Are You Treating Yourself Like You’re Telling Your Customers To?
How do we sell luxury, non-essential, artistic items? It’s not as easy as actually functional items like refrigerators or house gadgets, we have to find a special combination of words that somehow magically speaks to people way beyond the actual words that are used in the content we post or send out in an email campaign.
Quite often though, we end up saying something like, “treat yourself… you deserve this… you’re worth the money!” hoping it will resonate and then the orders will just start flooding in from these suddenly inspired people.
But let me ask you something, can you really describe “treating yourself” if you don’t treat YOURself.
I was working with a client a little while back who was having a hard time selling her artisan jewelry. She had been designing and making jewelry for over 20 years, she was not new to the game, her work was stunning, but she didn’t know how to reach people with her marketing. “I just don’t get it,” she told me, “my work is good! I’m good at what I do! why do I have to go into detail about why people should buy it. Wouldn’t they want to buy it just from seeing it?”
So I did a little exercise with her. I painted the picture of when she, herself, goes shopping. I asked, “are you more likely to buy something that’s been staged on a special table right in the middle of everything or are you more likely to buy the item that’s in a box, in the corner, with no decorations but a big price tag?”
She unwillingly admitted that she’d be more drawn to the item that had been specially displayed and we moved on to the next part of the exercise. I then asked her, “okay, so what is it like to discover something you just HAVE to have? what does it feel like? what thoughts run through your mind when you see this magical thing you didn’t even know had been missing from your life but now it feels like your life isn’t complete without it?”
She paused then said, very matter of factly, “I don’t shop for things like that, they’re too expensive. I don’t want to waste my money on things like that.”
I skipped over that obvious hurdle we’d need to address later (if you don’t think things “like that” are worth spending money on, why should your customer?) and tried a new question. I said, “okay, if you’re not into retail therapy, think of when you just go out and do something fun just for the sake of being fun… how does that feel? what makes you go and do the things that are completely unproductive but fill up your soul with light?”
She started to cry.
When she was able to speak again, she said, “I don’t do things like that. I haven’t gone out and done something fun in probably over ten years.”
Ladies, if you don’t treat yourself to big or even small things, you won’t ever know how to reach your ideal customer who needs to be someone who will buy those luxury, non-essential (or essential in another way *wink wink*), artistic things on a whim that’s simply, “because it’s pretty”.
If you are an artist but never buy art, or buy things on a whim, or treat yourself to simple or grand pleasures in life, even just once in a while, it will be a thousand times harder to come up with the marketing content you need in order to attract customers who do. I know we all have different budgets; I know we can’t all go on luxury vacations or buy 5-figure priced art; I know we can’t all treat ourselves to every little thing we see or else we’d go bankrupt… but if you don’t treat yourself to something, you’re unlikely to ever be successful in your business unless you hire someone to do your marketing for you (in which case you’re still spending money so you might as well do something fun for you too.)
So go get a special coffee, go buy the dress, go buy the necklace, go buy the art, go take a walk in nature at least… treat yourself to one small thing and make note of how you feel, what happens to your body, what happens to your mind, what happens to your confidence, what happens to you soul… THAT’s what will connect you to your customers way more than posting hours of content with no meaning behind it other than “buy from me.”
I say this all with love because I know it can be hard to break out from a shell of putting everyone else first. But I urge you to try it, for yourself, and for your business that means so much to you too.
Until next time… happy creating <3
Want to learn more tips and tricks for growing your small artisan business? Join my Artisan Coaching Studio where I teach women artists how to create an aesthetic online that gets them more sales while they still get to make memories with the ones they love.
