Creating a Successful Marketing Plan for Your Etsy Business

If you’re selling handmade crafts, or craft supplies, the chances are overwhelming that you’ll be familiar with Etsy. Etsy is the largest platform for the sale of these products, and a powerful means of uniting niche goods with niche markets. Success on the platform means creating products your customers will love. But it also means devising the right marketing plan. Online flyer and leaflet printing company instantprint has developed a fool proof guide to getting you started.

Let’s dive into some of the components they suggest:

Your USP

Firstly, you’ll need to understand your business’s Unique Selling Point. This will help you to stand out from more than two million other sellers. What is it about your business that makes it worth the attention of would-be customers? Once you figured out your USP, it should form the lynchpin of every other decision you make. instantprint suggest differentiating yourself from competitors by offering personalised products. They gave the example of jewellery makers – instead of making a ‘gold bangle’ (at the time of publishing there are 69,776 results on Etsy for this), maybe switch it out for a ‘personalised engraved gold bangle’ (2,407 results).

Branding

The right brand will help to distinguish your store immediately. Branding isn’t limited to your logo (though it will include it); it should also cover things like font choice and colour schemes. Effective branding should reflect the personality of your business.  For most Etsy stores, this means keeping things clean. That allows the products to speak for themselves. Given that crafts products are visually complex, limiting the surrounding noise is often critical. Make sure that you keep everything clean and classic.

Descriptions and Packaging

Effectively categorising and describing your products is essential, not only for getting your message across to would-be customers, but to the search engines they’ll be using to find you. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a practice through which you’ll be able to tell Google that your content is relevant to the queries they’re receiving.

The terms you use to describe your products should reflect the search terms that your customers are using. Accurately describing your products is most of the battle, but you might also do additional research to uncover specific phrases.

Of particular importance are tags. You can add 13 of them to any listing, and they should be used to describe your product and what it does. The more relevant your tags and descriptions are to the user’s query, the higher your rank is likely to be.

Content

Establish yourself as a reliable source of expertise and instruction, and you’ll draw the right sort of traffic to your site. And this traffic may in turn, translate into custom. You might compose video tutorials, blogs, or guides. Etsy users are inherently likely to be skilled crafters, which puts them at a natural advantage. You have a specialised area of expertise, which others might be interested in learning about. Why not present that information to would-be customers?

Social Media

Love it or loathe it, social media is a powerful means of driving traffic toward your internet store. Maintain a presence on Facebook and Instagram. The latter is a powerful means of spreading your message, thanks to its inherently visual nature. Take photos of your crafts, and document your process!