Kincs founder Doone Roisin talks strategy for growing sales, profile and market share. Kincs is a direct to consumer jewellery brand.
1. Influencer outreach
As a small business owner, I know how much real connections between real people matter.
How can I sell my product if I don’t truly know my customer?
Ever since I started Kincs, I knew that I needed to truly put a lot of effort into connecting with every woman I could. If I saw a sparkle in someone, I needed to make that spark brighter with my pieces.
And that’s how it went – all my female friends, influencers that I’d worked with in the past, and new amazing women that I found on social media (who loved the brand) were sent special, pretty packages with gifts to wear.
Here’s a tip: The key to the success of this was not asking for anything specific.
Even in my personal life, it really turns me off when a brand sends me something, but is asking for a specific post.
So instead of asking for something, they were told that if they love it – simply wear it and sparkle in it.
By taking this approach my friends told their friends about it, influencers wore it out of love for my new brand and love for my jewelry, and I was able to access a bank of content right from the get go with general buzz that was happening organically online.
That means that women from all over the world have supported the brand from its inception and have been in the front row of watching Kincs grow, which is truly heartwarming.
From everyday women to small micro influencers right through to mega influencers, I have a group of loyal Kincs girls who all love the brand and have a connection to the message I’m passionate about, which is adding more sparkle to your life. Not just in style but in your attitude, in your business, and in your relationships.
Another tip: Create an excel spreadsheet where you can keep track of everything – all in one place.
Having a solid excel spreadsheet that you can work from is going to help you save time when it comes to finding contacts and information that you may need.
It’s a great way to keep track of your outreach, addresses, notes etc. By compiling all of the information that you receive through Instagram, whatsapp, emails etc will help you feel more organized and more prepared.
This document is crucial for me and my business. In a quick skim, I can see all the people that I have collaborated with and that I currently collaborate with.
2. Paid ads
Using influencer marketing as my priority; from the very beginning, we had a strong underpinning campaign in performance marketing to support our efforts in influencer marketing.
This was another crucial step in getting our brand out there online. In marketing, they say that you need to see something around 6 to 7 times before you’re actually prompted to buy it.
This meant that we had to saturate pockets of platforms like Instagram with influencers wearing Kincs, followed by ads showing to those same pockets of people.
By building momentum through ads we were able to grow the brand every month.
Here’s the secret for my personal strategy regarding ads: Truly understanding our customers.
We needed a specific message that was going to resonate with a Kincs girl. That’s actually something that we’ve seen a lot of brands forget. Sometimes, they forget that their message needs to be tweaked in order to really resonate with the people who view the ad.
At first, we needed to start with identifying the Kincs girl, so that we could figure out what it is that a potential Kincs girl might want or need. This lead to us creating the customer matrix, which was the basis for us to come up with messages that would stick with the target audience when launching the ads.
The structure of the ads were as follows: hook, benefit, offers. Our main goal for the first stage was creating social proof by using content generated by our influencer outreach.
As Kincs is not a product that needs to be explained (in the sense of how it works), a carousel ad of Kincs girls wearing the product outperformed every other format.
In terms of testing both content and audiences, we launched a number of sandbox campaigns which allowed us to first find the best creatives in a cost efficient way.
After that we tested these creatives on a number of different audiences ranging from cold audiences through to lookalikes and existing customer database. From the get go we also launched short term retargeting funnels, retargeting people that had engaged with our content across social media channels and our website within the last 7 days.
This allowed us to capitalize on the traffic generated by all the Kincs girls and potential Kincs girls.
3. Partnerships
The third strategy that should never be overlooked is partnerships.
Partnering with brands who aligned with our values and added credibility to my business was a great way to leap ahead and reach new audiences.
My partnership with Bumble to create the first “Sparkle School”; a series of jewellery making workshops, was a great way to engage with a brand who is disrupting their own industry and shares similar values to us in supporting young ambitious women.
That partnership made way for press opportunities and it paved the way for other brands to reach out for similar partnership opportunities.
Let’s talk about how I got the Bumble partnership in the first place: First and foremost, there’s a lot to be said about attending networking events. I am going to be totally, honest. Yes, sometimes attending networking events can be a waste of time.
But I’ve often found that by playing the numbers game and going to as many things as you can, chances are I’ll start connecting with amazing people.
This was the case when it came to Bumble.
At a dinner, hosted in partnership by Bumble and another female founded brand, I was able to connect and speak with a woman on the Bumble team who loved what I was doing.
She connected me to the UK team and that’s how the partnership started. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas, and don’t water yourself down when you talk about your business.
The right partner is going to recognize your passion. Another way to get partnerships is to simply reach out and connect via email. You’d be surprised at how many people are interested to learn more about what you are doing by simply reaching out in a polite but powerful email. Even if you are not their fit. You truly don’t lose anything by trying.
However, it is very important that you find brand that has the same kind of values as yours. Finding brands that are within your same niche and complement each other can bring on big results when it comes to reaching new audiences.
A great strategy that we’ve used to grow our initial email list is to partner up with a number of brands in our niche that complement each other and organize loop give-aways.
Our concept was to get one brand to collaborate with us, which meant that they would give some of their products away as a part of the prize for the giveaway.
Once you have one brand involved, you can use that as leverage to get other brands involved and aim to have an incredible prize pack that consumers are excited about entering.
The goal is for each of the brands to share this giveaway to their email subscribers in their newsletters. By linking to a specific “opt-in” page where you enter by providing your email, we managed to generate a large number of emails early on.
That gave a nice boost of relevant email subscribers to the brands who participated in the giveaway, all while helping us grow too!