Oh gosh I hope not haha!

Is there a need in your market that the industry giants aren’t already satisfying? This is really too broad a question to answer with any use.

Might help if you got verified if you aren’t already?

I sell model kits and once or twice I’ve had posts removed because of the commerce guidelines against selling weapons. The only weapons I go near are plastic clippers and hobby knives. Instagram is absolutely smooth brained a lot of the time so you just have to work with what you have.

I know SO MANY businesses who can’t do effective social media/online marketing because they struggle to find people with the particular skill combination of:

• Being able to produce image and video content

• Knowing how to use the meta ad manager

• Knowing to to engage with online communities and be a community member

• Being able to provide these services long term to deliver consistent engagement growth and online conversions.

I am solidly ok at it and I still have businesses asking me to do theirs. If you could do that for local businesses where you could go in and sit down with social media illiterates, you could have a very scaleable business.

People say social media marketing is dying, but that’s only because Meta has killed the gold rush where low effort ad spam was rewarded. Now you just have to care and know what you’re doing, you can still get results.

How much do you interact with the accounts of people who buy the products you sell? Meta rewards engagement with engagement. If you only post unengaging content and don’t engage as a member of the community (through likes, shares and high effort comments) the the algorithm won’t put your content in front of people.

If you have a shop selling bike parts, you have a great source of content through restorations/upgrades, showing off customer’s builds as well as performance tips and tricks etc.

You’re selling honey at a farmer’s market, this isn’t a Mercedes dealership. All your clerk (she’s not a saleperson) needs to do is know enough about the product to answer customers’ questions and handle the transactions.

Your job as the business owner is to be directing people who want to buy from you to the stall via your marketing. If you’re only doing marketing at the market, you have a huge marketing problem and this employee is not at fault for that.

Do you have social media presence? Do you advertise online or anywhere else? How do you engage with your customers and get them thinking about the product before they even get to the market?

If she’s reading during quiet periods and doing her job when people want to buy your wares, then she’s doing fine. She’s on minimum wage, its not her job to define and execute a sales and marketing strategy that will funnel customers to your store front. That’s your job.

How is your business structured? Are you a sole trader doing Self Assessment? Or did you register a limited company with Companies House?

If you have a Ltd. company, you really should be engaging the services of a professional accountant, and filings for Ltd companies can cost over £1000 per year in accounting fees - but making a mistake when doing it yourself could be even more costly. If you are just doing a small side gig printing business (I have a Ltd company making plastic hobby kits and 3d ptinting so I know your industry) then a limited company is just expensive and not worth it especially if you are not VAT registered.

Spamming irrelevant hashtags does, but it’s ok to use a couple of relevant ones, and switch them up regularly to hit different groups of explore pages.

Start posting content that is engaging and fairly high effort, look up hashtag strategies (it seems to change year to year) and don’t worry about how many people like it at first. Then, go and interact with the community. Like other peoples posts, leave good comments, follow people who’s relevant content you like. Instagram rewards engagement with engagement. Don’t pay influencers until you are very well established, and depending on your industry you may not even have to. You can send them free products which they may review or feature, or they may like your brand so much that they champion your products for free (this is what happens for me.) I get the best results when I post about three posts a week, a couple of stories, and spend 30 minutes per day liking, commenting, messaging and following people who’s content is relevant to my brand.

You should be a community member with a brand, not a brand with an instagram account.

If you post your own content regularly and engage with other people’s, then you can use lead magnet type ad campaigns targeted at people who have engaged with your pages or visited your website, and start building an email list for direct email marketing which is cheapest. Those leads are warm and actually welcome your offers, so your conversion rate and LTV will be far higher.

This is just my own experience, but the success I have had on social media is built on being social. So many companies do not get that, and their social teams don’t care or try. The ads etc and just a way to turn that goodwill into leads.

My account is @beacon_models if you’re interested. I’m not a heavyweight, but my strategy works and it’s enough for my micro business to grow. If you want to have a look.

You have to ask yourself why you want to start it. I’ll give you a brief description of my story; at about your age I got into building tiny model ships that other people collected like stamps. I was so good at it that people started to ask if they could buy them. So I learned how to build lots of copies at the same time as batches. I didn’t make much money but I felt like I had to do it because I was so interested in it and found it so rewarding to serve my customers. It taught me about organisation, shipping, budgeting and that kind of thing.

15 years later I have a much more evolved and sophisticated hobby product business, but the passion that drives it is more or less the same. You don’t have to be passionate about a certain thing, but you do have to be really interested in building a system that make or serves that thing for profit. It’s just easier to learn how to build that kind of system when you actually care about the product or service and find it very engaging.

With so little info in your post it’s hard to say whether you should. If you just don’t want a 9 to 5, learn a trade and become self employed, but that’s not quite the same as starting a business. That’s starting a job - which is also fine.

So tell us a bit more and maybe we can advise better.