Digital Marketing Basics for Quilting Businesses

In this conversation, Andi and Tori McElwain delve into the essentials of digital marketing for business owners, focusing on how to effectively show up online. Tori shares her insights on the importance of building an email list, nurturing leads through content, and the critical role of launching products. They discuss strategies for managing multiple projects and the significance of documenting the creative process to engage audiences. The conversation emphasizes the need for a structured approach to digital marketing, making it easier for entrepreneurs to connect with their audience and drive sales.

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Digital Marketing for Quilters
03:44 Understanding the Lead Strategy
08:42 Content Strategy: Building Trust and Authority
12:11 The Launch Strategy: Converting Leads to Sales
18:45 Adjusting Launch Strategies for Different Products
23:33 Creating Content While Staying Inspired

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Co-Hosts:

Co-Hosts:

Tori McElwain @heytori.tech & https://www.heytori.tech/

Andi Stanfield @truebluequilts & https://truebluequilts.com/ 

Transcript

Andi (00:06.328)
Welcome back to another fabulous conversation here in Quilting on the Side. Tori, one thing that is always on the mind of business owners these days is how to show up online and this whole idea of digital marketing. So how do you approach that never-ending task?

Tori McElwain (00:28.299)
Definitely. So when I was learning digital marketing, I was always confused by it. I never really understood. I didn't say never really because I did eventually and now I'm teaching it but or coaching on it teaching and coaching. So digital marketing is all about showing up online. So it's about bringing people into your world, whether that is our main focus is the email list because that converts the best still is an email list, but it can also be a follower. Somebody who is in your world and sees what you offer.

So we want to bring people in, we want to build up that trust and authority in you, and we want to give them a reason to buy. That is generally what digital marketing is for, and it's online. All of it is online. So if you sell anything online, you do need to have a digital marketing plan or strategy in place to help convert those people who are just interested into actually paying customers.

Andi (01:19.045)
And it goes beyond just showing up, right? We need to have a structure, like you said, to bring people into your world, your community, give them a reason to stick around. And yeah, like you said, eventually buy from us. So as I've known you and you talk about digital marketing, you have that structure in place that really focuses on different

segments of that journey. So you want to describe that for us?

Tori McElwain (01:49.217)
I do. And I do this in the DMMC, the Digital Marketing Magic Coaching Program. So if there is so many nuances to all of this, so if you want a lot of help on that, I do offer coaching within that program. But this is how we lay it out. So the first strategy you need or the first plan you need is how to bring in what we call leads. And leads are people who are interested in what you offer. So whether you're selling patterns or just in patterns, if you have a long arm, they're just getting their quilts long armed. If you're teaching, they're just in learning. So what

they're interested in, they call them a lead. And that's typically an email on an email list. Like I said before, could be a follower on a social media platform, but most of the time your highest converting people or your highest converting leads. Now I know what that is, is going to be on your email list. So we've got the lead strategy, bringing people in. And then the second one you need is the content strategy. This is where you nurture. This is where you build up that trust and authority. So you brought them in.

Andi (02:19.372)
.

Tori McElwain (02:46.731)
You're building up trust and authority with your content. And then the last one you need is a conversion, which is typically a launch, a launch. Sorry, I heard somebody go, in the back of my head, lot of my clients, when they joined the DMMC, they joined because they're frustrated with that piece, the launching piece, the conversion piece of actually getting people to sell. But your first one is elites. The second one is the content. And the third is the launch or the sales strategy or plan.

Andi (02:56.529)
Yeah.

Andi (03:13.129)
Yeah. You mentioned that people tend to have the most struggle with the launch. in terms of creating digital assets and different things, seems, and I'm just going to share my thoughts and you correct me if I have any piece wrong, but mostly in that lead phase when you're just

showing up and introducing yourself to an audience. Those are your different posts and whether it's videos or anything on the social media platforms. You mentioned email, so that I see more as the content piece where you're really developing that relationship and that trust. And then we go into launch, which obviously covers everything because you're going to announce your offers on your

social media platforms as well as your email. So you really need to have a variety of things out there on the internet.

Tori McElwain (04:22.303)
Yeah, if you hear a lot of the professional business owners, that's what I was going to say. But if you hear a lot of the gurus, a lot of the people who like to teach other businesses or other entrepreneurs how to build a business, they'll talk about this sort of, it's called digital marketing, but like it's an entire system that works together. And what's hard to understand is you hear about the bits and pieces, but not everyone puts it all together for you and shows you how it works together.

So our goal here today is to kind of show you how those bits and pieces fit together and where they land within those three groups. So you explained part of that really well. some of it within leads. So let's just break it down. within leads, you'll have different pieces that you'll learn about to put in place. One is social media. So social media typically lands in the lead strategy. It's when you're taking people who do not know you.

and you're converting them into somebody who's interested in what you're offering. This can be really fast or this can take a lot of time. It's kind of depending on the person and what you're offering. So if they're passively interested in your patterns, but they haven't fell in love with one yet, they may just be a follower on Instagram or a subscriber on YouTube. And then when you launch a pattern that they just love, that is when they turn into a, maybe a lead where they sign up for a wait list, a wait list, or maybe they become.

customer where they go and they purchase that pattern. So it kind of falls in there. So social media is mainly leads and there's a little bit of overlap, but we're going to stick with social media is mainly in the lead strategy. So everything you post on social media is for cold audiences, for people who do not know you or do not know you well enough to purchase yet. And then another piece you hear a lot about our lead magnets. Now I hope you know where that one falls because it has the word lead in it, but that's in your lead strategy. So that's converting someone who is

Andi (06:14.923)
Mm hmm. .

Tori McElwain (06:19.713)
passively interested into somebody who is more more more interested they get something from you that gives them value and it helps establish that trust and that authority if they like your lead magnet and that's one thing that we go deep into with the With a lot of my offers is a lead magnet because that's where a lot of people have questions They're like how to perfect the lead magnet is one of my best My most watched and best attended trainings And it's in the DMC. It's also in my other offers

Andi (06:42.379)
Okay.

Tori McElwain (06:49.677)
But the lead magnet is a really great way to convert people who are passively interested into people who are more warm and trusting of you. And so that was one piece. And then another piece, the newsletter. So the newsletter I would put into leads, into a lead strategy because you're not quite converting them yet, but it can also overlap with content, with your content strategy. So in leads, we have pieces like social media, lead magnets, a new newsletter.

And that's also where SEO falls into place. So SEO, people finding you for the first time, bots being able to find you and bring up your website, that's all in your lead strategy. How do get people to your site? That's part of SEO search engine optimization, which we've talked about. Actually, we've talked about in a podcast just like one or two ago. So I'll link that below in our podcast in this, in the show notes so that you can go see it or listen to it or see it if you're on YouTube. Okay. So we got leads.

Andi (07:35.938)
Mm-hmm.

Tori McElwain (07:45.749)
The next one is content. Now content is anything that you publish online pretty much. That's why so many people just say content to include everything because it could be anything. Within digital marketing, would consider, I would consider content as in your core content or your long form content where you're really establishing that authority and that trust. It's typically something like a long form video.

on YouTube and that's like 10 minutes or more, right? It's not like a two sec, or not two second, but like a 60 second reel. It's more of the long form content. I mean, you can establish trust and authority with shorter reels, but for Nurture, you will see better conversions with that long form content. It can also be podcasting. So hello everybody. This is our court. So could be podcasting. It could also be a blog. So the written word.

Andi (08:33.075)
Mm-hmm.

Tori McElwain (08:40.385)
So whatever you feel more comfortable doing, that's the one I usually suggest you start, start with and see how it goes. So with that core content or within that content strategy, that content plan of what you're creating to build that trust and authority, you also have branding and collaborations. So branding is another one that could go into leads because it helps with the trust and authority and introducing people to who you are and that gets deeper.

But I would put that mostly into content because I think it helps build trust, which is what that content piece is all about, is building that trust, building that authority. So core content includes long-form content, branding, and collaborations. So anytime you're working with somebody else who you're leaning on and they help build you up in trust and authority because they are trusted and an authority of their audience. It all kind of works together there. So, so far we've got lead strategy and what that entails and we have content strategy and what that entails. So I'm to pause there.

Andi (09:32.604)
Mm-hmm.

Tori McElwain (09:39.979)
How does that sound so far?

Andi (09:42.049)
Yeah, it sounds very manageable as you are creating digital assets, know, whether that's images, captions, all that kind of stuff that tie in. You want to be sharing those so that new people are attracted, which is our lead segment. And then you want to and you've used that word several times, nurturing that we just we want to

continue building that relationship with people and we do that with longer form content. Like you said, blogs, newsletters, videos, all that kind of stuff really gives people a chance to get to know you, really solidify that relationship and understand more about your business persona and everything that you offer.

Those are two really good aspects of building your digital marketing.

Tori McElwain (10:46.401)
Right. So that's what we run. Typically, whenever we are building things, working on things in the background, we run our lead in our content strategy. We bring new people in, we warm them up. And then here comes the sales part, which is the launch. Or you can do, there's different ways to sell to someone in your, an audience, especially online. Um, my, my favorite is launching. And I know that a lot of people go, ugh, because I don't know if they realize that you were basically pausing.

the lead in the content story that you have been doing and with a launch, replacing it with specific pieces to help promote the next thing. So whether that is a pattern, a sale, a class, you are pausing to say, okay, now everything on social media is not to encourage people to come in, but to encourage them to either prepare for the next offer or to learn about the next offer. And then same thing with your core content. Now your YouTube videos are going to be focused on

whatever the next pattern is coming up, whatever the next class is coming up, getting them ready for whatever they need to know to be successful in that class and to feel like they're ready to purchase that class. And then same thing with our podcast. If you've noticed in the past, when I launched SPI, we talked about self-publishing. We talked about what could a book look like? And that is part of the launch that we did was looking at SPI is the self-publishing incubator. So that is one program that I run to help others.

self-published a book, so we posted or we...

It's not posted.

Tori McElwain (12:22.977)
shared, published, we published a podcast. I got the right word there. We published a podcast talking about what your book could look like and then offering SPI at the end of that podcast episode. And that was part of the launch. So this is when you pause the lead and the content strategy to focus all of that around the next offer you have. And you'll notice businesses might do this once a year, the launch part, they might do it twice a year. They may do it four times a year or

they may do it continuously. And that was what an evergreen funnel is, is when you do it continuously. Okay, I want to pause the...

Andi (13:00.462)
I had, yeah, yeah, I...

There's a lot of differing opinions these days about launches because it seems like maybe eight to 10 years ago, everybody was launching and it was very cyclical. Every three or four months, get inundated because you're following different people and they're all affiliates for each other. you keep getting the same kind of promotions because everybody's hopping on the bandwagon for this one big

program launch. And now, as you said, people want more Evergreen. They want to get off that roller coaster of one big sale item and then months of nothing and then another big sale period. And Evergreen allows you to be a little more consistent and just always having those consistent sales throughout.

the year rather than the peaks that you might get with a big launch or push to get the influx of new people. But on a smaller scale, like even those of us that may release a new pattern or something or want to run a holiday sale, we've talked a lot in season five about Black Friday as a big event.

and there may be other times in the year that you want to do seasonal sales. And you can put together some of these marketing assets, these digital resources, your social media posts, your newsletter content, and it can be all focused around a theme. And that's what I took away from a digital marketing guru back in the day.

Andi (14:58.341)
that you can really set up these kind of advertising campaigns and have them all tied together with whatever theme you choose to be the image for your launch. I was running a sale before the holidays, and I called it my early bird sale. So I used different images of birds and,

apples with worms poking out of it, just so that it was visually tied into the theme of being an early bird. And it was really easy to go in for, you know, 30 minutes to an hour in Canva and just make a bunch of posts. And then it's like, you have to sit back and trust yourself. Like, okay, past Andy, plan this all out. So let's go ahead and schedule it and just let the plan happen.

Tori McElwain (15:49.505)
Yes, that's definitely part of it is trusting yourself. But I think it's interesting how you phrase that with the launching because there was that phrase a few years ago. So I will say that it's 2026, right? When we're recording this podcast. And just in case you're listening to us in the future, it's 2026. In 2020, 2021, 2022, it was almost too easy to sell online. That is when you get the language of make money when you sleep.

things running in the background and you'll just make money while you're doing whatever. there is part of that is true. So you don't have to be awake when people sign up for a course and things like that. But now in 2026, because as you observed, people were inundated with these launches. They think they have to launch the same way when you really don't need to. You can adjust the launch to fit who how you like to show up. The struggle I find with my clients is they don't show up enough during

right before it's ready to buy because they feel like they've been talking about it for months, which of course they have in the back of their brain. They've been planning it. They've been talking about it. They've been writing stuff about it, but their audience has only been paying attention to part of that and usually a small part of that. So you have to talk. And I've talked about it before on the podcast where you have to talk, say it so many times that you are so sick of talking about it. And usually you've done enough if that's where you're at.

Andi (17:13.508)
Right? Yeah, you really do have to exhaust yourself and feel like this is the only

Tori McElwain (17:19.125)
Well, no, hold on, I wouldn't say exhaust yourself, but like, we can also like, anything else to say, maybe.

Andi (17:22.584)
Well, no, but-

Right, but you just, have to, I mean, think about listening to the radio. You hear the same song because it's on the playlist for a reason, because it's popular and it's going to show up every hour. So we can take some clues from that. you know, if you think you're a one track, you know,

item that you just keep repeating the same thing, then you're probably just about right. You know, you feel like you're talking too much about something, but you're probably just about right when it's the only thing on your mind.

Tori McElwain (18:06.241)
Yeah, definitely. I I know we've had a discussion before about launching where I don't want to smear you, but we were launching and we thought we had talked about it enough. And then when we looked back at, Instagram, we'd only put like three posts. We're like, wait, I didn't actually do what I thought I was doing. I like something like that. So launching launching is something that you can you can adjust for. So you can have a long launch. You can have a short launch if you're having

Andi (18:20.205)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm totally guilty.

Tori McElwain (18:35.393)
if you're preparing for a large course, say, that's usually one of our higher prices, higher price offers in our industry is a course, like a full comprehensive course, where I'm talking like 300 and higher dollars. You might need a longer launch runway to warm your audience up to purchase that because you're building trust, you're building interest, you're building...

how this solves their issue. Like there's a lot of things you can build within there to get them ready to be able to see the value in what you're offering. However, if you're selling a $15 pattern, that can be a lot shorter of a runway. You don't need a month or two to prepare them for that purchase. You can have just a few weeks where you're talking intently, intentionally and often about this upcoming.

pattern and typically it's a little easier because we're excited about it. We're like, hey, here's something new that's coming because whenever something's new, it's a little more exciting for us as business owners and as our own marketers to be like, hey, I got something new. Look at this. Look at that and look how this does this with this and look at the fabric when I do this and look at this color way when I turn it to this and it makes a lot more fun for us. But looking for those different things to help you figure out your launch content can be fun. It can be how do I show them?

How do I show a person who would like this why they would like it? And it's like, OK, well, why do I like it? Well, I like it because the blocks come together fast. Boom, there's a reel. I like it because I can play with the color in different places and it does different designs. my gosh, that's like four reels. That's a carousel and the two.

Andi (20:09.119)
Hahaha!

and a compilation video.

Tori McElwain (20:13.959)
Yeah, that's an entire blog post or two blog posts if you want to or even four if you want to do like by seasons all the colorways like you do a winter one and a full one and a spring one. And then, OK, what else would they need to know about the pattern? it's got really great directions. OK, so how can I show them as really great directions? Maybe showing the quality of the product they're purchasing. So if you're someone who likes to do patterns in a booklet, flipping through the booklet where it's a little bit fast, they can actually read it, but they can see it's a booklet and it's the size of it like a

book, I'm showing them the real value that they're getting, showing them that it comes with a template, showing them that it comes with a zoom or a meetup or a sew along that you're planning. Like all those different things can be your core content. It could be your social media and you can infuse it into the emails that you send for your launch. So it doesn't have to be crazy. It can be fun and it can be just exploring the different ways that you have fun with it as a quilter because your audience is also going to have fun with it as quilters.

Andi (21:13.495)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. One of the questions I have, and this wasn't pre-planned, so we get to hear Tori respond in real time, is one of my problems is that I am multi-passionate. I've got that quilters ADD that I have a lot of projects going on.

And so I feel like by the time I've done the prep, you know, I've made the sample, I'm done and I'm ready for something new. So how do you keep that energy going to launch something when you've got these other designs, other ideas going on?

Tori McElwain (22:02.709)
That's a great question. So from personal experience, what I was able to do and what I've seen a few other of my clients do actually, now that I've been working with so many, more, more experience, have more, more advice to give. What I would do is dive in deep when you're excited, get the video, get the pictures. And I've had clients grown at me saying, I don't want to do video while I'm sewing. I get it, but you have to.

Andi (22:14.016)
Yeah

Tori McElwain (22:29.013)
you unless you want to go back and remake it, which I know several of us do not like to remake the same thing over again. So that is part of the discipline. I think of being your own marketer is being able to pause and take those pictures and videos and they can be quick and they can be fun. That's how it came to me. I didn't like it at first. I had fun with it. So I'm hoping that people hear that and want to have fun with these videos. But that's what I would do first is while you're excited about it in it in the moment, get as much content as you can.

Andi (22:44.641)
Mm-hmm.

Tori McElwain (22:56.553)
and then make it easy for yourself. Set up a folder where you can easily drop these in or start editing those reels like in the moment and save them as drafts and then do a quick little caption of bullet points that you want to say to go with it. That way when you're exhausted from this project and you go back and go, no, now I have to market it. You already have three or four real ideas lined up. You already have like the captions outlined.

And it was easy because you were so excited about it in the moment. And then from there, you can build off of those. So if people are really liking the transitions, if they're really like, or not transitions, I always like to do like a, it's like, okay, here is it before, and then here is it after. So one example, I posted, I'm in the fiber fixed fam where we're creating postcards. So I showed the stabilizer to the camera and I just kind of zoomed in on it. And then,

Andi (23:30.226)
Hahaha!

Andi (23:43.105)
Mm-hmm.

Tori McElwain (23:46.953)
When I finished the postcard, I put it up to the camera and zoomed out. So it looked like it transformed the stabilizer to a quilted postcard already done. And that is something you can do for a quilt. You can show an empty bed. You can show an empty wall. You can show like wherever that quilt might go or just your design wall. That can be a real, just a quick, that's so quick to do while you're in the moment. And even afterwards, cause you can be like, that's a quick one I can add to my repertoire. You can also do.

any kind of, any way that you can show a transformation from this to this. So fabric to a finished quilt, blank bed to a now made up quilt or made a bed with a quilt on it. Like any transformation videos are really cool. But I would definitely get it in the moment, schedule it if you can, right there, even if they're drafts or I've even done a Google doc where I've dropped them or images into Canva. And like I would

During the day I would film a few things, would create a few blocks and I would take pictures. And then that night, while I'm still thinking about it excited, but I'm with my kids and I'm not necessarily going to go work at that moment, but it's in my brain. So I go into camp and I drop the pictures in. And then I'll take those links and put it in the Google Docs. So it's like, okay, if I can schedule all these out now that I have them linked, it's easy for me to go find them. So I would set that up for yourself. I would treat it as a gift for yourself so that you aren't

dragging your energy down, trying to do all these things in the moment after you've already lost the excitement, you've got it set up so you can easily jump back in.

Andi (25:18.916)
That's great advice and that reminds me, have heard similar motivations in the past that when you are creating, especially those of us in craft industries, as you said, we really need to be documenting our process even when we think we're just sewing something boring, sample, whatever.

advice I was given was to take at least five pictures a day. So I would add, you know, five pictures and a couple video clips, like you said, because the more content you have, the easier it is to pull those together into stories. And like you said, that how it started, how it's going, finished product sequence is, you know, gold online because people do like to watch.

How many times have you gotten sucked into something in an industry that you don't even care about, know, like basket weaving or, you know, Zentangle designs and all this stuff. And yes, it relates, obviously it's artistic, so I'm going to be interested in it. But do I really need to spend three minutes watching somebody draw out a floral feathery design? you know, but it sucks you in.

Tori McElwain (26:42.207)
Yeah, it does. It does. I would, and that's what I work with my clients on is figuring out what little pieces they can get that they like, that they can put together easily at the end. So it's kind of different for every person. So if you find some, a few things that work for you, like five pictures a day, and like Andi said, a couple of little short videos.

Keep doing those every single time. Your audience likes it because it builds up trust because you're doing the same thing for every pattern release. You have these little things that you do and they know something is coming. They get excited. They get used to what you're sharing and it's easy for you. Easy for you to remember.

Andi (27:18.813)
Yeah, I think that's a good thing to keep in mind is that anytime we add these structures and, you know, being able to understand our marketing in terms of leads, content and launch, it's going to make the whole process easier for us as we go forward. So I would encourage people to explore DMMC and see if that can give you the support you need. Join us in Patreon when we have these discussions and...

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