Handmade jewelry products are unique, original and take a lot of time and artistic vision to create. So reaching the right customers with the right message and offer is crucial to grow in this space. Luckily, it’s easier than ever to find your perfect target market for handmade jewelry!
This post is a sort of target market template which you can easily customize to match your specific audience and marketing goals.
Plus, as an added bonus, I also provide some crucial business growth points – such as building brand, retargeting and scaling – insert happy dance!
So I’m totally psyched to have you here and I hope that I can give you real, actionable value for your jewelry business!
Since this post takes advantage of Facebook and Instagram, you’ll want to first sign up for a (free) Facebook Business Manager account so you can easily follow along with the steps.
Why Facebook? Well for starters, using Facebook means using Instagram as well – two of the largest social media platforms.
And Facebook alone boasts over 2.7 billion active users!
So reaching for your ideal target – no matter who they are or where they live – just got a whole lot easier.
Now let’s dive in!
Outline
- Your Perfect Target Market
- Step 1: Exploring Audiences
- Step 2: Building Audiences For A Handmade Jewelry Business
- Step 3: Layering Audiences
- Step 4: Testing Audiences & Scaling
- Conclusion
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Your Perfect Target Market
Finding The Perfect Target Market For Jewelry
So let’s start this post off by answering the big question: who’s the perfect target market for handmade jewelry?
OK, so obviously this answer is going to vary from artist to artist. But I want to start things off quickly – and minimize any unnecessary fluff!
By following these simple steps below, you should be able to clearly identify your perfect audience:
Step 1: Identify Your Jewelry Type
- Bracelets
- Necklaces
- Metal
- Wood
- Resin
Step 2: Identify Your Main Niche
- Ocean/beach-inspired
- Sustainable material
- Travel-inspired
- Millennials
Step 3: Dig Deeper: Layer A Secondary Niche
- Affordable pieces for the cost-conscious consumers
- Luxury branding
- Recently engaged people, newly weds
- Dog or cat-lovers
- A specific location
Step 4: Create Customized Content, Offers & Messaging
- Customized content for a specific audience is crucial
- From here, you can start promoting, trying new markets and testing new audiences
Piecing together the steps above, one example target market could be:
Bamboo, travel-inspired luxury bracelets for millennials who travel to and love Asia.
Of course, we could segment even further.
For example, narrowing the above group to only women, or marketing to recent newly weds (as a sort of specific campaign).
Either way, this is a rather straightforward formula for clearly identifying your perfect target market.
After all, every successful handmade jewelry business has a unique angle, story or style; the content, marketing and audience targeting should follow suit.
But if you’re still having trouble identifying your target market, no worries – that’s totally normal.
So if that’s the case, then keep on reading and let’s learn how to research, explore and build out target markets!
Recommended Read: How To Market Handmade Jewelry – And Actually Get Results
Step 1: Exploring Audiences
Exploring The Facebook Business Manager
Finding the perfect target market to sell your handmade jewelry may seem a little daunting.
So as a starting point, we need to understand exactly who we want to reach – their interests, values, demographics and problems or pain points.
This information not only optimizes your targeting but also guides the finer points of your marketing campaigns overall.
For example, let’s say your handmade jewelry is ocean or boat inspired and uses organic hemp.
In this scenario, your target market would first include people who like boats and nautical things as well as jewelry and/or fashion.
However, the hemp detail would further pivot this market to people who’s values are likely environmental and relate to sustainability.
Moral of the story?
Niching down and customizing to a specific target market is a strategic sweet spot for marketing.
If you try to target everyone, you’ll target no one.
Facebook’s Business Manager is fantastic for building highly customized target markets.
The extensive library of customer data and the ability to cheaply explore, test and layer various audiences are core strengths of social media marketing.
Plus it’s a totally free platform to use and carry out audience research!
So let’s take a quick tour around Facebook and audience targeting.
The most important section to focus on (for this post) would be the Audiences section.
You can locate this inside the drop-down menu of the Ads Manager.
Once there, you’ll notice Facebook lets us build three different types of audiences.
Saved Audience
These are new audiences you create using demographic data, location information and interest-based targeting.
They are generally cold traffic prospects who do not yet know you or your brand, meaning they’re less likely to buy something.
Retargeting people in this audience who engaged the most with your initial campaign is highly effective
This require making a custom audience.
Custom audiences
These are very effective and highly recommended for successful marketing.
You can upload email lists or use existing data from previous campaigns or website traffic to retarget the most interested people.
This is retargeting and tend to be the highest-converting campaigns.
Lookalike audiences
These are similar to “copies” of existing audiences.
You can upload customer lists or use existing saved audiences (that converted well, for example).
Then, Facebook will create a different, but similar new audience that’s likely to behave and convert in the same way.
So for our purposes, we’ll want to Create A Saved Audience.
This option will allow you to build a new target audience and explore various options relevant to your group.
When creating a saved audience, you’ll put in basic information, such location, gender and age while naming it also.
From here, you can scroll down to detailed targeting to start adding your primary interests.
Notice the Suggestions tab.
Clicking this will pull up related interests and targeting parameters for you.
This is incredibly useful, especially for audience research or if you’re just feeling stumped at who to target.
I talk about this a bit more in the Layering Audiences section below, but the key takeaway is layering will make your audience more specific, or niche, which is what we want.
Niche down your audience using the Narrow audience or Exclude people options.
For example, we could narrowing all LA residents who like jewelry by layering interests so that they also must like beaches and surfing.
So definitely spend some time playing around with audiences and exploring the Facebook Business Manager so you can “get a feel” for everything.
Recommended Read: Learn How to Get Free Traffic Through Handmade Jewelry Blogging
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Audience size is an important metric to keep an eye on.
An audience that’s too small can be just as limiting as an audience that’s too large.
As a general rule of thumb, try to aim for an audience size between 500,000-3,000,000.
Although, this rule also has its caveats.
If you’re focusing on people within a 25-mile radius of a small town, then reaching 500,000 people probably isn’t possible.
Step 2: Building Audiences
Building Audiences For A Handmade Jewelry Business
Now that we have some different targeting plans, we can start to build and save those audiences for later use.
In fact, you can create as many audiences as you’d like, which is incredibly useful for testing and optimizing your online marketing (no worries, we’ll cover this more in step 4).
So first you’ll want to head inside your Facebook Ads Manager and select the Audiences page.
Then select the Create Saved Audience.
You’ll notice a variety of fields to fill out. Most are self-explanatory (i.e., naming the audience and selecting their locaiton).
But what I want to focus on is the Detailed Targeting (if you scroll down).
Here is where you can start building and exploring different targeting parameters based on your customer’s interests and/or demographics.
You can start with a core targeting point (such as “jewelry”), and then use the Suggestions button to get more ideas.
Spend some time in here playing around and getting ideas!
Once you’re done, simply scroll down and hit the Create Saved Audience button towards the bottom to finish up.
Now you can start creating more new saved audiences with fresh targeting details.
Remember, all of these will be saved to your account and available to use at any point within future campaigns.
Alright, now let’s talk about some targeting options for a handmade jewelry business!
Targeting Interests for Handmade Jewelry
- Handmade jewelry
- Art jewelry
- Fashion accessories
- Specific piece interests
- Necklaces, bracelets, earrings, etc.
- Shopping
- Fashion
- Engaged shoppers
- i.e., people who are known to buy something online, and therefore more likely to convert
- Pendants & Gemstones
- Specific brands similar to your style
- Tiffany & Co., Cartier, etc.
- Gold
- Interests related to your jewelry niche
- Such as ocean or beach-inspired, runner-inspired, environmental, travel, regional/local pride, etc.
- Newly engaged couples
- Bride & Groom
- Weddings
Recommended Read: Search Engine Ranking & Understanding SEO
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Geotargeting is a great strategy for targeting based on location.
For example, you can send ads promoting your jewelry to people who recently visited specific jewelry stores or other relevant shops related to jewelry.
Read more about geotargeting here!
Step 3: Layering Audiences
Narrowing Your Audience, Using Suggestions & Layering
After establishing some initial targeting parameters, we can further narrow down our audiences by layering interests on top of each other and excluding certain people or interests.
Conversely, we can also expand our targeting and audience size by adding in more relevant targeting details.
Remember that nautical-themed, hemp-made bracelets audience from step one?
Well, this is a great example of layering your targeting.
Layer 1
People interested in ocean-themed products and things
Layer 2
People interested in jewelry, fashion and/or design
Layer 3
People interested in sustainability and the environment
Layering these details on top of each other is niching down and making your audience targeting specific and customized.
From here, we can add more related targeting details to each layer to increase the audience size (if it’s too small).
Remember that layering can be done using the Narrow Audience, Exclude People and Suggestions options when building a saved audience in Facebook.
So as you can see, building numerous audiences and playing around with the layering gives us virtually endless targeting possibilities.
Recommended Read: How To Market Handmade Jewelry [& Actually Get Results]
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It’s important to clearly identify your brand and your unique story or angle.
This is your competitive edge and your differentiating factor.
Remember, people want to connect with brands they can relate to, who understand their values and their interests or community.
In this way, strive to align your targeting with your messaging, brand and values.
Read more about building brand as an artist here!
Step 4: Testing Audiences & Scaling
Testing Audiences & Scaling The Best Ones
Testing, or A/B split testing, is essential to truly understand what works and what doesn’t.
It’s the foundation to optimizing your campaigns, budget and marketing as a whole.
So what does testing target markets really entail anyways?
A/B Split Testing Basic Process
- Create one core audience and ad campaign.
- Next duplicate the audience and/or ads, swapping out variables to test
- I like to change the image/video creatives, messaging and calls to action for testing
- There’s a duplicate button to easily copy assets in the Facebook Ads Manager
- When duplicating, choose the same campaign to keep everything organized and “under one roof”
- Finally, launch your campaign with the core variables you’re testing.
So we can test a variety of variables and combinations.
But to keep things simple – and to stay on theme with this post – using the duplicate feature to simply test audiences is a great way to start optimizing your marketing.
In this scenario, we’d duplicate our core ad set (which includes both our saved audience and the ads themselves), then only swap out the saved audience, keeping the ad itself the same.
Once your campaigns are live, the Facebook algorithm will go out and test each of these variables and ad sets to find the best performing one(s).
Wait at least 3 days after initially launching a new campaign before making any changes.
We wait at least a few days because the algorithm needs enough time to go out and gather data for testing and optimizing.
After this, you can start pausing the under-performing audiences or ad variables while scaling the winning ad sets (by increasing their daily ad spend/budget).
This is essentially scaling and optimizing Facebook ads in a nutshell.
Of course, if you’re new to online advertising and social media marketing, some of this may be overwhelming.
So, here’s a useful article to learn more if you’d like to read more about testing and scaling.
Finally, before we wrap up here, I’d like to lay out some more general – but crucial – things to keep in mind for growing your business, brand and audience loyalty.
Business, Brand & Audience Growth Hacks:
- Understand your target audience(s) exactly
- Always be testing, researching and asking for feedback, either directly or with polls and quizzes
- Have a content/marketing plan that consistently brings value (not a take, sell-first approach)
- Value can be something educational, entertaining and/or inspiring
- Focus on building brand identity, trust and authority
- The strongest differentiating factor is brand
- What’s your unique story, business angle or business/product aspect?
- Use compelling, customized offers
- Understand and use retargeting strategies
- The rule of 7 indicates that it can take up to 7 points of contact before a new prospects converts into a qualified lead or sale!
- This means any target markets that are unfamiliar with your brand likely will not buy from you after the first point of contact
- Read more about how to use remarketing here!
- Use modern marketing tools and audience research resources
Recommended Read: 5 Keys To Building Brand As An Artist
Conclusion
This post reviewed practical and actionable strategies for finding your perfect target market for handmade jewelry.
We discussed how to build saved audiences, test different markets and scale campaigns.
Although digital marketing strategies can get pretty advanced and technical at times, staying grounded with the simple less is more mindset helps to keep things in perspective.
Just remember, always be adding value to your end consumer and focus on starting/strengthening relationships and building brand.
Online success is a marathon, not a 400-meter dash.
Let me know in the comments, what’s the hardest part about selling handmade jewelry online?
2 Comments
Benjamin Shinde · March 27, 2021 at 10:08 am
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Jeffrey Quinn · April 13, 2021 at 2:53 am
Oh wow! Thank you! I’m so happy that you found the information helpful 🙂 I really hope I can help artists like yourself improve their business and branding! Good luck to you and I’m so happy to help!