In this hands-on workshop, creatives will learn how to professionalise their DIY passion and transform it into a sustainable business. The focus is on building an authentic brand or personal brand that clearly communicates your values and establishes long-term trust with your target audience. The workshop also covers how to build and actively manage an engaged community, continuously strengthening reach and loyalty. Another key focus is on developing viable monetisation strategies – including collaborations, e-books, courses, and affiliate models – as well as creating credible, sustainable communication that avoids greenwashing and maintains a consistent, trustworthy brand presence. This workshop is aimed at self-employed individuals, bloggers, and small DIY labels who want to further develop, professionalise, and grow their creative projects sustainably.

How can you foster customer loyalty beyond likes and reach?

While online visibility is important, it's no substitute for genuine relationships. In traditional retail, trust, personal encounters and recommendations determine whether customers become regulars or just stop by once.

This 90-minute workshop will teach participants how to apply proven network marketing principles to physical retail in a meaningful and authentic way. The focus is on relationship building, referral marketing and fostering emotional brand loyalty, all without resorting to sales pressure, empty marketing clichés or additional stress in everyday work.

The workshop demonstrates how to turn walk-in customers into regulars and build a loyal offline community, step by step. It views the store itself as a social space: a meeting place, a space of trust and a local brand that connects people.

Content is conveyed through short impulses, vivid practical examples and group exercises. Participants will reflect on their existing customer contacts, recognise untapped potential in everyday store life and develop concrete, individually tailored ideas to foster greater loyalty and recommendations. Together, participants work out how small gestures, a clear attitude and a personal approach can have a greater long-term impact than short-term online campaigns. The focus is on practical, budget-friendly strategies that can be easily integrated into everyday work. The aim is to strengthen your store's role as a community hub — personal, authentic, sustainable and locally anchored.

In this deep-dive workshop, Tanja Kosub, an expert in visual marketing, branding, and product photography, demonstrates how high-quality product photos can be created using just a simple setup and a smartphone. These images make your brand instantly recognisable and attract the right target audience. The focus is on developing a consistent visual style that runs across all digital touchpoints – from online shops and social media to newsletters and Pinterest.A clear, coherent visual identity ensures that the right customers feel addressed, build trust, and form a strong connection with the brand. Good product photography facilitates purchasing decisions by showcasing materials, textures, details, and emotions – everything that makes a creative favourite piece special and saleable. Participants will learn which types of photos are essential for a professional brand presence and how to use them strategically to make products visible, create recognition, and effectively engage their ideal customers. Clear, step-by-step instructions make the techniques easy to implement in practice. This workshop is perfect for anyone looking to make their photography more efficient, position their brand clearly and visibly, and strengthen relationships with their ideal customers at the same time.

This masterclass is a hands-on, practical format. We guide participants step by step on how local shop owners can build a loyal community – not just with nice ideas, but with a structured system, the right tools, and concrete monetisation strategies. After all, local retail has never been more about relationships. Shops that succeed in engaging people, building trust, and consistently providing fresh experiences are the ones that grow steadily, even in challenging times.

Masterclass content includes:

• Step-by-step community building
• Tools and platforms that support engagement
• Ideas for monetisation and long-term loyalty
• Case studies showing how a community can directly drive sales

In this workshop, online marketing expert Sven Deutschländer will teach you how to take the product and service pages of your website to the next level – those pages where you showcase individual courses, services, or products and offer them for purchase. You will learn how to design your website as an effective collection of landing pages that strategically convert visitors into customers. Discover how to present your offerings clearly and persuasively, highlight the key selling points, and optimise your pages for different devices. Benefit from proven methods that guide your visitors toward taking action, helping to increase your website’s success sustainably.

In this workshop, a genuine Google Maps expert will show you how to optimise your Google Maps business profile to attract the attention of numerous local customers. Learn how to set up your profile correctly, create engaging content, and leverage key features to maximise your visibility in local search results. Topics include: basic information, products & services, reviews, and posts – what works best? Which features have the greatest impact? There will also be time to address your specific challenges: Are reviews not being published? Is your profile possibly suspended? Are unattractive photos uploaded by Google Maps users affecting your profile? We will discuss these issues and work together to find effective solutions.

In this hands-on workshop, participants will develop their own Instagram content strategy based on the Instagram funnel. Step by step, they will create a personalised content plan designed to attract new followers, increase reach, build trust within their community, strengthen their expert status, and drive sales. Participants will also learn how to adapt their content strategy according to different business goals or phases – whether building a profile, pre-launch, launch, or evergreen – and how to consistently produce strategic content even with limited time. By the end of the workshop, participants will leave with a clearly structured, actionable content plan tailored to their individual objectives.

AI systems evaluate shop content differently than traditional search engines. They analyze texts, structures, and contexts and decide which content can be used as a reliable source. This practical deep-dive workshop focuses on tailoring your online shop to these requirements.

The focus is on the following content:

• how AI systems read, evaluate, and use shop content as a source
• what requirements texts and page structures must meet in order to be considered in AI searches
• how to specifically adapt category, product, and supplementary pages
• which SEO basics are still relevant and where the focus is shifting

In addition to theoretical input, there will be exercises, examples, discussions, and a handout to take home. The workshop is aimed at online shop operators, handmade labels, providers from the DIY and creative industries, and content managers who want to structure their content in a way that is sustainable for the future.