You may not know that the average success rate of print on demand businesses is 24%.
This raises the question: Why is it so low?
There are several factors that contribute to this, including the nature of the business model, fierce competition, a lack of experience and patience, low profit margins due to not knowing how to price products effectively, and ineffective marketing strategies.
Print on demand relies heavily on digital marketing, as it’s a more time and cost-effective approach to promoting your products compared to traditional strategies. Some people might just slap their designs on products and hope people will find them. But the competition is intense; without a solid marketing strategy, your beautiful designs will remain invisible in the sea of millions of other POD products.
This guide will give you the 6 print on demand marketing strategies that successful POD entrepreneurs use to promote their products. Whether you are looking for budget-friendly options or have more capital to invest, this guide will provide everything that meet your needs.
Understanding Your Target Audience for Print on Demand Success
Your marketing budget will limit the strategic options you can pursue. But another factor that can influence the effectiveness of your marketing strategies is your target audience.
Understanding who your audience is, including and beyond just demographics, is important in marketing. Knowing their behaviors, HOW they shop, WHERE they hang out online, and WHEN they make purchasing decisions is important to choose the best marketing strategies and platforms for your business.
For example:
- Gen Z primarily browses on TikTok and Instagram and makes impulse purchases
- The 25-34 age group uses Facebook the most
- The 55-64 age group has the highest email open rate.
- Baby boomers are the ones who heavily rely on Google search for product discovery.
Apart from age, there are other factors to consider. Geographic location, niche characteristics, lifestyles, and values can all affect the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
6 Print-on-Demand Marketing Strategies for 2025
1. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is probably the most affordable and essential marketing strategy in this era, where the vast majority of consumers are digitally active and connected. With 5.24 billion people currently using social media worldwide, you can confidently leverage these platforms to reach your ideal customers. (Unless your niche doesn’t use social media.)
How to get started:
- Choose the right platform for your niche: Discover which platform your audience is most active on by doing thorough research and testing through repurposing your content and posting it on different social media platforms.
- Create user-generated content: You don’t need to invest in expensive equipment and create cinematic-quality videos. A phone and a free video editing app will do the job, and it often looks more authentic and relatable, building greater trust with your audience.
- Scale with agency and ads: Once you see some results, you can consider hiring an agency to help you create UGC and test it with ads, accelerating the process and scaling your business.
TikTok and Instagram are often the first platforms that come to mind when discussing social media marketing. However, for visually driven products, Pinterest is a powerful platform for gaining exposure to your products. It functions like a visual search engine, where people search and discover the products they desire, and your pins can attract leads for months, even years, to come.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO can be scary at first, at least for me. All those technical terms, such as domain authority, on-page SEO, and backlinks, and how you may be competing with renowned and high-authority websites, are intimidating. But once you simplify your approach and focus on the basics, you will start seeing organic traffic grow month after month.
If you are using Shopify, its in-built SEO features help your store get found on Google, saving you time and eliminating the need to manually handle elements like title tags and sitemaps. However, that doesn’t mean your job is done.
What you should do:
- Perform keyword research: Don’t name your product whatever you want. Perform keyword research and find out what keywords people are using to search for the POD products you are selling; otherwise, they won’t be found.
- On-page optimization: This helps search engines easily interpret what your pages are about and recommend them to your potential customers. Include relevant keywords and semantic keywords in your product page.
- Increase domain authority: Build some backlinks to increase the domain authority of your store
Writing blog posts is a common and powerful SEO strategy. You can write articles related to your niches that provide genuine value. If you sell fitness apparel, you might write about workout routines or healthy recipes and naturally mention your products where relevant. This allows your potential customers to encounter your brand not only during product searches but also through their exploration of broader subjects within your niche.
Blog content not only attracts additional traffic that way, but it can also generate some backlinks and establish your brand as an expert in your niche, which positively impacts the SEO of all your pages.
3. Community engagement for brand exposure
When you are doing your research on your target audience, one question you should be asking is, “Do they have a community?” Although unorthodox, finding your niche online community can be an effective way to gain exposure for your product initially. Your niche may be looking for something unique that is not available on the market, and you can give them what they want.
Go onto Reddit, Facebook, or Quora to find your ideal audience. The benefit of leveraging an online community goes beyond just introducing your products. You can gain feedback and improve your designs, which enables you to validate your ideas and create design products that resonate more strongly with their tastes.
When you find these communities, don’t think of these members as merely your potential customers, but treat them as like-minded individuals with whom you share niche passions. People can sense the difference between a direct sales pitch and a genuine effort to provide value and build a connection.
4. Email marketing
Email marketing is not a primary strategy to attract new customers and gain exposure, but it’s a highly converting one that drives sales from your existing audience. When you’ve collected the emails of interested customers, your marketing efforts and investment will also become significantly lower.
How to collect an email list:
- Pop-up forms: Create pop-up forms so you can potentially convert visitors later through email marketing, even if they don’t buy immediately.
- Collect emails at checkout: Give your customers the option to subscribe to your newsletter
- Lead magnets: Offer value, such as guides, templates, printable designs, and discount codes in your blog posts
Before you collect their emails or try to start promoting your products, make sure that you set up all the automations that are necessary for success.
- The welcome series: To officially welcome your email subscribers and give them a heads up on what they will receive in future emails
- Abandoned cart emails: To remind those who have added items to their cart but have not completed the purchase
- Post-purchase email: Confirm the customer’s order and provide essential tracking information. (An in-built feature on Shopify that is customizable)
- Birthday email: You can add a birthday field to your signup form and send a personalized email with a special offer on their day.
5. Influencer partnerships and collaborations
Influencer marketing isn’t just for big brands with huge budgets; it’s also a proven strategy for small businesses to gain exposure in a short period of time. On average, businesses earn $5.78 for every dollar spent on influencer marketing campaigns. Influencer marketing is effective, especially at the initial stage of your business. Your potential customers may have some doubts or uncertainties regarding your products, and the influencers they trust can provide the credible reassurance they need.
How to get started:
- Set your goal: Figure out what your goal is, whether it’s to gain exposure, drive leads, or increase sales, so you can track the right metrics and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns
- Set your budget: Determine how much money you plan to spend on influencer marketing. Allow some flexibility for negotiating with influencers.
- Find the right influencers: Spend some time looking for influencers in your niche who truly resonate with your brand message and marketing goals.
- Reach out and collaborate: When you have the right candidates, reach out to them and discuss partnership terms and campaign ideas.
- Track the metrics: Measure the right metrics for your marketing goals, scale what’s effective, or adjust your strategy to those that aren’t performing
In influencer marketing, follower count isn’t everything. A fitness influencer with 5,000 engaged followers in my target demographic is worth way more than a celebrity with millions of unrelated followers. Engagement rate and audience alignment matter most, and what you look for should differ depending on your marketing goals.
Sometimes, you don’t have to pay upfront fees to influencers. Product gifting is one of the influencer strategies to get your products seen by thousands of people. You can send free products to potential partners, and if they genuinely like them, they are happy to post about them. It won’t work all the time, but when it does, you will get the most genuine and authentic endorsements.
6. Paid advertisement
A significant upfront investment right from day one in social media or Google ads is not typically an optimal strategy, considering you’re still testing product designs. However, it can be a potential strategy for product testing and a non-negotiable strategy for substantial business growth once you have gathered sufficient data to suggest market demand for your designs.
What you can do
- Test with a small budget: When you have enough evidence indicating your designs have strong market appeal, create and test different creatives with a small budget.
- Explore multiple ad channels: Try different platforms, from Google to Instagram, Facebook to TikTok ads, and find which platform performs the best
- Increase your ad spend: Once you have discovered the best platform for your business and well-performing creatives, increase your ad spend and repeat the same cycle with new creatives.
If you’re certain that people want your product designs but your campaigns are not performing well, your ad creatives may be the issue. Metrics such as click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and cost per mille (CPM) tell you whether your creatives are engaging and relevant to your audience.
The solution is to test and learn how to create engaging creatives and test as many of them as you can to find the ones that are performing well.
Start your print on demand business today!
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