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The Etsy Marketing That Matters

So let's kick it off today with the three elements to marketing that works. This I'm calling the marketing that matters, because if you spend anytime on Pinterest, or you spend anytime online researching your creative business you've probably seen a lot of articles that say things like 21 ways to market, right? Or 10 ways to market your shop online and everything like that. The thing that bothers me about those is that first of all if you down that list it's things like share it on Facebook. Like #duh. We're all doing that anyway. We're all pinning it, we're all tweeting it. Tell me something I don't know. Give me more. The reason that I don't like lists like that is because it's marketing for marketing sake. It's more of the scramble. Okay, then I'll go out and do 21 things. There's no plan behind it. There's no strategy behind it. And there's no cure for the scramble within it. So the number one element to marketing that matters is sharing a consistent message. Sharing a consistent m...

essage. The main focus of that message is your brand message, is what are you delivering? And who or how is it serving that customer? So your marketing's job at the end of the day is to continuously share your brand message. Continuously and consistently put it out there to your ideal customers. Your shop, your Etsy shop, and your social media accounts are doing that right now. They're sending a message for you, whether you set it up intentionally or not. As you're sitting here everywhere that people can find you online that message is being spread. That's the beauty of online, and it's also the curse of being online. Because if you don't have it set up well, it's not sending out a good message. But if you do, it's sending out a beautiful message. It is welcoming people all the time. So the question is what is your marketing saying for you as we sit here? What is your social media account saying about you? Is it telling customers how you'll serve them? Is it telling customers what you're good at? Is it showcasing your experience? That's its job. The number two element of marketing that matters is to keep a customer focus on everything that you share. Marketing is not about what you want from the customer. So let's not get that twisted. Let's not share a lot of posts because we want more sales, because we're frantically scrambling through the day. We frantically want to bring more people to our product so that we get some income back for ourselves. That's how marketing is right now kind of being run for creative business. Instead, marketing is about what you're gonna give, and what you're gonna offer. It's a customer focus. So if I start out in a daily scramble I'm really scrambling, because why? Because I want more sales. I want more traffic. I want you email and I want it right now. I mean, I really want you email. Moreover, I want a reliable income for myself. And I want that bad. You see, there's a lot of me, me, me in that message. That's scary because that's how a lot of people market. Anybody can say that I want more sales. Anybody can say that I want more customers. And I really do like email (chuckles). But we're all saying that. So in order to stand out you want to shift the head space to what am I giving you? What am I willing to invest in this relationship that I know is going to be valuable to us both? And how can I culture more of a friendship with my ideal customers? Shift the focus off me. I wouldn't want to get know anybody that it was all about them when we got to know each other. And neither would a customer. There's always as much to know about what I call your ideal customer as there is your best friend or your spouse. Just for a quick recap, an ideal customer, there's different places you can find this exercise, I have attached an ideal customer workbook to the bonus materials of this course, and I really went in-depth with it in my Copywriting For Crafters course for CreativeLive. But just to give everybody who's tuning in for the first time a glimpse, an ideal customer is a fictional profile that you create in order to start to hone in on that message and start to realize what they want from you. It starts out as guess work and then it really graduates as you start to know real dream customers and dream clients. Then you start to put their attributes and their qualities into that profile. The number three element to marketing that matters is a long-term strategy. This, I believe, is the true secret to success in online business. I believe that there's nothing more powerful than your own persistence and your consistency. The hardest thing is weathering the slow seasons in this creative business. It's wanting to quit but not quitting when it feels like you're talking to yourself, because for a long time and for years to come actually there are gonna be slow seasons where you feel like you're talking to yourself and that means that you have to believe in your message, and you have to believe in your product. Delivering a consistent message, even when there's no return, and even when you get no instant gratification from that message, or it is just very low and very few instant gratifications or very little connection, you still need to keep going. We're gonna explore that strategy in the following session. That long-term strategy, that persistence. I'm gonna ask that you follow a rhythm, that you learn the rhythms of your business. It's gonna be a really interesting, I'm excited to bring that to you, because it's going to be a really interesting way to look at your business in a way that I bet you've never looked at it before. You're going to be looking for repeatable campaigns. Those are winning and powerful, and that means that you do something that works once and then you improve and enhance it as time goes on. You're going to boost what's already working. So we're gonna look for things that are working really well in your current marketing system. And then I'm gonna help you supplement the slow seasons and do things that will create more sales for you when you're having a slow season and weathering that. That's just the tip of the iceberg of what we're gonna cover today. To market your Etsy shop you're going to need a website that attracts and converts. We talked about that for an entire day and build an Etsy storefront that sells. That's my job. That's my job to help you get a better storefront together. Get a storefront that attracts and converts. To market effectively you're going to need a marketing strategy. That's everything we're going to cover today in Market Your Etsy Shop to sold out success. Again, that's my job. I'm here to help you build your strategy up. I'm here to walk you through it today. Finally, you're gonna need an email list, and that is your job. I cannot do that for you. It is absolutely necessary. If you don't have an email list sign up with a free provider right now. I know that it's a vulnerable hump, and I'm going to go ahead and assume that everybody here already has an email list or has one started. But as I stand here I can promise you that there are people that have not gotten over that hump and they need to hear it one more time, go sign up for an email list. It is the key to a successful online business. You need that direct contact with your customers and marketing strategy does not work without it. It takes five minutes to create. It takes five minutes to learn and start making your own opt-in forms and you can get it for free. And one of our favorite free providers is MailChimp. MailChimp.com Go get one if you don't have one. None of the following will work without it. You have to have a way to directly contact your customers. Please. We asked the online audience what sort of marketing issues they've been having and what they'd like to learn about. So I'd to read some of those comments. Manushka, how to actually start marketing properly. Time Capsule says how to drive traffic to our website from Etsy. Our secret tree says how to reach the right people. And Daisy chain oddities wants to learn how to talk to the people and what to post. And time capsule again says they'd like to learn how to increase our social media engagement from our fans that are customers on Etsy. Finally, Erin Merrick says I'm excited to hear about concrete examples of marketing and specifically non-cringe worthy marketing. Anybody here would like to add some of their issues and what they'd like to hear about? I'm interested to know how you convert your Etsy customer to your email list. I think email is so important, and I think email subscribers are absolutely essential. There are the places that you know where you can put the email subscribe opt-in. And you can put it in your shop announcement. But like we said, you don't want to put it in the first one to two sentences. That's very SCO rich. You can email a link to your opt-in with your thank you notice so that it automatically goes out with Etsy. There's other things that you can do, which I really love, and you can convert Etsy sales to email subscribers with a company called AWeber. I just mentioned the company called MailChimp. That's a free service. AWeber definitely starts at a fee. It's a more advanced service. They have an Etsy app connected so that when you connect them, when you get a new sale, AWeber automatically sends them an opt-in option. So they send them that first list. They will subscribe it to your list, to your email list, with AWeber if the Etsy buyer clicks the confirm, yes, I would like to get on that email list. Perfectly within the law and something that can be very useful if you find yourself getting a lot of Etsy sales but you're not getting them on your list. Thank you, that gave me an opportunity to share that tip, because I think a lot of people don't know about that. But also with email subscribers, there's the thing to be careful of is the CAN-SPAM Act. The CAN-SPAM Act is actually really simple and you can Google it online. But the thing about that is you always have to give them a way to unsubscribe. So wherever you're collecting your emails online, the most important thing is make sure that they have that unsubscribe button, and then there's a few other things that are kind of no-brainers, kind of always come out with email subscriptions online. Any email provider will make sure you're covered on those basics and make sure you're following the law. From here let's dive into marketing as a big broad concept. I'm going to break it down today into three parts. The entire day is gonna be segmented so that we are going to talk about marketing in all of its groups. We're gonna talk about marketing as a system and what it should be doing for you when it's online. We're gonna talk about marketing as a goal to set so that whatever you do when you're marketing makes sense to your business so the goal actually gets you out of the daily scramble. And we're gonna talk about strategy. So how to sell more whenever you're marketing. How to build your list whenever you're marketing, and strategy is going to be a really fun segment as well. Then by the end of the day we're gonna turn all of those components into a winning marketing campaign that you can duplicate or adjust so that it fits you creative business. There's a lot of components that come with marketing, because it is a broad big topic. But I designed the course materials, and I designed everything we learn today so that it could be mostly set it and forget it. That's gonna be a good a system. So I don't want to overwhelm you because everything is going to be able to be set up once, and then run effectively over time.