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Crafting a Business 101: Marketing Magic

marketing for small businessesSince it’s the beginning of the year, we’re rolling out all our newest series for Crafting a Business 101. Last week we debuted Creative Accounting, and today we’re revealing Marketing Magic!

The term “marketing” might seem very specific or conversely very vague to you. Or maybe you think that if you have no marketing background you can’t do it. To me, marketing involves all the many ways a potential customer can find out about your business. In the most obvious sense, marketing is advertising, but if you look at marketing like I do, then marketing relates to all the following:

  • Advertising (duh, I already said that)
  • Social media and networking (twitter, facebook, Etsy forums, teams, etc.)
  • Blogging
  • Printed materials
  • Your brand and your logo
  • The look and feel of your shop/website
  • Product photography
  • Listing tags, titles, and descriptions
  • SEO
  • Offline word-of-mouth
  • Customer service
  • Defining your target audience
  • Utilizing key stats to your advantage

Some of these things might not immediately fall under the marketing umbrella in your opinion. I like to look at it this way – if I’m working on bettering the appearance or appeal of my products, brand, or logo; improving my tags, SEO rankings, or product photos; spreading the word about my business via whatever method; or even just researching and learning about ways to increase my business efficiencies or better connect to my target customer, then I am marketing. It’s anything that either a) let’s someone find out my business or product exists, or b) encourages a potential or existing customer to make a purchase. That’s what marketing means to me!

If you haven’t already, take some time to look over the Creating a Business Plan series from last year. Several components of the creative business plan relate to marketing your business, including #2, Where can people find my product?, #4, Who will buy my product?, #7, How do I differentiate my product from the competition?, and #8, How do I successfully reach my target customer?

Through this series, we’ll discuss all the many ways you can make marketing magic for your business. As a creative small business owner, you’re probably working on a small (or non-existent) marketing budget. Luckily for us, we work in an age where there are hundreds of free marketing opportunities at our fingertips! So get excited because it’s time to improve your marketing!

What marketing tactics do you swear by? What marketing concepts do you think I left off the list above?

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Staying relevant…

I’m guessing by now you have (hopefully) heard about Etsy’s change in its default search mode.  Check it out here.  To sum it up, search results are now sorted by relevancy to search terms rather than recency.

So, I’m curious, what do you think?  As a newbie shop, I was slightly optimistic that this would boost my views.  I had been relisting a handful of items about once a week, but let’s face it, in the over-saturated Etsy jewelry market, I’m not sure if that was very useful.  It seems like search results based on relevancy would even the playing field somewhat.  However, I’ve been reading all sorts of negative comments and assorted freakage in the forums, which got me worried.

I’ve been taking a lot of time to re-do all my titles and all my tags to try to make everything as concise and relevant as possible.  The hardest thing is just getting into the mind of the buyer.  Today I actually tried using search terms that I’d use to find my items, but that’s the thing, they’re terms *I* would use.  A lot of my earrings fall into the categories of “old hollywood” or “old glamour” style to me.  I see other people use “estate sale style” or “glam” or even “retro glam” instead.  Do buyers use these sort of terms?  I’ve no clue.  I guess it’s really just a question of trial and error and using Etsy shop stats to see what keywords are really being used.

I was at least pleasantly surprised to see that a few of my items do show up on the first few pages of a common phrased search.  For example, these little cuties show up on page 1 of a search for “bird nest earrings” (let’s hope I don’t jinx myself here).

What are you doing to make sure your items show up under the new search results?