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If you are a paid member (either through FASO or BoldBrush Circle here on Substack), come see the latest ideas from us and our community in the BoldBrush Circle of Marketing community here: https://marketing.faso.com. We encourage you to join us and become a paid member today here. Other Venues to Create AwarenessArt Marketing Circle VII: Awareness - Other Venues
This is a members-only article series. We are making today’s article available to all subscribers today via email, but please be aware it, and other articles in this series that it links to will be locked in a few days and available for paid subscribers only on our site. Get full access to all resources by becoming a paid subscriber. (If you are a FASO member all these paid posts are available in your control panel at https://marketing.faso.com) Special Announcement: |
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Thursday, March 28th at 11:00am CDT (12:00pm EDT, 10:00am MDT, 9:00am PDT)
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We’re currently exploring the final circle in our members-only Circles of Art Marketing series - the first step in your customer’s journey to purchasing your art - Awareness. Since marketing will not work unless all elements are understood and practiced you need to think about all seven circles as a holistic system. One circle alone won’t accomplish anything for you. Therefore, if you’re a new member, or missed what we covered previously, I recommend you catch up on the series at the following links:
Art Marketing Circle I - The Sovereign Artist
Art Marketing Circle II - Your Art
Art Marketing Circle III - Turn Your Art Into a Product
Art Marketing Circle IV - Sales
Art Marketing Circle V - Your True Fans
Art Marketing Circle VI - Your Audience
Art Marketing Circle VII - Awareness
If you missed the previous articles about the awareness circle, you may catch up here:
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at advertising…
Last week we looked at print advertising. Let’s take a look at some other places, both online and offline, where you can create awareness of your art.
There are some online art coaches who are quite critical of art contests and sometimes, with reason. Contests are usually expensive to enter, difficult to win, entail a lot of expense in shipping pieces back and forth, and often are more trouble than they are worth. I have mixed feelings on this. For the most part, I agree, but they can have their place early in an artist's career to help build some resume material.
However, often ignored in those criticisms, is that, when it comes to digital marketing, there are also online contests and not all of them are expensive. In fact, I started one years ago called The BoldBrush Contest. The contest is completely digital and, in the last few years as we realized that we were entering The Sovereign Artist Era, we made a huge change - we made the BoldBrush Contest Free for all artists.
It’s a no brainer for you to enter a free contest, that might recognize your work, that might feature you online, that might payoff in an award. Why would you ever not take advantage of that? Guess what happens if you are recognized with an award, an accolade or, even just entering? What happens is, you now have material for a social media post. You can post when you enter and ask followers to vote for your artwork. You can post when you are recognized and get social proof that other people (in this case BoldBrush) have recognized your work. In other words, it’s news that you can post on your social media accounts, which will turn into “Like’s” which, if you follow our advice about personal outreach, will turn into new audience members on your email list, who, if you follow our systems, will turn into collectors.
We live in a world where galleries are dying, there are fewer and fewer curators. It’s easier for artists to promote themselves, but a bit harder to get external validation of your art. A free contest provides an easy way to possibly get some external validation in a world where that can be difficult. So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater because historically art contests have been difficult and expensive.
With that in mind, I recommend you enter the BoldBrush Contest every month and, if you find other online free, or inexpensive contests, you should enter those too. There are even Instagram accounts that feature nothing but artists that are recognized in online art contests. Here’s an example of one: https://www.instagram.com/artdataintel/
Targeted communities are a special type of forum. Think of them as somewhat like social media, but much more focused around a particular topic or theme. Whether or not there are targeted communities you can join will depend upon the category of art you work in. As an example, let’s say you are a painter who paints computers, tech-related art or even perhaps you make your art out of old computer chips and boards. I’m a member of a community called “Hacker News.” And it’s all about computers, software, programming, and tech companies. It is much smaller than a generalized social network, however, in a targeted community, everyone in the community will be interested in your niche (although they will not all be buyers of art). Being active in these communities can be extremely lucrative if you can find one. They also can become “side channels” to communicate with some of the same people you interact with on the big social media sites. One thing to be careful of is that most communities like this have rules about overly promotional posts, so you can’t simply show up and start posting art. But if you are considerate about how you approach them, they can work wonders for your audience growth.
Shows and festivals are beyond the scope of this article, which is about digital first marketing. Many other books have been written that cover the basics of showing your art in festivals, the proper way to design a booth, etc. So we’ll leave those topics to the experts. They are mentioned here though because, if you can do them, nothing beats meeting people face-to-face and showing them your art. A show can be a great way to expand your audience rapidly.
PS - If you are a paid subscriber and you have a question (marketing or otherwise) for our team, you can now start a thread in our chat room here.
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