Plenty of people nowadays are leaving their normal nine-to-five jobs to pursue their passions, building their own small businesses out of their love for writing, drawing, crafting, and more. Of course, building your own business comes with challenges of its own. Sure, you have no boss, no set schedule, and no strict dress codes, but if you don’t play your cards right, then you might also have no clients and no income. No matter how unique and incredible your product is or how much work you put into it, you can’t profit from it until you’ve generated interest in your work. At this point, you might be wondering how you’re supposed to go about generating interest, and the answer is through advertising, and it’s much easier than you’d expect.
Why Advertise?
You might object to the idea of advertising at first, worried that you’ll appear to be selling out or come off as too over-anxious, but it’s so worth the growth that it could provide your business. You might have faith that the right people will somehow stumble upon your product, maybe by combing through Etsy for the exact thing you’re selling, but advertising can help you engage with all kinds of customers, even those who you might not have expected to take an interest in your business otherwise. This is why advertising is so important to growing your business because as soon as you boost your business’s outreach, you’ll likely boost its sales as well.
How to Advertise
Advertising can take many forms, so it’s important to do your research and decide what audiences you should target to give your business the best chance at success. For example, if you’d prefer to get to know your customers on a more personal level, then you can always sign up for local events. If you’re someone who creates art of any form, then you might want to consider signing up for local craft fairs or conventions where you can set up a booth to display your products and interact with potential customers. You could even offer little promotional freebies, like giving out free tote bags with your business logo to any customers who spend over a certain amount. This will both motivate customers to spend more money and will provide you with free advertising! If your product is your own original music, then you should start searching for open mic nights and contacting small local venues that are known to have live music to see if they’d be willing to give you a shot at playing some time.
If your business has either a primarily or entirely online presence, then it would make the most sense to utilize online marketing platforms to advertise your business, that way you can include links to your website and your products. Online advertising can be an especially great tool in building your business since it can help connect you with new potential customers from all over the world, which you might have trouble doing on your own.
Of course, if you’re a bit more ambitious then you might prefer to take advertising into your own hands instead of having to dip into your business funds to pay for it. With the growing popularity of modern social media apps, it’s entirely possible–and incredibly easy–to promote your business on your own! Granted, you will have to come up with content that will appeal to others and generate interest in your product, and you’ll want to try to post regularly to remind people that you exist and make them feel more tempted to check out your products. For small business owners who craft their products, you could make videos of your process on projects from start to finish–customers love to see their purchases being handmade! If you’re a writer, you could post excerpts from your writing to get people excited about your upcoming book release. And if your specialty is in drawing–prints, stickers, or your own graphic novels–then you could draw some cute little slides of well-known characters adapted to fit your style. If you use popular characters, you have the potential to hook people into looking at the rest of your account and coming to love your art style.
Social Media Marketing Success Stories
You might have heard recently about the author Lloyd Devereux and his novel Stone Maidens. He’s recently done interviews on multiple talk shows, including the Today Show. Lloyd had published the novel 11 years ago after spending 14 years working on it, but it got almost no attention. This was, of course, until his daughter took to social media and posted a TikTok about her father and his work. The video went viral, gaining over 47 million views, and a week after it was uploaded, Lloyd’s novel Stone Maidens became the top-selling book in the crime genre on Amazon. Lloyd’s heartfelt success story just goes to show the power that social media and marketing can have when it comes to growing your success.
