Resources for Makers
5 quick tips to help promote your practice across your web presence and social media channels.
1. Be consistent with your branding
Make sure you are consistent with the same branding across all your platforms.
If for instance, if your profile is @Joebloggsceramics on Instagram don’t create a website that’s ‘www.JB designs.com.au’. This will make it harder for your customers to find you.
Just in the same way you would approach a series of thematic works, it is also important to act thematically across your brand. Create a clear identifiable style or language that helps your audience know it’s you.
2. Share the person behind the brand
If you have decided to create a brand identity that doesn’t already include your legal name, make sure your audience is introduced to the person behind your brand and your unique work.
Not only is this important for helping your audience find you, but it also shows that you are a small sole-trader business, setting you apart from large companies and emphasising that everything is made by you, by hand.
For customers that are unfamiliar with craft, a brand like ‘JB Designs’ might make them think that a larger organisation is behind all your wonderful work. Share your personal story across your website and social media channels to emphasise that JB Designs is an impressive, sole trader business.
3. Share what makes your work unique
Customers love to know why something is special. This is particularly important for craft practitioners to highlight as the storytelling of how a product is made helps them to understand why different price points exist for something that is made by hand, compared to mass-produced products. Make sure that this is clear to your customers that your works are handmade and one-of-a-kind. Include a short, succinct description that describes the unique process in how your works are made and celebrates the story of your practice.
For a brief example you could expand and develop from… "All Joe Bloggs works are handmade and wheel-thrown in Brunswick Melbourne. Each piece is one of a kind and finished using Blogg’s bespoke glaze process developed over 30 years of working with clay.”
4. Clear ‘Call to Action’
First ask yourself, how would you like your audience to engage with your practice and support you?
This really depends on what type of practice you have. For instance, if your work is primarily exhibition focused you might like your audience to read your CV and visit your upcoming exhibition; if you run your own workshops it might be to sign up; or if you have a production range to shop your works.
Some makers may at first feel uncomfortable including calls to action but as there’s many wonderful facets of craft practice, sharing this helps your audience know when something is available to acquire, when you’re sharing your skills and when you have new work in a gallery. Your audience are not mind readers and each one is exposed to millions of different types of content so a call to action helps them cut through the clutter.
5. Help customers come to you
Utilising SEO or ‘search engine optimisation’ is a great way to help customers find you. Using SEO means optimising your site and making small changes to help improve the ranking in which your site appears on google. When a customer searches something on Google, the algorithm compares their search to everything available on the web and presents back an ordered list they think will be most relevant to the customer.
Google looks at a number of factors including commonalities between the words used in the customers’ search, image descriptions, web addresses, Geo location and popular web content.
To help improve your SEO, think of your web presence with your audience in mind and write engaging content with humans in mind. What would you search if you were looking for your business? Include useful key words that describe your practice in your copy, for instance: ceramicist, Melbourne, Brunswick, sustainably made, one of a kind. Then when a customer searches ‘Ceramicist near me Melbourne’ this will help make your content more relevant, and help push it higher in the Google SEO ranking.