How To Develope An Art Marketing Plan
Starting an art business is a fascinating time for artists moving from a hobbyist artist to a professional artist.
Many hours were spent enhancing your artistic skills, and you are ready to share and sell your artwork with the world.
There is no better time than now to start an art business. You have all of the tools and resources readily available to you.
Launching a professional website can be done with a click of a button and is very affordable.
Website building platforms and third-party platforms are also available for you to showcase and sell your artwork.
Before the internet, an artist would work with an agent, sell their art at craft shows, or if they were lucky enough, they would have their artwork displayed in a gallery.
With a well-developed art marketing plan, you can own and grow an art business more abundant than you could have ever imagined.
Marketing Efforts Takes Time
Even though it is easy to create an online art gallery selling art is a lot more complicated than creating an artist website or creating beautiful artwork.
Building a business of any type is not easy.
It takes time, hard work, and dedication to develop marketing plans that will grow an audience.
The artists you admire online spent years laying the groundwork. There is no such thing as an “overnight” success’ story,
However, if you are determined and willing to put in the hard work, you can achieve your goals.
Benefits Of Selling Art Online
There are so many benefits when it comes to selling art online.
Some of the benefits include:
- The cost of running an online art business is very reasonable
- The amount of traffic that an online store can receive is unbelievable
- It is easy to build a fan base on social media platforms
- Reach a broader audience
- Lower overhead costs
- Higher profit margin
There are so many benefits when it comes to selling art online.
Some of the benefits include:
- The cost of running an online art business is very reasonable
- The amount of traffic that an online store can receive is unbelievable
- It is easy to build a fan base on social media platforms
- Reach a broader audience
- Lower overhead costs
- Higher profit margin
Art Marketing Strategy
Most artists know that they have to write an art marketing plan for their business, but few have one written.
One of the main reasons people put this task off is because they do not know how to write a market plan.
In this article, discover how to write a basic art marketing plan for your business.
Whether you are just starting to sell your art online or selling your art for some time, you will benefit from a marketing plan.
Your basic art marketing plan will help you follow through on your email newsletters, hosting events, promoting new artwork, etc.
Your plan will help guide you towards your goals without being derailed by unproductive distractions.
A helpful tip for writing a great marketing plan is to keep it simple. A simple art marketing plan will allow you to adjust.
Unfortunately, no set plan will work for all.
Every artist has unique art buyers, which makes every marketing plan unique.
Similar tactics are involved with marketing like writing business goals, blogging, posting on social media, and sending out newsletters.
Still, the details and strategies to attract art collectors will be different for every artist.
Art Marketing Plan Basics
- Short-term vs. Long-term Planning
- Know Your Business Objectives
- Know Your Target Audience
- Reaching Your Audience
- Assess Your Marketing Plan
Short-term vs. Long-term Planning
Tim Berry wrote a great article for Entrepreneur called 10 Business Plan Benefits You Might Be Forgetting.
In this article, he goes in-depth on the importance of planning. I highly recommend you reading his post if you need a little boost.
Here are the key points of Tim’s article:
- You’ll stay on strategy.
- The business objectives will be clear.
- Your educated guesses will be better.
- Priorities will make more sense.
- You’ll understand interdependencies.
- Milestones will keep you on track.
- You are better at delegating.
- Managing team members and tracking results will be easy.
- You can better plan and manage cash flow.
- Course corrections will keep your business from flopping.
Your destination or long-term goal can leave you feeling overwhelmed and unreachable because it is so far away.
Many people lose focus on their long-term goals because they have difficulty seeing how everything they do today will bring them one step closer to their goals tomorrow.
The long-term goal is a guide that will help you plan and make critical decisions.
Your goals are measurable so that you can assess the outcome of your efforts.
The valuable information that you gather will help you become more productive with your time.
Focusing more on your short-term goals will help you to stay more focused.
With shorter-goals, you will be able to see if you are on the best path.
You will adjust and tweak your strategies that need improvement without wasting much time.
It is better to notice if something needs to be changed a week from today rather than learning about it a year from now.
The majority of your efforts will be focussed on short-term goals that will guide you towards your long-term goal.
Know Your Business Objectives
Goals focus on achieving desirable outcomes.
A desirable outcome for an art business would be selling original art with a high-profit margin.
Having a clear vision of your business objectives will help you develop productive marketing strategies that will help you accomplish your goals.
Whether your art business goals are to sell original art online, sell your art in a gallery, sell giclee prints of your original artwork, they should be specific, measurable, achievable, and timely.
Saying you want to sell is not a specific goal.
Saying that you want to sell ten original pieces in six months is a specific goal that you can create action steps to reach that go.
The specific goals allow you to analyze if your marketing strategies are productive or not.
If your goal is to sell ten original paintings in six months, but you only sold two, you know that your marketing strategies will need to be adjusted.
Know Your Target Audience
Once you determine your art business goals, you want to distinguish the people interested in the type of artwork you create.
The people who are interested in your artistic style is known as your target audience.
These are the people you will want to dedicate your art marketing strategies.
How identify your target audience is?
To start, you will want to focus on the people who have a passion for the subjects you paint or draw.
For example, if you like wildlife and like to oil paint different wildlife animals, the people who love wildlife and oil paintings will be your primary target audience.
These are the people you will want to market your artwork to.
However, you don’t need to restrict yourself to just those people, but they should be your primary focus.
For example, another group you might want to consider marketing to are people who have a passion for wildlife but like all mediums of art, not just oil paintings.
The more specific you are, the better your marketing plan will be.
For more information about the target audience, visit:
How To Find Your Target Audience
What Is Your Target Audience Searching For
Reaching Your Audience
One of the most significant challenges you will face marketing your art is reaching your target audience effectively.
The main goal of marketing is to communicate the right message to the right people.
To accomplish this, you want to learn how to reach your target audience.
If you market your product to people who are not interested in the subjects you paint or draw, you’ll waste your time and money.
Here are some ways you can start reaching your target audience.
Create And Publish Useful And Relevant Content
The best way to reach your target audience is by publishing useful content related to your art business.
People searching online for the topics you are writing about will discover you in the search results.
When they click on your link, they will read the content you have published.
If they enjoyed the post, you published the will go deeper into your artist website, introducing them to your artwork.
Creating content for different mediums like video, podcasts, and social media posts is also an effective content marketing strategy you will want to implement.
The good news is that you do not have to write new content for every platform you are marketing on.
Time is money, and businesses have learned that it is more profitable to refurbish content on all marketing platforms.
All you have to do is write a high-quality blog post, use the same content to create a video, share it on social media, and produce a podcast.
Neil Patel explains how to get the most traffic from old blog posts in a post called Bring Old Blog Posts Back To LLife: 5 Strategies That Work.
Join Facebook Groups
There are Facebook for almost any niche.
Search for groups that relate to your niche and join them.
Spend some time visiting the group to identify what type of content generates engagement in the groups.
Dedicate some time liking and commenting on different posts in the group feed. Soon people will start to recognize you, and they will begin to engage with the posts you publish.
Use Hashtags
Using relevant hashtags can help you to reach your target audience on social media platforms like Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.
You will see better results if you use more specific hashtags than generic ones.
For example, you will see better results if you use #wildlifeart than using #art or #oilpainting.
Assess Your Marketing Plan
Writing and implementing your art marketing plan is just the first step. The steps to follow are what will make you succeed or fall short of your dreams.
No matter how big or small, all businesses are successful only because they assess and analyze the outcome of their efforts. After they review their data, they will then revise and optimize their marketing plans.
Marketing strategies take time to develop and grow, just like it takes time to create art.
Art Marketing Overview
Developing a business plan is difficult for anyone who is just starting a business.
The first step in starting an art career is to have a clear vision of where you want to be in 6 months, one year and five years.
The next step is to write actin plans to help you achieve your six-month, one-year, and five-year goals.
Create a spreadsheet with detailed notes that explain every marketing strategy you are implementing. Do not rely on your memory. In 6 months, you will forget all of the details you were applying.
Yes, you will know that you posted on Facebook, but you will not remember if images, text, or video produced the most engagement.
The notes you take will allow you to enhance strategies that are working and discard strategies that are not working.
Investing In Your Business
You have probably heard the saying, “You have to spend money to make money.”
Investing in your business the right way will help you to grow your business quicker than you could have evet thought posable.
For free art, business articles visit Art Business/Art Marketing Resource for over a thousand marketing articles.
Here are some popular online video courses from CreativeLife:
- Workflow, Time Management And Productivity For Creatives
- A Brand Called You
- Branding 101: The complete Toolkit
- Logo Design For Your Small Business
- Storytelling: Using Story To Influence And Connect
- Connect With Your Customers On Social Media
- How To Design Business Cards
Digital marketing strategies include:
- Content marketing
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- SEO (search engine optimization)
Final Thought About Creating An Art Marketing Plan
Not every strategy you implement will produce positive results instantly.
To speed up the growth of your online fine art business, you will want to review your efforts monthly and adjust where needed.
You Might Also Be Interested In:
- How To Start An Art Business In 9 Steps
- 3 Different Pencil Points For Shading
- How To Draw An Elephant With Pastels
- Blick Studio Drawing Pencils Review
- Shading A Cylinder Drawing Tips
Popular Art Marketing And Sales Tutorials
Below are some of the most famous art marketing courses that will grow your online art business:
Most Popular – How to Make a Living Selling What You Make by Megan Auman
Most Popular – Build a Successful Creative Blog by April Bowles-Olin
How to Build a Business While Learning Your Craft by Megan Auman
Pinterest Marketing for Makers & Designers by Megan Auman
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