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Have you ever wondered why some online sales profiles are more successful than others? Some products just seem to float to the top of the charts. Those products are submitted by the same people. The rich get richer. Surely, there must be some sort of conspiracy?
Actually, there is no conspiracy. You might be a top-notch needleworker. Your problem is not a lack of talent in producing high-quality items that people would love to have. Your problem is marketing and merchandising. They say that if you build it, they will come. They were wrong. You built it. They’re not coming. That is because you are not using the same techniques to draw people to your products that others use to draw you to theirs.
Have you asked yourself what it is about a product that makes you choose it over the one next to it? That is a rather critical point. If you can understand product design, you can understand your own purchasing decisions.
You might even want to take it to the next level and do formal studies in product design. According to NewSchool,
Product Designer
A Product Designer helps to define the experience and interface of products (also known as ‘User Experience’ or UX and ‘User Interface’ or UI) while defining the brand and marketing strategy around those products. Essentially, it is creating a brand and executing that identity through every phase of the product or services’ lifespan and design strategy – aesthetically, experientially, tactilely, ergonomically, and technologically speaking, of course.
Product design lessons
If that sounds like you, then you could do a lot of good for the world beyond selling products on Etsy. But if you just want to see some improvements in your social selling profile, here are some of the product design lessons you can apply right now:
Focus on User Experience
See this Baby Annabell? Don’t look at the doll. Look at the girl playing with the doll. She is so engaged with the doll, she draws you into her world. That Baby Annabell is real to her. No child could see that and not want one. You cannot see that and not want to give your child that same experience.
What I just described is a user experience. The child is not playing with the doll. She is experiencing it. She cradles it, feeds it, and handles it like a real baby. She is not encountering sharp edges or weight imbalance, or anything that would detract from the experience. As a seller, you have to push the experience, not the product.
In Living Colour
Shutterstock predicts 2021 will feature calm colours after such a tumultuous year. Harsh, garish colours were the order of the day before things went sideways. Now, people are turning to Set Sail Champagne, Fortuna Gold and Tidewater Green.
Advertisers have been using colours to manipulate us for ages. They are so good at it, we usually don’t even recognize it when it is happening. The most common example is pink and blue. Put two identical products in different coloured boxes: one pink and one blue, and they are automagically gendered regardless of what the product is. It wouldn’t matter if you put a toy gun in the pink box. Our colour bias would make us assume this must be a girl gun.
If you are unsure about what colours you should feature, just look at fashion magazines and Apple product launches. The connection is they both do a lot of research into what colours are right for a certain time of year. Match their colour palettes and you will do just fine.
Use Action Words In Your Descriptions
Everyone knows how important a call to action is in any advertising. The mistake is thinking it only appears at the end. You should be calling buyers to action the entire time. If you are promoting a teddy bear, don’t say it’s soft. Say it’s cuddly. Soft is just a description. Cuddly evokes the action of cuddling. Don’t say it is squishy. Say it is huggable. Which action makes you want to buy, squishing or hugging?
Your social media sales will soar just by applying lessons from the product design and marketing world. Sell the experience, not the product. Use colours to invoke the right emotional response. And use action words as descriptions rather than simple adjectives and adverbs.
