How To Grow Your Embroidery Business!

by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing

You have your Embroidery business started, you have spent a lot of money getting all of your equipment and learning how to embroider, now it is time to really get that business going. You may also be buried in work and still you really do not feel like you are progressing. Growing your business in many ways is just like starting your business. You must create a plan to move forward. Planning is the most important part of your business. Proper planning will save you many hours of execution and redoing unnecessary steps. If you do not have a business plan in place that you are currently using, you must create one. You cannot really grow your business to any significant size without a plan.

Before you start doing any type of planning sit back and look at each area of your business. Do not try to look at it as a whole, go to each part and take a real good look at it. You have many parts to your business.

• The Office
• Design Center
• The Hooping Area
• Machine Production
• Finishing
• Shipping

These areas are the least amount that you have in your small business. If you are offering other services or have a showroom, you will have even more areas in your business. Look at each area, the way that you have it all set up, think about the way that you move around in it to do each one of your jobs. Think about the entire procedure of doing each job.

• It is all set up the way that you want it to be?
• Is every area organized and running smoothly?
• Do you have a step saving organized workflow?
• Do you have a good paperwork flow?
• Do you have a step by step process written up for each procedure in your business? This includes each item that you have to do starting with taking an order all the way through to shipping out your finished product, invoicing it and taking the payment. When you have all of these in place it is much easier to train a new person to help you. You want to make sure that each person is doing the procedure in the same manner. Without a step by step process, this is not possible.
• Do you have Procedural Manuals written for each area of your business?

3 Important Steps To Grow Your Embroidery Business!

There are 3 very important steps you must have in place before you can start growing your business.

• Make sure each area is organized and running smoothly
• Create a Business Plan
• Create a Marketing Plan

Organize Each Area Of Your Business

To be able to grow your business, you must have help. Your business has no chance of growing if you are trying to do everything by yourself. Hire some help to take over the simple jobs so that you will be free to spend some time on growing your business. The first person to hire is someone to take care of your bookkeeping for you. This can be a part time person or someone that does it on contract and charges you for however many hours a week that they are working on your business. I have been having my bookkeeping done on line for the past 3 years and it works out great.

The next person to hire is someone to do your finishing for you. This included the trimming, removing backing and topping, steaming, folding and packaging of your products. This is a huge job that can be done by a minimum wage person and it does not have to be a full time job. Depending on the amount of work that you are trying to put out in a day, a 4 hour person may be more than sufficient or maybe a couple of days a week.
It is extremely important to go through each area of your business and make sure that it is totally organized and running smoothly. If not this is the first place to start. Start with your office and go through each department and create a plan for each one.

• Get your work flow organized and running smoothly
• Make sure your paperwork flow is running smoothly
• Write up your step by step process for each job
• Create your Procedural Manuals for each area.

If you will take the time to get all of this in place, you will begin to see more production at the end of each week. This first step alone will help your business to grow.

Creating a Business Plan for your Embroidery Business

Creating a Business Plan that you will be using on a weekly basis to actually run your business is the very next step in growing your business. The main purpose of having a business plan is to give you a clear direction and guidance of how you intend to run your embroidery business and plan for future growth. With this plan you will be able to analyze and measure each step along the way to ensure that you are truly on the right path. Measuring your results is extremely important. Without measuring, you really do not know how you are doing.

Writing a business plan is not hard; the hardest part is getting started and knowing where to start. Many business plans look great on paper, but do not succeed in real life. Make sure that you are writing a plan that will work for you in the real world!

Do not try to use one of those template programs on the internet for your business plan, they are not designed for embroidery businesses, and they are far too complicated. I know that there is one out there that advertises that it is for embroidery business, but it truly is not. It is a generic business plan that is marketed to every type of business. How do I know this, I purchased it. The only true business plan program out there is one that I wrote myself. If you want to check it out, go to EmbroideryBusinessPlan.com. That is a program that I created to teach you how to write a business plan for your business, how to create all of your projections, cash flow statement and how to plan out every area of your embroidery business.

Your plan will be revised many times and will always be a work in progress. This is not a done once and you are finished process. If you will use your plan properly to run your business, you will be revising it on a monthly basis.
It can be a simple 5-10 page plan that will work for most small to medium sized embroidery businesses, or as complex as you want it to be. This all depends on your situation and whether or not you will need financing.

Create a Marketing Plan for your Embroidery Business

As part of your business plan you will need to create a Marketing Plan that you will follow.
You need to create a simple plan that you will follow for 1 year.

• List all of the events during the calendar year that your target market will participate in and events for you to participate in that will take you to where they are. It is very important to be present where your market is hanging out!
• Create Promotions for the lean times in your business and for all of the special days and holidays.
• Create a great business card, I wrote an article about creating a business card What Does That First Impression Say About You And Your Embroidery Business? This will leave a great first impression when you meet people and will go a long way in creating relationships when you are networking. Networking is by far the best way to start building up your business.
• Join at least one networking group and it is better if you can belong to a couple of different ones. The Chamber of Commerce is a good one in most areas and the BNI and Meetups are also good. Yes each one of them cost money to join but it is well worth it. You can get a lot of referrals when you are part of these groups. And yes, I mean a part of these groups. You must participate in the functions, not just be a member. Being a member but not attending the functions is a waste of your money.

In my book, The Truth About Embroidery Business Success‚ 7 Elements To A Highly Profitable Home Based Embroidery Business  I have an entire chapter on Marketing your Business.

Without Organization, a Business plan and a Marketing Plan, your business will flounder! I have had that experience, it is not fun!
Here is a wrap up of the 3 steps to help you grow your embroidery business.

• Plan out and organize each area of your business
• Create a Business Plan
• Create a Marketing Plan

If you will follow these steps, you should see a massive growth in your business. It is very important to be growing your business on a daily basis. If you are not growing, you are moving backwards. For more information about how to your embroidery business, go to 9 Steps To A Profitable Embroidery Business!

“Do You Use Pinterest To Market Your Embroidery Business?”

by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing

Pinterest is one of the latest Social Media platforms that has risen on the scene and it is an excellent tool to use to Market your Embroidery Business. Marketing with pictures is the most effective way that marketing is done today.

We have heard a lot about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for the past few years, but Pinterest just popped up out of nowhere and has very quickly risen very high in the ranks and is taking over in lot of different ways. Right now it is the 4th largest website in the world used to drive traffic to your website or your offer that you are trying to put in front of your audience. It drives more referral traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. It drives more traffic than Twitter.

Whether we like it or not Social media is driving our business today! We must learn to express ourselves in pictures in order to be able to drive traffic to our website or the products that we are offering our customers and prospects. Social media in pictures is how we are getting their attention today. People have stopped paying attention to just words and it is the pictures that are captivating their interests.

Pinterest is getting over 70 million unique visitors a month and is quickly taking over the Social Media Marketing community. It is the first site to really get the social shopping concept right!

Women are dominating Pinterest more than any other social networking site and the current age group is 18-39. In North America 60% of the Pinterest users are women and 50% of those women have children. These are women that have money to spend and are looking for something that is different and unique. If you are marketing to women then you absolutely need to be on Pinterest. 40% of men are Pinterest users in the US.  In Europe Pinterest users are a 50/50 split between women and men.

Pinterest is perfectly positioned for growth as the mobile revolution continues to expand. As users continue to fall more in love with mobile devices in record numbers, the visual strategies that work on Pinterest will become more and more effective across ALL online marketing channels. In creating our marketing messages today, we have to start thinking in pictures and very visual images.

Getting Started With Pinterest

Step 1  Set Up Your Account

You can sign up as an individual person or as a business. I do not see the point of signing up as an individual person. I think that signing up as a business is the only practical thing to do unless you are there just there to socialize and if you have a serious embroidery business; that should not be your goal.

Basic Rules To Follow In Setting Up Your Pinterest Account
There are some basic rules that you must follow to receive the best results as you are setting up your account, creating your Pinboards and your Pins. Boards are your categories and Pins are your pictures or content that you are posting.

• Use Keywords in your Profile
• Name your Pinboards with keywords
• Name your Pins with keywords Put keywords in your captions along with a call to action and a link.
• Create original content for your Pins
• Add prices to your products
• Only 20% of your Pins should be selling products!
• Be inspirational with your products; show how they can be used
• Show what is unique about you

Types Of Pinboards To Set Up

• Customers-Testimonials
• Inspirational Photos of settings showing how your products can be used to give them ideas
• Different Niches
• Different Categories
• About You & Your Business
• FAQ
• Gift Ideas

Types of Pins To Create

• Inspirational
• Quotes
• Humor
• Wedding Inspiration
• Craft Projects
• How To‚’s
• Infographics
• Products & How to Use them
• Video
• Decorating Ideas

You want to create original content and pin it. 80% of all of the Pins are repined from someone else‚’s board. While this is good, you need to be creating your own content and it will help you rank higher in the search engines. You want to create beautiful pictures that will attract other people so that they will repin them onto their boards.

You do not just want pretty pictures, they should be promoting one of your products in one way or another. It is great to just put up pictures, but without thought behind them, they will not produce the type of results that you want as a result of spending your time creating them.

When you first log into Pinterest, you will see all of the recent activity. This is like your Newsfeed in Facebook. You will also notice that you can either Pin it or Like any of the pictures that you see. As I said before these pictures are called Pins. When you bring up your actual page, you will not see the Like button. This is replaced with the Edit button.

Step Two: Set Your Goals

You need to set your goals and stay focused on them during the process that you are setting up your Pinterest account, creating your Pinboards and Pinning your posts. Knowing your goal can help you fine-tune and focus all your Pinterest efforts into achieving them. You won‚’t waste time and scatter your Pinterest energy by posting Pins that don‚’t help to move your business towards your objectives. Keep your goal in mind with each Pin that you create.

Step Three: Decide Which Strategies will Best Work for You

Even if you don‚’t need to share photos with a group that values the photos as content and resource material for what you are looking for, you can still use Pinterest strategies to attract new subscribers.

Some of the current strategies that are working great are:

1. Providing Permanent Posting Power
   If you post a perfectly optimized post on Facebook one that‚’s sure to excite your target subscriber it’s life is limited to a few hours of visibility (assuming Facebook even displays that post or photo to your subscriber at all  possibility, thanks to the Edge rank algorithm and other feed changes). If your perfect Facebook post response or post is number nine, most people won‚’t even see it. Opportunity lost. Pinterest, on the other hand, displays your Pins and Pinboards forever. It’s really easy for people to see every bit of visual information you’ve created on Pinterest. They can refer back to your infographic, go pick up that great photo they remember from last week, see what‚’s new, and find any Pin in a matter of seconds. A Repin is forever.
2. Providing Information
   Is your target market composed of visual learners? In that case, Pinterest is tailor-made for you! All you have to do is create powerful and easy-to-absorb Infographics‚ and post them to a Pinboard named with a highly-optimized keyword your target subscriber might search with. (Note that you can share videos on Pinterest too.)
3. Connecting With Other Pinners
   You may be missing a whole segment of your market, if they are avid pinners or highly-visual learners among your majority of text-based or audio learners. Creating optimized Pinboards allows you to find and connect with this group. You‚’ll be able to absorb them into your community as they get to know your name and face. A key part of this, however, lies in reciprocal behavior. Don’t just provide Pinboards you think they‚’ll like (or find): Make sure you reach out to them, too.On Pinterest, you‚’ll be able to see who is a likely candidate to become a customer, fan, or a client. You’ll be able to see who is hugely popular in your niche, and not only connect with them, but analyze why and what are they doing that is so right! Repin, Like and Comment on your target audience’s (and peers) pinboards and Pins just as you would on any other social network.

Step Four: Create Original Content

Pinterest has never really just been about plopping a photo into a Pinboard and leaving it there. People have created infographics demonstrating everything from How-tos to statistics to Before-and-After shots to recipes.
There are 4 techniques that you should be using as you are creating your original content.

1. Protect Your Images
   Just because you‚’re sharing your images doesn’t mean you don’t want credit where credit is due. An easy way to make sure the unscrupulous don’t steal your images (while not annoying those who just want to share or display them) watermark them! And you can set your watermark to be as strong or faint, as large or small, as you like.
2. Enhance your Photo Pin
   You can also use online resources to edit and enhance your graphics and photographs. There are free program available that will help you do this.My favorite is Picmonkey.com
3. Create A Word Cloud
   Another resource that has proved surprisingly popular: Word Clouds. You can sign up for Wordle.net and create graphic versions of your text ideas instantly perfect if you, yourself, are not visually oriented‚ but your audience is.
4. Create Infographics
   You can create infographics using any type of artwork program and you can even create them using Microsoft Word. There are several programs available on the internet that you can use to create infographics but the resources that I have used are:
   *Infogr.am
   *Piktochart.com

In order to make this really work you want to start getting your current audience to engage with you and Like your Pins. Post on your Facebook page that you want them to follow you on Pinterest. Give them a reason to follow you on Pinterest. Have some tips on Pinterest for some type of information that is not posted on Facebook.
I have learned in all of my efforts of marketing my business is that you need to be reaching out on all of the Social Media platforms with your information because you will find followers on each of them that are not necessarily on all of them. You must find a way to broadcast your message across all of the major Social Media platforms, but Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest are the most prominent as of this writing that will help you market your embroidery business. I’d like to invite you to go to www.Pinterest.com/embroiderycoach and see how I have my page set up.

I do not have a lot of time to spend on social media, and I do not jump on any new social media platform as soon as it pops up! I want to know what the purpose of it is and what it is going to do for me and my followers. Is it actually going to add value? If I cannot add value for my followers then there is no purpose in it for me. It is like every other part of your business. You need a plan. You want to be able to reach other people with the efforts of your posts regardless of what platform you are using.

I feel that Pinterest is here to stay and is a great way to use for marketing your Embroidery Business!

The Embroidery Coach Fast Start-Infographic

by The Embroidery Coach | | Embroidery Business Marketing

I have just created a The Embroidery Coach Fast Start infographic. I am learning how to use Piktochart. This is really a cool tool to use!

The Embroidery Coach-Fast Start infographic!