Getting people to invest in you and your work is hard. Unfortunately for artists, it’s never as easy as simply finishing a piece and having people line up to buy it. In reality, artists have to be able to drum up significant interest and create a buzz around their work to hopefully entice a sale or two.
It’s for this reason that many artists can be found on social media, building a following and more importantly a brand. When selling art you need to be as good of a marketer as you are a creative, so with that in mind, here are some great ways to help promote yourself and encourage more people to buy your art.
Quality control
To get more people into the idea of buying from you, you need to present yourself in as much of a professional way as you can. This goes far beyond the quality of your art too, because even if your work is the best thing since Picasso, if everything else around it is lacking, then customers these days will be put off.
Leave no stone unturned; you need to spend time making sure your website is clean, slick and well designed; you want to ensure each product has a good description with personality and no typos; and you also want to make sure your social channels are up to date and looking good. You can’t cut any corners, otherwise you’re setting yourself up for failure.
Learn different types of marketing
Digital marketing is the most widespread and equally most effective way for artists to market themselves, especially on social media. However, there are other facets of this that you can use to boost audience awareness and connect with more people.
The first is to focus on your content marketing, and this means ensuring that your websites and blog posts are SEO optimized (meaning that they’re more likely to rank high up on search engines).
As well as this you also want to give email marketing a go, which is where you contact previous customers with an informative newsletter in which you can promote exclusive deals, discounts, or new products. Similar to email marketing, you can also try SMS marketing, which sends text messages to customers. This is a good idea as it’s a really direct way of marketing that gets an instant reaction. To learn how to use these better, here are some SMS marketing use cases.
Build a persona, not a brand
With anything creative, customers like to feel a sort of genuine human connection to the artist before buying their work. This means when building your art business, it’s important to consider this to ensure that your online presence has it’s own distinct personality, so that it doesn’t become forgettable.
There are a few good ways to do this, with one technique being regular blog writing. With a blog you can add so much of your own personality and build a conversation with your current and new followers by providing tips and insight into your process and work.
Another great way to show more personality is to upload videos. The content you make can be anything you want, however, good and easy things to do include producing behind the scene videos demonstrating your process, as well as tours of your creative space. Anything that gives the viewer a better understanding of your work and yourself as an individual will help.
