When it comes to improving SEO or one’s digital marketing, the specialists talk about setting up buyer personas. While the concept makes a lot of sense in certain industries, it’s not so easy when it comes to art or creating gifts. Let’s take a few examples and I hope the difficulty will become clearer.
Brainstorming Relevant Factors to Create our Buyer Persona
The first piece of advice people love to throw out is come up with one product and stick to that one product. This advice might work if you are manufacturing or selling cars or bicycles. However, even a car dealer will have a range of styles, designs, sizes and colours of cars. They generally do not stick to one car only.
It’s not so simple when it comes to gifts or art. Let’s take a look at handmade toys, for example. The tool provided on Hubspot to help to build a buyer persona sets very specific age ranges and you have to select one only. Is that true for buying toys?
Some will tell you to think about the age of potential parents as the age range to stick to. Well, although the norm and preferred might be that women in their 20s and 30s are the only ones to give birth, the reality is that this is not the case. The youngest mother is under 9. On the other end of the spectrum, the oldest age of a mother to have a natural pregnancy and birth is listed at 59 years. So when it comes to who will buy toys, will it be that ONLY women in their 20s and 30s will buy a handmade toy as a gift?
Are young mothers the only ones to buy toys? How about the fathers? We are talking here only of the mother’s age. What about the father? There are couples with large age differences so it could be that a woman in her 20s is married to a man 20 years her senior. That means the father is late 30s to 40s. In this case the father’s age pushed the age for purchasing toys over 30.
Let’s consider now some other relatives. It does happen that a baby has grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings, can’t they buy handmade gifts and toys too? You might say but a child does not have money or go shopping. Sure they do! I can clearly remember when I was 6 or 7 years old my sister and I decided to give our mother a set of pottery bells for her birthday. We received pocket money and this is what we used to purchase the bells. I don’t recall how we obtained them, meaning who took us to the store but we did manage to buy them without my mother knowing and give her a wonderful surprise of a creative gift that she would enjoy. She has those pottery bells to this day.
I hear you are going to argue that I jumped from toys to bells. Well, the jump was merely to illustrate that even a child can come up with the idea of a creative item they wish to give a relative as a gift and to save up their pocket money to fund the purchase. As far as I am concerned, why should I prevent those older or younger from the 20-30 age range from purchasing a handmade toy to give as a gift?
If we return to the pottery bell for a moment, one detail you might notice on this site is that I love creating in a range of different mediums. I have done ceramics and yes even made a ceramic bell at one stage. So where did this site begin and why do I have so many different items in the store?
Where we began with our store
To be perfectly honest I do not remember whether the first item I put up was a range of handmade greeting cards that my mother and I were making, or my hand painted cushion covers and table mats. I do recall that a short time after starting the store, I was talking to someone and mentioned that I wanted to master how to sell our range of creative items. At the time of our making the greeting cards, my mother had just completed a beautiful embroidery of an elephant as a picture suitable for a child’s bedroom.
A friend said to me that you don’t have to limit yourself to selling the picture only. You can expand on your earnings by photographing that image and putting it onto a mug, T-shirt, or cushion cover. You can of course print it onto canvas too. Well, now we would end up with a range of products and have more earning potential. I loved the idea and began researching some websites that print onto products. We had explored this idea in the past and now seemed like a good enough time to get back into it.
Sadly, I had already sealed up the image under glass and have not yet had the time to perfect photographing the original elephant. What I can say though, is that this idea opened the door to the many categories that have been added with apparel, mugs, accessories, and more.
Now some throw their hands up in despair and insist that I have to return to one product and one product only. I have to select one age group and one age group only. Hm, it’s getting to sound like discrimination not to mention limiting our creative skills and potential.
Carrying out some market research
While trying to figure out who would fit my buyer persona I began reading Pat Flynn’s book “Will it Fly?” in which he recommends doing some market research to determine whether an idea is tangible or not. I tried searching online and found websites selling handmade toys. Yay, that is good to see and such a welcome relief.!
Next I found artists selling their art and a number of them print their artwork onto products. Another sigh of relief! I was so happy to discover other artists doing what I wanted to do. At this point, I thought about the wonderful store where my sister and I had purchased that gift of ceramic mugs for my mother. I loved the store. It had all kinds of wonderful hand made creative items and art suitable for gifts or to beautify your home.
I remember how much I enjoyed wandering through that store. I never wanted only mugs or only wall hangings or only greeting cards. Half the fun was seeing the variety, appreciate the creativity, and being inspired to learn how to create my own.
So I began to do a different search and found that there are indeed other stores online that have a range of creative gifts.
Validation or confusion – what have we discovered?
At this point I find myself thinking of a song that I saw a month or so ago. The song is performed by a choir that has many children who each have their unique difference. They each had a special need and variation to communication. In truth, everyone is unique. Some like to create one product only. Others have many ideas and need to use those ideas. So for those who like to limit what I do and who I am, I include this video for you to watch. Discover the incredible, very creative gift that an 18-year-old has given to her little brother.
In the meantime, having found the answer from my market research, I am off to create another item. I don’t mind if you purchase it as a gift for a friend, or loved one. I don’t mind if you give it for a special occasion or just to show that you care. I don’t mind if you are a child, a grandparent, or perhaps a great-grandparent. I don’t mind if you purchase the item to beautify your own home or as a garment for you to wear. What I care about is that G-d blessed me with a range of creative talents that I love to use to create beauty. I love to share products that offer hope, inspiration and truth. I love to put thought into every detail of what I am making and for my creative gifts and art to bring joy to others.
I also love to create the opportunity for you to give a gift to another. As a result, offer you the opportunity to partner with us in doing acts of goodness and kindness. From all my years of working as an OT one of the greatest things I have learned is that the world needs more unity and kindness. There is enough division. There is enough hatred. Let’s flood the world with kindness, giving gifts to show that we care.
Do you enjoy buying creative gifts? Let us know in the comments below what kinds of creative gifts you love to give or receive.