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If you’re running your own business, there’s a fair chance you’ll need some form of advertising at some point. Sadly, this is something I’ve always hated, despite the fact I actually have a degree in marketing, and a previous, over 20-year career closely attached to advertising. But I still hate tooting my own horn, due to my personality. I have always preferred being the lone influencer, who toils in the background and makes things happen, rather than vocally promoting it.

But in 2020, the COVID crisis stopped my ‘shop entirely, and I realised my business had been relying on one market alone. I had to start experimenting with the ideas of how to develop and expand my business, which meant I needed to get more active with advertising too.

When I established Ox Works in 2016, I got off far too easy, advertising-wise. I had already created some reputation on discussion forums and Youtube, so once I had opened my Facebook page, I started getting orders immediately. Back then I still produced small batches of empty hilts, and each mini run sold usually out in less than a week. Often in just one or two days. Hence, I was already working to full capacity, and needed no further advertising than a FB post.

But the new products alienated my old customer base, and I had to start reaching for new markets. And this meant taking a leap into paid online ads. Which is something I seriously loathe. Online marketing is such a science, it’s almost maths. You’d have to know all kinds of fancy terms and micromanage everything, so getting even remotely interested in the process is an off putting idea for me. Yet I had to.

And my first experiment was paid ads via Etsy. It’s easy to build a campaign via Etsy, you basically just set the amount of money you want to budget for the ads, and Etsy takes care of the rest. It’s easy all right, but then again, doesn’t guarantee you any further sales. I got nil, and even traffic to my Etsy store didn’t increase much. In the end Etsy didn’t even let me increase my advertising budget, because the estimated traffic on my store was so low. Etsy’s search parameters are also a bit skewed, once I had custom poster art for sale on my boutique, it was available either in ‘clean’ or ‘weathered’ finish, and this led people (assumingly frustrated) searching for cleaning products into my store.

So it was time to think outside the box, well outside Etsy at least, and I set up a campaign of Facebook ads. First a test run for 10 days, budgeted relatively low so I could at least see how things start rolling. And yes, the campaign indeed increased the traffic on my store, so after the 10 days it lasted, I set up another campaign at a higher budget. This increased the traffic even further, while before advertising I got maybe half a dozen views per day on my Etsy store, now I got 50. However, even the increased budget did not increase the likes or followers of my FB page much, nor did it make one single sale happen either. A big, fat zero again.

Alright, one of the ‘laws’ of online marketing is that no matter how big your advertising budget is, it’s always too small. But from an advertising point of view, I’m a bit impatient. I’d prefer if I got even one single sale without much effort in advertising, this would give me more confidence that the actual product is going to work. After that, I’d happily invest in advertising later. This happened now when I started adding 3D printed props on my Etsy store. I didn’t even mention on my FB page I had added them into my listings. For the 3 months I tried to sell carved wooden signs and dye sublimation printed metal posters on Etsy, I got absolutely no sales at all. Once I added a few 3D printed props into my store, I got 3 sales within a week.

Etsy as a platform is also difficult, because it’s not as well-known as eBay or Amazon, and pretty much an obscurity in my own country. In fact, many of my new products could have found niches in the domestic market here, but the target group would have been… Well, kindly put, digitally challenged. They’d never found me online, and not placed one single order online. In a country where digitalisation is advanced, it’s uncanny how people over 55 are so morbidly afraid of ordering anything online, not to mention internationally. Because the computer would obviously have sucked their souls. They’d also prefer payments in buckskins, and petty cash is a major inconvenience for small businesses like mine, because I can’t pay my bills in buckskins. For a brief moment, I was thinking about creating a vintage style mail order catalogue, where the customer could tick the boxes of the product and then mail the coupon back to me. But this kind of system is difficult in bespoke custom products, since the customer would have to supply some information about the customisation. And I reckon it’s also not very cheap to campaign either. Even a relatively small printed quarter of a page ad in the local newspaper can easily cost a grand here, so I’d have to get a lot of odds and ends sold to cover that.

To be honest, the COVID crisis and the ‘new normal’ after that left the entrepreneur in me somewhat scarred. I have become more cautious when it comes to advertising. I’m living in this constant, bizarre fear. What if I now advertise and I actually start getting a lot of sales, but then something critical happens again? I got sick? Someone else in the family got sick? A machine in the ‘shop breaks and I have to wait for 6 weeks to get replacement parts? Or can’t afford to fix it at all? I wouldn’t be able to fulfil the orders, which has been the state of my metal hilt production for 6 past months now. It’s crazy, and incapacitating, but constantly nibbles in the back of my mind.

At the time I’m writing this, the only paid ad campaign I’m running is one for the book I’m selling via Amazon. Amazon’s advertising structure is more complicated, more detailed than Etsy or Facebook together, but then again Amazon is vast, and there's more books for sale than stars in the sky. Plus my book is niche to begin with, so I wasn’t expecting to get filthy rich with it.

Hence, I’m more active on social media instead. Now, I’m 48 and a Scandinavian male, so I’m not going to start producing dance videos for Tik Tok. I also suck at Instagram, because I hate using a smartphone as my primary tool. I’m not on Twitter and if you are, you may want to ask yourself some serious questions. But my Facebook, even though it is a dated platform for many, is still my primary channel for posting announcements and communicating with the customers. Etsy is for selling stuff, at least for now. My website is for promoting my business expansions (just a while ago reaching domestic customers for the dye sublimation prints, but now going through a major overhaul again) and Youtube… Well, I have neglected Youtube for a while, but I’m going to get more active there, in the form of product videos. I am also relatively active on one discussion forum, The Rebel Armory, because deep down I’m more of a forum person than social media person.

And this blog is an outlet where I can share some thoughts and background schemes about my business, and entrepreneurship in general.