How Face-to-Face Marketing Creates Loyal Customers

The craft business requires a greater visual element when it comes to marketing than many other types of genres. The reasons for this is because crafting allows for a greater expression of creativity. Because craft products are not mass-produced, there is an element of individuality for you to market. Even it you've found a good niche with a healthy customer base, you still have to stand out from everyone else. Face-to-face marketing allows you to interact with your customer base. This also adds a human element to what you’re crafting.

Humanity Matters

Especially in the age of social media, that very special personal touch matters. Only marketing via a social media announcement can often become cold and distant. This keeps you from making that personal connection that drives so many product sales. A customer looking at your crafts online may admire it, but mere admiration doesn't necessarily lead to a sale. In addition, trust in a company isn't built just by admiration of a product. To truly build that bridge of trust, interacting on a face-to-face basis with your customers is a necessity. Nothing builds this trust faster then a real human connection.

Building a Customer Base

For example, let’s say you’re meeting your customers at a trade event. One of them walks up to your booth and asks you questions about your crafts and business. After a friendly chat with this individual, you learn that this potential customer has a close relative that is very much into the sort of crafts you sale. Offering your catalog to this person and their relative, you've just potentially reached two new customers simply by engaging in small chitchat at a trade show.

Building a customer base isn't always about noise. Reaching 20 customers who now care about your product is cost effective. A flyer reaching 100 who are indifferent about your product won’t create sales. For every customer you reach, their positive experience is spread to others by word of mouth.

Connecting With Your Customers

It sounds utterly simplistic but word of mouth counts for a lot. Think of all those random flyers you get in the mail. How many of them go into the trash after a quick glance? That’s because this sort of advertisement is just noise, as it lacks the personable, human aspect. Rather than sending out fliers to random people, if that business went out of its way to interact with their customers--by going to live events like trade shows or simply by engaging their customers in conversations--they would actually connect with their customers. Remember, you’re not only selling your product, you’re selling yourself. If a customer cares about both your product and the person who’s selling it, you've increase your chances of getting a more loyal and larger customer base.

When a real person is attached to a product, people become more interested. This craft now has a person who made it. Thus, the customer can now learn more about what went into making this craft; the creative drive, the desired result, and the concepts the craft was trying to embody can now be passed on. That kind of thing can only really be accomplished in person. Print advertisement doesn't lend itself to this high level of nuance.

In the end, you want your customers to have some form of connection with the items they're buying. This makes them loyal, long-term customers. A good reputation is worth a lot and cannot be bought. Face-to-face marketing is still the best way to really reach a customer.