Unique Marketing Tips for a Handmade Craft Business

If you are a handmade craft business owner, whether you sell offline or online, or both, getting customers to visit your shop is about promoting and marketing. Word-of-mouth advertising, business cards, Facebook pages and websites are always great places to start, but marketing doesn’t have to stop there – nor should it. There are many ways to promote your handmade craft business. Here are a few unique ways:

Brochures, pamphlets and catalogs are great ways to show off your latest and greatest designs but it can be difficult (and somewhat unrealistic) to always carry these items around with you all of the time. A great way to show people the items in our shop is to upload photos of your inventory onto a small digital photo keychain. It’s quick, easy, customizable, and extremely easy to travel with.

Rather than plan old traditional business cards, postcards are much harder to ignore. Because of they are larger than business cards, they offer much more room for adding a few pictures of some of your bestselling items, as well as longer, more detailed messages about your craft business and even promotion codes to attract new or returning customers.

You’re in business to make money so the idea of giving some of your inventory away for free might not be your initial thought when marketing your business; however, hosting a giveaway attracts many viewers, which can potentially equate to more buyers. Giveaways also help promote your shop because winners of your giveaways, who may or may not have thought to buy items initially, will become living, breathing advertisements for your shop.

Joining teams on sites such as Etsy, Artfire, Craftster, Yahoo! Groups and Flickr is a great way to attract customers to your shop. Team members will clearly already have a bias towards purchasing handmade items, so exposing them to your items can only lead to good things. Teams also help you as a business owner because members can offer advice on what has and hasn’t worked for them, support you in your ventures and can even spread the word of your shop as you can for theirs.

If you are a handmade craft business owner who also sells on Etsy, creating Treasuries are great ways to market your business for the simple fact that they increase exposure to your shop. They also allow you to reach out to other craft business owners and form a network.

If you aren’t already a Pinterest user, you need to sign-up for an account immediately. “Pinning” items is extremely addictive and fun. It is also a great marketing tactic as followers of your pins and pin boards are much more likely to visit the originating link of your pin if they are inspired and/or interested.

Blogging is a fun and useful tool for photo-journaling the projects you create, as well as for joining communities of other craft bloggers and sellers. Publishing a blog also is a great marketing technique because content on a blog is always growing and changing which is great for SEO optimization.