Social media marketing is a great way to get the word out about your craft business. Social media can also help to alert long-time followers and new prospects about your attendance at a festival or event. If you’re a craft business owner who has set up a craft or visual arts booth at an event, social media can help drive traffic to your booth so you can meet new potential customers and increase brand awareness. If you’d like to promote your visual arts and crafts booth on social media, here are five tips to help.
Tip #1: Use all your channels
There’s a lot of debate about which social media channels are better for promoting a business. If you’re already on certain channels, like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, use all of them. It’s not a bad idea to stay consistent, too, and use as many of the same images and text on all the channels, if possible.
If you’re new to the social media game, Facebook is a great place to start. With about 2 billion monthly users, a few simple posts leading up to the event with photos and quick descriptions about what you will be offering at your booth is a great way to get the word out. Just know that your event is really only a starting point. You’ll want to keep posting and focus on building your audience; you can also learn about paid advertising options as you build followers.
Tip #2: Use photos of crafts and art, not just the whole booth
Some people just take a photo of their booth, which is OK if you have good signage and vibrant colors. But your customers and prospects really want to know what’s INSIDE your booth. Use a collage of several of your most popular craft items or art pieces. If you have a popular guest, use a photo of them. If you’re going to be teaching a workshop, show the process in action. And don’t forget to make sure your crafts or art pieces stand out. Display them on acrylic risers or pedestals like these or something else and make sure you have plenty of natural light and no shadows in the photos.
Tip #3: Use simple, clear descriptions
Less is more when it comes to text. Let the visuals carry the post. Make sure your headlines, subheads and first sentence, tell us exactly who you are and what you’re doing at the festival. Product mentions, workshops and other descriptions should be short. Use bullets if you can. And don’t forget to insert contact information at the end of the post. There are those who may not be able to get to the event, but if they like what they see and read, you want to give them the opportunity to connect with you.
Tip #4: Don’t forget during- and post-event posts
Don’t let the festival or event experience pass you by without documenting some of it and sharing it on social media. Make sure to post during the event. You could share, with permission, photos of happy new customers or workshop participants. If you actually demonstrate a craft, show photos of people getting their hands dirty, learning and having fun engaging with your craft at your booth. When it’s all done, create a summary collage and let the world know how much fun the event was with post-event posts.
Tip#5: Stick with it
Social media is an ongoing effort. Some posts may generate a lot of interest, but others may not. You need to post regularly in order to build your following and increase brand awareness. Hopefully, promoting your booth resulted in adding some new contacts or customers. But if it didn’t give you as good of results as you hoped for, don’t slow down your social media strategy.
Keep posting and start researching different tactics and platforms to get your name out. If you think a paid strategy might work for you, take the time to read into how you can set your budget and target your specific audience.
And you’ll also want to research other craft businesses to see how they’re succeeding with their social media strategies. And while you continue to build your business, make sure you offer great customer service to the loyal and new customers that come your way. Sometimes, all it takes is a few brand loyalists to spread the word on social media about your greatness and you may see more traffic and business than you ever imagined.
Happy posting!
Ray Ko has been creating effective visual merchandising and interior design strategies for retailers for more than 20 years. Today, he is the senior ecommerce manager for shopPOPdisplays, a leading designer and manufacturer of stock and custom acrylic product.
