12. Second Consultation

Attending the second consultation means we are really going into the end of this project. Which is kind of a pity because I felt that we are only just starting to grasp the fundamentals of running a business. There is still so much we can do, that is not possible in this 6 month span.

This also meant that for this last month before the business showcase, we really need to step up our game and solve the key problem: sales.

Every business has their own pain points. Sometimes its the production, sometimes its the sales. Unfortunately, our business has problems in both. I have listed enough problems in production from the past few blogs, and throughout the past few months, I would say we have solved them quite well.

But the art of selling has been eluding us since the beginning. Mostly it is because terrariums are not a necessity, in fact it is probably near the bottom of the list of things one needs in their life. How then, do we market ourselves to entice people into buying from us?

Marketing

Our social media marketing up till now has been a little... mild I would say? We only had Facebook and Instagram, and only on Instagram had we been truly active. At the start, we only posted pictures of random flowers taken by Aaron, as we had no products to show. When some of the products were made, it was already quite late, like over 3 months since the start of this project. In order to entice more people to follow us, we dared not post any explicit caption that calls for action, something like "Buy now!" There is only a small sentence in the page description asking for DMs if one is interested in any of our products.

Throughout the consultation, our MIE senior Lili gave us a few great insights on social media marketing.

The first thing of course, is to start the call for action. Having enough followers, the time is ripe to be more aggressive. If we do not take this first step, customers will never come knocking at our doors. Below are 2 posts, before and after the consultation.

The second suggestion is to pump money into our posts. Paid advertising will speed things up a lot, as opposed to growing organically. This is something we had wanted to do for a while now, but none of our posts really stand out, so we were actually waiting for an opportunity to post something that is different from our normal terrariums. The good news is that opportunity is only one week away - National Day. I will talk more about this paid post in the next blog.

The third suggestion was to expand our selling channels from Instagram and Carousell to other platforms like Lazada and Shopee. Unfortunately, we did think of that, and felt that it really would not help much. It seems that searching 'Terrarium' and related key words on these 2 platforms yield almost nothing, unlike Carousell. The few search results from Lazada and Shopee are either very cheap, very low quality terrariums, or simple terrarium jars and figurines. I believe that those that search 'Terrariums' in Lazada and Shopee are probably looking to build one themselves, not finished ones like ours. Currently, Carousell is still our best bet. However, this is still a good idea, as it is also a form of advertising.

The last piece of advice was striking. It was to start a branch of DIY products instead of finished terrariums. The idea is that terrariums are very likely bought as a gift to others, and it would be much more meaningful if one can build it oneself, than get one already made. For us, this also means almost no manpower costs, thereby saving the total cost by almost a third. Of course, it has its own problems, the main one being our terrariums' uniqueness will be gone. (We initially wanted each product to be different.) However, looking at our current sales, it is worth a shot.

Network Domain

So the first thing that the Prof asked when he came in was "What's wrong with your website?"

Turns out, our domain name was not transferred to us fully, as it was still in the vendor's hands. Its more akin to renting than actually buying the name. This could spell disaster, as once the company gets famous and wants our domain name back, the vendor could simply try to sell us at a high price and we could do nothing about it but to buy it. If we still want to use it, we have to continue renting it and again the vendor could raise their prices.

Fortunately, a few days later we were able to get the name back without paying much, so it was a false alarm. But still, lesson learnt.