sell or to the event of the month (Christmas, Valentine's Day, Mother's Day ...).