The art and design industry is challenging, especially in 2022, where every young artist is promoting on Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube. Good news: there are still untapped opportunities to promote yourself and your art now!
Whether it’s selling paintings, digital illustrations, or just trying to get a job, creating a marketing funnel to promote and market yourself will do wonders for landing that job or growing into a full-time artist. So, what are the steps to creating an effective marketing platform that will sell for you? We’ve broken it down into what matters:
- Creating Your Online Presence
- Untapped Opportunities for Social Media Marketing
- How To Create Content That Matters
Doing these three things will change your career, unlike any “get-rich-quick” schemes you’ve watched on Youtube. You need to focus on these steps for the next days, weeks, and months and you will create a platform that will sell your art for you.
Creating an Online Presence
As an artist, you need a website, social accounts, and meaningful content.
Crafting an online presence is one of the most important tasks you can do as an artist. Before doing promotion campaigns to get your name further out there, you need to make sure you have the foundation perfected. Let’s walk through the various elements of the perfect online presence and persona that will promote your portfolio, store, or art.
Your Website: Traditional or a CMS?
Here’s The Answer.
If you haven’t yet, you should build a portfolio or website to show off your art. Having a personal spot on the web gives you many benefits, not to mention credibility and is an essential step for acquiring clients.
When first building your online place, you will encounter various ways to build websites. One of the favorites we’ve been seeing with artists is Pixpa, which is designed specifically for artists. Classic options are WordPress or even creating a site from scratch, but we’d personally stay away from those options unless you are technically inclined. We’d stay away from Wix as well, as we’ve found it doesn’t optimize well for SEO which if you are planning to extend your reach on Google and improve user experience, one of the other options will suit you better.
Online Branding & Social Accounts That Will Give You a Heads Up.
The second step in building the perfect online presence is getting on all the social media! It is good practice to create social accounts you may not even post on, as a way to increase your presence for people searching on those platforms or Google. But before you do this, we suggest spending a day or two brainstorming your branding and style for your social accounts and your website!
User experience is more important than ever for your website and social media platforms. Online branding will help attract clients and buyers, but will also help to increase your online following in general.
The social accounts that are huge in the art (which you probably know) are Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, but there are tons and tons more! After creating these three accounts, you want to also create an account on Tumblr, Reddit, Flickr, Youtube, Facebook, Behance, and even TikTok.
Registering and posting a post on these platforms will instantly increase your presence, and if you can post weekly or monthly on all these, that is amazing for reach!
Social Media Marketing
You know the importance of social media, but it’s no secret that every artist today has an Instagram and it’s becoming tougher to stand out.
It is important to follow social media best practices, but what opportunities are there to quickly grow your social media following beyond the simple things?
Here are three untapped opportunities for increasing followers and engagement:
Use Events & Hashtags To Your Advantage
Events are a fantastic opportunity to produce a quick post that will get you an instant boost in followers and likes. And if you are using hashtags, are you profitably using them?
Hashtags and events need to be researched to find which events there are going on throughout the year and which hashtags are ‘profitable’ – meaning they have low competition but high engagement. Major art events on social media that will give you an almost instant boost in followers are: Inktober, #PortfolioDay, Huevember, and Mermay.
And there’s, even more, all made specifically for artists to promote their work!
Promoting your artwork with hashtags is centred on proper research. You do not need to add the top hashtags that everyone does. It would be best if you ought to consider good hashtags. We have defined profitable keywords as low-competition high engagement hashtags that will drive followers to your account. Here are the best steps to finding useful hashtags that will improve your engagement and follower-count:
- Search or click on base-keywords relevant to your niche (art, painting, sculpting, graphic design, etc).
- Scroll through the posts showing for that seed hashtag and click on each post to find other hashtags artists in your industry are using.
- Check how many posts are on that hashtag and any other stats you can see for it for that social media platform. Check the recent posts for their engagement and how often posts are posted to that hashtag. You want hashtags that get low amounts of postings (which depends on the platform, but 20,000-100,000 posts on Instagram are typically a good range) and aren’t filled with huge accounts but have posts with around 100 likes on them.
- Go back to step 1 and repeat!
There you go!
There are more techniques for finding good hashtags designed for each social platform, but these are the primary steps you will need to find good hashtags to engage.
Use Social Media Tools To Make Life Easy
One of the essential often-left-undone tasks is setting up a tool to schedule your posts and even engage with others. You need to post consistently for the best reach, and it is easy to plan posts ahead of time. You will also get the bonus of posting at the best times of day and analytics to tell you how your followers engage.
Social media automation isn’t done by most artists online which makes it a great way to promote yourself and create the best possible account you can have. This is a great article that lists out some of my favorite Instagram automation tools on the market. These tools have the power to do anything from scheduling posts at the most reasonable times to following similar users and liking their posts. These tools, if done responsibly, can be great for growth.
Although you still need to create content to schedule out and promote your posts when they go live!
Try Social Media Advertising
Another opportunity for promotion is social media advertising. We’ve all seen ads on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and the like. In fact, it’s easy to advertise on social media platforms like Facebook. You can learn more about how to run Facebook ads here.
Why don’t we take advantage of those same powers to promote your art! The apparent downside is the expense, but if you even have $5, you can run a campaign on Instagram to grow your following and get clients.
From our experience, Instagram does best for artists. Social media advertising is all about experimentation, so you will want to try out different images, copy, and artworks to showcase on your ad!
How To Create Content That Matters
Creating content that matters is a mindset shift and an important one for promoting your artwork in 2022. Most content online is low-effort and uninteresting. What you need to do as an artist is to create content that matters.
One of the easiest ways to do this effectively is to document your artistic and creative process. This is the best advice from the famous entrepreneur GaryVee. You are already brainstorming, buying equipment, and creating art, so why are you not recording, photographing, and documenting all of this?
How To Document Your Process
Just set-up your phone to record-mode and you’re halfway done! Documenting your creative process is one of the easiest ways to create meaningful, useful content that will promote your art online.
For most people reading this, you can use your phone. You can record yourself talking about art and how you create art. An actual recording of you making an art-piece (a timelapse can be a significant effect for this!), or even advice on other parts of being an artist like your favorite equipment or just your lifestyle (the anxieties and joys of being an artist)!
You can upgrade your set-up with a tripod for your phone or an actual camera that will record more professional quality and have more settings. Once you record or photograph your process, you should pop it in photoshop or a video editing software (our favorite is Adobe Premiere, but iMovie and Microsoft Movie Maker work great too). Play around with the software and settings to get your video and pictures into your desired state for posting! Presenting your work in visual storytelling will not only boost views but will also give you genuine fans who will share and like what you post.
Post What You Love
Your goal should be finding your audience. And to do that, you need to love what you post. This doesn’t mean it will be all fun and no work, but that you have an actual, real passion for the things you post and talk about. People know and connect to people with similar interests, so do not try to post what is popular if you have no personal interest. Sometimes the obscure, more niche interests gartner a quicker audience because they are passionate and looking for that content.
In my experience, as CEO of Goldspot Pens, producing Youtube videos centered around fountain pens has been an amazing way to gain exposure and promotion online. Fountain pens have a relatively small but extremely passionate audience who collect beautiful fountain pens and write their thoughts and passions down using them. If we went for the broader niche of writing or drawing, it would have been more difficult to grow our follower-count.
So, post what you love, find a real audience, and not only follow popular trends or build a fake audience that doesn’t actually support you.
Post Consistently
You’ve heard it before, but that doesn’t change the importance of posting consistently on platforms. Youtube has seen a clear bias towards accounts that post every day or at least weekly. This comes with certain negatives because quality matters for building up an authentic audience, but you can’t avoid it: you must post consistently. If you are making longer or more resource or time-intensive content, see if you can work to get it down to once a week or once every two weeks. Unfortunately, this is a reality, the post frequency that is most conducive to increased promotion on social media platforms are as follows. In case you need to get help with content you can appeal to the experts from US essay writers. You do not need to follow these guidelines (do whatever you can make time for!), but these are best practices.
- Post at least once a week on Youtube.
- Post once a day or once every two days on Instagram.
- Post two to three times a day on stories (Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat).
- Post once a day or once every two days on Facebook.
- Post at least once a week on Pinterest.
These are just best practices for increasing how much the platforms will promote your content for you. If you do not have the time or are creating long-form content, the main thing to avoid is being stuck in analysis-paralysis and not posting at all! The most important element in making online content for promotion is to make content!
Conclusion
To conclude, promoting yourself isn’t as tough as it looks at first glance! As long as you are putting time in each week to work on your online presence and content, you will grow with time and experience. You will learn the ropes of Youtube, Instagram, hashtags, and start to develop your strategies for promotion that apply specifically to your niche or industry.
The easiest way to learn to promote your art better is to start promoting it. We hope these three suggestions give you a starting point to launch your career and your online marketing experience and become your own boss. Remember, keep posting!
