Mia Fileman 0:05
Are you tired of marketing jargon and empty promises? Me too. I'm Mia Fileman, and this is Got marketing?, on the show, I deep dive with marketing insiders to unpack successful campaigns. I didn't earn the nickname the 'Campaign lady' for nothing. Get actionable tips, learn from winning strategies and avoid falling victim to marketing fads and fakery.
Mia Fileman 0:31
Hello friend, and welcome to Got marketing?, as you know, I am campaign obsessed. I mean, it's in the name, and there is more than one way to run a campaign. So for something a little bit different today, I have invited another campaign specialist to the show to discuss how they run campaigns, and I just can't wait to learn from each other.
Lucy Bloomfield 0:54
One of my philosophies is we want to design a campaign that becomes a part of the fabric of your business, and to get the stacking effect happening every single year, you shouldn't be remaking that marketing generally speaking, if it worked last year, literally do it again and take it to a new level.
Mia Fileman 1:13
That was Lucy Bloomfield, she has spent the last decade running marketing campaigns for SMEs with a specific focus on sales campaigns. In that time, she has refined the process so that she can deliver doubles, 2x what a marketing campaign produced last year, which is what she teaches at Doubleorders.com. Welcome to the show, Lucy.
Lucy Bloomfield 1:36
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
Mia Fileman 1:39
Yes, I'm so excited that we finally put this on the books after I ghosted you and then went overseas for nine months.
Lucy Bloomfield 1:47
It's fine. I enjoyed the content anyway.
Mia Fileman 1:50
Let's jump right in. I would love to hear in your words what you think a campaign is, because it's not a pineapple word, right? Like campaigns mean different things to different people.
Lucy Bloomfield 2:02
Definitely. So you introduced me talking about, like my focus. So just as a forewarning to everyone, I really see Mia as, like, the specialist in so many different uses for campaigns. But my speciality is definitely, like sales. So for me, a campaign is a block of marketing that has a start date, an end date, and a story that's told from start to finish within that block. But the objective of that is to produce money, and ideally, a lot of it. That's how I think about campaigns.
Mia Fileman 2:34
gOh my oodness, I love that so much. Let's unpack that a little bit. You said, start and end date completely on board. Story... This is it? This is an interesting take. Tell me more.
Lucy Bloomfield 2:45
Okay. Is it cool, if I kind of like pull down from my experiences with E-commerce to kind of explain how it all works. So generally speaking, like in E-commerce businesses, and I do believe that service businesses and other kinds of businesses should use this methodology, but for E-commerce businesses, you basically need a suite of offers that you rotate through every single year. There's these, like classic, quintessential offers like Black Friday and then a financial year sales that people just expect from consumer-based businesses. And so what I figured out over the years is like, yes, you can run a stock standard Black Friday. But if you wrap that Black Friday in a concept, it becomes part of the fabric of your business in how you market things that it becomes almost like a bit of a tradition and historically like relevant piece of marketing and an event in your business that your customers literally salivate and look forward to. So an example of this is one client I had that had luxury shoes as their product, and they really couldn't do a Black Friday sale. But what we figured out is that if we held back their samples, if we held back certain shoes that were going down in price because they were a couple of seasons old, pulling out old inventory that they had never really sold, and put it on that weekend, but with a wrapping around it that never said the word Black Friday at all, but it was an offer and limited time, it performed in the same way. So that's kind of where the storytelling component comes from.
Mia Fileman 4:16
I love that so much because that's exactly what I talk about, as well, is a concept or a theme or a big idea, which, in a sort of marketing speak, we're really talking about that creative strategy, right?
Lucy Bloomfield 4:31
And then the storytelling, for example, this particular client was, we ended up calling it the vault, so it's like this opening and closing and going through that storytelling process, like, the the hype, the creative like, it's just a really nice experience. And I feel like, if you're running offers in your marketing, like, if you wrap it with something that's like, unique and conceptual and kind of like leans into the limited timeness of it, if that's a word, um. Um, yeah, it produces more cash, which is really cool.
Mia Fileman 5:02
So something a little bit more compelling than please buy my shit.
Lucy Bloomfield 5:06
Exactly. It's 40% off, like, bargain, right?
Mia Fileman 5:10
Yeah, is a discount always involved, Lucy?
Lucy Bloomfield 5:15
No. So there's basically, like, four different discounts that I like, sorry, four different offers that I like running, and I recommend minimum people have one of these a year to you can definitely do a double on one if you start adding in more than four. Like the doubles don't really appear as much, but these are kind of the offers that I recommend. One is your stock standard, like price drop, which is your classic, yeah, discounting methodology, I generally recommend to clients that you put these on moments, timelines, periods where people expect slash demand, and if you don't give it, they will go elsewhere. So Black Friday.
Mia Fileman 5:55
Yeah. Literally, I'm on board. I'm on board. Yep, yeah.
Lucy Bloomfield 5:58
And then so your second like stock standard discounting period that's expected by the consumers is end of financial year. Some people don't want to do it, in which case the opposite of that, or the other offer that I recommend to people putting in is a historical date or campaign where you increase your prices. So instead of a price drop in June, it's actually a price rise after June, and it kind of like behaves in the same way, from a cash and performance perspective, to do that. And then the last two offers that you can do is obviously a new product launch and then cycling an old product, so controlling people's access to it and moving it on a like a yearly cycle.
Mia Fileman 6:40
Amazing. Okay, I've got so many questions. But before we, before we do that, I'd like to sort of take it back a bit and understand why campaigns like, why have you made this your thing?
Lucy Bloomfield 6:52
Oh, absolutely obsessed. Do you want to go right back?
Mia Fileman 6:55
How low can you go?
Lucy Bloomfield 7:01
So I started a skincare business when I was 23 and didn't know anything about marketing. I'd come from coding and cyber security and tech and Frank Body 2015 like classic marketing campaigns and studying them is actually the reason that that skincare business did really well. I took that company from zero to 10,000 customers in 18 months, using only $7,000 in ad spend. And it was because of marketing campaigns, and it was because of studying businesses like Frank Body and the girls at Willow and Blake that I was like, able to wrap my head around it and get it moving. So the obsession started there, and then I've just seen it work with so many businesses that I honestly think it's the most cost effective and effective way to grow a business online.
Mia Fileman 7:51
Oh my goodness, couldn't agree more. Yay. Now we've got two people talking about the value of campaigns. I love this. This is so good. Okay. So going back to your sales focused approach to campaigns, all of that sounds really good to me, but then my question is, well, don't you need an existing audience for those four offers?
Lucy Bloomfield 8:16
Yes, you do need that, I would say. And this is really what has attracted me to your work. I've, I guess I've been very fortunate in the sense that I have worked with a lot of businesses that have had those databases, but I have grown a couple of businesses from the ground up using them, but it's definitely very grindy at the start, and 'not performing', because you just don't have any resources to pull from. So this, I feel definitely from the stuff that I've seen you do with your clients, and just the content that I see you putting out on LinkedIn makes me appreciate more like brand awareness and lead generation, because you absolutely need it. You can't really run sales campaigns every month.
Mia Fileman 9:04
You heard it from her. I didn't have to say anything. I just sit here, be quiet and let the guests do all the heavy lifting today. Yes, absolutely. So my approach to campaigns is sort of same, same, but different in that we design a campaign based on your most pressing objective. And so yes, your most pressing objective might be money through the door, but unless you have an audience, then that becomes the most pressing objective, because we've got no one that we can remarket to. So I generally would advise that we start with a brand awareness campaign to get people to know who the heck you are. Start building that audience, whether that's the audience on social media platforms, whether that's an audience on email or just Google traffic, and then if you're a service based business, lead generation campaign is really important to get people onto your email list. And to start that, know, like and trust journey, which is so important, because the average life cycle from when a service based brand first interacts with the customer to converting that customer can be anywhere from, you know, four weeks to three years. Whereas with an E-commerce brand, I can see something come up on Instagram and be like, I want that, and 15 minutes later it is added to cart. That's not how service based businesses generally transact. The customer journey is longer, and so we need more happening throughout the funnel in order to nurture those audiences. And then once you have a database and you have a audience, then we can remarket to them with the sales campaign. And my approach to campaigns is that one campaign, one objective, which sounds like exactly the same as yours.
Lucy Bloomfield 10:57
Hallelujah, yeah, I'm so glad you said that, because, like, it's, I always have to help clients and students, like, strip their campaigns, because they always want to do all of these things. And it's like, okay, well, like a block of marketing can't produce multiple objectives, and if it does, all of them are going to be less than what you want. Yeah, definitely that. The other thing that I thought was really interesting, and I hope it's okay if I bring it up, because it really stuck with me in one of the conversations we had, like, a couple of weeks ago, was about your retreat. Are you able to talk about the like, how you use campaigns for like, awareness and lead generation, but then how, when you finally launched that retreat, it was gone.
Mia Fileman 11:37
Yeah. So it's sold out in two days, which is great, but I had a captive audience. It's a member only retreat, so I'm co-hosting the retreat with my best business friend, Fiona Johnson. We collaborate a lot together. She has a membership where she covers money and mindset, money psychology and business strategy. And of course, I've got Marketing Circle, which covers marketing, and so it's actually a really natural fit. And we found that we have quite a few members that overlap in both of our memberships, so we thought we would co-host the retreat. And because now Lucy, my one, number one objective in my business is retention. It's not actually attraction. I'm not looking for that many new customers. I'm just looking to keep the ones that I have. It has been a really interesting focus for me in terms of, like, what can I do? What can I offer to keep my members happy, to keep them staying in the membership, because they can cancel at any time. And so we thought, let's make this a member only retreat. So the only way that you can get access is if you are an existing member of Marketing Circle or Good Money Club. And then what we did with this, which I think was a bit clever, was that on the Friday, we announced that the retreat was going to be going on sale 9am Monday, we shared the sales page that they could read up all about it, but they weren't able to purchase it until 9am Monday. And so it gave them a little bit of consideration time. And then I heard from the people who were coming that they set alarms, which I mean, like, seriously, like, how cool is this? And yeah, in two days it was gone, we sold about, like seven of the 10 spots on in about 15 minutes, and then the last couple of spots came out the next two days. So, yeah, having that audience, having that in built community, is so important, like, and I didn't even, I didn't even post this to social media. I mean, I to my private Facebook group. I did.
Lucy Bloomfield 13:45
I just found that so interesting, because you're absolutely right. There is, like, a really big difference between E-commerce businesses and service provision or consulting companies, like how they can use campaigns. And what I've been thinking about it literally ever since we we talked about it, because obviously they're paying customers, and there's that, like, transactional nature and trust in that relationship already. But it made me think about the body and the volume of work that you've done with brand awareness and lead generation, and then the nurturing on that to like actually have that become a reality, and then you see, at the same time, so many people advertising retreats on Facebook ads, and it's just like, hon, it's not gonna work like that.
Mia Fileman 14:31
Yeah, yeah. I feel like people misunderstand who is the person that's going to come to your retreat. It's not a stranger of the internet that's going to want to come and spend three days with you and three and a half thousand dollars to come to your retreat. It's someone already in your funnel, that you've already worked with, that wants more of what you offer. So you know, it's the it's the easiest, hardest thing to do. Don't you think Lucy knowing? Exactly who your customer is.
Lucy Bloomfield 15:02
Oh yeah. I'm still, I'm still thinking about it.
Mia Fileman 15:10
Okay. Anything else about your specific approach to sales campaigns that you would like to mention?
Lucy Bloomfield 15:19
Yeah, another thing, I've gone deep into the Mia Fileman Rabbit Hole the last couple of weeks, just preparing for this, because I wanted to make sure that I was bringing the right vibe and the right content and everything.
Mia Fileman 15:30
Look Lucy, I found out the other day that we have a top 10 marketing podcast in Denmark. You definitely, definitely need to bring it for the show. Okay, I don't know a single Danish word, but if you're from Denmark, You're a legend. Thank you.
Lucy Bloomfield 15:47
Welcome. We love you.
Mia Fileman 15:50
with the W and the what's the two dots on the O?
Lucy Bloomfield 15:55
Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about. I don't know what it's called.
Mia Fileman 15:57
So Lucy's prepared for this chat. Just for you.
Lucy Bloomfield 16:00
Immediately prepared. like in to the highest degree. So one thing that stuck out to me about your marketing in the last month, particularly was something that I wasn't expecting to see, because I often have to fight Junior marketers when I'm consulting on this concept, which is reusing marketing that worked before. So recently, in me, is marketing. If you haven't been following along, there's been, I can't remember what the campaign is actually called, but it's like the past stories, like the story of the agency. What's that campaign called? Lessons in falling That's right. And like going through it, I can totally see why you would bring it back. So one of my philosophies in sales campaigns is we want to design a campaign that becomes like a part of the fabric of your business, and to get the stacking effect happening every single year, you shouldn't be remaking that marketing like I'm not saying. Don't add more marketing in and make it more dialed in and specific or elevated visually, like whatever you feel, there's an opportunity to improve. But like, generally speaking, if it worked last year, literally do it again and take it to a new level. And seeing you do that, I was just like, Ah, I'm not the only one that thinks this perfect.
Mia Fileman 17:18
Yeah, I would love to take full credit for replaying that campaign, but it was actually Fi Johnson that told me to do it, and that's the value in having people in your inner circle that can see the forest from the trees for you, they can be like, Why aren't you re sharing this? This is gold. And I'm like, Oh, is it still relevant? I have to update some of the tiles. Okay, do that then.
Lucy Bloomfield 17:41
Yeah, the deeper level emotional connection. It was so interesting. I'm like, waiting for the next one kind of thing. That's what I loved about it.
Mia Fileman 17:50
Oh, thank you so much for the feedback. It worked really hard for us the first time around, which was four years ago, to build that initial audience. I'm a big subscriber to the ideology of 1000 true fans like you do not need 100,000 social media followers, and, you know, a massive email database if you have 1000 true fans who will evangelise on your behalf. And that kind of campaign this like really stripping it down to my core and being really vulnerable and talking about things that I don't often talk about, like postnatal anxiety and someone stealing from me, and just all the things allowed me to build a really deep connection with people in the beginning. And so it started to build some of those 1000 true fans, and then I'm seeing the exact same thing happen four years later, with people reaching out saying this really spoke to me. I also was an agency owner. I've also had a team member steal from me, and yeah, it's just that shared trauma. We can we can bond over.
Lucy Bloomfield 18:57
I was wondering. One of my questions about that campaign was, Do you think that, like, if someone's listening to this and they are at that start of their journey, I guess in the audience building, do you recommend someone running like a tell all, almost like kind of that to connect with people?
Mia Fileman 19:17
Yeah, I don't ever believe in tell all this. I mean, I know, I don't know if I should say this or not, but there is a lot about me that no one's ever going to know about. So I'm not willing to talk about, you know, like, you know, relationship with my husband, what shitty things my kid did today. I this is just not something that I'm prepared to talk about on the internet. My relationship with my mother like, you know, we just there are some no-go zones. I definitely think that a storytelling campaign is always a good idea, always, especially if you are your target audience, or you can you want to relate to your target audience on that level, my target audience do have, or are considering getting staff, are mums who are running businesses, are agency directors are, you know, trying to have had, you know, complicated births and complicated birth stories. So all of this was just really, it resonated with them. I wasn't talking about flying business class and then going to Palm Springs for a retreat, like it was relatable content to my target audience, and so I definitely recommend a storytelling campaign. I think what holds people back is that they say things like, but I can't write as well as you, Mia. I'm not a writer, and it's like, I wrote it and then I heavily edited it, and four years later, I was like, Holy shit, this is such bad writing. So like, the only way to get better with writing is just to keep doing it. And so like, even I look back at what I wrote four years ago, the first version of lessons in falling, and it's not as good as what I wrote three weeks ago.
Lucy Bloomfield 21:00
I love that. Yeah. It definitely inspired me, because I feel I've been building my businesses, of like a very I don't even know what you would call the approach. It was basically run, run Facebook ads to a lead magnet, call the leads, sell them, put them on the database, email them every week, like I was delivering campaigns, but I wasn't doing campaigns. And coming into your sphere and learning about you and like watching you market as well, has really inspired me, because, like, a decade in marketing, there's a lot of things that I could, I could talk about. So yeah, that campaign has just like, I'm like, I'm gonna do it.
Mia Fileman 21:42
Marketing is a team sport. Join Marketing Circle and set sail with us as a member, you get access to all our programs, including the beloved Campaign Classroom, our proprietary Campaign Builder, and one on one, walking meetings with me, plus you'll be part of a tight-knit community of savvy entrepreneurs and marketers wearing all the hats just like you designed for those who want to build standout brands, our strategic and creative marketing membership is your ticket to future proofing your business, no fluff, no false promises, just real, actionable strategies that work apply To join Marketing Circle today, and let's navigate those marketing stormy seas together.
Mia Fileman 22:26
One of the ways that I like to look at marketing in general is this idea of brand marketing versus performance marketing. It seems like the way that you approach campaigns is more on the performance side, yes, like we've built this audience now let's extract the cash from them, which I'm all on board for, right? Because, like otherwise, we're just this is a hobby, a very expensive one, that takes all of our time. I'm much more on the brand side, though, because I know that people are prepared to pay more for the same thing if they respect and appreciate that brand that you are going to build a more dedicated audience to then remarket to if you have a strong brand. So like everything that I do is much more skewed to the to the brand side of marketing, which is that the money will come once you've earned their trust.
Lucy Bloomfield 23:19
Which I needed to hear, because I've been in e-com for 10 years.
Mia Fileman 23:24
Yeah, the answer is both. Honestly, it's both. And I feel like brand marketing is safer because it's like, great. All I need to do is, you know, create engaging, emotionally driven, fun content, but then you also do need to do the performance side like right now. Now that lessons in falling is wrapping up. You will have seen Lucy that I'm in sales campaign mode, filling 10 spots into Marketing Circles, so I don't have a huge sales goal. So I'm running what I'm calling a 'quick and dirty' campaign, which is 100% sales focused, and every post is salesy, every post is promotional. And I'm 100% okay with that, because I feel like I spend all the other months of the year doing the brand, building and connecting and relatable and delivering value, and, you know, starting conversations, and now it's like, okay, but also, I need the money in the bank to keep this business going.
Lucy Bloomfield 24:29
Yeah, do you want to be a part of it? Because I've done so much for you. I talk about this as well. I'm really glad you brought that up, yeah. Because I think about like, so I think my definition of marketing was that, sorry, a campaign, was that it was a block of marketing. But one thing that I talk about a lot in Double Orders is that it's like marketing has a function, and it's kind of unfortunately, going back to algebra in high school, but like, if you you have to move through different functions of marketing, because as a as we both know, running sales campaigns all the time is just like, it's not, yeah, it's not it, but it kind of sounds like your business almost has that cycle where you have, like, periods where you're, like, very much focused on that brand lead generation, and then you'll switch, which I think is completely fine. Like, I mean, yeah, as you said, like you do so much for your audience. Like, how about, how about you come in be a part of my world?
Mia Fileman 25:18
Yeah? Yeah. I mean, I just feel like at some point you have to ask for the sale. You have to say, Okay, I'm ready. I'm ready. You know, we can have fun on social media as much as you like. But ultimately, I need to hit this particular objective now. The way that I do it, and I'll link this in the show notes, is I have a marketing timeline and I plan out all my campaigns for the year based on the different objectives that I have. So I will run at least one brand awareness campaign a year. I will run three/four sales campaigns in a year, and I will run a couple of lead generation campaigns to just keep building my email list, and then I look at the calendar, and I actually plot those on the calendar, and I will never run two campaigns at once. Yes, one thing at a time, one thing at a time. So when you do that, you're just like, oh goodness, there's not that many months left in the year, right? Because you're just like, well, I need to do brand awareness in this month, and then I need a little break, and then it's school holiday, so I'm not going to run a campaign then. And then it's Black Friday. I'm going to leave that well alone, because I'm not an E-commerce brand. And then when you look at it holistically, like that, God, I hate that word, but like, you know, when you look at it on that macro level, you see that you do need to plan it out in advance, because then you run out of time, and you're like, oh, it's I've spent three months not doing anything, and now I don't have enough time to run a brand awareness campaign, a lead generation campaign and a conversion campaign, and then, As a result, your results are going to be affected by that. So do that in advance to plot out your year based on all the different objectives that you have in your business.
Lucy Bloomfield 27:09
What do you recommend for people that are and I'm secretly asking this for myself, because I don't have a library of campaigns that I've like produced in previous years, like, how many campaigns should someone be running at the start?
Mia Fileman 27:27
I mean, one is better than none, and I don't know what do you how many small businesses? I guess you work with, slightly bigger businesses than I do, but generally, my customers have never run a campaign before, before coming to work with me, and so like getting them to do the first one is already, like, double.
Lucy Bloomfield 27:47
It's a lot.
Mia Fileman 27:50
But after we've done the first one, then I think three to four campaigns a year is would be ideal. But, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Not every campaign has to be big, expensive. You know, planned for 12 weeks require a big production investment like quick and dirty. Let's do it.
Lucy Bloomfield 28:15
I love that. Yeah, three to four. That's really interesting, because I would say one to two sales campaigns, and then, if you've got the capacity, a couple of other campaigns can. What I've seen is a couple of other campaigns can. They won't get you doubles, but they will get you, like, good performance. So that's really interesting.
Mia Fileman 28:39
Three to four includes brand awareness and lead generation. So you've got two sales campaigns, and then you've got your okay, well, I need to make a focused effort to build my audience. We've already spoken about this, but I'd love to ask you directly if you have any actionable tips for the listener to get started with sales campaigns.
Lucy Bloomfield 29:02
Yeah, so I fundamentally believe in cycle-syncing your business. So there's a couple of different layers that you can cycle-sync your business on. Obviously, I'm going to assume most people here listening are women. That's kind of the vibe that I got. So the obvious one is syncing it to your cycle if you're pre menopausal. That's like, very, very important. So what we've found over the last 10 years is there is, especially if you've got E-commerce. But a lot like other businesses, you can sometimes see the pattern, 100% e-commerce businesses. You can see the hormonal cycle in the sales stats with businesses that have like predominantly women customers. So we track that and we sync, we cycle-sync the campaigns we like, place them so that things are done considerately. I don't know about everyone else, but there are certain times of the month where. I just don't like want you to talk to me. Just don't. And so once, once I found this. Because actually what drove all of this was I got interested in building a business that didn't grind me to a pulp every single month. And then I found the the stats in the my customers and my clients businesses. And I was like, holy crap. So we can cycle campaigns to them, and then the other thing that I would say is, I'm very big on following consumer spending trends. So one thing that I do immediately, as soon as I walk into any business is I look at the cash over a 12 month period, and I lay that line that January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, line against the past previous years sales. And though lines, generally speaking, unless we're talking about 2020, are pretty much the same every single year. And so you can really, like, get massive impact by timing your sales campaigns in alignment with your businesses cycle. And those are my hacks.
Mia Fileman 31:06
I love that. That's exactly what we did FMCG, yeah, that's exactly what we did in FMCG. You don't compare to last month. You compare to year to date of last year, yeah, for sure, because there's businesses are cyclical. You are such an anomaly. Lucy. You are like nuts and bolts, money, cash and then intuitive cycle. Let's make sure we work around your energetic levels. It's beautiful. Love it. You don't have to be one thing. Can be lots of things.
Lucy Bloomfield 31:40
Oh, my God, thank you so much. That's like the highest compliment I think I've ever received.
Mia Fileman 31:47
Yeah, the highest compliment I've ever received is you are exactly in person who you are online. I was like, Oh, that is such a nice compliment.
Lucy Bloomfield 31:58
I was flawed. I was like, she gonna be like this in person. And then I was like, Oh, she's better.
Mia Fileman 32:08
Goodness, the flattery will get you everywhere, girl. All right, talk to me about creative. Okay, so we've got these four offers. But what is this wrapping? Give me some examples from what you've done. By the way, sorry, I will get back to that question. My absolute favorite thing in the world to eat is a croissant. Oh, and my absolute favorite place in the world to eat it is Brunetti.
Mia Fileman 32:42
I'm fangirling hard over the fact that they are your client. What? What?
Lucy Bloomfield 32:50
I know. I know. I know. I'm still dying on the inside every time I say it.
Mia Fileman 32:55
Can we talk about it?
Lucy Bloomfield 32:56
Definitely, definitely. So I just want to give like a massive shout out to John Dwyer from Smashed Avo, who introduced me to Brunetti. He is, legitimately, I think, one of the best, most, like highest integrity men in the digital marketing space. He, he's just a great person. And he, when we were in a group coaching program together. He saw my introduction, and then he immediately reached out, interviewed me, set up a meeting with Brunetti, and that's how they became a client. So with them like and this is, I think, probably pretty specific to running campaigns for businesses that produce their own products is actually extremely complicated because there's only so much like for example, we have a Christmas campaign coming out for them soon. Stay tuned. There's only so much panettone that you can produce, because the art of making panettone is complicated. It takes 12 hours to make this cake, and it has to hang upside down for part of that. So these businesses like they'll have production capacity, things will have thresholds and ceilings that we can't, can't go past. And so the campaign structure and how it rolled out actually has to be uniquely designed to the business's production constraints.
Mia Fileman 34:26
now you're starting to turn me on. Yep.
Lucy Bloomfield 34:31
Um, so what was really cool, like, I would say we take, like, a base template, so your usual, like setup phase, where you're changing the website, your your height phase, your launch phase, your last chance phase, and then your cleanup where you're, like, returning the website and just like cleaning the campaign away. So that's like pretty basic structure or rollout of communication. But when we work with these bigger companies like we have to basically design a game or a structure that the. The customers want to play with that actually protects the company's production capacity. And so the game that we played last year was really fun. We were selling out, like in under an hour of panettone, and it was like a weekly Monday drop, and it was so fast that we couldn't even get the panettone into the stores. So what I have found is that people respect production expertise and the limitations of what a business can do. And when you pull those out into the front of the marketing and make it like kind of a game for people to interact with, it performs better. I don't know how else to explain it. Hopefully that makes sense.
Mia Fileman 35:35
because it speaks to the artisanal nature of the product, and people are like, well, it's gonna taste 100 times better now, but I understand what goes into it, that it needed to hang upside down. That's obviously gonna taste better when it hits my mouth.
Lucy Bloomfield 35:48
Then you tell all your friends that you know all these details, and it's just like, Oh, look how educated I am.
Mia Fileman 35:56
Yeah. Okay, so what did the creative look like for that then?
Lucy Bloomfield 35:59
Yeah. So we had a really amazing creative team. We had them in the back end of the Brunetti facility. So I hope one day that I can convince them to sell tours, because it's honestly a spectacle, what they're able to do back there. It is a huge company, and they are making all of that stuff by hand. So people, trays, cakes hanging upside down, trucks, deliveries, inventories, like, we brought all of that in, and we got people to guess and engage with like, how do you make a panettone? Why is it a panettone? There's other Italian cakes that are like panettone, but they're not panettone because they don't hang upside down. So just like all these production secrets, bringing them to the front, that was really a big part of the creative.
Mia Fileman 36:48
Yeah. So good. I love that. I think that, if I was working for a brand like that, where, you know, because they're always busy, if you go to Lygon Street, or even at the airport, Melbourne Airport, they have now a Brunetti there. It's always busy. If I had a brand like that, and I've had this in the past, where I was at Vegemite, where you don't need to work that hard to to make sales, I would be like, Okay, so what's in our portfolio that we could do better on is it cakes like, made to order custom birthday cakes? And we would design a campaign around that, because panatoni sells. So then it's like, or is it advocatory? Is it something else, like, what is it that we can because not everything in your business is going to be performing at, you know, 85% so what part of the portfolio do we need to focus on? And then I would build a campaign for that.
Lucy Bloomfield 37:43
I love that. And so would you do that in the like, Christmas swing, or would you do that outside?
Mia Fileman 37:48
Well, if Christmas is already massive for them, because it's Christmas, then I'd be like, Okay, what's March doing? Oh, March. It sucks. Let's, let's run something in March to get it to be in the stratosphere of Christmas, like, what can we do with because that's a low month, and then try to get your lower months to become your high months, and your high months to be even higher. And that's how you grow the whole brand realistically.
Mia Fileman 38:19
Oh, my God, I've loved this chat. People are going to be like, this is the nerdiest thing you've ever done. Can I be really, like, vulnerable with you for a minute? So like, when, okay, I've been running campaigns for two decades, right? But it's been a really long time since I ran them for you know, Maybelline and so forth. I've worked in small business for the last two decades. I've had two kids. There's always a little bit of an imposter syndrome around. Like, is she going to figure out that I don't know anything about campaigns? Like, you know, you bring another campaign specialist over, and you're like, what if I've got this all wrong?
Lucy Bloomfield 39:00
Yeah, right, relatable. That's why I find that you ghosted me. Because I was like, You know what? She's probably gonna call me out.
Mia Fileman 39:08
it's so silly, so silly. We know what we're doing, yeah, yeah. Okay, so that's my vulnerable share. I honestly was like, what if you were to tell me that's not a campaign, Mia?
Lucy Bloomfield 39:23
Well, I was like, I was feeling a little bit insecure, because I was like, Man, I don't do brand awareness and lead generation like, I changed my business in June 2024 from a retainer where, like, I'm always on and I'm always making campaigns to Hey, call me when it's peak trade season, and otherwise, don't talk to me. Okay, I know, I know the work that I want to do. And so I felt pretty insecure because I was like, I'm not doing I'm not doing lead gen, I'm not doing brand awareness. You have obviously got a knack for that. Like, look at the retreat sell out and stuff like that. Like crap. What if there's a box of stuff that I'm like, completely wrong on?
Mia Fileman 39:59
No, I just think you're much, much smarter than I am. No, seriously, in terms of the fact that you're like, I can fix this one problem, whereas me, like an absolute idiot, is like, I'll fix all the problems in your business. Like, yes, well, I can help you build the audience. I can help you nurture the audience. I can help you convert the audience and then, like, it is such a big job, as opposed to just being like, you know what my secret weapon is, doubling your sales periods. I love love, love that focus and that just that niche, almost, where you're just like, don't talk to me outside of those periods. That's yeah, I could learn from that actually. Because I'm like, yeah, no, I do strategy, I do messaging, I do email marketing, because I am a generalist marketer, and so, you know, I can do it. But just because you can do something, Lucy, doesn't mean you should.
Lucy Bloomfield 40:55
I'm tapping on it right now, for those guys that are listening, I'm like, yeah, yeah, you don't need to do everything. Lucy, yeah, totally.
Mia Fileman 41:02
I don't coach you yet, Lucy, but like if I did, I would say to you, is there something that you feel that is broken with your existing business where you're just not getting enough people who want to double their revenue in their sales periods? That doesn't sound like it's going to be a problem that you need to go fishing for all the other stuff. That's
Lucy Bloomfield 41:23
That's true. I feel like, from a from a body of work standpoint, I have a lot of client stories, and that's great. A lot of them are from a coaching business, which was like, more than three years ago now. So I want to have a body of work that is like, this is what it looks like, but these are the results that it can get for businesses. And I don't have that right now, so I think, yeah. And the other thing as well, and I don't know if you have this, it's one thing to do it for big, big companies, and I'm extremely proud and happy and grateful to be working with something someone like Brunetti, because they're just incredible, and it's another thing to market for yourself. So I'm like finding my heart and my passion for marketing through creating these campaigns for myself.
Mia Fileman 42:15
Yeah, this is a huge symptom of marketers, which is why I work with so many marketers, because they're so busy marketing other brands that they never actually get to marketing their own. And then, as a result, they're making their clients literally millions of dollars, and they're, you know, still fighting for every sale or sending out proposals and hearing crickets, whereas when, even as a marketer, you market yourself better, then we get to yes faster. People are like, Absolutely, I'm signing your proposal today. Can't wait to work with you. Look what you did with this client. Look what you did with that client. That client can't stop talking about you. So it's a it's an immediate yes. And then when we're converting faster, then we've got more time for marketing. So it's like, it's self fulfilling, right? We get this nice snowball effect. If you're spending all your time sending proposals here in crickets, following up, this is all just a huge drain.
Lucy Bloomfield 43:13
yeah, and that's, I think that's for me, why the retreat story really stuck out. Because I know, because I've sold retreats in my coaching business as, like, you know, an entry or an add on to the program that you have bought. How hard it is to sell one. And I was, like, the value of campaigns, marketing, brand awareness, lead generation and the nurturing.
Mia Fileman 43:33
yeah, for sure. Well, I could have spoken to you for the next 45 minutes. It was such a pleasure to talk to you. Is there anything that you would like to leave us on.
Lucy Bloomfield 43:43
on cycle sync? Your business, girls, it makes such a big difference. And we found, okay, this is kind of Woo, and I'm so sorry to drop it at the end of the episode, but if you put your campaign on the new moon, it produces more.
Mia Fileman 43:58
Oh, do you have the like stats to back that up?
Lucy Bloomfield 44:01
I do there's, there's two things. So there's a farmer's almanac that talks about pop line. So above the ground, vegetable growth is twice as much. In the new moon, around the full moon, you get under the ground, vegetable growth twice as much. And then there is a book that's passed around Wall Street investors, which is, definitely don't sell your shares and your stocks on full moon, because you'll make twice as much if you sell it on New Moon. So I read those two things, and I was like, let's see. And it works.
Mia Fileman 44:31
Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah. Shout out to my friend Leticia Undrach. She's going to absolutely love this. I'll make sure she goes and listens to this part of the of the chat, all of it because it was great. Such a pleasure. Lucy, let's do it again soon. Pick a new topic and do it all over again. It was so nice to get to hear how you approach campaigns. And I think it's really, really clever.
Lucy Bloomfield 44:54
Thank you.
Mia Fileman 44:56
Thank you. You listened right up until the end. So. Why not hit that subscribe button and keep the good marketing rolling. Podcast reviews are like warm hugs, and they're also the best way to support a small business. You can connect with me, Mia Fileman on Instagram or LinkedIn and feel free to send me a message. I'm super friendly.
