How To Market A Craft Show So You Can Make More Money

As most of you know, I participate in a number of arts and craft shows during the fall holiday season. I make beautiful soy candles, jewelry and I also sell my wonderful DVD “The Art of Soy Container Candle Making.”

Since I’m also a CPA by trade, I volunteered to help the local “Nutcracker Shoppe” with the Finance Director position, and also with internet marketing. I sat down with one of the long-time members, and worked on how to design a new website for them. We determined how many pages we wanted for an informational site about the upcoming show, and to collect e-mail addressed. I put in a bid to outsource the web design and got an extremely attractive bid from an web designer in India. We worked on the site for over 6 weeks, and it turned out beautifully.

I also convinced the Board to accept credit cards – since the show is a “central checkout” with all of the members tagging their items with their initials or stamp – so we know who the sale belongs to. Last year, some of the Board members said that they wanted to eliminate the central checkout and let each member (vendor) take care of their booth. So, I went up to a few of the Board members and told them that the show would do much better, if they accepted credit cards, instead of just cash and checks, and if they kept the “central checkout.”. They said they needed help, so I volunteered.

One of the ladies I worked with on the website was the marketing person. She placed ads in all of the local papers, free community papers and coordinated the printing of all the flyers and “bookmarks.” I worked on promoting the website everywhere I could Online – with free Online magazines, free Online community events, Craig’s List, and all the social networks. Since I created a nice video slideshow with pictures from last year’s show – I posted the video everywhere on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and many more sites.

So, together we created a great marketing campaign. Since we were now accepting credit cards, we had the Mastercard/Visa/Discover logo on all of our marketing material. This was the 30th anniversary of the Nutcracker Shoppe’s Christmas Bazaar and the first year to accept credit cards – and we wanted everyone to know it!

It was a daunting task for my first year as the Finance Director, even with years of accounting experience behind me. I spent days sorting and counting tags until my fingers had so many rubber band cuts from wrapping each stack with the tiniest rubber bands!

As the numbers came in from the bank the result was quite clear. We were almost 30% up in sales from last year’s show.

Now, I believe that was due to a number of reasons – new members with a following; a better layout of the craft tables; more kitchen goodies that are always so popular; and more people on the floor answering questions for the customers.

But, I can’t help believe that marketing the show Online & accepting credit cards was a big factor of bringing in more people to the show.

All I can say, is that the tremendous hours I put into the marketing & finance aspect of this show really paid off. Not only was I pleased with my sales results, but more pleased with working on the management & marketing of the show.

I think I’ll do a lot more to help others in the marketing area in the future.