We are having a little dance today because we have been “open” for 6 months this week.
I often have a little debate going on in my head, should I do more proactive brand awareness activities or should I wait until our one year anniversary has passed so I have a good baseline. There are pros and cons to both and so far I have tended to err on the side of “let’s wait until after a year has passed”, probably because I have more than enough to get on with without adding a whole host of marketing activities to my daily tasks to be perfectly honest.
Waiting for a 12 month baseline also means any activities I add to the basic every day tasks should be more measurable (hopefully) and hey, there are only another six months to go anyway :).
So how have the first six months been? ok, I think is the correct word. We have 3 revenue streams now, the last is still a work in progress. We’ve had a major VAT rebate which enabled us to purchase more stock and different stock. We had a few minor changes made to our online boutique and we’ve increased our followers on Twitter and Facebook (never under-estimate the power of either of these areas of social networking), and we now send out a monthly newsletter (numbers requesting to receive that increase every week too!). In fact when I think back to where we were six months ago to where we are now, I am very impressed with what we have managed to achieve.
So whats next? well, we’d like to have some more changes made to our online boutique, one of those being the ability to show customer reviews, this will help with brand awareness and give customers confidence in our brand as well as enabling us to see what we are doing right and what we are potentially doing wrong. We need to review our half-finished business plan (oops) and I’d like to write some sort of social networking plan – I feel we neglect this area too often and could be making more of it. We will continue with the set up of third revenue stream and monitor all our streams to ensure we are making the most of each – they are all different and have different requirements and we need to start thinking about Christmas in terms of what fairs and events we will attend as an exhibitor and start getting them booked up. Once we start getting some better weather we will also be making a foray into photography to see if we can come up with some fantastic lifestyle shots without paying too much for them. I could go on, our list is huge and seemingly never-ending. Last but not least, we will try to do more regular blog posts….whilst trying not to bore you……
A last note for today, BST starts 27th March so don’t forget to put those clocks forward, not got one? we have a few………..