Tips for Selling on Etsy

Etsy is one of the most powerful and well-known marketplaces for getting your products out there, but as you grow you may start looking towards other strategies to increase traffic.

So in this article, we’ll be going into detail on everything from building your brand identity to increasing your repeat customers!

Developing Your Brand on Etsy

Whether you own your domain or sell on Etsy, if you want to retain more customers, branding should be your first priority. While Etsy has some restrictions, there are still a number of ways to set your products apart from the rest!

While you can only rename your Etsy shop once, other aspects such as your logo, images, and voice go a long way in branding. These things, along with other brand assets, allow you to create a recognizable brand.

While visual effects are a large part of branding, it’s also important to consider textual aspects of your brand. This includes a number of crucial aspects:

• Unique Selling Proposition
• Keywords
• Brand Voice

Unique Selling Proposition

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is your main selling point. In essence, this is the reason user’s should choose your product over your competitors

Whether it’s comfort or sustainability, Identifying and leveraging your USP allows you to stay top-of-mind and retain more customers!

Keywords

Etsy provides its own search engine, which allows you to find products related to specific search terms. Keywords and keyphrases are the most frequent words/phrases used in your store.

By aligning these keywords with target search terms, you can leverage Etsy’s SEO to generate more organic sales! This allows you to bring traffic in without any additional effort!

Brand Voice

The last and most important textual aspect is your brand’s voice. Your brand’s design, word choice and marketing strategies all define your brand’s voice.

Having a memorable voice and recognizable brand is key to developing a brand that user’s continue to purchase from!

While visuals capture the user’s attention, textual aspects like these set you apart from others and retain the user’s attention! Beyond branding your Etsy store, you can also use social media, websites, and blogs to help promote your brand with customization opportunities.  In the next section, we’ll go into detail on how to bring your brand to social media!

Social Media Marketing for Etsy

With billions of users interacting daily, social media has become home to any and every demographic, which provides an incredible opportunity for your business. Whether you’re selling pet products or dresses, you can become a part of a community that loves your products in just a few seconds!

To find your audience in the vast sea of users may seem difficult, but social media makes this incredibly simple! You can simply visit similar pages on Instagram, Facebook or Linkedin, and engage with their content. By engaging with their content, as well as others who have done the same, you can begin building relationships within your community.

Once you’ve found your target audience, you must find what kind of content they’re consuming. There are a number of strategies to implement, but the easiest is to find a few similar pages on Instagram, and find out what they are producing. Then, analyze their best performing posts, and compile it into your own strategy!

Once you’ve built your brand, found your audience, and established your strategies, it’s time to share it! Social media is becoming an increasingly valuable and cost-efficient source of traffic. Simply by posting and engaging, you can build a presence on social media and leave an impression on your target audience.

Whether you’re selling books or pet toys, you can use social media to build and engage with your community, bringing more eyes to your products. But how do you get your content recognized on social media? This process can be broken down into three easy steps:

1. Setting up Your Profile
2. Creating a Content Strategy
3. Maintaining Consistent Growth

Setting up Your Profile

The first and most important aspect of building a presence on social media is your profile. This is your brand’s home in the community, so it’s important to craft a profile that engages and converts viewers.

To do this, there are four aspects you must pay attention to. First, you must use a searchable account name if you want to get found. For example, if you want to appear in pet toy searches, you could use “Bella’s Pet Toys”. 

Next, it’s crucial to use a relevant account handle. Whenever your profile is mentioned or shared, people will be looking at your account handle. While it doesn’t have to be formal, it’s important to make it readable and to exclude any unnecessary characters.

When browsing your profile, your bio’s job is to convert the viewer into a follower or customer. To do this, it’s important to tell your viewers what you’re sharing in a clear and concise way. After this, it’s important to provide the next step by using a call to action. This may say “Follow for daily tips, tricks and styles!” or “Visit the link in bio for more!”

The final, and arguably most important aspect of building your profile is your profile picture. This is your brand’s icon, which will appear everywhere from your posts to your conversations. If you don’t have a logo yet, you can create one using Canva or use a selfie if it’s a personal brand!

Creating a Content Strategy

Once you’ve built your profile, the next step is to create a content strategy that keeps your audience coming back for more!

There are a few aspects that you must consider when determining what, when and where you’ll post. First, you must consider who your target audience is and what kind of content they are consuming.

If you’re targeting pet owners on Instagram, it’s likely your target audience wants to see pictures of pets. Now that you’ve identified what kind of content to post, it’s time to start creating and posting.

It’s important to include a variety of content styles and formats so your audience doesn’t get bored of the content. This means incorporating photos, reels, carousels, videos and stories. Once you’ve established which types of content you’ll be posting, it’s time to take action.

Maintaining Consistent Growth

One of the most common principles of social media, consistency is key, remains truer than ever when promoting your Etsy store. If you want users to consistently engage with your content, they have to know when it’ll be published.

To keep posting on track, you can set up a content calendar or use a tool like Buffer to ensure consistency. This allows you to post the same day and time every time, so your audience is ready for your content!

Consistency is important in more than just the content you produce. If you want users to engage with you, you must do the same. This means commenting, liking and connecting with users in your community on a regular basis.

With these three keys, you’ll be able to build a solid foundation to manage and grow your audience. Doing this allows you to learn more about your audience and build a reliable customer base, which will prove immensely beneficial in the next section!

Getting your First Sales on Etsy

The truth is, getting the first sale is always the hardest. However, there are a number of ways to simplify the process. Whether you’re looking to grow organically or promote aggressively, these are some of the most profitable strategies you may want to implement.

• Boosted posts
• Building a website
• Email Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Blogging
• Giveaways

Boosted Posts

Social media networks also allow you to boost content to get more targeted viewers. If you’ve begun building a social media presence for your Etsy shop, boosting posts can be a great way to hasten the growth of your audience.

Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest, you can promote pictures or videos of your items to reach more targeted users. This is one of the quickest and simplest ways to increase your reach on social media and is typically cheaper than PPC ads.

Building a Website

If you’ve been selling on Etsy for a while, you may be looking for a way to truly build your brand. Building a website will allow you to seize full control over your branding and advertising

And now, with Etsy360, you can integrate your Etsy store with your website. This allows you to gain control over your brand, while still allowing Etsy to manage transactions and inventory.

Building your own website opens up a number of doors in marketing. By taking ownership of your store, you can then take advantage of blogging, email marketing, and custom branding.

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows users to build a list of interested buyers by providing value in exchange for their email. For example, you could start a newsletter or provide a discount via email, then add them to a list of potential buyers.

By building a list of targeted customers, you’ll have an evergreen marketing avenue that builds itself! This can be extremely powerful because you can send promotions, sales, and new posts to a list of interested users!

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) allows you to rank your website on search engines by targeting relevant keywords or keyphrases. Including keywords into your titles, subtitles and content allow users searching for that term to find your website.

This brings in targeted, organic traffic that can be converted into customers or subscribers. As your store grows and your brand becomes established, more traffic will be referred to your site!

Blogging

Building a blog, even producing a single post per month, can build up organic search traffic as well as engage users within your niche. Blogs give you a place to establish yourself as a niche expert, and solve customers’ problems!

If you own a store selling pet supplements, writing a post on pet health will bring your target audience to your content, looking for a solution! This will allow you to either recommend your product, add them to your email list or engage with your posts!

Giveaways

If you’ve built your social media profile, an incredible way to generate more traffic is through giveaways. Giving away products might seem counterproductive, but running efficient giveaways can prove extremely profitable.

To do this, create a post with the basic rules to join. This can include tagging friends, following your account, or sharing the post. As users share the giveaway, more users will interact with it, bringing more traffic to your website.

While you’re giving up a single product, the giveaway could yield new repeat customers, which is much more valuable than any single product!

Promoting Your Etsy Shop with Paid Ads

Now that we’ve established the organic marketing opportunities, it’s time to dive into the paid promotions that can help you skyrocket your engagement. Etsy offers in-app promotional tools, which is arguably the easiest way to start promoting but far from the most efficient.

If you’ve followed the steps above, you already have a strong community surrounding your brand, so promoting posts could help you grow that community. This can be done using Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest or wherever you may find your audience!

Once you find out where your audience is hanging out, the next step is to find out what type of content they are consuming. Then, you can begin creating and sharing this type of content!

Organic growth is an incredible way to build genuine connections, but if you’re looking for a quicker method, you may want to look at paid promotions. Paid promotions, whether it’s Etsy or Facebook, are an incredible way to get your products in front of your target audience.

There are numerous ways to promote your products with paid ads, including Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and Etsy itself. However, we’ll be going through Facebook’s process, which is the most popular and arguably most powerful platform.

To get started, select what content you’ll be promoting. Next, you can head over to Facebook, where you can create an ad campaign targeted by age, location, interests and a number of other factors! To do this, you can head over to Facebook and make an account with the Ads Manager.

Next, create a few creatives to test in your campaign. Once this is done, it’s time to select your objective. Facebook offers three objectives; awareness, consideration, and conversion. This tells Facebook what your priority in advertising is. Awareness prioritizes brand recognition, consideration prioritizes getting their attention, and conversion prioritizes sales and traffic!

Once you’ve identified and set your objective, you can select some details to target your specific audience. Facebook provides tools to target by career, age, gender, location and many more, so the more you know about your audience the better.

Now that the fundamentals are set, it’s time to select your budget and metrics. Once this is complete, your ad campaign is prepared! The final step is to tweak and improve the campaigns as you collect more data.

Getting Started

If you’ve read this far, you’re likely already selling on Etsy. While this is a powerful tool for getting your products recognized, you may have reached the point where you’re looking to increase your traffic beyond Etsy’s search engine. Whether you favor organic marketing strategies or aggressive campaigns, there are loads of ways to help get your Etsy shop out there.

So if you’re ready to take ownership of your store, head over to your audience’s favorite social media and start building your community today! As you’ve learned, this lays a foundation for any other marketing strategies you may execute, and requires little to no effort to start!

Once this is done, you can begin building your customer base and generating recurring sales using the strategies listed above!