Successful Shopify Merchant & Super Influencer Nicole Shiraz Talks How To Sell

Despite no financial help, Nicole Shiraz took a gamble and pumped her own savings into her very own first business. A successful empire grew from these humble beginnings, and Boss Ladies was born. Nicole pushed her business to suit the every day woman’s budget and schedule. There are now over 100 amazing luxury handbags worn by all types of women across Australia and the number is rising steadily.

Her business offers advice and inspiring tips, geared to changing the way women look, feel and spend their money - empowering women to not only look like a boss but be a boss!

Nicole has her media and travel experience to thank, working 5 years for TV networks such as Chanel 7, Fox Sports and ESPN to living in big cities such as Singapore, New York and Los Angeles.

Nicole hopes to help more women overcome self-esteem issues of social media pressure.

1. You are a very unique guest as you come from both sides so I would love to cover both today. 
2. What has been your overall marketing strategy with Boss Ladies?
3. What % of your strategy has been influencer marketing? When did you start using influencers?
4. What's your opinion on current state of the influencer marketing space?
5. How much of your sales comes from influencers?
6. Ambassador program  
7. How long did it take you to see results?
8. How do you choose your influencers?
9. What is your influencer marketing strategy in a nutshell?
10. What tools do you use for Influencer marketing?
11. Do you have a team that help you?
12. Do you provide the content to the influencers? Or do you let people make their own content?
13. How do you pay them? Do you provide free products to influencers?
14. What’s the best way to irk out results from the influencer marketing space?
15. What are 3 tips you can give merchants starting out with influencer marketing?
16. What’s your biggest success & failure when working with influencers?
17. What do you think about brands personally when it comes to working as an influencer?

Listen to the whole interview here: www.winningwithshopify.com/summit
Find Nicole at: www.bossladies.com.au 

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Transcript

Intro/Outro: 0:05

We are here at the Winning With Shopify podcast. What is the Winning With Shopify podcast Oh this podcast this is the one that's going to teach you how to take your Shopify store and turn it into an automated sales machine. Wow. So what does it have? Does it have the latest marketing, email sales and social media inbox? What else does it have mush? It does and it also has strategies and tips. Without the hype that fluff. Who's the host of the podcast? Oh the host is Caroline Balinska. Do you know who she is? Can you tell me more? She is a Shopify education partner, certified by Shopify and her course is approved. It's called 1000 sales and beyond. And correct me if I'm wrong, I understand that she is also the founder of justaskparker. c om. That one's the only small marketing task agency for Shopify owners. She's widely experienced, How many years ha s s h e b een in the game? Over 15 years. Marketing, manufacturing, design eCommerce. She's done a lot. Ye ah. Yeah. Oh yeah. You know it. so what is s he do ing t h is p odcast? Well, she's go ing t o s hare her knowledge and she's going to interview the experts to help you in your journey to sit th ere. Those experts though, they are good to have because we need to learn from the experts. Sorry. Don't forget to subscribe this podcast because you don't ever want to mi ss a n e pisode on it. Can you tell us what about mixed? Well, now here's your host, Caroline Balinska.

: 1:39

Hi. I hope you having a wonderful day. I'm really excited to announce t hat t he influence marketing summit for Shopify merchants is live for 2020. I'm really excited. It's free again. So you get three days access, 100% for free. And what I wanted to do was bring you the first 10 minutes of one of the interviews today before we start. Here's a quick word from our sponsor, gorgias.com, Who my team use e very day in our business. Just ask Parker,

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Caroline: 3:01

I wanted to bring you the interview with Nicole because the great thing about Nicole is she comes at from the influencer marketing aspect from two sides. She is an influencer but she's also a very successful Shopify mention as well. So she's a great interview to start off with, I will be giving you new interviews every week over the next few weeks so you can get an idea of what's available. Like I said, it's 100% free to sign up winning with shopify.com/summit the link will be in the show notes as well. And here we get into an interview with Nicole chiraz and you can get to know more about what it's like being a Shopify merchant with a very successful store who works with influences and also hearing it from the actual influences mouth, how influences want to be treated. So this is a really great interview. Let's get into it. So let's say hello to Nicole and find out more about her. Nicole. Hi, how are you?

Nicole: 3:56

Good, how are you? Fantastic.

Caroline: 3:57

This is amazing to have you on. I really, really thank you. And for everyone watching, I know they'll be very grateful too because you're going to be telling us about being an influencer, but also having a brand that not only do you get a lot of coverage about because of what an amazing product, what you're actually selling, but the fact that you use a lot of influences as well. So tell us a little bit about you, how you built up your actual Instagram account yourself and how you have sat on this journey with these new brands.

Nicole: 4:25

So I actually started this in January, 2019. And surprisingly, I did not have like a big vision for this, it started in my living room. It was like a side hustle that I wanted to do. I found a market that nobody had actually covered. And it really was my own selfish reasons that I thought a boss ladies. So I wanted a handbag luxury habit, my birthday. And um, my partner at the time gave me some money and we're talking thousands of dollars here. So I went to, you know, the Louis Vuitton store with cash, thousands of dollars and wanted to pay, you know, the shop, the money. But then like somehow kind of like stopped myself and was like, do I really want to spend this type of money on one back just to show off what Instagram for one day because in a week or two weeks I'm going to get bored of the bag and then I'm going to have to buy another bag to keep up with the trends. So in my mind I was trying to be very smart and wise with my money and that's when it hit me because at the time I was traveling between Sydney and Los Angeles and I was renting a lot of my clothes and I realized, I was like, why can I rent handbags? So I started researching about these and I found that there were a few businesses that did that in Sydney and maybe Melbourne, but they were very small and they were only renting for like two days. And so for me, I was like, okay, if I want to do that, how, how could I do that as an influencer, it takes me days to like the perfect shot, like spread out a week and do hair and makeup and it's like to rush like the two days, like you know, you might get drunk on a Sunday night and then Sunday you'll hung over and then you have to return the bag. Like that's just like too much pressure on top of being an influencer and taking better than editing. So I was like, okay, someone needs to come out with a business where we could have the handbag for at least a week and take that pressure off and you know, and kind of select people like me who need a bag for Instagram. And so when I started a boss ladies, that was my intention was to help girls like myself. And then I, it was surprising that the people, most of my customers were like everyday people, you know, like we've got like teenagers, you've got the moms, you have uni students. And it was just like everybody is going through that pressure. It's not just me of having to look and feel expensive and, but like not want to have to spend the money. And so how it started was I just opened up a boss lady's Instagram page one night and I noticed that a lot of influences in Australia, you know, a lot of them were my friends, but like it was, it was hard to kind of like reach out to them from my own page. I did that through the boss ladies page. I reached out to them professionally in a way where I said, look, I'd be happy to collab with you if I'm, you know, if we gave you the handbag for an event or weekend in exchange for posts and feet. And a lot of them were happy to jump on board without even getting paid. And the reason why, it's because I explained to them that he was a new concept and that not only were they promoting, like, you know, looking at the, they expensive, but they're breaking down that social media barrier of like having to, you know, keep up with the pressure and, and you know, so having to feel like a boss. So that's how it basically started with the same influences. And I really took a risk because I honestly missed about a hundred goals and maybe like five replied to me. Wow. And thankfully one of them is Laura and I knew who I was from a friend of a friend and she had I think about 500,000 goals at the time. I said, you know what, I got one girl that had half a million followers. She's a, she's the one that's going to make this go viral. So that was it. That was my starting point off the sheet posted to me. Every influencer wanted to jump on board. So can I just cut in that I have to do this. That is such a great learning curve for everyone watching this. You need to learn from that with it. Even if you're an influence on your thinking, like I want to be an influencer or as a Shopify merchants, you just said you reached out to a hundred people. You have Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Gucci handbags and only 5% of people. I'm an I'm an account. Imagine getting a cm from an account that has more followers, like why would we trust her? Like maybe she's sending us a fake bag, maybe she's not real so I can understand why a lot of them hesitate. It didn't jump up and a lot of them depression. The businesses say, okay, but why do we have three trends that like a lot of them wanted to keep the bag and I was just like, Whoa, I know you're not understanding the concept. Yeah, we need you. We're renting you back. We're not giving them away. And it was just, but eventually was the fact that you kept going. Yeah. You kept[inaudible] yes, until I got goals on bullet. Yes, I love that. But that just proves if it's going to happen for you that way that it took you a hundred people to reach out to and five finally replied and then one of them was a really big influence on anyone watching this that sits there going, Oh, I reached out to 20 people and no one said yes yet Nicole is living proof. She has, what did I say, over 100,000 people on her business Instagram account now.

Caroline: 9:48

And that is all because like you said, you started with zero and you reached out and you kept doing it and you finally found that one person.

Nicole: 9:55

I was blocked by Instagram for DMing, too many people. It came up, it popped up and said, you have broken a guideline because you've, I've inbox too many people. So then I was like, okay, I can't keep up. So instead of I stopped damning people and I said it emailing, I went into their pages and I physically copy and pasted every single email and I did that like all, not until I finally hit a hundred people. I felt I did that in one night. I had to do it like my target was a hundred you are amazing. I love that. I love that story because that is exactly what makes people succeed. And this is what I tell people when they say, why is that company succeeding in that other company not succeeding?

Caroline: 10:36

It is that determination, the guts, the ability to keep going on no matter what is why you've succeeded. So I love that. I think that that's fantastic. So it's now October, we're doing this interview and I'll tell her, you're telling me you started this in January this year?

Nicole: 10:49

Yes, correct.

Caroline: 10:50

Wow, that is amazing. And you've been adding more handbags, so you're constantly adding new handbags into your range, correct?

Nicole: 10:57

Yeah, so I mean every time we make money from the business, we put it back, we reinvest it back into the business and we continue to come out with handbags. A lot of people, you know, think that having handbags is just like you have to really keep up with the trends. It's not as easy coming out with a clothing line, stick for a year with handbags every month. It's changing. The seasons are changing. So, and each handbag is about like$5,000 so you can imagine the type of inventory that we have.

Caroline: 11:28

It's crazy. Yeah, that's unbelievable. So tell us a little bit about, let's jump around. We're going to jump around a little bit through your story because you are coming from both sides. You're coming from the influence side and the brand side with BOSS Ladies with the bags. What is your overall marketing strategy? So you started with influences. Has that been how you've stuck to it? Like influencer marketing is the only thing. My secret I think was the influence. It was great to get the name out there. So people, I wanted people to be what's boss, ladies, what's, and then just follow the page. I wanted to get the followers so that it becomes something. So it went viral in Australia. But getting the sales was completely different because just because someone follows your page, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to take it a sale.

Nicole: 12:07

So I started doing ads and for me that I think was the success to a lot of the sales in the beginning. The influence. Diff definitely worked because what I did was I gave them all a code, a unique code, so every time a customer used Laura Morris code, then I knew that okay, her followers or obviously engaging with the posts and she's obviously got the right type of followers and whatnot. So the influence is definitely helped. But my biggest version was, um, Instagram ads. I put a lot of money into Instagram ads and Google ads. Fantastic. So let's talk about this. I know that we're talking about influences, but this is great because this is showing that there's a funnel. So the funnel started off with the influences. Now you're running Instagram ads and Google ads. How those Instagram ads being run to your page or you're running ads that go directly to your website, what's your little strategy there? So I do both. So different days I do different things. Usually what I do is beginning of the way I like to keep it like light and fun. So I do a lot of story posts and then I promote it as an Instagram ad. Do as always, like the same thing. I would do the same and I've never really changed who ads. But when it comes to Instagram, I have like my own different kind of techniques. So I'd be like life fun stuff Monday to Wednesday. Uh, and then towards the end of the week, that's when I start sending the handbags to the goals and the content stuff being promoted on our page and on their page. But we start going really more hard on the, on the Instagram ads where we say, do you need a handbag for weekend? Or you know, um, do you have an event coming up? Um, and then we start throwing in our unique codes, like, you know, our special codes.

Caroline: 13:47

So how is that, I hope you enjoyed it so far. Like I said, there's so much more to share with you. This interview alone has another about 20 minutes to go, so you can learn even more from Nicole. The interview just gets better and better and we have so many more to offer you as well. We have access to all of last year's interviews as well, which are all still very, very relevant and even more that will be brought to you during the next three to six months as well. So I'm going to be giving you even more interviews along the way, but jump in now. There's lots of interviews. There's over 25 interviews for you to watch right now inside the summit, 100% for free. You get to listen to the full interview with Nicole, the full interview with all of the other guests as well. It is over at www.winningwithshopify.com/summit the link is in the show notes as well. So go and sign up. I hope you enjoy it. And each week I'll be bringing you and nother guest from the summit so you can get to know more about what is involved with influencer marketing.

Intro/Outro: 14:51

Have a great week. Keep smiling. Sign up for free for the Shopify approved marketing course at 1000salesandbeyond.com and get our show notes at justaskparker.com/podcast thanks for listening to the Winning With Shopify podcast.