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Hi, this is Alison. I got married last Saturday so while I’m on my honeymoon, I asked my friends and associates to write guest posts on topics that they can cover better than I can. Since today is Monday, our guest blogger is Patti Johnson of Patti Johnson Interiors. Patti has worked with custom woodworkers on numerous interior design projects and offers some tips below how to capture this lucrative segment of the interior design market and how to service these types of clients once you’re in the game. Take it away, Patti!
 Thanks for stopping by Furnituregirl’s blog. Alison asked me to share some insight into the realm of Interior Designers working with Woodworking Professionals and Creators of custom wood furnishings. Is it even possible?
When I say “working with”, what exactly does that mean? I am referring to the B2B (Business to Business) relationship, when an Interior Designer contracts with a Woodworker to create a custom piece for the Designer’s client. At this point the Designer becomes the Woodworkers’ Client.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, not all Designers are created equal, just as no two other people who share a profession will approach a business opportunity the same way, but generally, it should be a mutually beneficial and pleasant experience!
So, you may ask, exactly what happens during this so called “business transaction”? Well, it starts with a Designer with a specific need for a client that only a custom Woodworker can meet, a product that said Woodworker can provide. So, for starters, the Designer needs to be able to find you once He/She begins to source for the product. Do you as a Woodworker have a web presence? Is it stocked full of pictures to showcase the quality, beauty and value of the product? Is it truly unique? Does it boast Heirloom quality? Many clients want only those pieces that will stand the test of time and can be passed on to their children.
Once the Designer contacts you and is ready to meet you in your shop or showroom, He/She would bring a rendering and specifications for the piece sought after. At this time a determination would be made to whether or not you could meet the requirements, the deadline and the ever so important budget. You may be thinking, what’s different about that? That is not much different than how pieces are sold to the consumer. However, the Designer is not the end user. The Designer may need to go back to the client and sell your workmanship or drawings, sometimes several times. The Designer is acting as a Liaison at this point. Once approval is obtained, the Designer will contract with the Woodworker. At this point the Designer expects to be compensated for His/Her time and creative involvement, usually when the piece is completed. This is most commonly arranged in one of the following three ways:
- The Woodworker offers the piece to the Designer at a Trade discount previously agreed upon prior to entering into contract.
- The Woodworker can sell the piece directly to the client and pay the Designer a commission of a previously agreed upon percentage.
- The Designer can charge her client for time or for a Finder’s Fee and the Woodworker sells the piece directly to the client.
As a Designer, I have done business with various vendors in all three of the above ways. Sometimes an Artisan does not want to discount or pay commission and that is certainly up to the individual. I would encourage all creative Artisans to embrace working with Designers. The consumer often will be a high end client that is seeking these custom pieces and they often use a Designer to assist them. Designers will be able to render and specify the attributes to the Artisan more appropriately than the client (not always, but with a cohesive end result in mind) and, here is the kicker> REPEAT BUSINESS! When a Designer has an enjoyable experience with a Woodworker or other Artisan, He/She will return to YOU when the opportunity arises the next time. OR, refer you to all His/Her Designer Associates/friends. Oftentimes, mutual referral arrangements are created out of the initial B2B experience and leads only to more exposure for the Woodworker.
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Patti Johnson is an Interior Designer working in Powell, Ohio. She can be found on the web at www.pattijohnsoninteriors.com and on Twitter at @PJohnsonInt.
Sorry for being a little bit AWOL for the last month. Who knew that planning a wedding, moving and keeping up with work could take so much time? I even spaced on #woodchat last week.
However, I’m back this week with a vengeance. Don’t miss my post on email marketing for the holidays right here and head on over to the Custommade.com blog to check out my post on the new rules of marketing for woodworkers. If you’re not familiar with the site, I’d highly encourage you to check it out. It’s a great directory for customers looking for woodworkers who make custom furniture.
And thanks to Chris at Custommade.com for inviting me to guest post on their fantastic blog about all woodworking custom made!
 Image from Vertical Response, email marketing solution provider Believe it or not, the holiday season is already upon us. As some of you may have heard, I will be getting married at the end of the month (and I’ll have some fantastic guest posts for you while I’m gone on my honeymoon). The upcoming wedding has necessitated far more trips to Michael’s (the craft store) than at any previous point in my entire life. During our most recent foray last night, my fiancé and I saw the expected Halloween and Thanksgiving décor, but they had also already broken out the Christmas rubber stamps, gold reindeer and sparkly Christmas wreaths.
Personally, I believe it is a bit early to be thinking about Christmas as a consumer, but it is definitely not too early to be thinking about Christmas as a business owner. If you plan to make products to sell during the holidays, this is the time to start working. Most buying will be done during the early part of December so if you had planned to be finished by Christmas Eve, that really isn’t good enough. And if you’re selling online through your own ecommerce point or through a site like Etsy, those pieces need to be sanded, finished, photographed and on the site by the 29th of November, which is the Monday after Thanksgiving this year.
That said, my focus today is those of you who build heirloom quality furniture as a made to order or custom-designed product. You folks should now sit up and take notice of email marketing.
If you have any number of email addresses for customers or other folks who have ever expressed any interest in any of your work, now is the time to start thinking about how you are going to encourage them to buy from you during the holiday season. There are a couple approaches you can take.
The Baby Boomer email
We’ve discussed here before how your customer is likely a) at least upper middle class and b) female. What we haven’t discussed is that they are also likely, generationally speaking, Baby Boomers. These guys are at their peak earning potential, but may have cut back on their consumption as they’ve watched their retirement accounts go on a roller coaster ride over the past couple of years. However, they are still willing to spend money on the stuff that matters to them. And what matters? Getting the stuff they’ve been waiting to get for years, getting special things to hand down to their children and grandchildren and getting special gifts for their loved ones. They can be approached with the concept of treating themselves for the holidays, giving something special to a loved one this year or investing in an heirloom in the season of family.
The holiday deadline email
How long does it take you to build a piece of furniture? One week? Three weeks? Three months? When you’re writing your holiday communications, keep in mind that people can often be motivated to buy when presented with a deadline. If you know that you need a person’s order by October 1st in order to build it in time for Christmas, don’t hesitate to let your customers know. You can even send out a newsletter that includes this information and then send a quick email “postcard” the week before to remind them.
The non-Christmas email
Finally, keep in mind that not everyone celebrates Christmas. There are many other holidays scattered throughout the winter. So when planning your communications, keep those other dates in mind and depending on your customer base, try to be sensitive to the fact that your customers might celebrate a different holiday than you do.
Email is by far the most effective marketing tactic for the holidays and the holiday buying season is the most productive no matter your business. A little planning now will put you in a much better place come October or November.
Finally, if you need help crafting the perfect holiday email or developing an email marketing program, drop me a line. I’d be happy to discuss my services with you.
I often hesitate to write about topics like how to improve your paid search campaigns (AdWords, for example) because the variables I’d discuss like budget, cost, the keywords you’re bidding on and geography are pretty much the name of the game. In this case, the variables are the plan. When I’m working with a client one on one, I can take these factors into account, but in an open forum like a blog, I don’t want folks to go out and take my advice and then wonder why their campaign isn’t performing.
However, as with search engine optimization, there are a lot of things marketers know that your average small woodworking business owner probably doesn’t. So even though I’m hesitant to share this information and you should take it all with a grain of salt, hopefully some basic explanations will help clear up some very muddy waters.
How paid search works
If you’ve ever been on Google (and I’m just going to use Google AdWords as my example because it seems to be the one most small business owners find first), you might have noticed the “sponsored results” at the top and right of the regular search results (see below). Google AdWords controls what appears there.
When you create an AdWords account, you set a budget, write a three-line text ad, select terms that potential customers might search (called keywords) and then set a maximum bid amount for your keywords. There are other more advanced options you can take advantage of once you’re more comfortable, but these are the basics.
Then, when a potential customer searches a particular keyword or set of keywords, say “custom furniture in Des Moines,” a website that has been optimized for those keywords will show up in the regular search results, but if you have chosen that term as part of your AdWords campaign and put in a high enough maximum bid, your ad will show up in the sponsored results.
Note: “a high enough maximum bid”. AdWords decides who gets to put their ad on the search page (called an “impression”) based on who has the highest auction bid price. The selection of your maximum bid price is going to depend on your budget, among other factors. The neat thing is that Google spreads out the times your ad is viewed in a way that makes sure you will never go over that budget. Plus, you don’t get charged unless someone clicks on your ad, which is why a more general term for AdWords is pay-per-click or PPC advertising.
Budget
So let’s talk about budget. There are a number of different ways to figure out advertising budgets. I described one very go-with-your-gut method a couple of weeks ago as part of my on-going series on marketing planning. But when it comes to paid search (the term marketers use for placing text-based ads on search engines), there really is a minimum amount you can expect to spend. In my experience, anything less than $5 per day is useless even for testing and I’m generally happier with about twice that for a small business.
That said, $5 or $10 per day probably isn’t going to generate enough clicks to “move the needle”. This is for testing; to determine which keywords work for you, what they cost and whether your ad and the page where the potential customer lands on your site is going to work. If you’re looking for a big jump in people looking to hire you, you’re not going to get there with such a small investment. The reason I say that it’s dependent on your site traffic is that if you have a very small amount of traffic to begin with, 100-200 additional clicks per month might look like a big difference to you. So it really does depend on your particular situation.
By the way, if you haven’t done the math in your head, $5 per day works out to a potential budget of $150 per month and $10 per day works out to $300 per month. If you can’t spend that on advertising, I’d advise you to find another way of generating site traffic because you’re just going to frustrate yourself.
Keywords
The right keywords for your business are going to depend both on what you sell and how people search to find businesses like yours. For example, you might view yourself as selling “turned goblets” but a customer looking for such a product might search for “wooden cups”. Once you put in a few terms, Google will make suggestions for other terms that might have higher search traffic and you should look through those to see what else would be relevant.
However, with a small budget, I would caution you against really general terms like “furniture” because then you’ll be bidding against huge companies like Ashley and Crate & Barrel, who can afford to pay a lot more for a keyword than you can. Even if you can get someone to click your ad by setting a really high maximum bid, the person who clicks might be looking for some totally different kind of furniture than what you offer. You will have spent your whole budget on someone who isn’t even interested in fine wood furniture.
When I’m working with a small budget, I recommend very specific terms like, “contemporary wood furniture”. That said, depending on your geography, specific search terms might not get searched enough by actual potential customers to get enough clicks to spend your budget.
Once you’ve set your overall daily budget and the maximum cost per click you’re willing to pay, then you need to write text for your ad.
Your ad
AdWords allows a headline, two lines of text and web link to appear in your ad. It may be tempting to use your business name as the headline, but unless your business is very well-known or exceptionally compelling, you might not get the clicks that you would if you used a good combination of relevant keywords as the headline. For example, what draws your attention more: “John’s Saw Blades” or “Good quality saw blades cheap”? The same is true of other consumers. “John’s Woodworking” may not be as compelling as “Handmade wood furniture”. You can include your business name the body of the ad, but often your link will also contain your business name. Don’t waste space on anything that isn’t improving your ad’s chance of getting clicked.
Landing pages
Also, give some thought to the page your visitor is going to find themselves on when they click your ad (commonly referred to as a landing page). Do the pictures and text on the page align with what the ad was advertising? If not, you may be paying for visitors who won’t stay on your site and take an interest in your offerings. If you have Analytics installed, you’ll be able to see this disconnect in the form of a high “bounce rate,” which measures how many visitors come to your site, then immediately leave again. The bounce rate is calculated differently depending on which analytics tool you’re using, but in general, the lower that rate, the better.
If you are advertising something very specific like “modern bedroom furniture” you may want to create a special page for those visitors just so they see an item that is relevant to what they searched for.
Trouble-shooting
So here are a couple of areas where I often see problems with AdWords accounts.
1. Not spending the full budget – This can be a result of several different things. The first is setting the maximum bid price too low. If this is the case, you’ll probably notice a very low number where it says “Impressions”. This is the number of times your ad has been shown. Your ad is not going to get clicked if it never gets shown, so try increasing the bid price. The second could be that you’re not matching the creative (the ad text) to the keywords selected. If this is the case, you may be showing a good number of impressions, but few clicks. For example, the ad “Furniture built using sustainable forestry practices” is may not get clicked if the keyword term is “American-made furniture”. A better ad in that case would be something like: “Furniture hand made in the USA by American craftsmen”.
2. A high bounce rate for visits – One problem could be that the page a visitor lands on when they click your ad doesn’t relate to the keyword they searched for. If the keyword is “children’s furniture” and the visitor’s click takes them to your home page, which currently features living room furniture, they may not stick around long enough to find out that you do sell furniture for kids, just not on that page. You can fix this by creating multiple campaigns, changing your landing page or eliminating the keywords causing the high bounce rate. The right choice for you will depend on how badly you want that keyword to work for you.
3. You’re still not making any money – If you’re spending your full budget and you’ve got a relatively low bounce rate (anything less than 40% is probably pretty good), you need to look at other factors if you’re still not getting orders. You might not have your contact information in an obvious place, your products might not be what the market is looking for or your pricing could be too high. At that point though, we’re talking about reevaluating your entire business strategy, which is way more than this post can hope to cover.
Conclusion
The advantage of running an AdWords campaign of this type is that the point at which you’re capturing a visitor is generally the point at which they are looking to purchase. With other promotional options (say, advertising in a newspaper or going to a craft show), people might be there for many other reasons besides intent to purchase. Craft show attendees might just have wanted to step out of the rain. Newspaper readers might notice your pretty stuff, but not be ready to buy new furniture for another eight years. Most people (unless they’re me) don’t randomly search “custom furniture” on Google unless they have something specific in mind.
These folks are going to buy from someone and if they can find you, they may just buy from you!
A few weeks ago, I asked you guys to make a list of all the activities you are employing to promote your woodworking business. In fact, I made a list of all the possibilities I could think of to help you out so you didn’t forget anything. You might be able to think of a few more. If so, let me know in the comments. I’m re-posting that list here because it’s time to revisit it, but if you haven’t read the original post, you’ve missed a lot. You can go here if you want to catch up. Now, look over this list:
- Website
- Email newsletter
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Tumblr/Flickr/some other photo sharing site
- Organic search (like someone opening the Yellow Pages and seeing your free listing–Google)
- Paid search (like someone opening the Yellow Pages and seeing your ad—Google AdWords)
- Online display advertising (Apartment Therapy, other blog advertising)
- Public relations (contacting bloggers or reporters to write about your stuff)
- Print advertising
- Home shows/craft shows
- Retail location (yours)
- Retail location (someone else’s)
- Word of mouth/referral
Do I have something here that you haven’t tried yet? Print advertising? Craft shows? There is probably something there you haven’t tried and if there isn’t, perhaps there is something that you have tried, but think you could do better now that you failed at it once. Besides, now that we’re headed out of the recession, anything you tried in the past three years that didn’t work then might work now.
So are you convinced? Good.
It’s time to go do some research. For example, make a list of potential publications your target market might read. Local newspaper? National craft publication? National magazine? Get rates (cost) and reach (how many subscribers they have) from each of them so you can accurately compare. That said, someone should remind me to do a post entirely on advertising sometime in the near future because this isn’t nearly enough information on advertising.
Or make a list of all the craft shows you could reasonably get to (probably within driving distance if you make furniture). Talk to other artisans (both woodworkers and non-woodworkers) and see if they’ve had any luck at those shows. Find out how much the promoter charges for a booth. Figure out what your other incidental expenses will be (making pieces for the show, constructing a booth, getting business cards printed, gas for your truck, etc.).
Try to be as thorough in this exercise as possible. Most marketers do this exercise once a year, once a quarter or once a month depending on their business and budget. I’ve found that for most small business owners, once a year with a quarterly review is sufficient, but your mileage may vary.
Finally, compare the list of promotional options you’ve created to your budget. Maybe Dwell has great reach (lots of subscribers), but the cost of one ad is your entire annual marketing budget. This is a real plan, not a fantasy plan so keep your expectations reasonable. Try to pick a mix of options that you can spread throughout the year. Whether you’re a one-man shop doing exclusively custom work or a production shop employing 25 other people, you need to be busy all the time, not just in one big spurt early in the year. Keep this in mind when you look at publication schedules and choose shows.
Also, anything you try will likely have a six to twelve week lag time before you start seeing any orders. Expensive handmade goods tend not to be an impulse purchase.
Next time we’ll start talking about how to put this plan into practice.
 Blogging has many advantages for a small business owner. It’s inexpensive, it provides a way to communicate your expertise and connect with your customers and it boosts your search engine rankings when keywords are properly employed. Participation in social media recently became the most common behavior online.
But is it right for you? There are a few factors to consider.
Can you write?
This is the time to consider whether writing is your best skill. There are other ways to promote your business and if writing isn’t a skill you have worked to develop, you might consider something else—a podcast, networking events, videos on YouTube. Correct grammar and spelling are important to readers. If your content is excellent and your mechanics are terrible, some readers may have trouble getting into your work. They may even conclude that if you are careless with such details, you might be a careless person, which could do your business more harm than good in the long-run.
Can you commit?
Only 10% of blogs are updated more than once a week. Most are started with the best of intentions, but business owners are busy folks. For a blog that posts two to three times a week (what I’d consider to be the minimum for a successful business blog), there is at least six hours a week behind those posts. That’s time to consider topics, do the writing, find appropriate graphics or take pictures, edit the posts, manage any technical glitches that pop up and moderate comments. Add time with other social media such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and reading and commenting on other related blogs (some of the best ways to boost your readership) and you’re easily looking at 12 hours a week in marketing time, especially in the beginning.
Can you connect?
Face it, there are a lot of ways to reach customers out there. Once you’ve considered your target audience, do some research. Do the people you’re aiming to reach even read blogs? Perhaps they’re more newsletter people. Perhaps they’re not readers and spend more time online watching videos or listening to podcasts. Though the Web 2.0 crowd loves to put down advertising as expensive, ineffective and going the way of the dodo bird, it’s still the best way to reach some demographics.
I’m not trying to dissuade you from trying out blogging. It’s a great tool and a can be very effective in the right hands. But be realistic about your skill, your commitment and your audience and if you have any questions about blogging, post them here!
  
1. Seth Godin
If you don’t already read Seth Godin, you should. Here’s a good example of why: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/02/hunters-and-farmers.html
That said, if you’re looking for specific, actionable marketing advice, he is not your man. If, however, you want insights into how humans think and make decisions and act, he’s unbeatable and always gives you something to reach for.
2. Church of the Customer by Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell
On the other hand, for specific, actionable marketing advice, head straight for Church of the Customer by Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell: http://www.churchofcustomer.com/.
Jackie and Ben put the strategies and tactics of other companies into context so you can learn from them and apply their successful techniques to your business.
Between the three of them, they taught me 85% of what I know about marketing. 1% came from a marketing textbook. The rest came from experience–trial and error.
To get that last 14%, try 1,000 things. At best, 900 of them won’t work, but you’ll have learned something.
 You don’t have unlimited resources. You might wish you did, but you don’t.
Remember a couple of weeks ago when we were, as Fagin says, “Reviewing the situation“? I need you to go back to that piece of paper where you wrote down all your existing marketing activities. I want you to look at how much money you invested in each of those current activities. Now look at how much you’ve earned from that activity. This is what business folks commonly refer to as the “return on investment” or “ROI”.
I don’t have your numbers in front of me, but I’m going to guess that the activities you spent the most money on worked best. The fact is, when I was selling high end custom-designed furniture, the most expensive advertising we did (the Washington Post Magazine) worked best. The free tools (Twitter, Facebook, free listings on online directory sites) worked least well. There are good, sound marketing reasons to maintain a presence in these places, but seeing a huge return on your investment directly from these sources are not among them.
And don’t come to me saying, “But, Alison, you built your business using these free tools. Why can’t I?” The reason is that we’re in different businesses. I am selling consulting services. You’re buying me for what’s going on in my head, not what’s going on with my hands. You are selling a visual, tactile product. You need visual, tactile marketing. Besides, I’m in the process of spending $2,000 on a logo and website. Don’t talk to me about free!
So be honest with yourself. Write down a number that you think you can spend on your marketing in a month (or a quarter, or a year, whatever you’re comfortable with), say, $1,000. Now write down a number a little higher than that, say, $1,500. Now continue to increase that number until you say, “Wow, I really don’t think I can spend that right now. The number below that one looks more reasonable for me.”
Now look at your dollar figure goal from my post earlier in the week on marketing goal setting. How do the two compare? If your marketing budget figure is higher than your goal figure, you have a problem. You can’t spend more than you make and stay in business, at least, not for long.
Likewise, if your goal figure is a lot more than your marketing budget figure, you also have a problem. Here’s where “you have to spend money to make money” comes in. In my experience, you need to be spending 10-25% of what you make in revenue from product sales on your sales and marketing activities.
Although, my thinking varies from day-to-day on whether it’s a chicken and egg problem. I’m not sure whether the spending drives the revenue or vice versa. However, I do know that if you have a sales goal of $5,000 per month, you need to expect to spend $500 to $1250 per month on sales and marketing. If you have a budget of $50, you’re probably not going to make that $5,000 goal.
Of course, there are exceptions. An established woodworker with a long waiting list and a lot of word of mouth referral business might get away with spending less. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for everyone.
So, do you have your number written down? Just put the overall budget number down with your goal amount and your marketing overview. We’ll be getting more specific next time as we review your promotional options.
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Rockler Woodworking and Hardware first jumped into the Social Media world a couple of years ago, in late 2008. Since then we’ve since grown quite a substantial following in the three main sites we concentrate on: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. It’s not the quantity of followers that’s most important, however – it’s the quality. We obviously want to be connected to real, practicing woodworkers! (In your case, the goal might be good potential customers for your finished product, but it should also be your peers in the woodworking industry).
I say...