What’s Working in Digital Marketing (and What’s Not)

Ecommerce and digital marketing continue to evolve, and jewelry stores are keeping up to connect with their customers.  Here are the top five “What’s Working and What Isn’t” for jewelers using digital marketing channels in 2023.

Organic Search (for your Website)

Working: Reducing the number of brands and designers you carry to clean up your Google index while improving organic traffic and your websites ranking.

While “old school thinking” may be that the more pages or products you have on your website = more keywords = improved SEO rankings, the reality is that Google views large sites with pages that don’t receive organic traffic as deadweight and irrelevant to the searcher’s journey. The “kitchen sink approach”, in this case, does not work.

Regularly reviewing which pages are not receiving organic traffic and deindexing them from Google will focus your SEO and improve your overall organic rankings.

Not Working: Focusing exclusively on the desktop look of your website, when it’s primarily the mobile experience that ranks your website in Google.

We all use our work computers and laptops to view websites, yet for several years now Google has publicly told us they look exclusively at the mobile design of your website while ranking your pages.

Focusing on the mobile experience will improve your website for more than 80% of your visitors and in the process help your website rank higher because it’s now focused on mobile first.

Paid Search (Google Ads & Bing Ads)

Working: Bidding on your brand name; controlling the messaging, updating with latest events, promotions, and offers, and consistency!

Bidding on your jewelry store’s name is one of the most fundamental components of paid search advertising. Not only does it help prevent competitors from doing the same thing to your name, but it allows you to let searchers know what your latest event, promotion, or special is. If you are relying on Google’s default description of your store when someone searches for your name, you may be leaving sales on the table.

Not Working: Overreaching with a limited budget. Do maximize your return by limiting by geography, time of day, and audience demographics to avoid this.

Trying to spread a small budget over too broad of an area is like spreading too little butter over your toast: ultimately unsatisfying. Limit your geographical reach to small increments around your store, whether it be 5 miles or 10 miles depending on the density of the population. Keeping your ads relatively close to home will lead to more customers and foot traffic in the stores.

Secondly, focusing your budget on hours that potential customers may be searching for jewelry (such as the 3pm coffee break with coworkers, the 7pm couch time, and the 10pm shopping in bed time) and getting off of a 24 hour cycle will ensure that your budget goes further throughout the day.

Social Media and Advertising (Facebook & Instagram)

Working: Creating product carousels using your integrated SiteManager product feed and pushing appropriate products to appropriate customers.

Jewelry is a visual product, and the best way to show a selection of shoppable jewelry to a targeted audience is through product carousel ads on Facebook and Instagram. Every Punchmark website offers a built-in product feed that can be used to create product carousels perfect for mobile swiping and shopping. Use those to create carousels around a specific product category, and then target that carousel to the age group and demographic most likely to purchase.

Not Working: Posting organically on social media once or twice a week.

Social Media has changed significantly in the past ten years, both from a users perspective as they try to navigate their timelines, and how the platforms perform overall. Posting images and text on your profile is no longer guaranteed to be seen by your followers.However, Facebook and Instagram will give you more organic reach if you use Reels and videos, especially when you are posting at least once a day or more. Use the latest and greatest tools from social media, and you will attract a younger buying audience.

Email Marketing & Automation

Working: Automated sequences and list segmentation using customer data for anniversaries, birthdays, purchase dates (bonus points for integrating with SMS such as with Klaviyo).

Your customer data is one of the best marketing tools you have. When you gain a new customer, be sure to ask them for their anniversary, birthday, and other notable events in their life. Once you have that information, you can drop those customers into pre-scheduled automated email sequences that will handle them the rest of their lifetime with you.

For Millennials and Gen Z shoppers in particular, offer an option to subscribe to an SMS instead of email version; we’d rather receive a text that it is time to schedule our yearly cleaning than yet another email promoting something we’re not interested in.

Not Working: Sending messages to emails that haven’t opened your promotions in 18+ months.

List cleaning has been around for decades, but few jewelry stores take advantage of the benefits of it. Segment your list to know who hasn’t opened an email from you in 18-24 months and send them a “are you still interested in the latest jewelry” email. If they respond, retain them, but if they don’t, export their email addresses into a spreadsheet and remove them from your list. Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and other popular email addresses will now improve your deliverability, leading to higher open rates and hopefully more clicks to your website.

Video Advertising (YouTube & Social Media)

Working: Editing and formatting your video for all devices (mobile and desktop primarily).

Many jewelry stores are running cable and television commercials to attract their target audience, but few also edit those same commercials for the most popular devices that show video in 2023. After finalizing your new horizontal made for television commercial, ask your video editor to create several 5, 10, and 30 second versions that are designed for mobile horizontal screens using the same video you just produced. You now have multiple video commercial options for both engagement ring audiences as well as anniversary ring audiences.

Not Working: Posting videos organically to YouTube without running them as targeted commercials.

Search engine optimization for YouTube is an important part of managing a YouTube channel, but the greatest audience reach comes from targeting your videos as YouTube Ads. There is a very large audience on YouTube just waiting to hear about your store, and with YouTube beating Amazon and AppleTV for NFL Sunday Ticket, the opportunities for jewelry stores to find their next new customer are huge. Your potential customers should see the same video on their phones that they see at the sports bar.

Source: Punchmark