Marketing Art: A Little of Everything, or Just Pick a Single Avenue?
In my ongoing quest to market my work — and to gain a little more visibility hopefully with the end result of selling something — I continue to evaluate my marketing approach... and possibilities.
If you are a commercial artist to any kind of degree, it's inevitable that you need to market yourself, much as you might find the whole process distasteful!
Most artists loathe self-promotion.
In some ways this is the story of joining absolutely everything. You join everything, all the marketplaces, all the social media channels, all the blogging sites, all in the hope that at least one of those things will do well. Additionally, you're hoping that by joining lots of things you can add together all the little tiny bits and eventually it'll add up to something.
At least that's what I've been doing so far.
While we were out of town at the festival in Oregon, I spoke to some of the other vendors that were there and several of them seemed to depend exclusively on just their Instagram or their Facebook pages. And they seemed to be getting decent results.
One woodworker I spoke with said he just updates his Insta daily, and then stages a "sales event" once a month, and almost all this work from a full month is sold within 48 hours. He has built a following that knows to expect this once-a-month release of new work.
Setting aside for a moment the possibility that the biggest challenge I have to overcome is the nature of the product rather than the marketing of it, I've been thinking, once again, about my approach to marketing.
Mostly this ongoing process and desire for changing the formula is the consequence of realizing that what I've been doing so far isn't really doing much. My wife insists that every point at which I get something out there is going to help in some ways, but to what degree is some of this just wasted effort?
During events, we put marketing materials in the hands of (often hundreds of) people, and it seems like it makes absolutely no difference in terms of visitors to the website or any of the online stores, and so I have to ask myself how effective that is because it does after all cost money to print up postcards and flyers.
I suppose I would be less concerned about the whole thing if our little world of patchwork economics didn't depend — in part — on the artwork bringing some kind of income. I know what I do is actually viable from the fact that we can go to a weekend show or a multi day event and things sell quite well.
Perhaps the one thing I'm not working with as well as I might is the gathering of names and having a targeted mailing list that I can do direct contact marketing from.
I've always found that particular type of marketing to be particularly tedious and time consuming. I used to do it when we had a brick and mortar art gallery, and looking back I have to admit that it was one of the more effective forms of marketing we used, particularly towards the end because we'd gathered a list of almost 13,000 names.
Of course it's different from a gallery where you have a guest book and you invite people to sign up on a daily basis, but maybe this is something i need to look into a little bit more and be a bit more proactive with.
"Raw materials"
Regardless, with things (economically speaking) being the way they are these day, I need to find ways to improve my process.
Onwards!
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2024.08.07 AS-TXT-271/241