12 Print on Demand Marketing Techniques for 2024

There is a reason Print-on-Demand (POD) is the first stop for many first-time entrepreneurs and creatives testing out the ecommerce opportunity using in their own or third party’s designs. Like other forms of dropshipping, POD has a low barrier of entry.

A website and dropshipping supplier is all you need to get started. Such low startup costs have a downside though, not least of which is the intense competition. By default, any POD website is just one of thousands of others that provide the same service.

The key to building a profitable and growing POD store is effective marketing. Consumer decisions are often driven by the emotional connection they make with the business and brand.

The nature of the product itself is a less significant factor as it’s likely not technically different from what’s available from the competition. Marketing amplifies your POD business’ presence thereby giving it the spotlight it needs to capture the target audience’s attention.

Let’s take a look at the most important marketing techniques for POD success.

1. Define Your Niche & USP

Before you splurge on an elaborate marketing campaign, first define who you want to sell to and what sets you apart from the competition. It sets the stage for every other marketing action. Your POD store cannot target everyone.

There will be a specific audience that will be most interested in the product. By identifying this niche market, you can more efficiently spend your marketing budget and are less likely to waste advertising on people that will likely never buy.

Settling on a target audience does not rid you of competition. You are not the only one who will be chasing that market. However, targeting means you can tailor your messaging to best speak to that demographic.

Develop a unique selling proposition (USP) that gives consumers one or more reasons to choose your product over your rivals’. The USP could be anything from unique designs to the quality of print material to service features to exceptional customer service.

2. Write Engaging Product Descriptions

Bland, uninspiring and unhelpful product descriptions are a lost marketing opportunity. On the other hand, clear, catchy and well-crafted descriptions espouse the product’s unique qualities and can be a persuasive tool that helps potential customers make a purchase.

Infuse your descriptions with storytelling such as a snapshot of the inspiration and emotion behind the design.

Make high quality product descriptions work for you by:

Convincing language — Use believable but concise and rational language to emphasize each POD product’s unique advantages. At the same time, subtly appeal to buyer emotions and proactively answer potential concerns.
High-quality visuals — Quality images and videos complement informative product descriptions. They provide quick and compact explanations nsuring clarity of what your customers are about to buy.
Optimize for search engines — Incorporate appropriate keywords in descriptions. We’ll cover SEO in more detail in its own section further down in this article.

Facebook has more than 3 billion monthly active users. YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok and WeChat have anywhere between 1.3 billion and 2.5 billion users each. On no other category of websites/apps does the average Internet user spend more time on each day. Social media is a vast audience that a POD business cannot afford to ignore.

Each major platform comes with a unique flair, dynamic and demographic that demands a customized marketing strategy. TikTok is the home of short videos. YouTube favors long-form video. Instagram is image-centric.

WhatsApp’ status’ has impressive organic reach. Pinterest is the visual creatives’ world. Facebook tries to be the jack of all trades. While most of your potential buyers may be concentrated on one platform, spread your reach and risks by marketing on multiple platforms.

Some effective tactics for social media marketing in general include:

High-quality visuals — Use high quality images, videos and captions to showcase products. With the increasingly professional-grade quality of smartphone cameras, most POD stores do not have to hire an expensive professional photographer to create captivating visuals.
Engaging content — Weave a narrative into product posts. Balance product promotion with more subtle marketing. Provide behind-the-scenes views, sneak peeks of upcoming designs and anecdotal experiences.
Content calendar — Posting frequently and consistently is central to keeping your business top of mind. Create a content calendar that your followers can bank on. Platform algorithms often prioritize placing content from active accounts/pages onto user feeds.
Community building — Desist from making your social media platforms a monologue. Encourage audience interaction and cultivate community by responding to comments promptly, running polls and incorporating relevant hashtags.

4. Leverage Influencers for POD Growth

The average person will find their peers, mentors and favorite public personalities more relatable while viewing brands and organizations as distant, impersonal and overtly transactional. Influencers are individuals that hold significant sway over a segment of the population.

They range from music stars and Hollywood celebrities, to authoritative subject matter experts and popular social media personalities.

Influencer marketing exploits the influencer’s ready and well-defined audience. Collaborating with an influencer provides a direct path to a group of people that is already engaged and ready to listen. It provides rapid visibility, trust by association and almost immediate sales.

To make influencer marketing work for your business:

Choose the right influencer — For best results, identify influencers whose values and audience are consistent with your POD business’ target market. Do not be fixated with an influencer’s social media following. Working with multiple nano influencers that have strong persuasive power over highly engaged small communities may be more effctive than working with a mega influencer that has a passive, overly generic audience.
Be Authentic — Choose influencers that have a genuine connection with your brand. While influencer marketing involves some compensation, the messaging and endorsement is most effective when the influencers genuinely believe that the product is worth it.
Coordinate the campaign — It’s good to give the influencer some creative room as they are best positioned to know what resonates with their audience. That said, coordinate the campaign’s content and execution based on your business goals. Track campaign metrics to know what works and what doesn’t.

5. Utilize User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is a form of influencer marketing except more authentic since there is no compensation to the content creator. For example, an ordinary person talks about buying a product from your Print on Demand store and how it exceeded expectations.

UGC is effectively free word-of-mouth advertising. Consumers are more likely to buy your product when they see non-sponsored platitudes by multiple real, everyday people.

To cultivate and leverage UGC, you could do the following:

Encourage UGC — Be proactive. Ask customers to share their experiences. Not everyone that loves your store will talk about it unprompted. Some people will need a little nudge. Encourage your buyers to share photos, videos and written content on them using your product. quality and popularity.
Facilitate UGC — Build an environment that makes UGC creation easy. For example, start branded hashtags, run UGC competitions or offer giveaways to incentivize customers to share positive experiences.
Feature UGC — You can let UGC do its magic from the creator’s own account. However, sharing UGC on your website and social meedia platforms can give it more traction. Remember to credit the creator.

In the world of online shopping, other buyers’ experiences can be a much needed guide — to a much greater degree than offline shopping. Testimonials, reviews and case studies are like recommendations from a neighbor.

Advertisment ⓘ

Few people want to experience a product right off the bat without completely knowing what to expect. Other people’s experiences can provide that social proof they need. A product with glowing testimonials and five-star reviews is perceived as trustoworthy and a safer bet.

Build social proof by:

Prompt — Post-purchase, develop an onscreen pop-up, an email reminder or other firendly notification asking buyers to leave a review of their experience on your site, social media pages and third-party review platforms. The sooner a customer provides feedback after they buy, the more detailed and authentic it’s likely to be.
Highlight positive feedback — Be open to both positive and negative feedback. Negative sentiment is an opportunity to learn and improve your product. However, showcase positive feedback to ease concerns of potential customers. Consider creating in-depth case studies for larger (corporate) customers to demonstrate the impact your business has had.

7. Optimize Your POD for SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of improving your website’s visibility to search engines. The higher your store’s web pages appear on search results, the greater the traffic your website receives and the more the conversions. More than 90% of all website traffic originates from Google Search.

If your website ranks well on Google, it’s much easier to replicate and/or tweak your efforts for similar success on small players like Bing. Keywords are central to effective SEO. However, as search algorithms get better, content quality and relevance to search queries and search intent has become equally important.

Some useful SEO strategies include:

Create quality content — Page content should be interesting, relevant, logical, coherent, readable as well as free of grammatical errors.
Optimize — Thoughtfully include keywords in your meta descriptions and keywords as well as page content and product descriptions. Add alt-text to all images explaining what each image depicts.
Use internal linking — Create internal links guiding visitors toward relevant pages, improving engagement and increasing the time spent on the site.
Backlinks — Request for backlinks from authoritative websites. For search engines, backlinks are votes of confidence i.e. good quality websites only link to good quality websites.

8. Effective Email Marketing

Email marketing is not outdated. Despite spam filters that sometimes block promotional messages or flag them as spam, email marketing remains an important tool.

Further, social media algorithms that make it hard for your followers to see your posts, mean social media marketing is not the substitute to email marketing it was once touted to be.

Email provides a more direct and personalized means of engaging with your audience consistently and repeatedly. You have better control of the conversation and can guide each person through their buyer journey. To build an email list, have an opt-in pop-up window that invites visitors to subscribe to.

For effective email marketing, you could:

Email list incentives — Create incentives for visitors to subscribe. Usually, that would mean offering incentives such as exclusive discounts, product updates, recommendations, new product early access and other informative content.
Captivating content — Use enticing subject lines, compelling content and appealing design to draw attention and encourage conversions.
Offer value — More than creating engaging email messages, they should be meaningful and deliver value. Provide discount codes, new product early access, education content and inspirational stories.
Segmentation — Your email list is not a monolith. Segment the list based on demographics, interests, preferences, behaviors and purchase history to deliver more targeted campaigns for different segments.

9. Smart Paid Advertising

With the exception of influencer marketing, the techniques we have covered here would mosty be classified as organic marketing methods. Often, these non-transactional methods will not suffice, especially at the beginning when your POD business does not have a significant audience.

Paid advertising jump starts your marketing campaign. Paid ads can take different forms including social media ads and search engine pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

To ensure your paid advertising has the desired impact, do the following:

Budget — Determine how much you are willing to spend on advertising.
Targeting — Define your intended audience’s demographics, interests, and online behavior so your ads are designed to reach the right people.
Ad Creative — Develop compelling visuals and copy that resonates with your audience and clearly communicates your message.
Landing Page Optimization — Craft a landing page that provides a seamless user experience and clearly showcases the product being advertised.

10. Create Customer Loyalty Programs

Retaining existing customers is the engine for longterm business growth. A loyalty program creates a strong bond between buyers and your brand.

While incentives are an integral part of why customers would want to join your program, wanting to associate with a brand they like is important too. Either way, encourage participation through exclusive discounts, new product early access or personalized perks.

An effective loyalty program drives repeat purchases, fosters customer retention, builds strong relationships, drives engagement and encourages brand advocacy. Develop a loyalty program that rewards your customers not just for repeat purchases but also joining your email list, referrals and for orders above a certain threshold.

11. Run Exciting Giveaways

It’s hard to go wrong with freebies. Everybody loves to get a thing of value without having to pay for it. Giveaways and contests can generate excitement, improve brand awareness, increase engagement and draw new leads. Some ways you can wield giveaways and contests to your advantage include:

Offer free products or discounts as prizes. requiring participants or sharing user-generated content.
Organically grow your reach by encouraging or requiring buyers and website visitors to follow you on social media, tag their social circle and share the giveaway’s/contest’s announcement.
To only attract persons genuinely interested in buying your product in future, ensure prizes are in line with your target market's interests and needs.
Build a buzz of user-generated content by requesting winners to share photos and videos of their prizes.

12. Optimize with Data Insights

POD marketing is not something you plan and execute once then leave on autopilot. Effective marketing is iterative by default.

You are constantly learning what your audience wants and how to satisfy their needs. Regularly monitor your marketing results to gauge performance, identify areas of improvement and optimize accordingly.

Use your website’s, social media platforms’ and third party analytics tools to capture and evaluate the data required to refine your marketing strategies.

Pay attention to core metrics such as website traffic, engagement rate, conversion rates, customer acquisition costs and cart abandonment rate. Build on what’s working and eliminate what isn’t.

Conclusion

The POD industry can be an exciting space for budding entrepreneurs and creatives. Success is however contingent on developing and deploying the major marketing techniques we have covered in this article. That said, no two POD businesses are the same.

The combination of strategies that delivers great success for one may not necessarily do the same for another. Stay adaptable and continuously optimize your marketing techniques. With a consistent, data-driven marketing plan, you can move your business from a fledgling venture to a thriving enterprise.