Did you start a stationery business from your home? Are you learning how to make wedding invitations to sell? That’s so exciting – starting an invitation business is a really fun journey! One of the toughest parts can be learning how to market your stationery business. So today I’ll share with you 5 of my favorite places to sell wedding invitations! And the best part is that all of these marketing techniques are 100% free – I currently make over 6 figures without running any ads to my products at all! 

Knowing your Client

Before we discuss marketing your stationery business, it’s important to know your client. We call this exercise the Ideal Client Profile, and there’s a free worksheet you can download here. There’s a slightly beefed-up version of the worksheet in our marketing community – The Client Bundle! If you join The Client Bundle you’ll get eBooks about all of these platforms I’ll discuss today, as well as new lessons on how to attract clients every single month in our Facebook Community. 

A key lesson that you should learn is the difference between finding clients and attracting clients. All the educators in The Client Bundle community teach attracting clients. We don’t go out and find clients. I can’t remember the last time I directly pitched a potential client. Instead, we practice the art of optimizing each platform for our ideal client, and attracting ideal clients to our business.

The biggest difference between attracting clients and finding them is that I never really have to convince anyone to book me. They already want to book me by the time we first chat, because they’ve seen my work and understand who I am as a designer. Plus, they’re fully qualified for my price range (custom invitations starting at $3,500 minimum), so they are already primed to pay that.

The more you can understand who your wedding invitation clients are, the better you can speak to them, and the more of them you’ll attract to your stationery business.

So how do you attract high-value stationery clients? By understanding who you’re talking to. That’s where the ideal client exercise comes in handy, so start there!

Marketing your Invitation Business

Now that you know who you’re speaking to, which platforms will work best for you? I’ll break down 5 of my favorite platforms for marketing your invitation business! Each one has slightly different demographics for their users, so you’ll want to start with the platforms that make sense for your ideal client. There’s no point being on Facebook if that’s not where your ideal client is hanging out (spoiler alert: a lot of young people aren’t looking to make purchases on Facebook anymore). 

So choose your platforms based on the demographics, and what type of invitations you’re trying to sell. I’ll elaborate on this as I go through.

As a reminder, The Client Bundle contains 7 eBooks that dive deep into attracting clients on all of these platforms I’ll mention (and even a few extra!). 

Market Wedding Invitations on Pinterest

Pinterest is an awesome place to market wedding invites. According to The Knot, 40 million people each year use Pinterest to plan weddings! That’s…a ton. So you can bet that a lot of those people are getting wedding invitation ideas on Pinterest.

The demographic for Pinterest is typically young, but growing a little older with time. However, it’s still one of the first places people turn for wedding planning and definitely the only “social media” platform that’s got a real focus on weddings.

I put social media in quotes though because Pinterest isn’t reeeally a social media platform as much as it is a search engine! If you think about it, people are using Pinterest for their own good much more than they are for social interaction. You don’t share your boards generally, and if you do it’s with 1-2 other people. In contrast to a platform like Instagram or Facebook, that’s nothing.

So I prefer to think of Pinterest as a search engine, and treat it as such. What does this mean?

1. Linking pins to your website or shop directly is important
2. Branding your pins in some way (with your business name, website, colors, logo, etc.) is helpful to getting business on Pinterest
3. Search terms, keywords, descriptions, titles, etc. are vital to getting found on Pinterest

Searching popular pins and staying on trend will help you a lot. One of my favorite things about Pinterest is that a pin can go viral at any time – you might post something in 2019 and have it go viral in 2021 for some reason! As long as it’s optimized for the right keywords, there’s always the possibility of it going viral. 

How to use Pinterest easily? Check out this blog post all about how I created 1,000 pins in under 4 hours! 

Sell Wedding Invitations on Etsy

Etsy gets a lot of hate, but it’s a great place to sell wedding invitations! Especially if your invitations are semi-custom or you create wedding invitation templates, you’ll likely have a lot of success on Etsy if you put in the work. 

The best part about Etsy is that it has its own market base of millions. Almost 40 million, actually. If someone is looking on Etsy for invitations, they’re definitely going to find something they like, so they’ll never leave Etsy and come to your website instead. NOT selling on Etsy just means you’re losing out on that traffic. It’s okay if you don’t sell on Etsy, but don’t let all the Etsy hate make you think it’s not possible to be profitable on Etsy.

I do think that Etsy is a little harder place to sell 100% custom work, just because you don’t have photos of the work for the listings. So if you only sell custom invitations, then you may have better luck in other places.

Etsy is similar to Pinterest in that there’s a lot to gain from optimizing its search engine capabilities. This means:

1. You should use all 13 tags available for each listing, and customize them for each product
2. Including popular search terms in the title and description of your listing will help you get found
3. Increasing your number of listings will actually help your shop get found – for instance, my suites are listed in categories for 4-piece invitation suites, 6-piece suites, and micro-wedding invitation suites. They’re basically the same products, but listed in slightly different ways!

A few other things that are really important for selling invitations on Etsy:

1. Use all the listing photos that you can! It’s a great place to add shop policies, color options, font options, etc.
2. Their new video feature allows you to upload a 15 second video for each listing (you should do it)
3. Pricing your invitations to sell on Etsy means you’ll need to take into account all the applicable fees for listing and selling your products. 

Want to learn more about selling on Etsy? Watch this video:

Marketing on Instagram

I actually get most of my wedding invitation clients from Instagram! It’s different from either Pinterest or Etsy in that it’s a truly social media. Building a community on Instagram is one of the leading factors to making sales in your stationery business. Most people will follow you for a bit before reaching out to purchase wedding invitations – although it’s not unheard of that someone would reach out at first touch!

Since this is my area of expertise, I have a few videos you can check out. I love this one about creating a good first impression on Instagram:

For selling wedding invitations on Instagram specifically, you want to take a few things into account:

1. Follow accounts that are similar, but not too many in direct competition
2. Use hashtags and speak to your client, try not to speak to other wedding invitation designers (that’s really tempting, but can pigeonhole your account in the wrong direction)
3. Make sure you have a call to action on about 75% of posts (follow, like, click, visit, inquire, DM, email, etc.)

I actually had the pleasure of speaking to someone on Instagram’s marketing team about Reels, and here are the key takeaways from that conversation (they told me the best number of hashtags to use now too!).

And yes, Reels are popular! Honestly, video is taking over, even on the other platforms like Pinterest and Etsy – so here is a fun video that shows you 10 easy Reels ideas for artists! You can take these videos and pin them as well as including them in your Etsy listings too! 

Sell Invitations Online

…online? As in…the entire internet? Yep, this section is about optimizing for the World Wide Web, aka SEO or Search Engine Optimization! This will refer mostly to your website, but you can also use SEO techniques in other places (remember how I said Pinterest and Etsy were practically search engines?). 

In my opinion, there’s no greater way to ensure the success of your business than by getting good at SEO. The key point here is that there are already people searching for what you offer, no matter what kind of invitations your business creates. Someone, somewhere is already looking for it.

So SEO is about connecting those people who are looking for quirky, modern, watercolor, rustic, holographic wedding invitations with the person that can create those – you.

What I like about SEO is that you don’t have to actively drive the traffic to your stationery business. You don’t have to share on Instagram every day if your work has good SEO, you don’t have to remind people to follow you on Pinterest, you don’t have to constantly update your Stories or make Reels or send out email blasts if that’s not your thing. With SEO, you create content that’s well optimized, and let it do the work for you.

That’s not to say it’s always EASY – but it’s a little more passive than some of the other options.

My favorite tips for starting out with SEO? 

1. Learn about Keyword Research and pick 1-3 keywords that you want your website as a whole to rank on. These should have about 200-500 monthly searches and focus on your main offering (for instance: Wedding Planner Austin, Texas)
2. Name all of your images on your website with keywords! “Gold Foil Wedding Invitations” is much easier for Google to read than “IMG_2919”
3. Have at least 250 words on every page of your website – even your gallery pages. Text is easier for Google to read than Images are!

Here’s a video that will help you with point number 1 – Keyword Research:

Networking for Invitation Designers

Lastly, another great place to market your stationery business is just in your life. It doesn’t have to be in person, but think of this as your larger network of connections. I once got a wedding invitation client in a bar because my friends had gotten me balloons to celebrate 10k followers on Instagram. Someone asked what the balloons were for…and then booked me to make her wedding invitations.

I also get a ton of clients from people I went to college with, friends of friends, and of course through wedding planners. My ideal client has a wedding planner, which makes them a perfect networking opportunity for my business.

If your ideal client goes to a book club, go to a book club. If your ideal client is a gym member, join a gym. It’s not sleazy if you don’t make it sleazy, or treat everyone you meet as a potential client. If you’re proud of your work, share it and discuss it with people, then clients will come from that! Plus, you might make a new friend.

There are also networking events specifically for this purpose – try local networking or young professional groups, and those specifically for wedding industry creatives. TuesdaysTogether has chapters all over the world that meet once a month, as do organizations like ILEA and WIPA.

Again, it’s not about being sleazy, it’s about living your stationery business through and through. The more you share your work, the more people will be attracted to it. I never go to an event or meeting with the idea of “finding” clients. I go to spread awareness about my business and meet people!

You can learn more of my favorite tips and tricks for attracting ideal clients via Networking, Pinterest, Instagram, Etsy, SEO, Facebook and Branding all in The Client Bundle! I hope you’ll check it out and join the Community…