Best ways to promote a business

headoutthesand

I've started a small craft making business and need some ideas to help promote it.


At the moment I have a facebook page but it's near impossible to get it advertised as I can only 'invite' friends of mine to see it. Beyond that they want me to pay £7 per day.


Is there any other ideas to get it going? I have made up flyers to put on local notice boards but stumped for my next step.


TIA

w00519772

Finding customers is always the challenge. I guess you get what you pay for. Seven pounds per day seems a lot for a small sole trader. Try a local newspaper. I think I paid about eighty pounds per month.


word of mouth is always good. Is there anyone that can review your work?

carlx

Social media is your friend, IF you know how to utilise it. Facebook is a superb platform to promote business interests. You can't just rely on friends of friends, adding and promoting your business, you need to force that action.

My advice is to research ways to promote yourself online, it doesn't have to cost you much money, if any at all.

In regards to Facebook, one quick easy way is to produce something to give away, limited edition etc and then do a competition, ask people to like your page and share the page in order to enter the competition. This will get a broader range of users viewing your company and its products. Then randomly select somebody and send them the prize, it will generate more likes and shares than spending £7 a day on Facebok advertising.

That is a really cheap and cheerful way of using facebook, there are plenty of other, more innovative ways of doing it, but you get the idea.

Vectis

carlx wrote: »

Social media is your friend, IF you know how to utilise it. Facebook is a superb platform to promote business interests. You can't just rely on friends of friends, adding and promoting your business, you need to force that action.

My advice is to research ways to promote yourself online, it doesn't have to cost you much money, if any at all.

In regards to Facebook, one quick easy way is to produce something to give away, limited edition etc and then do a competition, ask people to like your page and share the page in order to enter the competition. This will get a broader range of users viewing your company and its products. Then randomly select somebody and send them the prize, it will generate more likes and shares than spending £7 a day on Facebok advertising.

That is a really cheap and cheerful way of using facebook, there are plenty of other, more innovative ways of doing it, but you get the idea.

I'm not actually sure about the benefit of giving away prizes in a competition as a way of getting customers. We did this previously and 99.9% of the people who entered were obviously just looking for the prize and not interested in anything else. It's not helped by sites such as the forum on this MSE site (competitions forum) where competitions are made known to everyone along with the answers (assuming it's a quiz type competition). None of the entrants were interested in anything apart from winning the prize which, for the company doing the competition, makes it a pretty worthless exercise.

I'm not saying ignore social media, far from it, but giving stuff away to attract spending customers is a bit of a long shot in our experience.

headoutthesand

thank you for the replies.


I tried the give away thing when I just started and it didn't get a lot of interest. Thankfully the item I was giving away wasn't leaving me out of pocket too much.


I am going to make up flyers and post them on local notice boards and I just saw earlier that there will be a baby-fair type thing soon so will take a stall at that and hopefully promote it more.


It's a bit more challenging trying to do it (advertise) alongside a full time job but i'm sure i'll get there in the end.


thanks again

SugarandSpice

Good luck with your new craft selling business. I'm no expert in advertising, in my humble opinion I think craft items sell better by "Word of mouth" which is probably the last thing you want to hear!

However, with that in mind, it could be worth contacting the schools which are in your area and speaking to the PTA members. There are normally fundraising events going on annually and school mums generally like a "unique or bespoke" item. Some schools may charge a small fee for you to have a stall or they may ask for a percentage of your takings. It would be good for you to decide which you would prefer and offer that first....

Have plenty of business cards attached to your items and I'm sure after a couple of events, your name will be the talk of the playground

Once again, good luck and let us know how you get on!

1stBusiness

SugarandSpice wrote: »

Good luck with your new craft selling business. I'm no expert in advertising, in my humble opinion I think craft items sell better by "Word of mouth" which is probably the last thing you want to hear!

However, with that in mind, it could be worth contacting the schools which are in your area and speaking to the PTA members. There are normally fundraising events going on annually and school mums generally like a "unique or bespoke" item. Some schools may charge a small fee for you to have a stall or they may ask for a percentage of your takings. It would be good for you to decide which you would prefer and offer that first....

Have plenty of business cards attached to your items and I'm sure after a couple of events, your name will be the talk of the playground

Once again, good luck and let us know how you get on!

I second this. I used to work as a TA in a primary school and they would charge £15/stall at their fayers. A lady that I was working with makes jewellery and her stall went down pretty well! There were also people selling crafts such as handmade greetings cards and somebody selling cupcakes.

Have you considered craft parties? The lady that made jewellery also offered to come to your house and host a birthday party where say 10 kids got to make themselves a bracelet etc. Quite a few of the teachers booked her for their daughters parties. I think you would have to get yourself a CRB check though if you are going to be working with children.

Have you tried selling on Ebay/Etsy? What about starting a blog? There are loads of free sites that you can use to create one. You could perhaps share tips/tutorials on how you make certain items? You could also link up with fellow crafters in your local area.

IMHO, I've entered and won Facebook comptetions and was really disappointed! A friend runs a cake business and offered a box of 6 cupcakes. What I got were 6 dry fairy cakes that I could have made better myself! Unless you're willing to offer quality products as prizes, people won't recommend you/come back to buy your goods.

Mistral001

Is there a market for selling crafts direct to the general public? It depends on what type crafts of course and some specialist crafts might have a market selling direct. However, if it is more general perhaps you should concentrate on selling to shops.

Foodie1

Pinterest would be a good social media for you to use as it is used mainly by women and is photo based so you will be able to show off your products. Another one to consider is Instagram as it is also photo based

partialycloudy

I find twitter very good, very easy to get followers if you follow other similar business and tweet often....I prefer it to face book personally