Some of the Rosewood Team standing side by side smiling.

We’ve previously explained how to maintain and manage your business’ relationship with influencers. This time we’re going to look at how you can work successfully with your marketing team, like the one at Rosewood Marketing. They work closely alongside your business to create meaningful and impactful marketing campaigns. It is an active and long-term relationship, and a marketing team will require consistent collaboration from other parts of your business. You will want to follow certain practices that ensure their optimal performance. After all, their success is also yours. Here’s how to successfully work with your marketing team.

Regular and Clear Communication

Every relationship relies on clear and consistent communication, and it’s no less true for successfully working with your marketing team. Maintain a steady dialogue so that you keep each other updated. Inform your marketing team as early as possible with all the pertinent details about new products or new services, collaborations with other companies, attendances at public events, etc. This is invaluable information about your business’ work, and your marketing team can only plan around them if they receive this information early. At the same time, marketing can move fast, so it’s also beneficial if they can ask pertinent questions and have them answered promptly to jump on a sudden trend. In turn, they can update your business in a timely manner and can provide updates with regular performance reports and analytics. 

Have and Update Your Goals

Your marketing team will create, handle, and communicate any plans they make to accomplish your business’ marketing goals. However, you and your business need to first set those goals. Ask yourself some questions. What do you hope marketing will accomplish for your business? Do you want to increase discoverability or advertise certain products? Are there aspects of your business you want to highlight or receive more attention? The answers to those questions will help provide the basis for a marketing team to start planning. Remember to continue asking these questions, so that you can regularly communicate new or revised goals to your marketing team. 

Listen to Your Marketing Team

With clear communication and these goals set, your marketing team can help identify the best and optimal channels to accomplish them and start formulating plans and timelines. To work successfully with your marketing team, listen to their input and feedback. They will develop clear objectives from your goals and define key performance indexes (KPIs) for tracking progress. They will be able to tell you whether online advertisingsocial media, or search engine optimization will be most effective, along with the best practices. Your marketing team may refine or revise your goals based on their own professional experience or identify certain communication and information as necessary. Similarly, their reports will include insightful analysis that explains and interprets the various statistics. 

All of this is valuable information, so listen. Just as your marketing team will rely on your knowledge about your business and industry, you rely on their expertise and knowledge about marketing. They are experts in communication channels, tools, and methods. They understand what the general public and more specifically your community wants, expects, and needs to see. Your marketing team will use that expertise to produce effective marketing, introduce you to unfamiliar concepts, and guide you through any new processes. Your marketing team is just as invested in its success, so heeding their insight is essential to successfully working with them.

Provide Them with Materials

The best marketing content has real depictions of your business. People love to see authenticity at work. Stock photography is convenient and has its uses, but the strongest and most successful marketing has images and videos of your business, its products, and team. Unfortunately, your marketing team cannot always be present to capture such content. Thankfully, most people today have phones with great cameras sitting in their pockets. Take pictures and record videos of your business operating when the opportunity arises. We recommend creating a cloud drive such as Google Drive or Dropbox where you can regularly upload the materials for your marketing team to access. Not everything might be a perfect asset for your marketing team, but regularly providing them with those materials will give them a treasury for creating some truly outstanding and special marketing. If you want some more professional materials, consider getting professional photography and videography of your business and brand.

There are myriad other materials that can help your marketing team be successful. Branding materials from companies whose products you carry are high quality and valuable. Has your business received thank you messages? Those are fantastic testimonials for your marketing team to advertise. If you’re not sure what materials might be useful and your marketing team has, it is best to ask. Your marketing team will happily inform you of the kinds of materials that can help them be more successful. 

A Critical Part of Your Business

Following these best practices is critical to successfully working with your marketing team. Steady communication, clear and definitive goals, space for input, and a regular supply of materials will provide them the basis to help your business grow. Your marketing team is a critical component of your business, and like any organ, it needs to work together with the others to ensure the body’s, in this case your business’, health and success. If you are ready to start meeting your marketing goals, contact Rosewood today.

The Rosewood team reviews all they accomplished in 2022

After a relaxing and celebratory holiday break, the Rosewood team are back and busy at our desks in our various offices today, and 2023 is proving to be as exciting as its predecessor. We’re excited for all the amazing projects this new year is bringing and anxious to get started, but first, we’re taking an opportunity to review and reflect on the incredible year and successes the Rosewood team and our clients have shared in 2022. 

Rosewood Grew in Team Members and in Service Offerings

Overall, 2022 proved a productive and fruitful year for us and our clients. Rosewood saw growth in all divisions of our company and reached some fantastic milestones. We grew to over 120 active clients and white-labeled for 5 other agencies. We also started a new nonprofit fundraising platform in collaboration with Graf-Martin Communications. Our Canada-wide team even met up this Fall and spent some quality time together for a photoshoot and day of fun.

Rosewood Rebranded to Serve Our Clients Better

Rosewood saw some exciting changes and developments alongside our growth in 2022. In November we celebrated our seventh anniversary. It’s astonishing how much Rosewood has grown and changed over the years. To match our development, in August of this past year we launched our rebrand with Rosewood 2.0. Our loyal peacock departed for a new logo look and feel. To match the growth of our services over those years, we also took the opportunity to clarify our company core values, mission and vision. Along with that new look, we implemented a new target audience and social media strategy. We’re still growing and changing and will soon be launching a whole new website that better reflects Rosewood’s path forward. 

Rosewood Welcomed a New Account Coordinator

2022 was certainly a year of news for Rosewood. To better organize our wide swath of projects, we implemented a new project management system through Monday.com. That was spearheaded by another new at Rosewood. We brought on our newest team member Paige as an Account Coordinator to our clients and to support Rosewood internally. Paige has been an incredible addition to our team. Her passion and enthusiasm are contagious, and her penchant for planning has been vital for customizing Monday.com’s setup for each division and their specific needs to ensure the utmost streamlining for everyone.

Speaking of our divisions, they also have plenty to boast about for their 2022s. 

Here are just a select few of their wins from 2022:

Websites:

  • Designed and launched more than 25 new websites
  • Completed over 640 updates and requests
  • 18 new clients signed on for maintenance for regular updates, optimal functionality, and high-quality content from our expert web team
  • Developed a new fundraising platform for nonprofits in collaboration with Graf-Martin Communications

Ads:

  • Our advertising team produced a nearly 20x return on advertising spend (ROAS) which also produced a customer acquisition of up to 6x for some of our clients
  • Ads team was able to generate over 7,300 visits to just one of our client’s websites
  • One client’s ads reached nearly 71,000 people, and another was seen a staggering 312,646 times

Digital Media:

  • Created and published well over 1100 posts 
  • Numerous new clients signed up for our social media services to improve their business’ discoverability, reach, and authenticity
  • Successfully increased clients’ reach through social media to develop high-profile partnerships, including two from the ground up

Catch the Ace:

  • Helped nonprofits raise over $500,000 to support community programs

Misc.:

  • We successfully put our heads together to solve an escape room during our team building day
  • Our Director of Digital Media, Georgie, became a proud mother to the first Rosewood Baby (and she’s adorable)

It proved to be an eventful and accomplished year, but we’re even more eager to continue our work and growth into 2023. We have some new services that we’re excited to announce soon. Keep an eye on our social channels for updates. For now, we hope you all are also having a good start to the new year. Thank you all for being a part of this past year, and we’re looking forward to sharing in success this year.

Deanna busy at her desk.

At Rosewood Marketing, we use the e-commerce platform Shopify to build beautiful and effective online stores. Shopify has a robust toolset that allows it to create stores for businesses of various sizes and types. For small and large businesses, it supports online product sales, brick and mortar locations, service-based businesses, and even subscription models. Shopify also has a wide suite of plugins called apps, that increase your online store’s functionality even further. Most of these apps are free to start and include scaling subscription fees for extended functionality. There are tons to choose from, so to help you find the best, here are our favourite Shopify apps and why you should love them too.

Frequently Bought Together

Upselling is one of the simplest ways to boost sales. We love Frequently Bought Together because it provides immediate and smart product recommendations to those shopping for products on your store. It’s simple in concept yet powerful in practice. It has a wide set of customization tools, comprehensive stat trackers, and you can even create bundled discounts. All of these make this app an easy favourite .

Klaviyo

Klaviyo has swiftly become one of digital marketing bests. It provides an advanced suite for email and SMS marketing that is hooked directly into your Shopify store. Klaviyo provides a wide set of templates that allow for beautiful, branded communications with advanced HTML features. That comes along with a wide set of email and SMS automations that connect directly into your Shopify store. These allow for audience segmentations, abandoned cart reminders, product recommendations, and win-back campaigns that help drive sales.

Privy

Privy is an all-in-one app for your store’s digital marketing. This ecommerce omni-tool provides your online store with on-site popups, email marketing, and SMS messaging. Privy’s email and SMS messaging has similar functionality to Klaviyo, but with limited functionality and support for fewer contacts. It’s better suited to smaller scale communication. It also integrates directly with MailChimp. However, its on-site popup functions are where Privy particularly excels and earns our love. Popups can motivate users to sign up to your newsletter, click on cross-sells, or spin a contest wheel. 

Sales Popup 

Popups help drive conversions by making online shopping more convenient. Sales Popup excels at social proof and creating urgency. It can inform users about a product’s recent sales and amount sold as proof of wider interest. It can also notify a user about limited stock or show a sale to motivate purchases. Just be sure not to overwhelm your shoppers with too many popups. This will make shopping on your online store stressful or agitating, rather than exciting or thrilling.

Zipify Pages

Just like in a physical store, you want to welcome customers when they arrive to your online one. Zipify Pages is perfect for creating elegant landing pages that greet and guide your customers. Along with an easy builder, Zipify allows you to A/B split test different landing pages, create call-to-action sticky buttons, display product carousels, and highlight cross sells. All of these features help a user know they’ve come to the right place.

Smile

Loyalty programs are effective for customer retention. 84% of consumers say they are more likely to stick with a brand or business that offers a loyalty program. We love Smile as the perfect Shopify app for adding a loyalty program to you online store. After an easy setup, Smile can add loyalty points, referral rewards, a VIP program, and more to boost brand loyalty. All of this helps with customer acquisition and retention.

Google Customer Reviews

Customer testimony is important for helping build consumer trust and your brand’s authenticity. 89% of users read online reviews before purchasing a product or service, and 59% of buyers use Google reviewsGoogle Customer Reviews is a Shopify app that adds Google review functionality to your store. It can add a seller rating badge to your website, display product and store ratings on Google shopping listings, and automatically request and collect customer reviews. This specific app doesn’t have a subscription fee. Instead, it only costs a one-time $25 dollar charge to add to your store.

Product Reviews

Shopify also offers their own Product Reviews app. This app adds a review system directly into your store so customers can easily view and leave purchase reviews on items and services in your store. It also includes tools to easily review, publish, or hide reviews. They can even be exported into a spreadsheet. Plus, as a bonus, since this app is developed by Shopify, it’s completely free to add to your Shopify store.

Just the Start

These apps will provide a wide slew of features to your online store that increase its potential to drive sales. You don’t need to start adding all of them now. Consider what features are most essential and beneficial for the moment. Build those up before you find your store loaded with partial features.

There are even more great apps to consider. Shopify’s wide feature set and these powerful apps make it perfect for every kind of business. If you’re Interested in developing a Shopify store, want some help picking your perfect apps, or taking your ecommerce to its highest functionality, contact Rosewood’s web design team. If you need help with Klaviyo or another email service, our marketing team can provide you with stunning email communications.