I’ve been working in my family business for 15 years and last year, I took over the marketing department. My training has been mostly in sourcing and design, so marketing is not something that comes naturally to me. After taking an online course and doing a lot of research, I decided to add live video shopping to our marketing strategy.
As an established business, most of our revenue comes from bulk deals to traditional resellers and online retailers. However, we make lower margins on those products, and I believed that we could switch to D2C selling ourselves using online platforms, to make more revenue. At that time, I didn’t know anything about virtual selling, but I wanted a new challenge.
I had to convince my family a lot, but eventually I began to manage our social media page and set up an eCommerce store on Shopify. We created some new designs to appeal to a younger, Instagram-type audience. There were 4 designs that did better than the rest, and we even got a few sales in the first 2 months, without live shopping. After that, my family began to support me in our online store, and we made even more sales.
But as we built a good social media following, I wanted to increase sales numbers. It’s very confusing for me to see over 10,000 followers on Instagram, but such low sales numbers. Why are all these users not buying if they like our brand?
I did more research and realized that we don’t have that trust in social media that we have in the real world. That’s when I tied up with Swirl and started creating live shopping videos. We did a behind-the-scenes shoot at our factory and warehouse, and I even put my dad on the camera! He’s not very comfortable but when he understood that virtual selling is the same as selling in person, he became better at it. Our viewers were happy to see a family-run business and slowly but surely, more sales started coming in.
Today we do virtual selling events 3 times a month, and my whole family likes to appear on the live selling shows. The numbers are increasing every day, and so is our bank balance. So now my family has full trust in my abilities!
