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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. Social MediaArt Marketing Circle VII: Awareness
This is a members-only article series. We are making it 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) What did you work on this week? |
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 this circle, you may catch up here:
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at generating awareness with social media and inviting people to join your audience.
Social media is the most accessible tool and by far, for the Sovereign Artist Era, the most important. So we are going to spend most of the rest of this section on explaining how to utilize social media to its fullest advantage.
Like all technologies, social media brings with it both good and bad. If you stay away from the politics, bickering, and filter bubbles, social media is the most amazing tool ever invented for artists to build awareness. You are blessed unlike artists of all previous generations to be able to build awareness of your art without leaving your home and, with a smartphone, without even leaving your sofa. People used to go to gallery openings and now they scroll Instagram. Any artist from the year 2,000 or prior would be incredulous that artists now have this tool and yet they still complain that they “can’t sell their art.”
The reason many artists fail to build real awareness on social media is that they are not utilizing it correctly. They simply post whatever they feel like (including politics and food porn) and then hope people somehow magically discover them. And, when a few people do discover them, most artists don’t take the steps necessary to move people from awareness of the on social media into their audience of their email list. Unless you are incredibly lucky, that won’t work. No general goes into battle without a detailed plan and you should not try to just “wing it” on social media. We’ll show you, in a detailed step-by-step way, how to make social media work for you. If you don’t put in the actual work after having the plan, well, that’s on you.
The goal of your social media posting is to do so in such a way that you get your posts, your art, and your information to spread far and wide across the network. Achieving that goal, without a plan, is rare.
Rarity in the 21st Century
When marketing art online, the way to think about rarity is quite different than you are used to thinking about rarity in the physical world.
What does "rarity" mean, online, for artists? And how can you use that knowledge to sell your artworks?
You probably think of “rare” as something that is quite limited, one-of-a-kind, and something few people ever get the chance to see or own. And that is a true and timeless definition of rare.
But there is another, more relevant definition of rare in the 21st century digital age.
Online, paradoxically, an image that spreads very widely across social media or the internet is a rare image.
This is true because very few images spread widely.
If you can master getting your artwork images to spread far and wide, not only will that be a rare skill, but this can be utilized to create value in art images that are not in the traditional sense rare.
In other words, an image's ability to cause itself to be replicated has become a counterintuitive, digital definition of rarity.
This is the point I was trying to make in this tweet:
The Mona Lisa is rare precisely because it’s everywhere.
Like all marketing, online art marketing requires you to create the demand FIRST.
If you haven’t already created any demand for your art, then simply minting NFTs in a marketplace or posting your art on your website is likely going to be a waste of time.
If you have a social media following, and are able to create a meme, or get images of your art to spread virally, at least to your following, then you have a chance of creating demand, moving people into your audience and selling them something you offer.
The short playbook is this:
Post your art, get it to spread, get people to be interested in the image and your story, move them into your audience, get them more interested in you through emails and other means that nurture your growing relationship, and then (and only then), offer them art for sale.
If you haven't shortcutted the process, then everyone who originally saw your image is a potential buyer.
There are four primary ways you’re going to accomplish this:
1. Post about your art, and only your art
This is how your account will come to be known for something and you won’t confuse people and cause them to stop following you because you rant about politics or post pictures of your colorful lunch salad.
2. Follow other accounts related to the category you work in
This encourages people in your same category to follow you back (gaining you followers) but, more importantly, trains the platform’s algorithm to show you more and more related content so you will find other accounts to follow and connect with as well as classifying your account in a category that it can show to other people.
3. Work with a group of colleagues to cross promote one another
Most artists skip this step and, in many ways, this is the most important step. You need six friends, who are artists, preferably whose works somewhat appeal to similar collectors. You are going to ask them to repost your best posts, spreading your content wider (and if you do it right, viral) and they are going to do the same for you.
4. Reach out to people who like and comment on your posts personally
This will impress people, make them realize you are a real person, and most of them will want to connect with you and join your audience. We’ll explain how that works in detail in the next section.
The first item is self-explanatory. Post about your art. That’s it. If you want to post about other topics, create a different account for your non-art related topics.
Items two and three we’re going to cover in detail in the next part of the book, “The Circles of Art Marketing in Practice.” So we’ll skip those for now.
The fourth item, personal outreach, is something you can start easily, right away, today and I’ll explain how that works below.
Next week, we will delve more into the practice of personal outreach on social media.
See you then!
Creatively,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder
Art Fanatic
Apostle of Creativity
PS - May your life be filled with peace, love, and joy!
PPS - What do you think? Please let us know in the comments or at least help us out by clicking “Like” on this article. Thanks so much:
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