The luxury market is a goal that many of us business owners pursue – as it offers great opportunities for generating beautiful, bespoke work that we are proud of, and becoming known and respected in all the right circles.
If you are looking to position yourself as a premium brand selling luxury products or high-end services, here are some of the key mistakes to avoid!
In this article (clickable links below):
- First Mistake: Expecting budget customers / suppliers / work to bring you high end leads
- Second Mistake: Offering your clients a non-bespoke and ineffective sales experience
- Third Mistake: Not understanding your target luxury client avatar
- Fourth Mistake: Having a brand that is inconsistent
- Fifth Mistake: Not doing your homework
First Mistake: Expecting budget customers / suppliers / work to bring you high end leads
The most important thing to remember is that like attracts like – and so if you are consistently working with clients with lower budgets (or other vendors that target low budget audiences), chances are they are recommending you and referring you to clients with similar needs. Avoiding this mistake means widening your supplier network and your client circle, and investing time and money into networking opportunities to form new relationships.
Related to this is the idea that you should ONLY be marketing and showcasing work that truly represents the luxury work you want to do more of. Your portfolio, website, and online presence will attract similar work in the future, so be selective! If you feel like you only have budget work to show – now is the time to uplevel. While you wait for your first opportunity to create high end work, consider investing in a photoshoot that will align your brand with luxury and help you shift how your brand is seen in the market.
Second Mistake: Offering your clients a non-bespoke and ineffective sales experience
Remember that clients investing in luxury expect not only the product or service, but the whole brand and sales experience to be seamless and exclusive. Are you including premium, special touches in your materials, packaging, and proposals? Are there ways you can make the client experience more customised and personal to them? Many luxury brands have beautifully designed templates they invest time and money into, and then adapt these to their clients to give them that bespoke experience they are looking for.
You need to be easy to do business with. Are you appearing when clients search for those luxury keywords? Is your sales process making it easy to buy from you, or is it causing confusion or frustration? One key mistake we see businesses making is not optimising and streamlining their sales process. Luxury clients expect better experiences, fast response times, easy-to-navigate FAQs, and elegant examples of your services and products so they can decide if you are right for them – quickly. Make sure you are investing in PR, SEO, branding, and website design that is optimised towards converting leads to sales.
Third Mistake: Not understanding your target luxury client avatar
Identifying your brand’s ideal client or target audience can be a really important exercise – but just because you’ve done this once, years ago, doesn’t mean you won’t need to revisit this again. If you subscribe to this kind of thinking, these kinds of client “avatars” are useful and can become outdated, so it’s really important to ensure that you have an up to date vision of your luxury client demographics’ pain points and desires. One very foundational mistake that we see businesses making is not having a brand voice and personality tailored to the audience they are trying to target and serve. It’s always a very fruitful exercise to revisit this annually, and think back to which client types in the previous year generated the most revenue for you, were most satisfied, or perhaps offered you the most rewarding work.
Fourth Mistake: Having a brand that is inconsistent
In order to win over a luxury client, you need to inspire trust, look and feel reputable, and align yourself with their values. Without high-quality branding and website design, your offering will get lost in a sea of mismatched graphics, fonts, and colours. Once you’ve created a brand that reflects your standing in the luxury market, your marketing needs to be consistent through all touch points too: all packaging, collateral, social media graphics, and your website design of course.
Alongside clean and consistent messaging, you also need to be thinking of ways that your luxury brand can still feel human and relatable. Your brand is a living, breathing thing: it needs constant curating, updating, and expanding to make sure you are reaching your full potential in the luxury market and captivating clients for all the right reasons.
The Business Allotment owner Jodie Newman understands the consistency of those brand touch points when she is working with clients to help them grow with a creative approach. “I map all the touchpoints of where my clients interact with the Allotment, and work hard to build the right brand experiences. And these can be small elements of the bigger brand picture – such as an on-brand colour and a plant for my Zoom backdrop, to sending out creative goody bags to clients so they have a physical representation of my brand when we work virtually.”
Fifth Mistake: Not doing your homework
Related to a few of the points above, another mistake we see is brands not realising that part of the journey into the luxury market means having a bird’s eye view of the industry. You need to have a good understanding of who is collaborating with whom, which influencers your competitors are marketing through, what campaigns are going viral, and what trends are moving your audience at any given time. Your strategy for content creation needs to be dynamic and educated, which comes from monitoring and becoming intimately familiar with the marketplace you operate in.
The key here is to examine the changes you spot and adapt to them, while staying true to the brand values and core principles at the heart of what you do.
We hope this advice has been helpful and given you some food for thought on how to position yourself as the premium, luxury brand that you are. If you are looking for support in elevating your branding or marketing, don’t hesitate to get in touch! We offer marketing and branding power hours during which we can review all your customer touchpoints, your unique voice, and brand-specific ways that you can learn from the mistakes we’ve touched on above.
Until next time,
