marketing

Target Market Part 4: Taking Aim and Reaching Your Customers

Welcome to Part 4 in a series about Target Markets — or those awesome people who want and need your stuff. Marketing your successful indie biz requires a clear understanding of your target audience:  who they are, what they like, and where you can find them. So far in this Target Market series, we’ve covered: [...]

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Target Market Part 3: Surveys and Stealth

Quality information about your customer base is one of the most important tools in your marketing toolbox.  Describing your perfect customer is a good first step, but if you want to minimize risk and improve your chances of success, nothing beats good old objective data.  When you want to really understand your customers’ needs and [...]

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Target Market Part Deux: Demographics

This post is part 2 in a series about identifying your target market.  We’re discussing what they are, why we need them, and how to find them.  If you missed yesterday’s post, Target Market: Finding the Right People, click on over to catch up. We’ll wait. The problem with mass-marketing is that there is no [...]

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Target Market: Finding the Right People

Do you know who your perfect customer is?  What does she look like?  Would you recognize her if you saw her in the grocery store? We’ve talked about a few of the factors that go into pricing handmade products. Price can be calculated by adding costs + labor + profit. Price can be a starting [...]

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Poll: What’s your Handmade Habit?

I thought we’d do a little market research this morning. Wanna help me out? You see, I have a hunch that handmade-sellers are often handmade-buyers as well.  But I’d like to test this assumption. The results of this poll could help us better define our target markets. Because on one hand, fellow sellers might buy [...]

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Price as a Starting Point for Product Development

Yesterday we talked about the balancing act between the prices we charge for our handmade products and the value that our customers perceive in our products. Perceived value is tricky — it’s different for different customers.  For example, the value I perceive in a handmade quilt is different from the value my brother perceives in [...]

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Balancing Price and Perceived Value

Pricing your handcrafted product is a balancing act, to be sure.  And, like many of you, I’m tired of seeing under-priced products out there in the market.  Devaluing craft does none of us any good. “But pricing is hard!”, they say.  I see it all the time in handmade forums: “If I price my items [...]

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Be Twitterrific

Twitter is a fantastic venue for online conversations.  Twitter can introduce you to a large community of like-minded artists and designers.   And, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool that helps you form connections with potential customers. Sometimes though, people abuse their allotted 140 characters.  What was once an interesting conversation turns into a [...]

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Lessons from The Big Move of 2010

Now that we have internet in the new apartment (finally!), its about time I break the regrettably lengthy posting hiatus. The “do-it-ourselves” moving process has taught me many things.  First of all, I discovered that I have more upper body strength than I ever would have imagined. And secondly, I learned a few lessons about [...]

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Social Pressure, Social Proof

I just looked it up:  There are more than 218,004 Etsy sellers with at least one item in their shops.  And according to Etsy, 2,008,387 new items were listed during the month of March alone! Staggering numbers, for sure. I’m sure I’m not the only shopper who has felt overwhelmed when searching for a handmade [...]

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