Marketing This Thing - Part III - Grab a Breath Mint, It's Time to Cuddle

OK, now strategic marketing is going to mean getting very close to the customer

(not close enough for any type of disease transference, but close enough that we maybe could benefit from a wintergreen tic tac before proceeding)

and it includes market research although hopefully no trips to the mall with clipboards trying to make eye contact with people who are suddenly very focused on the shiny, tile floors.

Most makers -

(I am thinking all, but there may be someone out there who for some strange reason most likely having to do with trends is out there making things they do not love)

who are making a living with their makings are selling things that they are passionate about - things that you and I may not love - but things that they think are freakin' amazing!

They have also either taken the time to figure out that there was a market for their makings and where that market is or they got really lucky.

(and I totally believe in luck, but only beginner's luck - which life has a way of bestowing on us once as a kick in the ass to get us going, after that our luck is kind of like our face at 40 - we've earned it)

I think successful business owners need to have a personal passion for their business beyond paying their mortgage.

A friend of ours has a house alarm installation business that he started after his own house was robbed. Early on he thought marketing to new home owners would be a smart idea and he got lists of them and did mailings to them, but what he found over time was that his primary customer was not a new home owner at all, it was someone whose house had just been robbed.

At first he felt kind of weird to directly start marketing to them (even though this was the reason he got into the business in the first place) but when he really thought about what he is selling which is safety and peace of mind, plus he offers people all kinds of free services and advice, he started talking to these people and letting them know what is available and talking to their neighbors and he is doing really, really well. It is sometimes hard to sell the solution to a problem to someone who has never had the problem.

And strategic marketing is all about solving a problem for your buyer. It helps to be thinking - what problem am I solving and who and where are the people with that problem? And the earlier in your creative business start up you think about this the better.

When I saw Etsy I fell in love hard and fast - the head over heels at first sight kind of love that could have left me barefoot, pregnant and with high credit card debt if I wasn't careful ... luckily I was.

I was already a greenie (although an imperfect and sometimes lazy one) and remaker of all things remakable and I knew in my heart that there was a segment of the market - a pretty untapped segment - of people like me who were thinking about the impact of the things they were buying and who also wanted stuff that was modern and different.

I knew this would be my niche. Modern eco for people like me was what I was thinking. People who wanted to feel good about the environmental impact of what they bought, but who still wanted to buy really cool stuff.

People who wanted to own and wear things that were different - things that made a statement about who they were and that made other people ask them - what is that?

(but in a good way, not in a skin rash - is that contagious? - kind of way - or at least that was what I was going for)

This - "people wear things to make a statement about who they are" - is something everyone who makes wearables can think about when developing their line or planning advertising.

Now, I could see right away that there was alot of jewelry on Etsy, but I did not see this as a bad thing.

Think of how all the car dealers and furniture stores group themselves together on highways.

It would be hard though if you were a Honda dealer right next to another Honda dealer so you need to be working uniquely from your heart and you will probably need to be selling in other places - certain types of art will probably always do much, much better at shows and shops where people can really see them and touch them and hold them and walk away with that art in their hands.

Strategic marketing 1. Opportunity Identification

(this is more than I really love my stuff and so will they)

We need to be seeking holes in the market that might be opportunities.

Double Click Ad Planner by Google is an awesome tool for some strategic thinking. It's free and based on the incredible amount of information Google collects from us on a daily basis probably very accurate.
We can use it in 2 ways:

1. by looking up a site's url and even better 2. we can search by audience where we can choose our own parameters

I LOVE to enter a site where I might want to sell my work or buy advertising, etc and then click around on the other sites the same people visited! It is addicting.

Checking out Etsy.com I can see that Etsy's average browser (and I say browser and not shopper and you will see why in a minute) is a female, 25-44 years old making $25K-$45K a year, with some college or a bachelor's degree living in the U.S.

The keywords they most frequently searched on the day I checked were: fabric, pioneer woman, land of nod, hancock fabrics, joann fabrics, ballard designs, I should add though that the most frequently searched keyword by far was "etsy" or some misspelled version of it -

other sites they visited that day include artfire, craftgossip, craftster, fabric.com, regretsy, twopeasinabucket (scrapbooking supplies) and firemountaingems.

So what does all this mean to us -

(other than the fact that alot of these viewers are makers, too based on the other sites they visited and the keywords they searched and this is ok because we sell to each other all the time)

well, the income levels tell us something about the upper price points that will likely sell well on Etsy (in general) but other than that I think most of us would find our general customer categories working within these profiles.

Now, this is once again getting way too long so I will continue this tomorrow with some specific things we can do. In the meantime if you have never played with the Double Click Ad Planner have fun thinking about the type of customer your work would attract and what kind of things they are looking for and what places they are looking.

* finger cuddle photo by Dancing Pancake Studio
* love is the new black print by The Love Shop

Why Listening is Just as Important as Talking and why your target market may be able to avoid you - Marketing This Thing Part II

There are 2 types of marketing that those of us with maker businesses have to be thinking about - there is strategic marketing (this week's topic) and operational marketing.

Strategic marketing is about positioning our businesses to make money.

One of the ways to do this is to put the customer at the center of our core business thinking and decide what products and services to produce in the first place based on them.

This is no different than what any other type of business has to do to make money.

Now for makers this is not about selling just to be selling -

if we are not creating a business selling something that we are passionate about and is uniquely our own than we are not creating anything anyone will ever miss when it is gone and it soon will be ...

to make room for the passionate stuff that someone willing to put the time and energy and hours into discovering and working and reworking is dreaming up right now in their pajamas or their office suit or their McDonald's bright red shirt -

someone (to quote Will from Monday) who is not afraid to die on that treadmill.

A photographer who's soul yearns to roadtrip the country and photograph rusty cars in junkyards and battered old street signs should not be snapping birds on branches because maybe birds on branches are trending right now ...

(although I would totally hop on the hedgehog train if I were you - I had previously predicted the fox trend and am now predicting the hedgehog trend)

but a strategic, customer centered marketing focus would ask the photographer to think about just how infrequently most people change their wall art and maybe license her images for use on other products or maybe create a humorous 'junk in your trunk' greeting card line or package her photos in such a way that customers are more likely to buy them such as producing a Blurb coffee table book of her photos and selling that.

Now in one sense this does not really expand this photographer's "target" market (again I am picturing ducks in a shooting gallery) because her market is really the people who love her aesthetic (and the people shopping for those people) but it does give them more reasons to buy from her and more ways for her to operationally market her work.

Before I discovered Etsy I created and sold a line of scrapbook-type hanging boards that I called Graffiti Boardz.

I sold them in a few stores at the Jersey shore, but mostly I sold them at local craft shows, street fairs and music festivals.


I made them for about 3 years (it was a part-time thing) until I talked to the album frame manufacturer who fabricated the metal framing I used around the boards about resizing them just for me. I wanted them to make me a 12" frame (the size of standard scrapbook paper) instead of the 12 1/2" frame (the size of a standard record album).

Within a few weeks they had fabricated the special sized frames (yippee) for me and (not so yippee, maybe just a yip) for Michael's and A.C. Moore which they promptly stocked the frame department with and labeled scrapbook frame.

(yes, I am taking total credit for scrapbook frames in the craft stores ... as well as the Cheesecake Factory's crispy crab wontons ... I take total credit for those, too and possibly Obama's economic plan, but we'll see how that works out first)

Anyway back to the new (to me) Etsy marketplace because although these boards had sold very well at local craft shows where you need a broader appeal product with a high 'mom' factor (niche products will not make you the queen of the local craft show circuit) I knew instinctively they were not the right aesthetic for Etsy and that the big old internet, which was getting bigger by the nanosecond, demanded niche thinking.

(plus I thought hanging scrapbook frames were about to be everywhere - and I was tired of making them and my scrapbook store-owner friend, who sold me all her scrappy leftovers at below wholesale prices was ready to move on, too)

Of course, if my heart and my soul were still screaming Graffiti Boardz, I would still be making them (I am sure with a gazillion little adjustments by now) and truly if my heart and my soul were still needing to make them, then I would be making the selling part work ... even on Etsy.

So, what does all of this have to do with listening instead of talking and our so-called elusive "target market" - well, I knew that a successful creative business needed to be customer "focused" at its core -

putting the customer at the center of our business thinking in the beginning as hard and as much work as this can be -

is still alot easier than putting them at the center of our bullseye and "targeting" them later on by firing products at them and seeing what we can hit.

(due to the popularity of video gaming, customers are increasingly agile and able to avoid this type of 'targeting' anyway)

If we don't make what people want to buy

(note - I am not talking about things that everyone wants to buy - we'll leave that to Target)

then no matter how clever or creative our operational marketing is - it will probably fail.

Now, we have to do this without silencing our creative voice because if there is not a whole lot of what is uniquely us in our making then no amount of operational or strategic marketing is going to work for long anyway.

This is where alot of makers get stuck - they either decide to make what sells and it ends up looking an awful lot like what everyone else is making

and then spend alot of time looking for someone to buy it or get pissed or depressed if no one does

or they decide they want to make what they want to make no matter what

(which is, of course, totally ok if you are not wanting to sell it)

and then spend alot of time looking for someone to buy it or get pissed or depressed if no one does

but if other people are the center of a business, and I think they are, then it is just as important to listen to them in the beginning as it is to talk at them at the end.

Staying true to our own voice while seeing customers as active partners and not passive 'targets' is totally possible for all of us.

On Friday I will talk about some very specific ways we can do this in Part III of Marketing This Thing - Strategy is Not Just for Generals.

(I know you may lose some sleep waiting - please don't hate me for this)

*listen print by the amazing and uniquely herself elle moss

This is Not a Customer-Free Zone or why "other" people may be the whole point of our business - Marketing This Thing - Part I

Sometimes it is easy to confuse the things we need to do to make our art and the things we need to do to make a business with our art.

Making a business with our art sometimes requires a shift in our thinking from "what do I want to create?" to "how can I use my creativity to provide what people want to buy?" -

both questions are part of the making experience, but forgetting to transition that thing that you just have to make

(and I totally get that "have to" gut feeling of creation and do not want anyone to ever, ever lose it)

into something people want to buy can create a kind of customer-free zone where other people -

who I would argue are the entire point of our business (not the point of our making, of course, but the entire point of our business) in the first place - get lost.

(and we don't want them to wander off into a WalMart)

We can totally make things and never give any thought to selling them and I would agree that the most genius art is created in a customer-free zone, but not the most genius businesses.

If we are making our makings into a business we should already have a good sense of ourselves and what it is we love to do and need to do and what it is that we do really, really well.

If not, we need to take a step backwards and give ourselves some time to focus on this- this is a process after all, a marathon not a sprint, and although everything these days feels like it is going 1000 miles per hour - it really isn't - there are some things that will always take time and be worth putting the time into.

Our work must come from our heart and our soul and be truly unique and our own

(this stuff is hard or everyone would be doing it)

but to turn our makings into a business we need to focus outside of ourselves a bit or we may be left searching for some kind of marketing miracle to sell it for us.

I think if we have to spend alot of time figuring out how to convince people to buy our stuff something has probably gone wrong somewhere along the way.

This week I will be focused on marketing this creative venture of ours - and by marketing I do not mean some kind of uptown version of "selling" - it is much more personal and radical and important than that!!

Marketing is really about aligning our business and our brand and 'our world' with the stuff outside ourself, the living breathing two legged stuff - those other people in the world.

This is absolutely NOT a matter of trying to "please" all of the people all of the time, but targeting partnering with the people

(I hate the word "targeting" because it sounds like our customers are plastic ducks lined up in a shooting arcade and it is our goal to knock their heads off and we really, really want to win the 4 foot teddy bear for little Morgan or Megan or Melissa and it's every man for himself)

that we can connect with most powerfully and match their needs with our own creative skills - this big old internet has actually created a world hungry for the very real and personal skills that only us small maker companies can provide.

In fact the vastness of the internet demands that we not please everyone. It requires us to find our niche. And, if you don't have a whole boatload of people who would never, ever buy your stuff then you don't have one.

Staying true to ourselves while keeping an eye or an eyeball or at least an eyelash on what people want to buy is totally do-able!

Wednesday - Part II of Marketing This Thing - Why Listening is Just As Important As Talking (and why our 'target' market may be avoiding us)

* mini alphabet letters by lovemaestore

a little Monday morning inspiration from the fresh prince:



some stuff I am taking with me:

1. greatness is in all of us
2. when other guys are sleeping, I am working
when other guys are eating, I am working
3. I am not afraid to die on a treadmill
4. your life will become better by making other people's lives better
5. you don't say, I am going to make the perfect wall- you say I am going to lay this brick as perfectly as I can and pretty soon you have a wall

Here's to a day/week/lifetime of wall-making everyone!

trouble in paradise? or wait I live in New Jersey so maybe I should call this trouble in anti-paradise

So, I am doing a little whisper-typing while hubby helps me rearrange some tables in my studio

(I have to whisper type this because he does not like me blogging about him)

but 2 things have happened within the last 24 hours that I find very alarming, especially with Valentine's Day approaching and I feel I must report on them

OK- he's left the room- I need to type fast ....

#1. Hubby ate the last cookie

now he has always been the kind of hubby who hardly ever takes the last of the milk, never the last bite of a shared dessert and would never eat the last cookie in the box

at least not the last chocolate cookie

so what is up with the fact that he ate the last cookie last night right in front of me and then proceeded to fold up the box, without even missing a beat in the conversation

#2. Hubby left his radio station

(I was briefly in country music hell - am I the only one who thinks country music is all about beer now - I still miss the Dixie Chicks)

and his seat position in my car when he borrowed it and he only drove like 4 blocks roundtrip

now normally I am not such a pain in the ass that I would even give this another thought, but when I noticed it this morning after last night's 'cookie incident'

I am left wondering if something is wrong here and how long this kind of stuff has been going on and I may have been too busy to notice.

(he's back, more whisper typing)

I mean, I know that I have eaten many a last cookie, switched many a radio station dial within seconds of buckling my seatbelt and sometimes forget to look in the mirror before I leave the house

(that last one is not related but it can drive hubby crazy and is for some reason coming back to me now)

but he doesn't ....

I guess I will have to see if all of this is leading up to a gigantic Valentine's Day surprise -

(hopefully not in the form of another girl - one who does not smell like E6000, always checks her face for respirator 'dents' before leaving the house and who will always save the last cookie for him)

will keep everyone posted ....