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All about Australian Women
All about Australian Women
I was delighted to join the League of Extraordinary Women for their monthly inspiring breakfast. We joined Claire Boulton, Director of Threads and Style who spoke about marketing, aligning with strategic business partners, and finding unique ways to reach your target audience.
With over a decade of marketing experience, Claire’s skill set includes brand and agency management, partnership and retail marketing for Virgin, and establishing and maintaining partnership relationships. In August 2012, Claire launched www.threadsandstyle.com.au, an online shopping and styling website for women.
Claire was keen to point out the key to the success of any business is marketing and when you first start out you’ll be marketing on a very tight budget. Her valuable marketing tips included:
• Be creative with your marketing to grab people’s attention
• Network! Networking can lead to a lot of new business and referrals
• Social media – we are in a social media revolution, embrace it and use it!
Strategic partnerships are incredibly mutually beneficial especially if you can run joint promotions. Threads and Style tends to strategically align their fashion business to other business partners based around image and looking and feeling good. They aren’t competing, merely helping each other. Claire has found this to be the best way to leverage clients and to expand the awareness of the brand and increase followers.
“Creating option value means positioning your firm as such that you benefit from a wide array of opportunities”.
Claire has used Threads and Style’s strengths and those of her strategic partners to make both firms stronger in the long run.
Other unique ways to target your audience can include offering something for free. At Threads and Style they give away free jewellery as this encourages customers to become interested in them before they start to spend money. They also run monthly competitions and think of unique ways to target and reach their audience.
In this highly competitive world we operate in as small business owners we must continuously think “outside the box” to be and stay appealing.
Visit www.leagueofextraordinarywomen.com.au for more upcoming events.
