Marketing Ideas for Quilting ?? OMG!!

Churches and homeschoolers can be a great source of scrapbookers and quilters.

1. Contact local churches and homeschool groups and offer a discount or incentive of some sort.

2. If the store is big enough, offer a free room for scrapbooking groups to hold an event. Same with quilters.

3. Team up with the local pregnancy center - sponsor a "Baby Quilt Night" - quilts made in the store that night are donated to the pregnancy center.

4. Team up with a local battered women's shelter and sponsor a "Sewing Night." Many ladies and their children come to the battered women's shelter with nothing - not even clothes or a blanket for their little ones. Experienced quilters can make a baby blanket in a few hours, or a small outfit. Items made are then donated to the local shelter.

Tons more ideas can be added to these - just all I have time for right now.

Do they just offer quilt materials, or do they actually make quilts?

Offer free classes so they can get beginners in to buy a starter quilting or starter scrapbooking pack. I liked Trekkie's idea of baby blankets - heck, you can do special occassion scrapbooking and quilts, like baby showers, weddings, etc.

I would look at it from a different angle.

Bring the offline up to date (it's 2011 welcome to the net).

I could show you scrapbooking forums with hundreds of thousands of members, that will never be in your city, yet have the same hobby interest as your low traffic local members.

Example, create a scrapbooking DVD series & use the products you stock. Sell the DVD, sell the supplies.

I suggest your offline scrapbooking business make friends with UPS.

I think they need to re-look at their sales and marketing processes, the sales funnel, and also to identify their target audience. Most of the advice given above are sound and good, even, but it may be rather all-over-the-place, and even random. Perhaps consider to get a marketing consultant in (do a barter trade for a cashless transaction if possible) to identify the kinks and to ramp/scale up the business.

What businesses? Think female and parenting

For a boost to their own website - they do have a website, right? - that gives you a multitude of mommy blogs to contact. You would be looking for guest posting opportunities there - any project that can be done in half a day that is related to kids... any mommy blog will say yes to that in exchange for a contextual link or two.

For a boost to their brick and mortar, I recommend low cost - not free - instructional classes on small projects that can be done in one class. The upsell is a bigger, better two-class project and the supplies needed for that. I would advertise those with a flyer campaign using flyers with tear-offs. Hang the flyers in grocery stores, hardware stores, wherever there are bulletin boards.

The brick and mortar owners could choose their favorite local charities and publicize the fact that they are donating a certain percentage of the class fees to the charity. A different charity could be chosen each month. Find the supporters of the charity and they will be THRILLED to advertise the class to their whole list! Hint, hint...

Find the local bloggers who are writing things about their town and check into guest posting there. Offer good free content in exchange for a blurb about the classes. If the charity option is being offered be sure to mention that in the article. Perhaps even do an exchange for a month of free or reduced advertising in the sidebar for the article.

Sponsor a crafts show or be one of the sponsors of a craft show that is already established. Do a free class AT the show.

i like your fifth ideas "5. Go on WF and beg for more ideas"
yeah, that's it..warrior communities helping each others..

Dan, I know of one scrapbooking blog that is actually a blogspot blog, that gets awesome laser targeted traffic from having sponsored contest. I don't think the people that run the blogspot even front any of the money for the products they give away, they simply bring in the traffic from the way it looks to me.

I'll see If I can dig up one of the contest links for you.

[edit]
I sent you the link (PM).