Home Garden And Tools Industry: Marketing Tips for E-comm.

Selling homemade, garden, tools or handmade goods requires a different approach to marketing in order to get it right.

The reason there is a differentiation between how you sell these products and say, dog products is because the buyer’s thought process is different.

How often do you buy garden fencing without first seeing it in a hardware store?

While there is no one size fits all, there are certain tactics you should employ to make sure your ecommerce store does as well as it can.

In this blog post, we’re going to look at a number of different ecommerce marketing tips for anyone selling home, garden, tools, or handmade goods.

When selling handmade remember pricing is important too.

You’ve spent hours, maybe even days perfecting your handmade goods, therefore you want to know you’re getting enough money to make it worthwhile spending your time creating your products. This means you need to seriously consider the price you’re selling your products for and should consider using a competitor price tracking tool to see what other people selling similar items to you are pricing theirs at.

The issue with homemade and artisan goods is that you’re usually a small business. Normally, you create the products yourself, put them on your website or listing site and market them through your own channels.

Therefore, break down the costs of manufacturing the product itself, how much time you spend making them and come up with a price point that makes you feel comfortable.

Look into marketplaces

We mentioned marketplaces as a viable option for selling your goods if you’re in the homeware or handmade niche and it’s true.

There are a number of different marketplaces you can look at:

• Etsy
• Bonanza
• Craftstar

The benefit of selling on marketplaces is you’re reaching an audience who are already looking for products like yours. It helps you reach a wider audience who may not have previously heard of you, your business or even your product.

Be careful when you use marketplaces, though. There are some considerations you should take, for example, keep in mind you don’t have full control over how your shop is branded. When you’re selling on marketplaces, although you’re putting yourself in front of a wider audience looking for products like yours, you’re also putting yourself next to your competitors.

This means you need to work extra hard on how you brand your product.

Your product name and descriptions are important

If you’re selling your home, garden, tools or handmade goods on your own website, you should take careful consideration as to the product names and descriptions you give your product.

This is for two reasons:

1. Using the right wording will help you show up in search engines when people are looking for a product like yours.
2. Using the right wording will help your audience understand your product in more detail, without having to see it in person.

Let’s look deeper at both of these scenarios.

Suppose you’re redesigning your garden and you’re looking for gnome ornaments to fill some empty space. You know you want the gnome to be green and you also know you want them to be quite small.

So you head to Google and search for “small green gnomes”

If we click the first link, we’re taken to an Amazon page that has the exact type of thing we’re looking for.

You’ll see also, in their product description they also used other phrases people might have searched for.

Like garden ornament and elves. This is because you can never be quite certain what search phrase someone will use to find your product, so you need to phrase your product descriptions in such a way so that they have a chance of being found.

You can also use Google keyword planner to see what other phrases people might use similar to your chosen search term to incorporate them into your product descriptions.

Secondly, let’s talk about why you need to use the right wording to help your audience understand your product in more detail, without having to see it in person.

When it comes to marketing, the right product descriptions and product names are important. They help establish your brand and help potential customers understand your products more.

You may want to opt for a simple name brand name or you may want to opt for a more literal brand name. This works better for people working in the tool industry.

Rather than rename your drill: ‘Powerhouse Pete’, it is often more helpful to use a product name exactly describing what it is, for example, this drill from Screwfix.

This way, as soon as people land on your website, they have a clear understanding of what your product is and its features.

Use imagery and video

You’re working within an industry whereby people often prefer to see what they’re buying before they buy.

You wouldn’t buy a garden fence without first seeing what it looks like. Although we spoke about the need for good product descriptions, there is only so much visualization someone can do through words.

Organic traffic can be improved by up to 157%.

As well as good product names and descriptions, you need to show not tell, meaning video and imagery will be one of your best marketing assets if you’re selling in the home, garden, tools or handmade niche.

For example, if you sold drills on your website, you could think about creating a video like the one below that goes into detail about how to choose a hand drill.

You could then lead people to specific product pages on your website given that they now know the criteria they should use when choosing the best hand drill for them.

Creating this sort of ‘how-to’ content brings a product to life when it’s often the norm to talk to a person in-store.

While selling these sorts of products online is more difficult, especially for people who aren’t 100% certain of what they’re looking for, you can still make sales and profit if you create the right story and imagery around your products.

You can also use images to bring your products to life. Showing your products in action, like Amazon do can help your audience envisage themselves actually using the product and how it would fit into their life.

Your customers are your best advocates

When it comes to selling in the homemade, garden, tools or handmade goods niche, we’ve mentioned that people often prefer to buy in-store. How do you compete online in a world where people prefer to buy online?

You use your current customers. Let’s look at an example. You’re about to buy a new mattress. You set a budget for this mattress of $1000, therefore you’d like the mattress to be high-quality and suit your sleeping preferences.

In most cases, you’d go to the store, lie on a few mattresses and pick the one that felt best for you.

So why is it then, online mattress companies like Casper manage to do so well when their store is online. One of the reason is that they offer a free-money-back guarantee. The second reason is that they use their customers as advocates.

Because of the sensitivity of their product (you sleep on your mattress every single night), Casper needs to use their current customers to wax lyrical about their products because people prefer to hear real reviews from real people.

They believe it more when a customer says “best mattress ever” than when the company brands itself as the “best mattress ever”

So if you can incorporate some customer reviews or feedback into your product listings to help people understand your vision.

Takeaways

If you’re trying to market your products in the homemade, garden, tools or handmade goods niche, you need to think carefully about the tactics you use. you’re working within a niche that primarily people prefer to buy in person so they can ‘get a feel’ for what it is they’re about to buy.

But don’t let this discourage you from entering this niche, or scaling your efforts if you already sell within this niche. Having a clear and good understanding of what it is you’re selling, who you’re selling to and the types of things they want to see will put you in a good place to increase profits.