Content marketing and Facebook Ads with influencer turned eCommerce business Sweet Hearts Hair (episode 146)

19th February by Chloë Thomas

Alan Belshaw is the Managing Director of Sweet Hearts Hair, a hair design company who provide both tutorials and the products to create the right look. They launched in Sept 2015 and now doing £250k per year growing 86% year on year.

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About the business

eCommerce Business Structure – Online Only
Product Range Scale – niche
On WooCommerce
Located in the UK, sell globally

Getting Started

While Alan started off as a wind turbine technician building turbines offshore, his wife Beth created a small hair tutorial-based Facebook page, hoping to move into creating parties. She created videos on Facebook, and the growth numbers accelerated. Although they had tried to create a small, local-based business, they quickly realized there were bigger opportunities and accidentally became a country-wide influencer. They decided to test their audience to see if it was a convertible audience, and when conversions went well, they began looking into further products. Their first product was a hair detangler, which is still their number one seller and has about 4,000 5-star reviews on Facebook. Now they have about 35 products total.

Listen to learn why the most convertible tool you have is free content, how free content leads to having customers who trust you, and how designing content and products specifically for your customers meets their demand.

The Team

Sweethearts Hair currently has a press manager, two pick and pack team members, two editorial team members, and Alan and Beth, who started and run the business.

Content Creation

It’s important that you’re creating shareable content that is engaging for your particular customer. If your customer sees your content, engages with it, and is willing to share it, that’s it. You’ll know when you get your content right, because your customers will drive that.

To cater content to your customer, you must understand your customer, create content for that customer, then put it on the right platform for your customer.

Listen to learn some of the pros and cons of the Youtube and Facebook platforms.

Facebook Advertising

Although Alan sees value in organic content, he also invests in Facebook advertisements. Organic content isn’t quantifiable. With advertisements, they can break down the analytics of the audience he created from one video, then create a secondary audience off of that, then create a lookalike with all the characteristics of that audience. There’s so much information and so much they can do with it. Learning from the analytics helps them understand their audience better, which enables them to shape content in a more defined way specific to their customers.

Listen to hear an example of how analytics has helped Sweethearts Hair learn about their customers.

Most Awesome Thing Right Now

The most awesome thing right now is the realization that they have the ability in their hands to quantify what their sales are going to be. The sky is the limit for what they can achieve, provided that they stay focused on what they’re trying to achieve, that is, to build their brand, build free content, and work out what the brand is costing them to market. It’s so empowering.

eCommerce Book Top Tip

AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness by Gary Vaynerchuk
The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick

eCommerce Traffic Top Tip

Content catered directly to your audience on the platform you understand the best.

You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…

Tool Top Tip

AdEspresso
The Pulse

Growth Top Tip

Study your customer.
Define them as closely as you possibly can. Understand what they look like, who they are, and where they go. Test the information you get. Get your analytics back, strip it down, retest it until you know what works, then scale it. If it scales, do it again on a bigger scale.