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When the founder of Base Butter reached out to me about issues they were having with sales, I saw this as a great opportunity to collaborate with a beauty brand that was changing the landscape of skin care. Base Butter is a handmaid skin care company for women of color. When I began working with the founder, my first task was making sure she understood a lot of what I was going to teach her might contradict what she thought she knew.
The problems they were experiencing was not anything new, but they needed a new way to approach their marketing, storytelling, and strategies around growing the company. Below you’ll find the strategies I developed for Base Butter to grow from 0 to 15k in less than 3 months.
Intro: Most people associate launching as a one-time thing, like an introduction to a new business, product, or service. But from my experience in the past decade in digital marketing, I defined launching as the act of improvements.
Think about it for a second. Whether there is a price change, new packaging for your brand, repositioning your brand or pursuing a new sales channel, every time you improve there’s an opportunity to “launch”. Considering every new update or every improvement as a launch, students that I’ve worked with take this same approach every day in their brands. This approach has been around for years, it’s nothing that I invented, but it’s something perfected by Steve Jobs himself. Think about how apple launches new products every year in September.. wait they’re the same products, but with improvements. In the case study below, I break down Base Butter’s 15k launch within 3 months, the launch framework that will put you in position to succeed, and how to build a business that generates consistent sales.
Base Butter was founded by She’Neil Johnson and what started out as a beauty brand in her kitchen to serve her friends quickly grew into serving others who didn’t feel the beauty industry met their needs. She’Neil focused her efforts on the voiceless and faceless women in the beauty industry who were never publicized in magazines yet they had huge purchasing power. Base Butter would focus on black women and women of color in everyday life who just wanted to know someone cared enough about them to make products for them.
From She’Neil’s apartment in Harlem, Base Butter was born and it quickly gained notoriety being featured in many popular magazines including: Cosmopolitan, Byrdie, Essence, Nylon, Forbes, BuzzFeed, and that’s just to name a few. Most brands dream of getting this type of publicity early on, but those that do most times can not sustain it. As a solo founder, your job is to do everything in your business and most times you’re so IN your business that it can run OVER you.
When Base Butter began working through the power your launch curriculum, their main priority was to understand their current business structure and the short and long term objectives before launching. Here is how I advised them to do:
There were 4 key components I had to examine before putting together a marketing strategy and those components were: product market fit, current marketing, customer journey, and supply chain. Those components allowed me to determine scalability. Meaning if these components were not in place then the marketing strategy or the launch would not be a success. Driving traffic to a brand is only as good as the structure that’s in place to handle it.
Two skincare products. And within just 90 days of launching the brand, She’Neil and the Base Butter team generated over $15,000. What’s even more important is that they have been able to maintain that momentum ever since.
A week before the launch of the new website, new products, and new voice of the brand, I remember a slight nervousness over the Base Butter team. I’m sure there were many questions and possibly even doubts creeping into their thoughts around marketing and sales. I mean they had spent months developing the new products but never really thought about marketing activities to generate sales. This is what I find most common when working with founders. The same level of effort it takes to create the products does not go into marketing the products. And if you know business, you know that sales need to be made to stay in business. Why then do so many founders make the mistake of not focusing on their marketing and sales strategy?
If you’re a business owner who made this mistake then you’re probably shaking your head in agreement right about now. I also don’t want you to think that you should stop spending time on your product or service to solely focus on marketing. The biggest take-away is to spend the same amount of effort in both. Marketing activities such as website conversions, campaign development, traffic, etc are all critical components into your marketing strategy to make sales.
Working alongside the founder, I developed what the sales and marketing strategy should look like if they want to experience consistent sales; not just the day of the launch but beyond that — keyword: consistent.
Our secret sauce for consistent sales was attributed to Facebook & Instagram ads. I trained the business owners how to use Facebook and Instagram ads to drive sales and begin putting part of their process in auto-pilot.
I know many have tried Facebook and Instagram ads — and it may not have worked for them right away. I also know many have not tried running ads before to their business. The biggest thing I’ve learned when you want to have success is about learning from others who have been there and know how to get you to your ultimate destination.
So how do you decide if running ads is right for your brand? You can start by weighing the pros and cons:
The truth is that if you’re working with someone or being trained by someone who knows how to teach you step-by-step on running successful marketing campaigns then it increases your chance of success.
Every launch needs to have a launch date. Meaning there should be a date you select and prior to that date, there needs to be a set of activities performed to make sure you’re successful before that launch date arrives. We put an emphasis on the pre-launch phase making sure we were reaching out to our contacts — friends, family, etc. Making sure we had the attention of a small community that were familiar with us. This is very important because the “know-like-trust” factor is already built in and because of that, this small community will sometimes give you pre-cash before your launch date arrives. Having more money on hand to invest in other parts of your marketing never hurts. When you look at Base Butter as a brand you notice how well designed it is and how crafted each campaign we put together came about (thanks to Roy Handy for the amazing photography and visual campaigns.)
Once they established some buzz around Base Butter products, they needed to find a way to engage with their community and people that didn’t know about Base Butter. The strategy I recommended to them was focused around Base Butter’s core mission, better skincare. So Base Butter developed a survey around skin regimen that was relevant to their market. Through this survey we developed a deeper relationship with our audience and even gave them a 15% discount to shop with Base Butter when they launched.
When the online store officially opened, Base Butter drove sales through sales and clean cut marketing campaigns on their social media. This required a photo-shoot beforehand to not only capture product photos but tell a story that their community could relate to. These photos would quickly spread over social media as it resonated with their audience.
Another key component during the launch was listening and capturing reactions. The good with the bad. The good reactions turned into testimonials and the bad reactions were good feedback to improve the product and service. The Base Butter community noticed the public efforts to celebrate each reaction, therefore this drove great residual effects which increased sales.
Now what? This is where most entrepreneurs and business owners struggle. After the hype dies down typically the sales stop. What do you do now? For Base Butter, we already had a strategy and process in place. They were going to continue running ads to new audiences and re-targeting potential customers who had been visiting the website.
Brands need to understand that marketing and sales is an everyday thing. Well, unless you don’t want to be in business anymore. The approach, “build it and they will come” does not work. And going viral after your launch is just as good as winning the lottery, it doesn’t happen. And when you accept that, you can begin putting together a marketing and sales strategy to stay in business.
Step 1: Join the Power Your Launch Marketing AcceleratorStruggling to make consistent sales in your business? Interested in a marketing intensive to help you learn the skills necessary to market and monetize your business online and on social?
Since 2011, Abu Fofanah has helped more than 100,000 entrepreneurs, Abu is on a mission to empower entrepreneurs with the digital marketing skills in order to bootstrap their company.
Abu travels the world and teaches business owners, students, Fortune 500 companies how to use social media to increase their sales. He’s taught and spoke at Harvard Business School and University of Pennsylvania. Previously at a prominent digital marketing agency, he worked with & coached hundreds of clients and created campaigns that generated millions of visibility and sales.
Abu currently runs his Power Your Launch Marketing Accelerator which has trained over 10,000 Women Business Owners from various industries. He’s the prominent industry expert around paid advertising and digital strategy.
Step 2: Register for my free workshop below to learn how we can work together: Register for the Free Workshop Here >>
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