How to build a team. Attracting luxe wholesale accounts. Paid ads + more...
La Onda is a newsletter by Sandra Velasquez, founder of Nopalera, with actionable insights around brand building, selling, and a recap of the most asked questions during Mentor Mondays.
The theme of today's Mentor Monday could be summed up into one word: Attract.
How do you attract a team?
How do you attract premium / luxe wholesale accounts to your brand?
How do you attract customers to your site?
Shifting the perspective of building something that will attract the right people to you is different than "how do I get people to like this thing that I like?"
And trust me, I know how it feels to ask the latter. I spent 15 years a professional musician. More on that in a future podcast episode.
Let me recap some of the actionable answers I gave during today's IG live.
But then I'm going to tell you what it's really about.
Where to find people
I found my social media manager on Upwork.com
She started as a freelancer, then moved to monthly retainer. Now she's a full W2 employee with a 401k. There are other great sites like freelancer.com, fiverr.com, indeed.com , or even LinkedIn.
You can find salary ranges by scrolling through job descriptions on Indeed.com or LInkedin.
If you are looking for designers or photographers, you can search on Instagram. All creatives have IG accounts.
Try your local college for interns. We have an intern now and its awesome!
You don't need to hire a full team out of the gate. BUT , you def cannot run a company alone forever. You WILL need a team if you plan to scale.
Paid Ads + Building An Audience.
YES and YES. Ideally you would build an audience before you launch so you have someone to launch to. Despite the IOs 14 updates crashing everyone's FB ads, they are still working for many of us. When I spoke to big marketing firms about how they are dealing with the IOS14 update they said they were focusing on first party data.
Translation: Work your email list. (which means, you need to have one)
You can run ads that send people to a landing page. (that's what I did).
You can run ads for a giveaway where people can enter their email right inside of FB.
If you do any in person pop ups, get people's email address.
Offer people a discount on their first order when they visit your site.
If you already have a live brand, do a giveaway that directs people to a landing page to collect emails instead of that tag 3 friends and follow all brands method.
Paid ads are a great way to get site traffic. The way the algorithm works — once you get 100 people to take an action on your site you can create Look A Like Audiences.
If all of this sounds overwhelming, hire a freelancer to help you. see point #1 above!
OK, but here's what its really about...
The way the I attracted 300 wholesale accounts, a sales rep, and a kick ass team is that I spent a year building the brand before I launched.
What does that mean?
Studying the market (I actually had a spreadsheet of current brands, their products, ingredients, price points, etc...).
Identifying where the market gaps were. What was missing? Where were the opportunities?
Defining my brand purpose. (hint: you should be able to say this in one sentence)
Writing down on paper what my company values were. Like you are starting a religion.
Identifying who my customer was. (make something for somebody, not just you)
Deciding where I wanted my product to live (where you start matters, btw. If your goal is to be in Sephora, then you cannot start at Whole Foods)
And then....
I created a deck (in Canva) comprised of all of the above info and I presented it to my designer. My exact words were, "I want to create a high end Latina brand that can sit on the shelves of Barneys". And I walked her through the deck. The vision.
People want to work with people who have a clear VISION and know WTF they want. #attract
There are some obvious things in this story like: invest in branding. invest in quality photography. Invest in a well made website. Invest in copywriting. ALL of these things help bring your brand to life. Human beings are visual creatues. Color. Shape. THEN text.
Imagine what would happen if stoplights were text only. Stop. Slow. Go.
There would be a milllion accidents.
Until next time!
Sandra
BOOK RECOMMENDATION
Supermaker by Jaime Schmidt