10 Candle Business Marketing Tips

It’s no secret that we enjoy candles at Glassnow. As our top selling container category, we’ve seen candle companies of all kinds create amazing scented products. However, maintaining a candle business is tough. Where do candle business owners find the time to dedicate to the marketing? To address this, we created this short marketing guide that any candle business owner can follow. The information here will certainly be useful, but there’s no doubt that all you candle creators out there will need to dedicate time each week to reach more people. Let’s get started!

Understand Your Candle Business Customers

Understand Your Candle Business Customers

Whether you’re selling scented candles, wedding dresses, or any other product, knowing who it is that you are selling to is crucial to the success of your marketing. There are the 3 primary factors to consider when thinking about your buyer’s persona:

  • Demographics – Age, gender, geography, & more. These are important to know, as they will help create better targeting methods for your promotions. Start by creating a fictional (or even real) customer, or “buyer persona,” that is most likely to purchase your candle and write out these characteristics.
  • Spending Behavior – Do your customers typically purchase premium-grade candles? Do they love deals? Do they shop online? What other similar products do they buy? Knowing these behaviors will allow you to align your marketing in the right place. Make sure to include these details when creating your buyer persona.
  • Attention – Where do your customers spend their time? What consumes their attention? These are some of the most important aspects to identify, which will guide your marketing placements. For example, you may create Facebook ads for your customers as you know they spend time on social media sites.

Know What Makes Your Candle Products Unique

Your favorite part! You get to talk about the reasons you started your candle business in the first place. This ties very closely to your buyer persona, since the details and quality of your candles typically align with specific target markets.

Write a list of all the “value propositions” that your candle products are characterized by. Here’s an example:

Know What Makes Your Candle Products Unique

Manor Candles: Variety of scents, variety of colors, variety of sizes, come in recycled-glass containers, long-lasting wick and wax, etc.

These value traits will be used when creating your ads and serving them to your buyer persona, which we will discuss below.

Identify The Best Sales Seasons and Scents For Your Candle Business

Enjoy the Busy Season

Having a good grasp on your calendar can help you go miles in this business. There are plenty of times around the year for candle sales to skyrocket and it’s definitely important to know when to buy a few extra pounds of wax. Here’s a simple rule of thumb; Season = Scent! Look below for a few examples of seasonal scents:

Season Example Scents
Spring Apple blossom, cherry blossom,
lavender, honeysuckle, lemongrass,
jasmine, lilac, lilies, magnolias
Summer Beach, sea salt, citrus, wine, coconut,
peach, sandalwood, grass, citronella,
aloe, hay, linens, watermelon
Fall Pumpkin spice, apple, cinnamon,
spices, sage, eucalyptus, amber,
cedar, tobacco, brown sugar
Winter Cinnamon, vanilla, peppermint,
pine, orchid, chestnut, maple,
cookie, nutmeg, juniper, birch

Showcasing this sort of versatility with scents in your brand can instill confidence in your customers that you’re there for them all year round!

Sell Candles in the Slow Seasons

Don’t let the slow months keep you down. This is not the time to slow down on the marketing efforts. Focus on the products that sell year round and promote them for a variety of use cases.

Here are some marketing ideas for the slow season:

  • Give a discount to your email list
  • Send small gifts to customers with birthdays
  • Promote gift ideas for teachers or graduates
  • Use obscure holidays as a humorous excuse to create fun promotions
  • Maintain your social media posting during these times that keep everyone’s favorite candle “top of mind”

Promote Your Candle Business Online – “The Good Stuff”

Promote Your Candle Business Online - "The Good Stuff"

In 2019, the most important place for marketing is online. This applies to both physical and online stores. Keeping in mind your buyer personas, value propositions, and seasonal relevance, here are some tactical candle marketing ideas to use in the digital age:

Crafting Your Business’s Voice on Social Media – 4 Steps

  1. Select Your Social Media Channels – Candles are an attractive looking product so be sure to choose the best visual platforms for these products. Photos are a big pull on platforms like Instagram, Facebook & Twitter so investing in these big 3 is vital.
  2. Brainstorm Themes and Ideas – With your brand in mind, come up with ideas that align and have emotional effects with your audience. Humorous, “Scent-imental”
  3. Create a Content Calendar – Planning out your post ideas is important in keeping your audience engaged. You want to post enough so they look forward to your posts, but not too much that they’re sick of you. Creating & sticking to a calendar will help you maintain a healthy frequency. For more best practices on creating a content calendar, check out the article here.
  4. Design and Write! – Design your posts & write your captions, then SCHEDULE – in a later blog, we will list all the tools necessary to speed up the marketing process.

Reach New Candle Customers With Online Ads

Online platforms thrive on selling ad space, and there’s plenty enough for everyone to buy! Sign up for free ad accounts on Google and Facebook. These platforms are the best at gaining clicks directly to your website, as well as segmenting your audience and showing ads specifically to them. And because the cost is based on the number of clicks on your ad, it’s only as expensive at it is successful.

Ensure Repeat Customers With Email Marketing

Subscribing to newsletters is a massive indicator of favor with your brand. Whether its automatic from purchases or voluntary from your website, you’ll definitely be accumulating email addresses from your customers. Reach out to them! Start a monthly newsletter, maybe send one a month. If they’re successful, send the same one twice a month. Free platforms like Mailchimp make designing and sending emails a breeze!

Explore Additional Initiatives to Marketing Your Candle Business

  • Blogs – Blogs can be a great way for people to get to know you! It’s not often we get a glimpse at where our money is really going; give that to your customers.
  • Forums – Like blogs, forums can be a great place to commune with the customers who truly care about your brand and the industry. The difference here is that you’ll also find many other business owners in this space who share useful opinions and techniques involved with their work.

Marketing Ideas For Brick and Mortar Candle Businesses

Marketing Ideas For Brick and Mortar Candle Businesses

In addition to the online tactics above, here are some marketing ideas that brick & mortar candle businesses can take advantage of.

Keep Customers Engaged With Your Candle Business

Customer engagement can be easy in an online space. Commenting and posting will only take seconds of your day and can bring in hundreds of dollars. In-person engagement requires a bit more work, but a lot more fun! Here are some suggestions:

  • Sell at local events & markets
  • Host candle-making classes in your space
  • Invest in printed flyers & ads in your community

For more tactics on boosting direct sales to your candle store, check out this useful article from ShowMomTheMoney.com!

At Glassnow, we love knowing that our packaging options can do even the smallest part in helping someone maintain their own business. We hope this guide will be helpful for you in marketing your business for years to come.

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