Last year, my now-10-year-old daughter made recycled crayons for a kids' craft fair, got great feedback, and decided to make it a real business. Naturally, I made her a website.
This past weekend, longtime client The Arc of Camden County hosted a craft fair, so we got her a table. We had a blast. But I also noticed something every small business owner should hear.
The other vendors were serious artists, with tents, banners, lights, and display shelves. But when I collected business cards from my favorites, none had a website. They relied entirely on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
The problem is obvious if you run a local artist through the strategic marketing framework I've laid out before.
As an artist, you mostly have to create demand, since nobody's searching for witches made from recycled books.
And since crafts are often gifts, with new designs all the time, repeat buyers matter a lot.
Fairs and social media are great for getting seen. A website makes them work harder by enabling:
- Contact list: capture email and SMS sign-ups at the fair, buyer or not.
- Product discovery: an Instagram grid is a haphazard catalog. A website shows everything you make.
- Referrals: a URL is easier to pass along than a social handle.
- Direct sales: Etsy is great, but your own site skips the platform fees and restrictions.
The math works out, too. A good booth display can cost as much as a website. You could build a website in the time you'd sit at one event. A year of booth fees can easily be more than a year of web hosting.
It's also not mutually exclusive. A website makes every fair and every post worth more: contacts collected today become sales and referrals later, and posts can link to a buy button instead of a back-and-forth in the DMs.
And it's far easier than most people realize. That same morning at the Haddonfield Farmers Market, a friend told me she wanted to grow her small-batch chili business beyond the market, which ends for the season this weekend. I built her a website before breakfast the next day.
Liked this edition? Forward it to another business owner who might like it, or leave us a Google review! Want to discuss this or another topic for your business? Book a call.