How I 10x’d my Family Business’ Online Sales in 9 Months
Are you looking to massively grow your business — family or otherwise — in a short time with only a few hundred euro investment? In this article I will share a simple marketing strategy that helped 10x my family’s business in just 9 months. Anyone can do it with just a few motivated people, and a lot of passion.
I’ll keep the strategy short and sweet because I believe the real value lies in the overarching vision, rather than in the execution’s details. Finally, I will highlight a few failures and learnings that have come from this adventure, which I believe are even more valuable than the success.
The Perfect Storm
The 23th of March 2020. I had just finished month 2 of traveling across Asia when my trip was abruptly interrupted by a world pandemic. Forced to go back home and lockdown until further notice, that meant 2 things:
- I now had plenty of free time
- And online sales in most B2C industries were most likely going to skyrocket
I knew that this was the catalyst I needed to convert my family business’ from offline to online.
A Bit of Context
La Fioraia Pazza is a small company crafting handmade goods. The name, La Fioraia Pazza, is Italian for “The crazy florist”, quite a fitting name for an artisan — my mother — deciding to start a business at 50, in a declining industry. Before getting into the strategy, there are a few things you probably want to know about my family’s business.
- The Brick & Mortar Business launched in 2013 (mostly retailing at tradeshows and events, no physical shop)
- Online shop launched in 2015. Never generated more than 10% of total revenue.
- Solid presence on Facebook: regular posting and highly engaged community. Active on Instagram and Pinterest too.
- After the pandemic outbreak, almost every trade show and event got canceled, prospecting a revenue loss of 90–95%
Switching from offline to online business
Step 0: Reverse engineer your customers
It may sound obvious to most people but it’s too crucial to not be mentioned: the first thing to do before defining a marketing strategy, is to analyze your clients in detail. The more you know about them, the better: sex, age, consumption patterns, concerns, pushbacks raised, recurring questions, which words they use, preferred social platforms. You name it.
I luckily had loads of knowledge about the company’s clients and products (I’ve learned a lot by analyzing Facebook page and website analytics, I helped out at tradeshows and even took part in some manufacturing processes back in the days).
Key takeaway: Our buyer persona is a woman between 45 and 65, she is completely computer-illiterate but extremely active on Facebook.
Step 1: Building up a new website
The new website was built with our target audience in mind — and their general lack of knowledge when it comes to navigating the web. The main improvements we focused on were:
- Simplified UX (with a focus on Checkout process)
- Improved overall website look
- SEO (on page, speed optimization ..)
- Improved mobile usability
- Rearranging product categories
- Optimizing best-selling products pages
Step 2: Doubling down on social media activities
Doubling down on what’s working in your marketing strategy is always a good practice. The company had a highly engaged Facebook community built over 6 years of regular posting and excellent customer support. Facebook has always been our website’s main source of traffic. We, therefore, increased the number of weekly posts and diversified the type of content (educational, promotional, inspiring etc).
Key takeaway: We found our content ‘sweet spots’. This gave us the idea to start a free tutorial series teaching how to make simple accessories for anyone interested in DIY crafts.
Step 3: Online classes
Online classes have been massively spreading across the web over the last few years — and now even more so with COVID. This kind of offer worked great with our customers for 2 reasons:
- People were desperately looking for online entertainment because of the Covid19 restrictions
- Materials for DIY, have always performed better than finished products on our website (and online classes on how to use those materials was the natural next step)
Key takeaway: we gave away the first 3 online classes. That motivated our “low-tech” audience to go on our website and learn how to go through the “purchasing” process. And just like that, hundreds of new clients got hooked on our classes and found out that purchasing on our website, at the end of the day, was not that hard.
Step 4: Promoting interaction within customers
This was done quite simply by creating a private Facebook group and incentivizing our audience to subscribe through exclusive contests and giveaways for group members only. From the beginning clients were naturally interacting, helping and congratulating each other on their projects.
This natural engagement increased customer retention rate, as well as new customers’ conversion rate, by motivating the less confident people to give it a go and try to craft something.
Step 5: Weekly live streaming on Facebook
The success of the online classes showed us our audience was craving similar content. Online classes, though, take quite some time to be produced (conceiving a new project, filming, editing, etc) so we needed something we could offer on a weekly basis: enter Facebook live streams. An instant success!
Key takeaway: Every week a new project was explained in detail and clients had the chance to buy the related product bundle, containing all the materials necessary to realize that project.
Step 6: Run Facebook ads
Facebook ads have been integrated into the strategy since the very beginning. They have been useful to grow our audience, promoting new products and Facebook lives, pushing commercial offers etc. Because of the high level of organic reach and engagement of our posts, I was promoting existing Facebook posts as much as possible, rather than creating new ones. That allowed me to get better results with smaller investments (monthly ROS up to +10%).
Step 7: Excellent customer support
La Fioraia Pazza’s customer support and key account management have been excellent since the very beginning of the company and it has been a key part of the growth we experienced in 2020. It’s very easy to neglect customer support when you are growing fast and have limited resources available. But, make sure you don’t miss out on your potential biggest fans & advocates!
Failures & Learnings
It has not been all successful of course, there have been plenty of failed experiments too. It may sound rhetorical but learnings from failures are extremely valuable. So here are some of the main learnings I’ve gathered through this journey:
- Focus — Don’t try to use every existing channel, double down on the ones working better instead: that applies to both social media and market places. Yes, it’s cool to be on Pinterest and Instagram and to sell on Etsy and Amazon Handmade etc. but, is it really worth it? The answer may not be so obvious but, especially if you have a limited marketing budget, double down and what is clearly generating revenue and let everything else go (don’t take me wrong, testing new stuff is great, you should definitely keep doing that!)
- Be self confident — Don’t try to do things you cannot execute at a sufficient level. At the same time, don’t let the fear of not being perfect hold you back. You don’t need to be perfect at every single thing you do. For instance, we could have waited to have a professional set up before starting to record our online classes. By doing that, we would have lost a major revenue generator of 2020 and possibly missed the momentum.
Whenever you think you can execute something valuable well enough, just do it and ignore that internal voice telling you it’s better to wait a bit longer.
- Be creative and be humble — sometimes you just can’t achieve something no matter how hard you try. That’s when you need to try to think out of the box. Talking and brainstorming with other members of the team is the best way of achieving that: you don’t need to be a marketer to have a great marketing idea. But you need to be humble to be receptive towards non-marketers ideas.
For instance: How can you sell a product which used to sell very well offline online? Recreate a beautiful shop in your atelier and let your customers take a tour through a Facebook live stream. Create a dedicated section on your website and let the shopping begin. Brilliant, right? Not my idea :)
- Your business is unique — being knowledgeable about marketing best practices is great but don’t forget your business has its own specificities, so don’t get too stubborn on stuff just because it works for most of the businesses.
I’ve tried hard to increase my traffic from Google and got poor results. Yes, I could be better at SEO, I could invest more time and resources but I think ultimately Google will just remain a marginal source of traffic compared to Facebook.
- You are unique — I was trying to hide all the “less professional” sides of the business, especially when generating video contents. The truth is, customers appreciate authenticity! Be honest with your clients, don’t be afraid to look goofy sometimes and don’t be so serious!
If you made it this far, I appreciate the time you took for reading. If you agree or disagree on any point I’ve mentioned, you want to discuss any point in greater details or you want to discuss your business case, just drop a comment, I’d love to hear from you!
