Promotion of a store on Etsy

Here’s how to promote your own store on the Etsy marketplace and make it more popular. Platform features, basic marketing tricks, SEO tricks, etc.

General Tips

Let’s take as a basis the checklist provided by other Etsy users and marketers. It includes actions that, if done correctly, should increase the profile’s popularity and bring in new customers.

All of the points listed below are applied to one degree or another in other spheres of business and successfully show themselves there. The main thing here is to competently combine techniques and focus on the buyer, and not mindlessly repeat the actions of other sellers in the hope of copying not only their tactics, but also their success.

Promote your Etsy store on social media

Any business needs social media. To refuse an Instagram profile in addition to a website or an Etsy profile means to refuse to interact with an impressive layer of the audience.

And in general, social networks have a lot of advantages:

• People find your business through social media.

• VK and Instagram profiles affect the ranking of your business in search engines.

• Social networks allow you to comfortably communicate with a category of users who prefer not to use other communication channels.

And this is only part of the advantages of running a conditional Facebook account in parallel with Etsy.

Use SEO Practices

Adaptation for search engines in the spirit of Yandex and Google is different from adaptation for the search engine built into Etsy, but it also works. The bias towards the use of key phrases, various techniques for filling out a profile and analyzing search queries all work on almost any type of resource, including Etsy profiles.

The only thing to keep in mind is Etsy’s specific approach to SEO. The techniques you’re used to on Google may not work. This topic requires special attention, and at the end of the article we will talk about it again in more detail.

Research your competitors

Take a look at how sellers of similar products, that is, your direct competitors, are doing. Analyze the design of the profile, take a look at the keywords used and the promotion tactics.

Do not rely on competitors’ style of work. They have already taken their niche. But after analyzing the data on other sellers, you can adjust your tactics to hit those niches that are not touched by competitors. And also include in your strategy to promote practices that, for some reason, were ignored by other Etsy users with similar profiles.

The SERP Checker service can be used to collect data. He will detail the keywords requested.

Offer discounts

Also an obvious option. The presence of promotions and discounts in the store attracts an audience, and sometimes even one that is not at all interested in the product. Some people love to shop and love the benefits. And they don’t need anything else to be happy, so the discount scheme still works great and doesn’t even require any innovations.

So do not hesitate to lower the cost of goods from time to time (if, of course, the reputation of the brand and its positioning allows it). Reduce income from one sale, but you can get a lot of new customers. Some may become permanent.

Set up your referral program

Referral marketing is a popular way to promote websites, social media profiles, and other services or products. Using existing buyers as the main marketing engine is a convenient and inexpensive method to tell a large number of people about yourself, spending a minimum amount of money on advertising.

There are a lot of specialized services that help you quickly develop your referral program and start earning additional income and customers from this.

Connect with your audience via email

Users do not always track changes in your shop and at times may forget about its existence altogether. It’s important to communicate with them, and this is one of the most important reasons why you need a social media profile. It is easier to reach out to the public through them. But if this option does not work, then there is a more classic one.

Get your customers’ email addresses and communicate through it. Create a newsletter and tell about the replenishment of the assortment in it. Demonstrate the benefits of your referral program by offering a personalized discount to longtime customers who have made multiple purchases.

Collaborate with competitors and bloggers

Mutual advertising won’t hurt anyone. Agree with other stores so that they talk about you on social networks, and you tell them about them on your social networks. Both stores will benefit from this, receiving a portion of clicks and potential buyers.

You can also contact bloggers for similar help. If you know a YouTuber who is suitable for the products you are selling in terms of their topic, then go for it. Offer him something in return or pay for advertising. This will help to noticeably grow the audience if the selected blogger has many subscribers on Instagram, YouTube or another similar service.

Buy ads from relevant resources

If you decide to buy contextual advertising, then you will definitely need a clear targeting specialist. The fact is that advertising itself will not bring money if it is not properly configured by a specialist.

It’s important to make sure your ads are shown to the right people. Those who might be really interested in the product you offer. It will definitely not work on bystanders.

And if you are going to buy ads purposefully from specific sites, then you need to choose the most relevant ones. Moreover, it is not even a matter of the topic of the site, but of what kind of audience lives on it and what interests it has.

Create additional sites / pages

Back up your Etsy shop success with additional sites and online stores. Build a personal website that competes with Etsy to rank on Google according to standard search engine SEO rules. This will give you another position in the SERP and help popularize your main profile.

In addition, it is worth understanding that not all of your potential buyers have an Etsy account, so an alternative way to make a purchase can easily give a couple more real customers who are ready to spend money in a way convenient for them.

Communicate honestly with your audience

This is obvious, but scams are not going to help them become more popular in the long run. It is possible that some scam dropshipping tactics can work one-time, but this is illegal and hurts your reputation. Therefore, always adhere to the principles of honest and open communication with the audience.

Interact with them, do not hesitate to ask for support, offer to invite friends. But always take a responsible attitude to your own activities, so that buyers already have a desire to tell more about you and leave positive feedback.

Try to be unique

This tip is especially useful for those who are just about to open or are just opening a shop on Etsy and have chosen a product category that is already packed with a lot of sellers. Don’t expect your customers to notice you. Even if you seriously work on the SEO component and invest in advertising, it will be extremely difficult to sell a bad product. You need something that will attract your audience. Something that helps you stand out from the competition.

Therefore, you should not enter the market without some significant advantage. It is better to first try to identify your “chip” and develop a powerful advertising campaign based on it.

Use analytical tools

If there is little advertising and social media promotion, you can go further and continue to delve deeper into SEO using the appropriate tools:

• Analytical systems in the spirit of Yandex.Metrica for monitoring indicators in social networks and on a personal website. This will help you get to know your audience better: what they like, where they click, what age the customers are, the gadget, etc.

• Search and keyword analysis systems like SERPStat. With them, you can get more information about keywords and adjust their frequency on your site or in your Etsy profile in order to attract a larger audience.

Try offline advertising

Small business does this. Computer foremen walk around the city and post advertisements with a list of their services and a phone number to complete an application. You can do the same. Make a cool ad and leave a link on your Instagram. You can also use a QR code, it can be an interesting promotion tactic.

Well, those who have a lot of money can order a billboard. It is important to be creative and give people the opportunity to quickly get to your profile. Hashtags, QR codes, shortened links. You can use all the tools that can work.

Sign up for courses in marketing

The ultimate option for those who are not ready to search for information on their own. There are tons of online educational institutions where you can learn marketing. At least the basics.

Udemy and Coursera have specialized courses designed to teach people how to promote their Etsy profiles. There is about advertising, and about SEO, and about a lot of other aspects. In general, everything that you will read about in this article, but in more detail.

However, I cannot vouch for the quality of such courses. Information products are specific things, and their cost often seems unjustified. But this is not true for everyone, so you can try.

Etsy Shop SEO Tips

Special attention should be paid to the SEO component. The fact is that for Etsy there are slightly different rules for setting keywords and adapting to search engines.

And at the same time, the platform developers do not report anything specific about these aspects, so it is especially difficult for novice sellers to understand the initial profile setup.

Service requirements

The service itself has few specific requirements. He advises to develop into the store, take cool photos, communicate with the audience, indicate a specific cost, etc. In general, the classics, no specifics. Except for three points:

1. The title should contain the keywords for which you plan to rank the product.

2. All tags available in the service should be used for the description.

3. The more photos on the card with the product, the better.

This is what Etsy itself advises. Nice set to get started. But this is not enough.

Tips from platform users

But Etsy users with experience know much more about SEO on this marketplace and share a lot of interesting facts. For example, in the title, they recommend to include as many keywords and tags as possible. Human product names don’t work here.

The Etsy search engine pays more attention to the first 40 characters of the product name. You should concentrate on them first of all, adding master keys there.

Keys need to be inserted into tags, not only popular ones, but also mid-frequency ones, and sometimes even rare ones. Depends on the product category. The same key queries can be written in the product description.

It will also be useful to post at least 50 different products in your profile. Such stores are considered quite large and are actively promoted when ranking search results.

Instead of a conclusion

That’s all. Use as many marketing schemes and new traffic sources as possible for your Etsy store. Many of the promotion methods described above are free, although they take time to develop. But as a result, they can form a confident traffic flow and a large audience of loyal customers. The main thing is to create a quality product and not ignore SEO practices.