Pro Tips (episode #8): Organize your communication and sales

How to sell your creations ?

Welcome to our eighth video episode produced in partnership with Melanie Jung, author of the blog Les Pies Bavardes. These monthly meetings provide you with valuable advice on how to grow your business and get on the road to success.

As Mélanie advised you in her previous videos, you have worked on your five pillars (your target clientele, your prices, your why, your brand image, your artistic signature). You feel confident and ready to finally sell your creations. Well, just a little more patience! There is still a long way to go before you launch yourself!
The next step is to really work on your organization. It is an essential step to know how to sell your creations.
The organization happens on two levels: theorganization of the communication and thecommercial organization. They are done separately, but we must not forget that they are linked.

The organization of the communication

Communication is the nerve of the war. And for good reason: no communication, no sales. You can make the most beautiful creation in the world, if nobody knows about it, nobody will buy from you. Logical, isn't it?

Your communication comes from your why! Your creations are the result of your own expertise, based on an experience you have lived. So, in order to achieve a fluid and natural communication that bridges the gap between the creator and his target clientele, you start from your own experience! You create coherence, an alignment between your products, your convictions and your target clientele.
This is the basis of communication!

To make your creative business known, three communication tools should be put in place:

• The blog: it allows you to go into detail about your why with an article on the theme of the month. Of course, your themes feed your why.
• Social networks: they allow you to publish excerpts from blog articles according to a content strategy that you have defined beforehand based on the social network you are targeting. Don't forget to make your posts attractive with beautiful photos that correspond to the products or product photo shoots. The goal is that a maximum of people look at them, like them and share them.
  Be careful, we refer from social networks to the blog and not the other way around. We refer to the blog where we have a registration form for emails. The goal is to collect as many emails as possible. This contact is essential to address your newsletters and build customer loyalty.
  We know that some of you are allergic and hermetic to social networks. And yet they are now essential to sell handmade creations. So, it is necessary to start!
• Emails: they are essential to stay in touch with your customers. We send an email regularly in the form of a newsletter, once a week for example.

The commercial organization

That's not all: when you think that your communication is sufficiently organized, you have to define an action plan. The easiest way to do this is to take a calendar, look at and list the commercial holidays that punctuate the year. You can also look at the national and international days that exist (there is sometimes more than one per day). But you don't choose randomly, these events must be consistent with your why and your target customers.
Depending on the event you are targeting, you can imagine a special communication for a new collection, make a discount, offer boxes, offer shipping costs or simply boost your communication. Be imaginative!

Once you have chosen the events you want to communicate about, you have to plan your projects. And for that, use a retroplanning!
What is a retro planning? It's a reverse schedule or a countdown schedule if you prefer! We start from the end date of the project and work our way back to the beginning date. Between these two dates, we distribute the different tasks and subtasks that we must accomplish by taking into account the time that we will spend on them.
This method is very efficient and very practical to see your progress, especially when the due date is far away. You can use it for a special event, but also for your e-mail campaigns, the launch of a new product, the publication of content on your social networks.
A little tip: you should always have a broad vision and plan for more time than you need: it's better to have more time than you planned so that the project can be completed within the time frame you set.

To manage to organize a complete year is really the best. But if you can't do it, at least try to have a vision of a quarter so that you don't lose sight of what you have to do.