Why chasing every new marketing trend is quietly wrecking your eCommerce growth with Jodie Minto

Jodie Minto (00:00)

Treat every piece of marketing, every campaign, every post, every ad, every email as an experiment. If we can look at it through that lens, where it's a little bit fun, like it's all a little test, it takes some of the pressure off when something doesn't work. Because everything we do in our business, all of the marketing, all of the things, is just constantly taking what we did, taking the results of that, and then finessing it, refining it, and trying again.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (00:28)

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce Podcast. I'm Dahna, founder of Bright Red Marketing, and I created this podcast because I wanted to bring you the best advice from Australian experts in eCommerce and eCommerce store owners. If you're wanting relatable stories and actionable advice, as well as the latest Facebook advertising strategies, you're in the right place. So let's get into today's episode.

Hi, and welcome to the Bright Minds of eCommerce Podcast. Today we're here with Jodie Minto. She's an eCommerce coach, mostly in the fashion space, but she's been in eCommerce for a very long time, and she's going to help us. So welcome, Jodie.

Jodie Minto (00:59)

Hello, thanks for having me. So excited.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (01:01)

So good to have you on the show. Let's jump straight in. What do you see as being the biggest mistake eCommerce founders make when it comes to their marketing?

Jodie Minto (01:10)

Are we just going with one mistake?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (01:13)

We can have a couple.

Jodie Minto (01:15)

I think it depends on what end of the spectrum the founder's journey is at. At the very beginning stages, I think one of the biggest mistakes I see brand owners make is that they're just relying on organic socials and hoping that's going to be enough to drive enough volume of visitors to the website and enough conversions. A lot of people at that newish stage come into my world and say it's just not happening fast enough, they're not getting any sales. They're relying on lots and lots of organic social content, which of course we need to do and prioritise, but it's not enough. There's not enough visibility to get things moving. So that's at the beginning stage.

At the other end of the stage, that messy middle, sort of thirty thousand to a hundred thousand dollars revenue a month mark, I find people are overly dependent and reliant on paid ads. And when there's a little wobble, whether they're making changes behind the scenes in Meta, or it's just an unfavourable time of year to be selling a summer product in winter, for example, the ads cost a lot. That has a massive impact on the business, because they've gone all in on ads and forgotten about their email marketing and their content.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (02:33)

I agree with that.

Jodie Minto (02:35)

So, two big ones: no ads, or too many ads, or too much reliance on ads I suppose, and not having a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the marketing and all the different channels they should be looking at.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (02:46)

Yeah, I suppose it's the same problem, different fronts. How do you suggest business owners try and map that out? I've spoken to a couple of people who are just starting out at the moment, and there's that "you don't really want to spend too much money on ads until you've proven concept" mindset. So you kind of do want to start a little bit organically. But then if you get to the point where it is going well and ads start working really well for you, it's very easy to get distracted by that. How do you recommend mapping that out?

Jodie Minto (03:16)

Yeah. In the very beginning, if you don't have proof of concept — and I'd use a benchmark of proof of concept being that you've made twenty sales of that product to a real-life human who isn't your mum, your husband, or your daughter, someone you don't know, a stranger — you've sold twenty to fifty units of this thing, whether that's online or even in person at a market stall. I started at market stalls, and I hate market stalls, I know some people love them, but it was a great testing ground to get that proof of concept, to see what people wanted and liked, and then take it online and scale things up from there.

So if you work a day job right now and you're just starting out, even if it's taking a couple of boxes of your product to the lunchroom at your office and trying to make sales there, just get your product in front of anyone, in any way you can, to get that confirmation that this thing is going to work.

Then, from an ads perspective, when you're first starting out, think about what your actual strategy is at that point. Maybe it's just audience building. If you've got ten dollars a day, maybe you're just trying to grow your email list or your Instagram followers before dipping your toe into purchase campaigns. Or, on the flip side, if you want to just do purchase campaigns, focus on one particular strategy first with your ad spend, rather than trying to spend ten dollars a day across multiple different objectives and goals.

So at the beginning, try and get that validation that your product is on the right track — if it's a garment, that it fits well, that the price point works — before ramping things up online.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (05:07)

I'd agree with that. I think it's one of those things where you've got to have that proof of concept, but sometimes it's hard to do. So that's some really good tips. And then, obviously, once it's starting to work, make sure you're not putting all your eggs in the ads basket. I mean, we do ads, so there's eggs that need to be there, but if that's all you're relying on, it gets very expensive very quickly.

Jodie Minto (05:30)

Exactly, exactly.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (05:32)

Before an eCommerce brand gets a bit more established, what are some of the things you see people not having sorted well enough before they start doing too much?

Jodie Minto (05:46)

Too many things, usually. I've been guest lecturing at a private college in Sydney for up-and-coming fashion entrepreneurs, and something I've been explaining to them this week is that Meta's job, or any paid ad's job, is to get someone to take some sort of action — in the case of social media ads, to click the link and come across to your website. Once they've managed to do that, their job is done. They got you the click. Now it's up to you.

So what happens a lot is that people land on this website, or this product page, or somewhere they weren't even supposed to land, and the business owner and the website then drop the ball completely. A lot of the time people know they've got to do ads, they've heard about ads, and they'll just turn the tap on. But there's all this work to be done on the website, the product page, the landing page first.

Particularly for fashion brands, I often see their product page won't have a size guide, won't talk about what the product's even made of — is it a hundred percent cotton or a hundred percent polyester? All of these questions people have aren't being answered at all. There'll be one mannequin photo of the dress on an ugly mannequin in someone's living room, and we're trying to charge three hundred dollars for it.

It's all of these different things on the website — that conversion rate optimisation — that often lets the whole marketing activity down. We've paid the money, we got the click, we got them to the website, and boom, now they've gone, because they're thinking, "what is this that I'm looking at?" So we need to make sure we're optimising those landing pages to overcome all the objections a customer might have, and to build the trust and confidence that they're not going to get scammed if they order.

For apparel and fashion, the biggest questions or objections are usually: how long and how much will it cost to get this to me, i.e. shipping? What if I don't like it and it doesn't fit me, what's your refund policy? What's it made out of, will it fit me, where's the size guide? And then, what else have other people had to say about this product and this brand?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (08:03)

I think it's wild when you're on a fashion website and you can't actually tell what it's going to look like. There's a very, very small model, and the size guide is either copy-paste or there is no size guide.

Jodie Minto (08:20)

It's hidden somewhere so people don't even know it exists.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (08:23)

Yeah, or it's one blanket size guide for the whole website, and you're like, "I am not the same proportions as the model."

Jodie Minto (08:33)

That's right. And there's not enough information for people to go "yeah, take my money, here's my credit card details." So what do they do? They leave. They're like, nah, never mind.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (08:40)

It's one of our favourite things to test, actually — where we send people. I find so many people want to send traffic to their homepage, but that's not necessarily the best place, especially with fashion. There's nothing worse than clicking on an ad for a dress you're obsessed with and then not being able to find the dress.

Jodie Minto (08:58)

Exactly. What sort of customer experience is that? It happens so often — that's so cute, you click, and boom, where is it, I can't find it. Sometimes it's really annoying if it's sold out, too. I clicked on some sort of plant-watering thing off the back of an ad, and it had sold out. I'm like, why? It's the only thing you sell, why are we still running ads?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (09:16)

So getting people as close to point of purchase as we can is my advice — we just need to make sure the website's sorted and converting well. Do you have any benchmarks around conversion rate that you think people should be sitting at?

Jodie Minto (09:30)

Yeah, I do, and I probably have a slightly different benchmark to what I've seen other people say. I'd generally say one percent and up, we're moving in the right direction — so out of every hundred visitors, one person buys, things are looking okay. It would be great if it was higher, and I know a lot of people say don't run ads until you have a three percent conversion rate, but in reality I don't see many three percent conversion rates across a period of, say, thirty days.

But I always say this with a side of caution, because if someone's been running traffic ads to their website, and this happens a lot, people come and say, "I'm getting lots of website visitors, but no one's converting, my conversion rate's 0.01," and we go and look, and they've been spending all this money on traffic and getting low-quality clicks through to their website who were never realistically going to buy anyway. That negatively skews the conversion rate numbers. So I'd say one percent, but go and check what sort of traffic is coming in too, to get the full picture.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (10:42)

I've seen the reverse of that as well, where the only people going to their website are friends and family, and they've got a ten percent conversion rate but no traffic, and they're like, "but we started running ads and it dropped." Well, exactly, mum buying is obviously going to drop off a bit.

Jodie Minto (10:58)

Yeah, I see that too, especially with people starting out. They're like, "no, my conversion rate's great." I'm like, that's awesome, how many conversions have you had? "Three in six months." How many of those were friends and family?

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (11:08)

That doesn't really count. But thank you, wonderful. Obviously in marketing, people tend to be quite reactive — "I saw this thing, I'm going to try something, someone said this, I'm going to do this." Where do you think that comes from, and where do you think the problem lies?

Jodie Minto (11:27)

I think, and I shouldn't laugh because I do this too — you're like, "what's this new trend, I should try that" — it often comes from, dare I say, a place of panic, or from things not going well. Ultimately, business and marketing is just a series of experiments to test what works, so yes, we want to be testing new and different things, trends and whatever, to see what works. But we don't want to be constantly jumping on the next trend or tactic without giving anything a long enough chance of success.

So a little sprinkle of experimental tests and tactics or trends, but not flip-flopping backwards and forwards constantly. I see this where people get fed up with Facebook ads, for example, and say, "I'm turning them all off because I heard you don't need them, and I can just tweak my SEO or post dancing reels." And then, lo and behold, a month later they've made no sales.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (12:36)

So you've made Meta mad now.

Jodie Minto (12:38)

Yeah, I know. And it's like, well, it was again a test and an experiment, and if it didn't work, it didn't work. But I think for marketing we need to have our core fundamental strategy and tactics happening — regular email campaigns to our list, our automated flows, some form of lead generation and list building, some form of paid ads to accelerate things, and we're also showing up on organic social media, so if someone clicks on the back of our ad and comes over to Instagram, the last post wasn't seven weeks ago. We want to make sure it still looks like the business lights are on. We have to have these baseline things running all the time.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (13:21)

A hundred percent agree. I think that's the hard thing with being a business owner as well — a lot of people are doing everything themselves, sometimes there's another job, sometimes there's other things going on in life, and it's very much trying to find the time to do everything well, or at least good enough, without having these chaos reactions when things aren't working as well as you'd like.

Jodie Minto (13:44)

Yeah. I think, for any founders or business owners listening, none of these experiments or marketing things have to be perfect. Just give it a go. Most of our small business owners are one-woman, one-man bands doing it all, and yeah, I send heaps of emails that are pretty ordinary, and I do heaps of social media posts too, where all I do is keep trying to sell things. Don't beat yourself up if it wasn't perfect. Showing up with an average attempt is better than not showing up at all.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (14:23)

That consistency thing, right? Having regular emails go out is better than one perfect email going out every six months.

Jodie Minto (14:30)

Exactly right. So don't overthink it, just get something out. We just want to remind people we're still operating, and often they're just scanning through anyway, they're not reading word for word, they won't notice the typos. It's just about that consistency, like you said.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (14:49)

Yeah, a hundred percent. I know something a lot of business owners struggle with is around stock and cash flow — they know they need to get stock in for the next season, cash flow's tight, they're running a sale. How do you approach tying those into your marketing decisions, so it makes sense but you're also not haemorrhaging cash?

Jodie Minto (15:11)

Totally. Someone explained to me in my eCommerce fashion brand days, and it was a bit of a lightbulb, an epiphany. As a product-based brand, you're always in this negative cash flow situation, where most brands aren't flush with cash because we've made some money, we've got some cash in the bank, but we're reinvesting it in the next collection, which might be six months before we even get to sell it. So we're always generally chasing our tail cash flow-wise. I can't give financial advice, but I know for me, I investigated inventory finance, or a business overdraft, something like that, because just knowing this was actually normal for this kind of business model was almost a relief. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong. So for me, when someone said, "it's always going to be this way, Jodie, you just need to find some sort of—"

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (16:08)

—a way of growing. It's going to make more, but you've got to invest more into the next one so there's more stock to sell next time.

Jodie Minto (16:14)

I'd just reassure you that it's actually really normal. It's just figuring out how you can manage that cash flow gap, because it kind of is always there, unfortunately. Aside from that, I'm a huge fan of going into Shopify and looking at the inventory report, the ABC report, because a lot of eCommerce founders say "I have no money," and I go, well, okay, where is the money? And it's usually sitting in the inventory. A lot of it's usually sitting in that C-grade inventory, the slow-moving stock.

So if you're using Shopify, make sure you add in your cost per unit — I used to round this up to include any import tax and shipping, to be a bit more realistic — so you can go in and see, okay, if I've got a hundred thousand dollars' worth of stock, and seventy thousand dollars' worth of that is sitting in C-grade, slow-moving stock, well, we have a bit of a problem, because that's where all the money is sitting, collecting dust on the shelf. That's what we look at when it comes time to plan a promotion — Black Friday, Boxing Day, whatever it might be. We've got all this money tied up here, it's not really moving, we're better off reducing it in some form, doing some sort of promotion, or even just giving it a bit more attention. Often we've ignored it, haven't talked about it in any of our marketing, and it's about trying to clear it down and at least get our money back for that slow-moving stock, so we can reinvest it in the bestsellers, the hero products, the A-grade stock. That's how I approach working out what stock's going to go on sale, and that often drives the strategy around upcoming promotions for the year.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (18:06)

Okay. Do you have any promotions you like? Obviously going on sale is pretty standard — I like when you touched on giving it more attention. I've noticed that with a lot of clients, they're like, "this thing's not selling," and I'm like, cool, you have one photo of it.

Jodie Minto (18:18)

Exactly, and there's no ads running to it, we're just running ads to this red dress over here.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (18:23)

Yeah, like when was the last email about it?

Jodie Minto (18:25)

Yeah, exactly. We often have product we're like, actually we haven't talked about this — maybe I need to re-photograph it at the next shoot, bring some of that old stock and re-photograph it on a new model, in a different light, a different setting, and try to refresh it, give it a bit more love.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (18:41)

I really love that. So we've got sales, and refreshing and giving it more attention. Is there anything else you'd do with that C-grade stock to try and get your money back? I know that's something a lot of people really struggle with, whether they're starting out or really established.

Jodie Minto (18:53)

Yeah, what we used to do with that C-grade inventory — you don't want to be doing thirty or fifty percent off sales every other week, because then your customers just wait until you're on sale. So what we used to do was pick one product, say the black dress, and every Friday we'd have a flash sale, just for that one product that hasn't got visibility, hasn't sold very well — for that one day, or maybe just the weekend. It'd be on sale for whatever discount, giving it a bit more of a chance. We'd test these short-term discounts on a product a number of times, maybe two or three times through various different ways, before it would finally just sit in the sale collection.

So we've at least given it a bit more spotlight, tried to push it — do some social media posts, an email on it — and see how we go doing that a few times before deciding, okay, this just sits in the sale collection now, and can be used later for other promotions.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (20:12)

I like that, because I find a lot of brands get stuck on "what's new, what's new, what's new," and it's like, well, what about that stuff that's not going anywhere yet? That's money sitting on your shelves. I like those ideas. I find a lot of brands want to grow, but they're very stuck on just the next campaign, the next promo, the next launch. Do you have any strategies around actually working out a proper growth strategy, rather than just "what's the next campaign going to be?"

Jodie Minto (20:44)

Yeah, I think ultimately for any kind of business, we need to be really clear on what is the thing, the product or service, that's making up the bread and butter of the business. For a product-based brand, if it's this particular collection or category, that's the bread and butter of your business — lean more into that, expand on that range, rather than bringing in hats and accessories and shoes and towels and everything else, spreading that product category wider and wider. Go all in on what's actually working.

I used to do this all the time — kimonos were what we sold all day long, every day, and then I'd think, "no, I feel like I need to build the entire outfit," so I'd introduce all these other pieces, the top to go underneath and the pants and so on. But what would still keep selling was the kimonos, and what would end up in that C-grade inventory was all this new stuff I felt like I should be investing in, because I wanted something else to talk about. No — just design more kimonos in different prints and colours, that's all we needed. So keep it pretty simple, know what's responsible for the bulk of your revenue, and do more of that rather than spreading yourself really thin.

The flip side is if you actually don't have a bestselling category or style right now — that's when you'd be testing new things to find that hero product, or evolving and testing different things. So growth strategy, for me, is all about zooming in on what's working from a product category point of view, and also from a marketing point of view. If you're spending on Meta ads and that works really great, and you're also spending on TikTok ads because you felt like you should be there, but they're not converting at all, forget it, don't do that. Focus on the marketing activities and the products that truly make the difference.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (22:46)

Yeah, a hundred percent. My only caveat to that would be, if only Facebook ads is working, you still need to make something else work.

Jodie Minto (22:52)

Totally, because you can wake up tomorrow and you've been locked out of your account, and you're not allowed to advertise anymore.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (22:57)

We had a client who was down for three months and they lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Jodie Minto (23:03)

Exactly. So if you don't have a robust email marketing strategy that you're also doing, you want to hedge your bets, particularly around Meta, which is so temperamental — not only can the cost per sale be great one day and double the next, but you can also lose access to your account really easily. We need to make sure we've got solid email marketing, that would be my next thing, and a content strategy to support it.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (23:31)

And that email is bringing in good revenue. I feel like it used to be thirty percent — I don't know whether people still stand by that thirty percent should be coming from your emails — but I find a lot of brands aren't getting anywhere close to that, and just aren't into it, and I'm thinking, we need to be making much more money.

Jodie Minto (23:50)

Exactly. Ideally, email would be bringing in about thirty percent of your sales, combined through EDMs and flows, and even a bit more, because if you do have to lose that access to Meta, you don't want your business to completely fall over.

Emails are huge, and I see this a lot — people are like, "my ads aren't working, my ads aren't working, nothing's working," and we come over and they've got six hundred people on their list. I'm like, what are we doing here? And then their emails are bringing in thirty percent of the sales with only six hundred people on the list. We need more people on your list, and we need to be growing that email list so we can do more.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (24:26)

Use some of those ads to get more people onto the list.

Jodie Minto (24:30)

Yeah. So we definitely can't have all our eggs in one basket. Maybe it's picking like three marketing activities and making sure you do those well, versus picking fifteen marketing activities and doing them so-so.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (24:45)

We've got Black Friday coming up soon — I mean, it's August, but it's coming up soon. What are some things you think people need to get in order now to make sure they do Black Friday well?

Jodie Minto (24:59)

Yes, I think they first need to go and have a look at that ABC report inside Shopify, to first determine whether their Black Friday campaign is going to be about discounting what they already have, versus sourcing new product or releasing something new for Black Friday. There's always a bit of a revelation once we go and see what we've already got — if you've already got tons of stock sitting there waiting to be sold, I'd let that guide the Black Friday strategy, so it's around reducing and getting rid of that, whatever that looks like. If you don't have much stock, or things sell out really quickly, or it's some sort of special new collection launch, that's a different approach. So that's where I'd be looking first.

I should give a pre-warning: I'm always a bit not skeptical about Black Friday, I know it works, I'm just a bit miffed about it, because what I see is that usually there's some sort of discounting going on, that's what makes up the Black Friday period, but on the other side, it's also usually the most expensive time to run ads. So not only are we usually paying double for our ad conversions to get the sale, we're also then reducing the price by half. A lot of people come out and say, "I've made no money, in fact I've actually lost money, I was giving away my product." So we want to be aware that could be the case.

Right now, what we should be doing is looking at Black Friday, in my opinion, almost like a remarketing strategy — building our audience, building our list, getting ready so that when the time comes for Black Friday we're predominantly leaning on email and social media to make those sales, and knowing that the ads might cost us a bit more. We don't want to be suddenly going from a hundred dollars a day to five thousand dollars a day in ads, because you're probably not going to sell—

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (27:02)

Well, I could've told you that.

Jodie Minto (27:03)

—it. We're building the engine slowly. We're in an audience and list-building stage, getting ready, and behind the scenes figuring out what that Black Friday offer is — is it discounting and getting rid of stuff, or are we bringing in something new? Making sure that in the prep to Black Friday you're well equipped for picking and packing, if you're doing it yourself you might need some extra help, satchels, bags, all those kinds of things — getting the stage ready. And knowing and anticipating that ads might blow out, so doing the hard yards now, before things get a bit crazy, and knowing you're not going to be just relying on ads to make this Black Friday campaign a success, and budgeting that the cost per sale and the ROAS is going to be the same as what it is now.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (27:48)

We obviously spend a lot of money for Black Friday, and it's wild to see what everyone does, and what people's expectations are, because we're managing it for our clients, but everyone's very vocal around Black Friday about what's working and what's not. It's always so interesting to see who has a good Black Friday and who doesn't, and I find the ones that have prepared and literally started now tend to be the ones that get a better result, because they start scaling now, they start building the brand, they're prepped, they're planned, they know what their finances are, they know what they can afford to give as a discount. Giving seventy percent off because someone else gave seventy percent off is not how to determine that.

Jodie Minto (28:30)

Exactly. We want to be getting the new customers through the door now, ready to then sell them this new thing, rather than trying to compete at a really busy time of year to acquire new customers with some sort of offer. I think the success — often we hear of huge success around Black Friday, and they say, "I did a hundred-thousand-dollar weekend," and you go, "how much did you spend on ads?" And they say, "ninety." On paper you can say "we did the hundred-thousand-dollar weekend," but in reality you were probably about minus twenty grand once you take out the cost of stock.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (29:03)

It's the most successful Black Fridays are very well planned.

Jodie Minto (29:07)

Exactly. It's like a six-month strategy, it's not "gosh, what am I going to do the month before?"

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (29:13)

And it's not "things have gotten quiet in November, I suppose we can have a Black Friday."

Jodie Minto (29:17)

Yeah, which, in fairness, is what most eCommerce founders that I see do exactly. But again, if they've been doing the hard yards, list building and acquiring new customers throughout the year, it's fairly easy for them to do that — okay, I'll just do a series of emails around my thirty percent off, talk about it on socials, do a little bit of ads around it as well. It's not a big deal, because they've already got the people to sell it to, the audience to sell it to, they're not trying to build the audience and sell at the same time, against absolutely every brand that comes out from under a rock to try and push things.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (29:53)

A hundred percent. I think a lot of brands hear the stories of LSKD and the big massive brands having these massive Black Fridays, doing millions of dollars, and they expect their small brand — and by small I mean less than ten million dollars — to have the same. What's your plan for Black Friday? What's your strategy? What are we clearing? What do we need to do? Let's get it done.

Jodie Minto (30:15)

Yeah, totally. It's like a three-to-six-month strategy, it's not a month before, or even a week before.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (30:22)

A finishing piece. We love to ask, what are we going to do after Black Friday? Because it tends to drop off.

Jodie Minto (30:30)

Yes.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (30:30)

Like, everyone's bought from you, we need something exciting now.

Jodie Minto (30:34)

It's the hangover after a sale period, and it happens all the time. This is why it's really important not to be doing a sale every other month, because then the month in between is complete crickets and the brand struggles. So it's about preparing, having something new, and a formula I always suggest is that if you're doing some sort of sale, the following week I want you to release something new, because we want to keep up that momentum. Not week by week, but there's something that comes immediately after that sale period that's new and exciting, that will hopefully help overcome that hangover.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (31:16)

A hundred percent. You've got to keep people on their toes — if they expect there's going to be a sale every month, why buy at full price? Before we wrap up, is there any final marketing gem you think is worth sharing? Obviously you'd have a million, but anything on the back of this conversation you're like, let's talk about this?

Jodie Minto (31:38)

Look, I think ultimately it's more a piece of advice — treat every piece of marketing, every campaign, every post, every ad, every email, as an experiment. If we can look at it through that lens, where it's a little bit fun, it's all a little test, it takes some of the pressure off when something doesn't work. Because everything we do in our business is just constantly taking what we did and the results of that, and finessing it, refining it, and trying again. It's just about test, test, try again, forever.

All of a sudden your ads have just fallen off a cliff — don't pack up your entire business, just know it's a test. This is what marketing is, little experiments. Take the information we have, turn off your ads if you need to for a little while, give yourself a breather for a few days, then come back and figure out what's the next test, what are we going to do from here.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (32:36)

We have such a similar philosophy on things, which I think is why we get along. So there you go. If people want to work with you or reach out, what's the best way for them to contact you?

Jodie Minto (32:45)

I'm an Instagram girl, so come on over to Instagram, I am Jodie Minto. Otherwise, my website's jodieminto.com. I'm in a period where there's new things coming and a few of the old programs are going, and there's something very new and exciting coming, so do come over and check that out. I also have a podcast — if you search Jodie Minto, I have lots and lots of episodes on all of the things too, so come have a listen there. Bye.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (33:10)

Now, a couple of little questions we'd like to ask everyone. What's your favourite business book or podcast? You can say your own podcast if you like.

Jodie Minto (33:17)

No, nothing worse, it's like listening to yourself on an answering machine, listening to your own podcast. Favourite book — I'm a big fan of Denise Duffield-Thomas, I actually used to dance with her as teenagers. She's got some great books about knowing your worth, charging what you're worth, saying no, setting boundaries. I love all of her books, I often gift them.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (33:39)

I haven't heard her name in so long. And I used to love her content.

Jodie Minto (33:43)

Yeah, I think she's a bit like me in a different era of life — she's got little kids, mind you, I've got grown kids. But she's definitely still around.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (33:54)

So make the algorithm make me pay attention again.

Jodie Minto (33:57)

And she's got a great podcast too, and I feel like her content is great when you need a bit of a talk, a bit of a pep-up, a bit of that friendly "it's okay, business is hard, but make sure people aren't walking all over you." I love all of her stuff. If I'm honest, that's probably the last podcast I listened to, Denise Duffield-Thomas. And I have a book someone recommended, I haven't read it yet, called Quit. It's about knowing when to pivot, or being able to let go of something, whether it's a business, a product, a category, or a course — knowing it's okay to change direction and try something new, and close something off, even if it seems like it's working and it's profitable, but if you're out of love with it, it's okay to quit that thing and do what's more aligned with where you want to go.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (34:52)

I love that, I think we get stuck sometimes trying to make it work, and sometimes it's okay to—

Jodie Minto (34:57)

—move on. Yeah. And even if it doesn't make sense on paper, it's your business, you're in the driver's seat, you can do what you like.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (35:05)

That sort of answers the next question, but what would you say is your favourite piece of business advice you've heard?

Jodie Minto (35:11)

I think it was Emma Isaacs who said, and she might not have been the first to say it, but "fail fast" — and this also comes to hiring people, which sounds terrible, "fire fast." If something's not working, don't drag it out, don't try to fix it and strangle it to try and make it work. Sometimes it's just, that's not working, that was a flop, come on over here, try again. Or if it's a staff member or team member, if it's not good for you, it's probably not good for them either — have the hard conversation, ask what's going on, can we make this work, yes or no. Let's not stretch out the pain if it's not a good fit for everyone.

Dahna Borg – Bright Red Marketing (35:54)

I love that. Well, thank you so much for joining us, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. Thank you for having me. Thank you for listening to the Bright Minds of eCommerce Podcast. As always, you can find the show notes on our website at brightredmarketing.com.au, just look for the podcast page. Thanks for listening.