Promotion and Publicity
One of the things I learned early on is that when promoting the next Exhibition of your work, the importance of spending your advertising budget on promoting to those who are already interested in your work. That is why your list of previous clients is your first port of call, followed by your Gallery owner’s list which has buyers of artists’ work.
People who already own and like your work are more likely to want to own another or be happy to recommend you to their friends. By contacting them on a regular basis you can remind them of your existence and encourage them to tell others about you – to share you.
Researching Your Clients
But what if you are looking for New Clients? Well, you have to do some research. My marketing mentor and friend, Erica Stone, taught me all about research and its value, and showed me how you have to use a bit of lateral thinking.
If your work has a theme, you could look for people who collect (insert your art subject here) or like a famous artist that you like, and so on. You might want to join the ‘Friends of the Tate’ or ‘Friends of the Royal Academy‘ so that you can mingle with people who love art and, hopefully, want to buy some of their own.
If you already have some customers, you can use what you know about them to make a profile of your ideal customer. You may already know some things about them; where they live; what kind of accommodation they live in, their approximate age – perhaps, maybe even the kind of work they do. If you have met them, you may even have some knowledge about their likes and dislikes.
One of the best ways of discovering more about your current customers is to Ask Them. You can do this setting up polls online or in social media.
You can use services such as Survey Monkey to do this, or search for ‘poll maker’ to find others. You can also create polls in Facebook.
Interviewing a few of your best customers can be beneficial in many ways. Don’t be afraid to ask – you will likely get some who say ‘No’ but remember that rejection not personal to you, it just a preference, and many people are flattered to be asked for an interview – it makes them feel special.
You can interview using a questionnaire, and if you know them well enough, you could even visit them in person and record a video (with their permission, of course).
Find Potential Buyers for your Art
Once you know more about your customers, their likes and the circles they move in, you can use that information to find potential New Buyers.
Facebook advertising has an interest-based targeting tool use can use and you can place a short-lived ad to get things rolling. With this tool, you can target people who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to another page or topic. Interest-based targeting is commonly confused with ‘likes’ targeting, which also has its uses.
There are thousands of interests to target, and they’re located in the Interests section of your ad settings.
Perhaps your customers are mainly on LinkedIn or Twitter – These social platforms also have similar advertising tools.
However you go about your research, I must warn you – it’s a long and painful job but well worth it as the rewards can be great. Few of us ever get round to doing it at all, let alone thoroughly or effectively.
But the job of Audience Research can be made easier using software.
One more thing – don’t get hung up on finding one ideal customer. Your customers are like to be diverse and come from all walks of life but at least try to get an idea of where to find them and make a start with promoting to them.
Contacting Existing & Potential Clients
Before you can use the information you have gathered effectively, you need to be able to contact the people on your list easily and regularly to keep them informed and up to date with
- New works
- Exhibitions
- Special Offers
- Recent Developments
- Projects
You can also send them a ‘Thank You’ – and anything else you can think of to keep them engaged and interested in your work.
People already on your list may have provided you with their home address, and hopefully, their email address.
Cards Postcards and Leaflets
Make sure you have a business card – and give them out freely. You can leave them in public places including shops relevant to your subject matter, such as garden centres, cafes and galleries (You may need to ask permission). You can use a postcard as your business card too – the extra space can allow you to list services you provide as well as a stunning image.
Traditionally, artists only send out postcards or leaflets to their list about new exhibitions. Some artists do workshops or courses and mail for those too. If you don’t have a customer email address, this can be limiting but the ‘snail mail’ method has potential to generate interest throughout the year. For a start – you can make a special or free offer to those who have not provided an email address to encourage them to give you one!
When you have an email address, keeping in touch is free or very inexpensive.
I suggest you don’t completely abandon snail mail though. Postcards with a good image are great. They are often kept for longer and other people besides the addressee may see them. You can use postcards to tell them about – anything!
Email is the most effective way to target your communications – as long as those emails have been given to you voluntarily.
You can buy email lists, it’s true, but these prospects are ‘cold’ and if you do take the bought list route, it is important to ‘warm it up’ with free information or even physical freebies. The most valuable of these can be offered in exchange for an ‘opt in’ to your autoresponder service.
This brings me neatly to…
The Most Important Promotion and Publicity Software
So what is your Most Important Piece of Software?
Your Auto Responder Service!
Why? Because you can use it to collect the addresses of people who actually Want to hear from you, and you can email them whenever you like.
How it works:
The service keeps your list and you can have multiple lists (buyers, potential buyers, workshop clients, etc.).
You encourage people to opt in to your list buy offering them something of value. They give you their email address you send them the item.
The item can be something free, an inexpensive or a discounted item; it can even simply be an invitation to be notified of future exhibitions. You can experiment and see what works for you.
TIP: You can send a letter/email to your existing list asking them to ‘opt in’ to your auto responder too.
The best thing is that you can send to far more people than your normal email will allow, you can easily separate (segment) your lists so that you don’t send everything to everyone and your emails can be tailored to each audience. You can even send an automated series of emails at set intervals after they have signed up and/or send individual emails for exhibitions and such.
A Cautionary Word: Think carefully about what you send; think about what YOU would be happy to receive – if you would be annoyed or bored with your missives or if you couldn’t happily send it to your friends and family, you probably should think again.
Tools
I will be adding more useful tools to the Resources Section soon
Finding Your Ideal Buyers in Minutes using Audience Research Software. Some of them can find out an awful lot about people.
It’s pretty scary really.
But it gathers the information that is already out there from multiple sources and puts it all together in a usable form. There are other that confine their searches to Facebook or Twitter etc.
Some of these Resources are Free and others are Paid. Some of the paid resources give a lot of information up front so that Even if you don’t buy, you will pick up some useful insights if you click the links!
I should mention that if you do buy through my link, I may sometimes, but not always, be compensated.
