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Test Your Art Marketing Efforts for Better Results
Have you been promoting your art the same way for years without seeing better results? Allow me to remind you of this quote.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
It first appeared in 1981 text from Narcotics Anonymous and has been misattributed at various times to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Mark Twain.
If the quote is true, are you nuts?
Being Persistent and Consistent with Your Art Marketing
You are undoubtedly investing a lot of time and resources into your art business: websites, blogs, social media, videos, newsletters, postcards, and more. That’s terrific!
I’m a big fan of persistence and consistency—in doing the same thing over and over again—in marketing. You must commit to certain repeated marketing tasks before you can judge their effectiveness.
At the same time, I believe in tweaking aspects of your marketing as you go along. As an entrepreneur interested in earning money from your art, you want to understand what’s working and what isn’t. This is why it’s critical to track your numbers.
You should learn something with each new artwork, email, newsletter, or blog post, and you need to use that knowledge to get better results in the future.
Every marketing effort should be a test. Nothing in your routine should be considered sacred because you want increasingly better results.
What brings you the most clicks?
What blog post is attracting the most attention?
What results in more subscribers?
What leads to more opportunities?
What has given you the most engagement on social media?
What did you send that encouraged immediate responses from recipients?
Use the lists here to adjust, test, and repeat for improved results.
The Problem With Lower Price Points For Your Art
Have you ever created a body of work just so you could sell at lower prices? If so, you might have created a problem for yourself.
Do any of the following ring true for you?
- You are afraid that people won’t buy your art if you charge what it’s worth.
- You believe that the people in your geographical region buy only cheaper art.
- You’ve started making smaller pieces because they’re less expensive.
- You have signed up for a service like Fine Art America to begin offering multiples of your art, even though the originals aren’t selling.
If you have created lower-priced work for any of these reasons, you might be lowering the bar along with your prices.
Let’s face it: selling lower-priced art is safer. There are many more people in your pool of prospective buyers at the low end.
But I can’t believe that your goal is to appeal to the masses. You, like my clients, surely have big dreams, and that means selling big art at fair prices.
So I have to ask … Are you running to this safer place of inexpensive art because you’ve been inconsistent with your studio practice, marketing, exhibitions, and networking? In other words, are you producing “more affordable” art because you don’t want to do the work required to sell your best work?
Have you given up on selling at that higher price because you believe it’s too difficult? Maybe the cheaper stuff will be easier to sell, you might think.
I have no objections with making art in a variety of sizes or offering reproductions of your art, especially if you’re selling a lot of work and can’t keep up with demand.
What I object to is your playing small and safe.
Ambitious Artists Own Their Goals
Ambitious artists hire me because they want more recognition for their art and support as they get their art out of the studio and into the world.
I strung together these words during a small group discussion at a conference. One of my clients happened to be sitting next to me and flinched at the word choice: ambitious. (You should have seen her face!)
Then she challenged me on it. The word just didn’t sound right, she thought.
I said, “You’re ambitious. Don’t you think?” She thought a bit, and agreed with a little hesitation, “Yes, I probably am. It’s just the word I have problems with.” (Update: She has since embraced the word fully!)
Ambitious Artists
Definitions of ambition include:
- A strong desire to do or to achieve something, typically requiring determination and hard work.
- A desire and determination to achieve success.
- An earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction, as power, honor, fame, or wealth, and the willingness to strive for its attainment.
If you don’t see yourself in any of these definitions, you might want to rethink your path as an artist-entrepreneur (all successful artists are also entrepreneurs).
Without the desire, there’s no motivation to take action. Without the action and hard work, there are no results.
“Ambition” isn’t something that’s usually associated with artists, and it’s even been viewed as a negative attribute for women to possess. Yeah, I know. Really? In the 21st century??
We still have problems with ambitious women? Women still have problems owning their ambition?
C’mon!
We also have a tendency to worry about
The Art Biz ep. 71: Goals for Artists and What You Should Be Focusing On Instead
I teach setting goals for artists. It’s the first lesson in the Art Biz Accelerator.
I encourage all of my artist-clients to articulate their goals because they have to know what they want to achieve before I can support them.
And, yet, I know there is something far more important, and more difficult, than setting goals: Doing the work.
We just survived a year in which we lost control of so much in our lives and businesses. We lost control of whether a venue would be open for a show or whether a live workshop would go on as planned or be canceled.
But, in fact, we never had control of these things in the first place.
You will never be able to control results or outcomes, but so much else is in your command. Before we move on in the conversation, let’s first look at goals.
SMART Goals for Artists
I used to teach how to set SMART goals for artists, which is a system for articulating goals and deadlines—a system that was definitely not devised by an artist. The acronym stands for:
The way I taught SMART goals to my clients and students was fairly rigid. Goals had to be articulated as an affirmation and include the due date: I will do [this] by [this date]. If my student or client didn’t write it to my standards, I made the necessary corrections.
While I understand this is a tested system that has been used by millions of people through the years, I have let it go. It doesn’t work for most of my artist-clients.
I think the reason it doesn’t work is because
7 Steps to Developing Your Artistic Style
In order to project a professional image as an artist, you must be able to distinguish yourself and your art from a sea of other talented artists. To do this, you must first develop your artistic style.
As most artists have come to learn, developing an artistic style all your own is easier than it sounds. It means that your work doesn’t look like your instructor’s work, but that it is also cohesive when shown together.
What is Artistic Style?
Style is a word we use freely and without much thought. But what does it mean?
In her book Living With Art, Rita Gilbert writes that “style is a characteristic or group of characteristics that we can identify as constant, recurring, or coherent.” She goes on to say, “Artistic style is the sum of constant, recurring or coherent traits identified with a certain individual or group.”
An artist’s style is not good or bad. It just IS. The execution might be criticized, the colors might be perceived as ugly, or the composition seen as weak, but the style is what it is.
Your style is a combination of the mediums, technique, and subject matter you choose. It’s not just that you make contemporary quilts or that you paint landscapes. Those are mediums and genres by themselves. No, style is that extra little thing you do to distinguish your work from that of other artists.
Two quilt artists might each create abstract, colorful compositions using the same traditional block. If both are mature artists, however, we’d probably be able to tell one artist’s work from the other. For example, a fiber artist might employ one or more of the following in creating the quilt.
- Hand-dyed fabrics from organic dyes
- Loose threads hanging on the surface (rather than hiding them)
- A particular fabric that becomes a signature of sorts
- Text written with ink on top of the quilt
In other words, she becomes known for works that contain a certain characteristic. For a painter it might be loose brushstrokes, impasto, or a repeated image. Kehinde Wiley, who painted the official portrait of President Obama, is known for his highly decorative backgrounds around his subjects. Sarah Sze brings together hundreds and thousands of found objects to create detailed multimedia landscape installations.
What are you known for?
