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The top goal of your marketing efforts is to build a high-quality list of customers and prospective customers with whom you are able to communicate, develop a relationship, and market your art. Your customer mailing list is your number one marketing asset. Outside of creating your art, building, maintaining and nurturing this list is your top goal.
There are three big buckets of marketing channels: They are known as paid media, earned media, and owned media.
"Paid Media" is a fancy term for advertising: You pay a magazine, and they feature a page full of your art.
"Earned media" means the value of media that you didn't pay for: If the same magazine runs a full page editorial story about your art, the "earned" media is worth the same value as paying for a full page. More even, since an editorial about your art will carry more weight in the minds of collectors than an advertisement that you place.
"Owned media" is the last bucket. And the most interesting. Owned media refers to channels that you own. Or, channels that you at least exert a very high degree of control over.
While you should utilize all three types of media to market your art, paid media is generally expensive and usually takes repetition to achieve sustained results, and earned media, while great, is relatively infrequent and something you can't plan and control. So for now, let's focus on owned media.
Of the owned media options you have both inbound and outbound assets. A website is an example of an inbound asset. You control it, so it's owned media. But you can't make someone visit your site. With a website alone, you, like a fisherman stuck on his own dock, you have to just sit and wait for a bite. You have to wait for your other marketing efforts to bring people willingly to your site [1].
Inbound channels, like a website or a search engine, can not create demand for your art, they can only harvest demand that your other marketing efforts have already created. Blogs, as an aside, are also an inbound channel and I no longer think they are a good use of marketing time for most artists (there are a few exceptions), at least not by themselves. They can work well in conjunction with an email newsletter, but, in that situation, it's really the newsletter that does the heavy lifting. [2]
Outbound channels, on the other hand, allow you to put your message in front of qualified prospects at a time of your choosing. You don't have to wait for people to willingly visit an outbound channel.
This makes a mailing list a huge asset. Particularly a high-quality, well maintained email list. It's a channel that's both owned and outbound.
With an email list, you control the channel and you can put a message in a subscriber's inbox any time you want to. Not only that, when done properly, it has a third attribute that makes it even more valuable: It's a permission based asset.
It's owned, it's outbound, it's affordable, and you have permission from everyone on the list to send messages to them.
That is a powerful combination and one you don't find very many other places in marketing.
If you put the work in to provide interesting and regular content, people will even expect your messages.
So let's put it all together: you own it, it's affordable, it's outbound, it's permission-based, and your fans are expecting it.
That is why your email list is your #1 marketing asset.
Until next time, please remember that Fortune Favors the Bold Brush.
Sincerely,
Clint Watson FASO Founder, Software Craftsman, Art Fanatic
PS - To start your own email marketing program, if you're a FASO customer, we recommend you use the built-in ArtfulMail program. If you're not a FASO customer (or need more advanced features), we recommend ConvertKit. Help us keep bringing you great content by signing up for Convertkit with our affiliate link here.
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