Numerous ways are available to facilitate your craft shop, increase the online visibility of your brand, and sell your products. These will help you in establishing a new customer base throughout the world and will also help in retaining existing customers. For ages, handicrafts have remained the backbone of Jammu & Kashmir’s economy. Besides, it plays a huge role in the preservation of traditional art, heritage, culture, skills as well and talents associated with the history and lifestyle of the people. If you have a part-time craft business to generate a side income and now want to establish a full-fledged craft business and be a part of the artisan community, the strategies discussed below will help you with that. There are many great techniques that you can utilize to help promote your craft business. However, you want to be strategic about which strategies you use.
Looking to grow your audience and attract new users to your arts and crafts business? Follow these trends:
Launch a business website with valuable content
The first and foremost step one should take to step into the digital world is to build a business website. Yes, you heard me right about “Business Website”, there are a lot of websites but many fail to understand that building a business website means having the right content which is in line with your business. While making the website it is very important to keep in mind that it should be appealing, perceptive, and user-friendly. Having your specific business website gives an enormous opportunity for the potential buyer to look around at your products before making a final selection.
Indigenous crafts are more popular due to the rich heritage and culture that is bought out from every product thus storytelling on your websites could serve an important role in boosting the business. Presenting information in a logical and sequential pattern is also a key element that makes it much easier for your audience to follow and keep their attention. Through good content and appropriate & impressive images, one could guarantee to grab visitors’ attention. This way your website can help build trust among visitors, through which you will gain credibility & eventually your target audience would like to share your content with other prospects thereby generating more traffic to your website.
Spread The Word On Social Media
In today’s world, your business’s social media presence is equivalent to currency. It is a ticket to markets and customers that you could not have reached with traditional means. Thus, from microblogging to video-sharing platforms, masterful business owners should be able to leverage them all. For your handicrafts business, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube will serve as excellent social media marketing platforms. Design an in-depth strategy to use these platforms effectively as they are more visual-specific.
Collection Ads on Facebook
The best advertisement accomplishes two things: it increases a general user’s interest in crafting by grabbing the user’s attention and inspiring them to start a new project. Then, once you’ve got the user’s attention, the next most important step is to provide them with the exact information and products they will need to make their inspiration a reality.
Collection ads allow you to do just that— inspire users with a beautiful finished work of art, while providing all the necessary parts to users so they can create something similar of their own. These ads are remarkably powerful at both increasing market interest for users at the top of the consumer funnel and driving direct purchases to users already in the market for your business at the bottom of the funnel.
Utilize Product-Specific Creative
If your arts and crafts store offers a multitude of different products and services, it’s easy to forget the need to stay specific to your advertising. While generic display ads may increase your brand awareness more than a product-specific ad, product-specific ads are intuitively much more likely to:
Increase the base demand for your business’ products.
Display specific examples of what you sell.
It is found that displaying actual products in our e-commerce ads tends to drive a higher ROI than generic ads or promotions.
Analyze your market initiatives and keep experimenting
Just building digital platforms or using digital platforms is of not much use if one does not look at its performance. So it has been paramount to understand the effects of online campaigns, hence it is essential to make use of online tools to figure out conversion rates, revenue per keyword, the behavior of visitors to your site, the source of these visitors, etc and through these metrics, one can get to know how effective their marketing initiatives have been & one can modify /change strategies which can help to generate more leads to suit one’s craft business.
Ultimately experimenting is part & parcel of online marketing strategies. As there are various kinds of handicrafts that have been sold in different parts of the world, there are various channels and strategies one needs to try to find out what works & what does not. Constantly monitoring, tweaking, and experimenting with newer ideas will eventually give the best outcomes.
Content segmentation
Segmentation has been around for a while, most will use them for segmenting customers, which means targeting customers with similar demographics, or shared interests. And it’s common practice to have segmentations of forms of communications like e-newsletters, news, and updates or offers and promotions.
But moving beyond the standard opt-in or-out marketing strategies, brands should be looking to more detailed and considerate tagging of their email content that allows a user to opt out of receiving certain kinds of content.
Advertise On Google Shopping
Handicraft businesses should consider testing out Google Shopping. It is typically found with the highest purchase intent for new customers and low returns. That all equates to a strong return on ad spend and a great investment for your business’s new customer acquisition and retention.
Artificial intelligence in digital marketing
In recent years, advancements in Artificial intelligence (AI) have led to more intuitive reporting, automating general marketing tasks like monitoring site traffic and boosting search engine optimization for organic reach. But rather than focusing on what we already gained from AI, it’s time to look to the future and how it impacts digital marketing.
As AI technology advances so do its capabilities, moving from automated tasks and campaigns to being able to predict what customers are likely to want next. AI can analyze more data, more quickly, than we do as humans. For this reason, it’s able to take the large data set that’s there to analyze the purchase history and behavior of customers. Then, be able to suggest a specific item or offer, or even a personalized advertisement.
Using AI to predict your customer’s next move means you can target them with the product or service they need, right when they need it. This kind of targeting will lead to high conversion rates and the sense that you understand your customers and their needs without being intrusive or overwhelming them with irrelevant targeting.
Find A YouTube Influencer
There are hundreds of influencers on YouTube that are teaching everyone from complete novices to experienced veterans how to create art. By the nature of users seeking out these videos on their own and trying to learn, this content is highly engaging and influencers have the power to become authority figures and highly trusted product guides. Your company can benefit from reaching out and teaming up with influencers to get your products or brand mentioned in their videos or link descriptions.
And if you’re unable to work something out, you always have the option to create your video or banner ads and target their videos and channels to reach consumers that way.
Test out Pinterest!
Art, Art Supplies, & Hobbies was reported to be the most popular category on Pinterest in 2021 according to Statista. There are an estimated 32.4 million pinners with an interest in DIY Projects and 26.4 million pinners interested in Fabric Crafts to target, not to mention the hundreds of relevant search queries you can go after.
It’s up to your business to invest the time in testing the right messaging with the right audiences to grow your business here.
Stay relevant but be genuine
As the owner of a handmade business, you decide what products to make and how to make them. To remain relevant, you should be prepared to adjust and adapt. Stay on top of trends, be they broad and likely to stick around—sustainability and inclusion, for example—or narrower, shorter-term trends like the hot new color or footwear style.
If you stay alert, a lot of what’s happening around you can be mined for emerging trends. Watch television, read magazines, scan your news feed, and people-watch like a marketer.
Relevance, however, should not come at the cost of authenticity. The negative impact of inauthenticity can easily outweigh any benefit you receive from appearing to be cutting edge. Be aware of what’s trending, latch onto what genuinely fits and incorporate it into your marketing.
Short, DIY videos
TikTok has shifted the landscape of social media away from status updates and curated photo grids in favor of short video posts. It didn’t take long for other platforms to jump on the bandwagon, with Instagram launching its Reels feature and Youtube leaning into ‘shorts.’
Short videos emphasize the fast-paced way in which we consume content and highlight the need for simple and succinct messages or engaging content that asks us to participate—whether it’s learning a new dance, joining a challenge, or participating in surveys and polls.
The great thing about these short videos is that everyone can put together a quick video that isn’t super polished through their phone. Not only that, but these short engaging video content are candid, behind-the-scenes, DIY, real stories, and have a more unpolished look is what younger consumers want.
Conclusion
To tap into new markets, handicraft businesses can leverage digital marketing strategies. Employing paid marketing campaigns can quickly expand reach, while organic marketing efforts, such as SEO and social media engagement, help establish a lasting online presence. Crafting targeted marketing campaigns, whether paid or organic, is key to reaching untapped audiences and driving business growth.
