I’ll be upfront: I didn’t get into the record shop game because I love marketing. I got into it because I love records. But twenty-plus years in, I’ve accepted that if nobody knows you exist, it doesn’t matter how good your curation is. You need people through the door and clicking on your website. So I’ve tried basically every digital marketing tactic going, and I’ve got opinions about which ones actually move the needle for a shop like mine.

Let me save you some time and money.

Email Is Still King

I know it’s boring. I know it sounds like advice from 2008. But email newsletters remain the single most effective marketing channel for our shop, and it isn’t even close.

We send a weekly email — new arrivals, a staff pick or two, any upcoming events, and the occasional story about a record we think deserves more attention. Our open rate sits around 42 percent, which is apparently pretty good. More importantly, we can see the direct impact: within 24 hours of sending, we get online orders for the specific records we’ve featured. It’s trackable, it’s predictable, and it costs us basically nothing.

The key is not making it feel like marketing. I write those emails the same way I’d talk to a regular who just walked in the door. No promotional language. No “ACT NOW” nonsense. Just genuine enthusiasm about music.

We use Mailchimp because it’s what we started with and the free tier covered us for years. There’s nothing wrong with it. Pick a tool, stick with it, write good subject lines, and be consistent.

Instagram Works, But Differently Now

Instagram used to be great for us. Post a photo of a new arrival, get likes, get people through the door. That still happens, but reach has tanked. Unless you’re doing Reels or spending money on ads, organic posts get shown to maybe 20 percent of your followers.

Short video works, though. A 30-second clip of a record on the turntable with the audio playing does better than any static photo. Behind-the-scenes stuff — unpacking deliveries, setting up the shop, conversations with customers — gets genuine engagement. People want to see the human side of the business.

What I’d avoid: spending hours on perfectly curated content. Your customers aren’t following you because you’re a lifestyle brand. They’re following you because they like records and they like your shop. Authenticity isn’t a strategy here — it’s just the reality that polished content doesn’t perform as well as honest content.

Google Business Profile Is Free and Underrated

If you haven’t claimed and properly set up your Google Business Profile, stop reading this and go do it now. It’s free. When someone searches “record shop near me” or “vinyl records [your suburb],” your Google profile is what shows up. Photos, opening hours, reviews, your website link — it’s all there.

We get about 2,000 profile views a month and roughly 300 direction requests. That’s 300 people a month who might not have found us otherwise. Update it regularly. Post photos. Respond to reviews. It takes ten minutes a week and it drives more foot traffic than any other single thing we do.

Paid Ads: Proceed With Caution

I’ve spent money on Facebook ads and Google Ads with mixed results. The issue is that our margins on a $45 record aren’t huge, so the cost per acquisition needs to be low for ads to make sense. For specific events — Record Store Day, in-store performances, a major reissue — targeted local ads can work. Running them continuously burns through budget fast without proportional returns.

One thing that surprised me: working with an AI consultancy to analyse our ad spend data showed us we were wasting about 40 percent of our Google Ads budget on search terms that weren’t converting. Generic terms like “buy vinyl online” attracted people looking for the cheapest option, not people who value what indie shops offer. Narrowing our targeting to more specific terms — artist names, genre-specific searches, “independent record shop Melbourne” — cut our cost per sale by more than half.

What Doesn’t Work

TikTok: I’ve tried. Our demographic isn’t really there, and the effort-to-return ratio is terrible for us. If you’re targeting under-25s, maybe. For us, no.

Paid influencer partnerships: We sent records to a few music bloggers and Instagram accounts. The exposure was nice, the sales impact was zero.

Discount codes and constant sales: This trains customers to wait for discounts. It erodes your margins and cheapens the brand. We don’t do sales. Ever.

The Honest Truth About Time

The biggest constraint isn’t money — it’s time. I’m running a shop. I’m ordering stock, processing online orders, talking to customers, unpacking deliveries. I don’t have four hours a day to create content.

My approach: one email per week (about an hour), a few Instagram posts (maybe 30 minutes total), and keeping the Google profile current (ten minutes). That’s it. Anything more and it starts taking time away from the actual business of being a record shop.

The tools and platforms will keep changing. The fundamentals won’t. Know your customers. Talk to them like humans. Be genuinely passionate about what you sell. That’s the marketing strategy, and everything else is just the delivery mechanism.