Business of Craft Season 4 Episode 6 Anastasia Williams

WELCOME TO SEASON 4 OF BUSINESS OF CRAFT

Welcome to Business of Craft, a show designed to help entrepreneurs with fabric or fiber businesses become more successful. Our guests share best practices and teach effective marketing skills, that help crafty business owners learn to grow and scale. Let’s start crafting a better business together!

My guest today is Anastasia Williams, founder of M1R Marketing. She specializes in creative direction, consulting and coaching for the fiber world, and hosts the podcast “Fiber Radio”. She joins us today as a marketing expert to talk about a grab bag of four often misunderstood topics: funnels, understanding your ideal customer, finding your why and discounting. 

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#1 In reading your bio, I learned that you came into this space from a hand dyer background. Tell us a little bit about your origin story. 

#2 We should probably reveal to listeners how we came to know each other…. Through a little bit of drama right? I’d love to hear what you first thought of my outreach email to you a few months ago.  

#3 When we were discussing a topic for this show, we decided that maybe a “grab bag” of topics would be helpful. Let’s just jump in with the first topic: finding your why. This is based on the work of Simon Sinek who wrote the book “find your why” and did an amazing TED talk on the subject. You recently had a podcast just on this topic and you said that there are actually two types of why’s. Can you tell us more about that?   

#4 Can you give us an example of what an external “why” would look like? 

#5 Next up is Funnels: Describe what they are and how they’re supposed to work and why you recommend using them for your clients. 

#6 Before we can work on funnels, we have to really understand who our target customer is and one thing we constantly teach is about the customer avatar or your ideal customer profile. What is your experience working with your clients about their struggles with this?  

#7 How detailed should this ideal profile be? 

#8 What if you have more than one avatar, then what?

#9 Sometimes an avatar doesn’t match the business owner’s ideal customer.  How do you coach clients around those types of issues?

#10  If you make time to look at your FB insights and your google analytics, you’ll either confirm or deny some of those hunches. What do you advise clients along those lines?  

#11 Next in the grab bag is discounting. By the time this show airs, we will have just finished up with Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. I always fear that some retailers maybe went too far with discounting to compete. I’ve got some definite opinions about discounting but I would love to hear your thoughts on it? 

#12 If they do decide to discount, what’s your strategy recommendation for how much and what to discount?  

#13 Your business has a really cool component that you call the Fiber Business Collective. Tell us about that. 

Key Takeaways:

• Find Your Why – It’s important to know your intrinsic WHY (why are you running your business, what do you need out of it?) as well as your external WHY (how do your customers and the world benefit from you running your business, showing up every day.
• If you’re going to run any kind of business you need to know who your customers are. Whether you call it a customer avatar, buyer persona or something else, crystallizing in your own mind who your customers are will help you design marketing that speaks to your customers needs. Not what’s great about your product, but how can your product or service solve your customers’ problems? Make their life easier? 
• If your customer avatar is aspirational, how does it compare to who is actually buying your product?
• Data is important. Numbers are facts about your customers – who is buying and how much. You do need to be checking in on the data so you can adapt and change to what it is telling you.
• Beware the dangers of discounting. You don’t want to sell your product for below its value. When you consider “sales” think about what kinds of value-adds you can include? Try not to be predictable with sales – you’re teaching your customers to wait for the sale so they never pay full price. This doesn’t mean you can’t ever have a sale, but think about it as a surprise and delight option, not a regular feature.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Connect with Anastasia:  Instagram | M1R Marketing | Fiber Business Collective | Fiber Radio Podcast