How to create a marketing plan for a jewellery business

Before starting to market your jewellery business, it is helpful to produce a marketing plan. It helps you decide on a strategy that fits what you look to achieve and follow a budget to keep your campaigns affordable. To help you create a plan that can steer your business towards success, learn what sections to include and what each requires.

To write a marketing plan for the jewellery business, this guide covers:

• Market research
• Target market
• Brand positioning
• Competitors
• Goals and strategies
• Budget

You have a few options for how you conduct market research. That said, your main objective should be to find as much information as possible about your customers. This can involve learning about their lifestyles and their response to your products, for example.

A popular way of getting information from many people is to put out surveys to ask multiple questions. Potential customers fill out questionnaires, allowing you to look for patterns in the responses you receive.

For a more direct way to gather information from potential customers, you could also use interviews to ask people questions. This method can give you more detailed answers, but try to ensure that the interviewees don’t just tell you what you want to hear. Ask open questions to avoid guiding their answer, such as “what do you want from a jewellery brand?” instead of “do you want jewellery brands to be…?”.

For jewellery, it may be useful to understand the experience that people have with your product. Customer observations involve watching people’s reactions to either your products or your competitors’. If you want to create a campaign centred on the feelings customers get from the products you sell, this could be helpful to do.

Based on your market research, develop some ideas of the people you would like to target. These groups will form your target market and the customers your marketing campaigns aim to reach.

If you come across similarities within your audience, you can create a summary of your ideal customer. You could put together a customer profile (or customer avatars), featuring characteristics about a hypothetical person and a run-through of their lifestyle. Use this to decide which marketing channels to use later in the plan.

Customer profiles can include:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Interests and fears
• Challenges
• Online activity

Deciding how to position your brand involves choosing where it sits within the market. You may aim to offer luxury jewellery of the highest quality, affordable pieces for those on a budget, or even something in-between. Deciding where to position your business should inform your branding.

Your brand is crucial for your marketing, determining how customers view your business and allowing you to build recognition. Things to consider may include your name, logo, colour scheme and possibly even the tone of voice you want to use to speak to customers. Having made decisions on your brand will make your marketing more coherent and give the desired impression to customers.

Another important section to consider for your marketing plan is what your competitors do. This can include what they offer through their product, what they present as a brand or how they choose to market themselves.

Researching competition is helpful to find the best routes for you to use. If others can take advantage of specific marketing channels, then your business may benefit from them too. Conversely, if there are also channels unused that may present an opportunity for you too. 

To research competitors, you can check their websites, social media or even visit if they have a physical store. Any insights that can guide you towards ideas for your marketing will be helpful.

There needs to be a purpose for your marketing plan and it should be clearly expressed through measurable goals. If you can measure the aims, you can look back at the plan during and after the campaign and see if you achieved them. For example, a goal could be to increase your business following on social media by 500 across all platforms in three months.

Having the aim set means you can decide the best ways to achieve it. So just as importantly, you should include a strategy to get there. You can make decisions on what channels you should use and for how long.

To help you decide on the marketing channels, look back at your consumer profile and think about how you could reach that hypothetical person. You should also look at the competitor research and see what messages you could use to reach customers while differentiating your brand.

The last piece of research needed for your plan should be how much everything you would like to do costs. Each channel that you choose to use in your strategy will have a different expense. If you look to hire a digital marketing agency for help with a social media campaign, for example, you can often approach them to receive a quote.

With the activities costs, another decision will be how much to spend on your marketing. For this, look at your business finances and think about what’s affordable. Marketing is an investment, as you aim to get something back from it in the long term. 

How much to spend depends on your strategies. For example, to generate more sales, spending more may seem like a better investment than to build a reputation if you need to see a return on that soon. If you have costs to cover quickly, to wait for the long term return of increased brand awareness may not be practical.

For you to stick to your budget and see how much your business is likely to afford, it may be helpful to set up a separate account for your business.

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software, to make financial management easy. The expense categorisation tool lets you group costs and keep track of the budget throughout your marketing campaign

You also get accurate and up to date  cash flow insights to help you stay informed of your business’ financial situation. This helps you consider whether the marketing campaigns have been a success and if you afford to move on to another one.

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