14 May Read a Free Excerpt from Marketing Magic for Savvy Craft Businesses
Stitchcraft Marketing’s new book Marketing Magic for Savvy Craft Businesses: Supercharge Your Social Media, Market to Makers, and Build Better Customer Relationships is packed with useful, actionable tips and techniques to strengthen and expand your craft business.
Gathering over 50 years of combined marketing experience in the craft industry, Marketing Magic holds our proven best practices and provides step-by-step guidance to enable craft businesses to take charge of their marketing strategy. Each chapter covers a different facet of the marketing matrix we create and/or strengthen for each of our craft clients. Chapter titles include:
- The Crystal Ball of Craft Retailers: Understanding a Changing Landscape
- Making Magic: Strategies to Fill Your Spellbook
- Conjuring Brand Loyalty: The Know, Like, Trust Loop
- Magical Personas: The Process of Identifying & Creating Customer Avatars
- Casting the Spell: Communicating Your Brand Narrative
- Spellbinding Success: The Magic of SMART GOALS
- SMARTer Sorcery: Magical Strategies for Long-Term Goals
- The Generosity Charm: Using Generosity Marketing to Build & Sustain Community
- Crafting Powerful Incantations: The Importance of Blogging
- From Owl Post to Inbox: Why You Need a Newsletter
- Bewitching the Feed: Effectively Using Social Media to Build Community
- Invocations for Scaling: Growing with Digital Advertising
- Alchemical Alliances: Content Creators, Influencers, and Community Leaders
- Creating a Sacred Space: Turning Your Business into a Sanctuary for Crafters
- Advanced Divination: Using Analytics to Set Future SMART Goals
- From Spellbooks to Specialists: When & How to Outsource Your Marketing
Today, we’re sharing the third chapter from Marketing Magic to offer readers a peek at the book. Conjuring Brand Loyalty: The Know, Like, Trust Loop, outlines the evolution of the Know, Like, Trust funnel and instructs craft businesses on how to incorporate the concept into their marketing strategy. Enjoy!
Conjuring Brand Loyalty: The Know, Like, Trust Loop
Here’s the thing no craft business wants to hear about their brand: your offerings are not unique. The craft retail space is flooded with businesses that offer the same or similar products and services at similar or lower price points.
The internet has underscored this humbling fact. In the past you might have only competed with a business in the next town over. Now you’re competing with every business with an internet connection worldwide. Not to mention the big box store located in your community!
The market is flooded. Your regular internet sleuth aside, now customers also have access to multiple price comparison apps on their phones to help them find the cheapest version of the product you’re selling. This is a common refrain among our clients: How do I stand out? What can I do to differentiate myself?
Differentiating yourself in a crowded, competitive marketplace is all about customer experience. It’s the one tool you wield with complete control.
Yes, you have to work harder than ever before to earn your customers. But the reality of earning and keeping your customers hasn’t actually changed all that much. As Alice Hoffman wrote in Practical Magic: “The truest magic is in the things that never change, even when everything around them does.” True marketing magic comes when we understand the root of success lies in reaching and maintaining a loyal community—that has not changed.
Differentiating yourself in a crowded, competitive marketplace is all about customer experience. It’s the one tool you wield with complete control. Retailers who create an incredible customer experience rise above the competition. Customers who seek out lower prices will always seek out lower prices. But if you can curate an enjoyable, personalized—some may even say magical—shopping experience, you may even hook the frugal shoppers. Which brings us to the loop.
Originally coined by Bob Burg in his book Endless Referrals, the Know, Like, Trust Funnel (or Marketing Hourglass) is a relationship principle. Burg said:
“All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like, and trust.”
The Know, Like, Trust principle outlines a clear spectrum of customer experience. It’s described as a funnel because the beginning of the spectrum (Know) is wider than the end of the spectrum (Trust). Since its inception, marketers have updated the funnel shape into an hourglass to reflect four additional stages: Try, Buy, Repeat, and Refer.
KNOW
The traditional Know phase describes the foundational stage in the customer experience. This is when customers ask themselves: Who are you? Why should I care about what you have to offer? This stage is introductory—your “customer” isn’t actually a customer yet. They likely don’t know anything about your brand. This is your opportunity to make a great first impression!
As a craft retailer, it’s your responsibility to answer those questions. And because we’re at the widest point in our funnel, you should deliver those answers in multiple and varied ways to as many potential customers as possible. This is when you’re focused on raising awareness around your brand. So how do you do that?
Methods for raising awareness in the Know stage of customer experience include: *Print and digital advertising (social media, display, and programmatic) *Social media posts *Trade shows and consumer festivals *Earned media (print and digital articles; blog posts highlighting your brand; social media posts about your company) *Friends & Family referrals *User generated content (UGC) *An About Us page on your website to communicate your brand story
The new Know phase accounts for the more comprehensive experience potential customers seek when exploring your brand. If the traditional Know phase is focused on raising awareness using the above bulleted methods, the new Know phase further hones the focus to include two strategic initiatives: inspiration and exploration.
In the inspiration phase, digital natives turn to social media to find ideas, new brands, and shops. Once they find your digital presence, they quickly shift into the exploration phase as they research their findings (and use social media platforms as search engines).
Research indicates younger consumers spend more time in the traditional Know phase, exploring and finding inspiration online. Where before you may have created a post about your product and linked to a blog about it, now consumers expect to bounce between your post and posts from other consumers, your blog and blogs from other consumers, and between different social media platforms (like TikTok and YouTube) seeking similar experiences and reviews.
Like what you’ve read so far and want to discover the remaining elements of the Know, Like, Trust Loop? Are you ready to conjure your own Marketing Magic? Purchase a copy of Marketing Magic for Savvy Craft Businesses!
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