Doing hands-on projects, building my knowledge and testing my skills. 

Learn by doing, right? 

Marketing is one of those things that I have genuinely done for fun. I first developed an interest a few years back while I was still taking college classes. It became a bit of a hobby; something I did in my free time, just to see what kind of audience I could build, how quickly I could do it, and how well it could be maintained. 

The projects that I have tackled this month really highlighted why I enjoy marketing. I also got to learn a little more about myself, my style, and what strategies I can use that have real, viable effects. 

This month can be broken down pretty simply into four sections. Four weeks, and four projects. 

Week One: 

Research, Skill Building, and Choosing a “Test Subject”

One of the first major things to tackle when doing anything new is building a knowledge base.

I needed a foundation of information; a comprehensive way of putting what I was doing into words. Previous academic interest and casual experimentation aside, considering “content marketing” as a genuine skill of mine felt a little foreign. 

It’s something I have done in the past, but I couldn’t actually pinpoint what it is amongst my projects.

As in: I could talk it up, but it all kind of meant the same thing. 

Hence the beauty of research.

I spent the first week diligently learning about what content marketing is, what skills I needed to master, and how I could learn those things. A lot of the skills I needed to learn really excited me; things like design and writing capabilities, storytelling and creativity, and understanding the analytics and numbers. All huge interests of mine, and definitely some reasoning for my enthusiasm. 

Other soft skills were things like organizational techniques, good judgement, sticking to deadlines, and curiosity. All in all, right up my ally. 

The second major aspect of week one was picking a test subject.

A business to use as a guinea pig and see what I could whip up in a month. I wanted to pick something that I could actually post about, write about, and see results of, so I picked one of my own businesses.

The one I chose to focus on was my Etsy shop, where I sell stickers I design and print. I have done literally no previous advertisement for this business (spare 2 or 3 Instagram posts). All of my sales have been through word of mouth. It was a pretty perfect example to use. 

After I picked my business, I did a bunch of research on previous sales; my marketing, audience, and where would be most effective to sell. After I wrapped up my research, I moved on to week two. 

Week Two: 

Building A Landing Page

I am a little ashamed to say that I had no clue what a landing page was. 

Luckily, now I definitely do. I looked at so many landing pages this week that now I am noticing them on almost every website I look at. The first time I recognized one, it was one of those pleasant moments where I could sit back and think, “Wow, I am retaining information.” Huge relief. 

The gist of it is that a landing page is a single page website with a specific CTA (call to action). 

I started building my own landing page with the mentality that I wanted it to match my portfolio website, judithjpeters.com.

Second, I wanted it to be fairly minimalistic, straightforward, and link directly to my Etsy shop. Third, I wanted to include a link to my Instagram. 

I used carrd.co to build this page. 

I have never fought so hard to make a button work on website. Ever. I usually don’t really struggle with stuff like this. Building websites is something I started messing with a few years ago. Carrd.co is definitely a very simple tool, but for some reason I got really hung up on one thing. A button. I ended up scraping the whole thing anyway, but it is relevant. 

I learned something important about time management, planning, and letting go of my stubbornness.

I am a very… determined person. This is a polite way of saying that I dig in like my life depends on it when I can’t figure something out. Case and point, I spent literally four hours researching how to program the buttons to work correctly on a single page site. 

And scraped the whole thing later. 

I could’ve spent that time doing something more productive for the project, but I hyper-focused on something borderline irrelevant. I was glad I learned this lesson early in the month; it definitely helped me later. 

All in all, I was pretty happy with my landing page. Over the following weeks, I kept tweaking and editing it, but overall, it stayed pretty similar to my original design.

I count it as a success. 

Week Three:

Campaigns

Week three was all about campaigns. Specifically, email and social media campaigns. 

When I was bored and between school and jobs, this was pretty much the niche where I kept myself occupied.

I love doing this kind of stuff. It’s actually something I would consider a fun hobby, and it still baffles me to this day that it is actually something I could potentially do as a career. I love planning out a campaign, creating the content for it, and putting it out there. 

For the purpose of my business, I chose to stick with Instagram, since that is where art tends to do best. 

I did this whole thing in Canva. 

This was for two reasons: The first was that Canva is great for this kind of stuff. Anything with pictures and social media and graphics does fantastically in Canva. 

The second was that I accidentally forgot to cancel my free trial to the Pro plan on Canva before it renewed, so I am absolutely determined to get my money’s worth since I didn’t have it budgeted. I am using Canva for everything. 

The first thing I did was collect pretty much every single picture I had of my stickers. I settled on using a lot of the images that I used as listing photos in my shop since I have never actually posted them anywhere. I picked 15 photos, and mixed in a few “from the sketchbook” photos to make it clear it is an “art project” style business. 

Second, I organized it all. I also made a point to edit everything as minimally as possible. This is a personal preference of mine; if I see heavily edited pictures of products, specifically artwork, I tend to wonder what it really looks like. Maybe I’m cynical, but I definitely applied my own personal, creative lens. 

Next, I used the “comment” feature that Canva has to prepare captions. 

This included exactly what I wanted the posts to say, and had every hashtag I wanted to use ready so I could simply copy and paste each comment as I posted the photos. 

I leaned into my curiosity a little and included a few with just hashtags and no captions. I wanted to see if it made any difference in how many people interacted with the posts.

 Overall, it did pretty well! My Etsy shop’s traffic went way, way up and my very new Instagram account is now up to 60 followers. I am pretty happy! 

The email campaign aspect of this week was a little bit newer for me, but I had a blast. I thought about what I would want to know about my products if I were a new customer. What I would read, or find persuasive. I decided to keep it fairly minimal, but include stories behind why I drew some of the designs. I also included a discount code that can be applied to my Etsy shop as a “welcome gift.” 

Shocking, I know, but I used Canva again. 

I did a Pages document of the text, and later on when I had the chance, I did graphics in an email newsletter format so they looked clean, more professional, and matched to my landing page. This was definitely my favorite week. 

Week Four: 

Summary, reflections, and review. 

This month went by crazy fast, but I definitely appreciated the week to assess what I have done. This week, I took the time to put everything in one place. To make these summaries, look back at the progress I have made, and consider what I have learned and would do differently next time. 

My most major takeaways from this month: 

Having an eye for design is a must for marketing, but being able to keep organized? That might be even higher priority. If I hadn’t stuck to my detailed plan and schedule, I would’ve fallen behind pretty quickly. 

Takeaway number two is pretty straight forward. Don’t get hung up on little things. I wrote about this above when thinking about my landing page. I need to stay focused and prioritize what actually needs to be done, not what I thing would be “good to know.”

Takeaway three was that I love doing this. I had a great time with all of it, from building the landing page to taking a little extra time to make my email campaign look “prettier.” It was a super fun month, and I learned so, so much.