How Digital Marketing Can Benefit Artists
Are you an artist who is struggling to gain popularity and show their talent? Learn how digital marketing for artists can help you find your audience.
Digital marketing for artists is something most people do not consider necessary. Most people in this world wouldn’t consider an artist a person equipped with marketing skills. Artists are of course creative people. They are often considered as people who want to be seen differently from the crowd. Then why would they need selling skills to that same crowd?
Artists are concerned with thinking creatively and making new things. Many people consider artists to be freely wandering without a care in this world. But in today’s competitive world, artists need to take extra efforts to promote their work.
For this promotion, digital marketing for artists is a great tool. Digital marketing is easy to learn and there are many digital marketing courses online. In this article, we will learn how artists can use digital marketing for the promotion of their artwork and survive in this competitive space.
In times before the internet, the ways artists could promote their work were few. A writer could try to publish their work in established magazines. Painters and other visual artists would organize exhibitions in art galleries. This required a lot of effort and money. But with the popularity and reach of the high-speed internet, this has changed for the better.
Today, there’s nothing that’s stopping artists from privately exhibiting their work. Musicians can directly upload their music on Youtube. Painters and writers can promote their work through social media. Instagram and Twitter are great social media platforms for this purpose.
Artists can find buyers for their work on these platforms directly. They are no longer dependant on expensive exhibitions, waiting for getting published, or depending upon a music label to sponsor them. This transformation has given the power to the artists and the creators.
There are also other benefits. Since the work artists publish on the internet channels are open to the public, they can instantly get feedback and reviews. Over time, this helps artists learn market preferences much faster than the artists in olden times. They can even use the feedback to create a work that gets an even better response from the audience.
Digital marketing for artists is also cheap. If you learn the right techniques and tips, you can make the most of your marketing budget. You can see the results of your marketing campaign in real-time. The marketing campaign can also be controlled and manipulated and new changes implemented instantly.
With the help of online marketing tools, it is also easy for artists to do testing of their work. They can make minor changes to their work based on the responses of a sample audience and then release the optimized work to the general public. This can be done with the help of A/B split testing.
But since the democratization of resources, it is easy for not just one artist but all of them to promote their work online. This has increased the noise. Now it is harder to make your voice be heard and your work stand out. There is a host of people who call themselves ‘artists’ today who would be far from being considered an artist 50 years ago.
In order to be successful at online marketing, artists need to break the clutter and stand out from the crowd. They need to get higher visibility in the eyes of the audience. To make this happen, it is not enough just to be talented. You also need to market your work in the right manner.
Artists today need a perfect marketing strategy to promote artwork. For this, they will need to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing and use it to promote their work. This way, artists can connect with the right audience in the right place.
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Digital marketing for artists
Online marketing can help artists reach their audience much easier than artists did until 20 years ago. There are many channels of online marketing for artists like social media, Youtube, search engines, websites, ebooks, phone apps, e-mail, etc. There are different merits of each of these media.
There are two forms of digital marketing for artists. One is paid. The other is organic. Organic marketing is where you do not need to spend money directly to reach an audience. It is cheap but also harder. Paid ads produce instantaneous results but also require a decent budget depending upon your needs.
A good digital marketing strategy for artists is a blend of both paid and organic marketing. For example, a writer would need both a blog to attract the audience organically as well as direct the audience towards buying their ebook.
You can also promote your blog or ebook through social media or e-mail marketing. You can use social media ads too in combination in order to promote your ebook. There are some other tools for online marketing such as PPC, online PR, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, content marketing, and many more.
Artists can use these channels of digital marketing in various ways. There are many benefits of digital marketing for artists.
Check out these courses from IIM SKILLS that might benefit you in your careers
Easy
Digital marketing is very easy compared to conventional forms of marketing that artists used before the internet. Visual artists like painters, illustrators, photographers, digital artists, can easily use various social media platforms or use popular apps to get promoted.
There are various online tools that are easy to learn. These tools can help artists perform the promotion on various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. If you are an artist, you can learn the fundamentals of digital marketing easily from your home with the help of an online digital marketing course from IIM SKILLS.
Big audience
Your digital marketing campaign can reach anywhere where there is the internet. Digital marketing has a greater reach than other channels of marketing. If you can properly adjust your campaign settings, you can reach the right audience.
Social media is used by everyone today. With the help of Facebook ads and TweetDeck, you can reach people on the three most useful social media platforms ie Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
There are also many channels in digital marketing like search engine traffic, search engine marketing, blogs, e-mail, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, etc.
Cost-effective
Digital marketing for artists is cost-effective. You can design a digital marketing campaign in the smallest of budgets. Many ways of marketing like creating a blog or uploading your work on Instagram, Facebook, or Youtube are free of cost.
If you are a visual artist, you can just start an Instagram page and upload your artwork. with the use of proper hashtags and ways to increase your followers, you will soon have a big following. Although this step would take a few months at least. You can combine these organic methods with small paid ad campaigns to boost your visibility.
Trust
When you put good, appealing, and engaging content regularly and users like it, it builds a connection. You build a name and a following and your work gets shared by your audience themselves.
In time, this will help build a loyal customer base for you. You can promote your work and share your thoughts and even promote other people’s work in exchange for a fee.
Although digital marketing can be learned fairly easily, creating a successful campaign that satisfies your goals needs time and practice. Designing a marketing campaign for artists would require lots of practice, research, and thinking strategically.
Whenever you are trying to sell something to a market, you need a proper plan and strategy for successful implementation. The central digital marketing strategy for artists is to write helpful and in-demand content on blogs and using social media platforms to post plenty of visual content for potential buyers.
Digital marketing is an essential tool for artists in today’s world. The competition has increased very much. Many people are producing works of art as a part-time activity. But not everyone buys works of art.
Of all the users of the internet, a very small fraction is actually interested in buying works of art. This is because very few people appreciate art. And if we look at people interested in buying artwork in your specific domain, the buyers would be even fewer.
For example, fewer people would be interested in buying sculptures, than compared to, say, a painting. Therefore it is important to target the right kind of people and not waste your efforts and money on showing your work to people who would not be interested in buying a piece of art.
A digital marketing strategy is not only needed to target the right market. For an artist, it is also important to stand out among other artists. The competition in the field of art is rising. More and more people have started to call themselves artists. Since digital marketing is within reach for everyone, a good content strategy would be essential to stand out from the crowd.
For an artist, the bigger the audience, the more are the chances of success. More success implies more people would be interested in buying their work. Digital marketing can help these artists gain exposure to a big audience. But this takes patience.
Digital marketing for artists involves a learning curve. Even though results are comparatively faster than conventional forms of marketing, they are not instantaneous. Digital marketing can definitely provide exposure rapidly. But there are some human processes that have a natural timeline.
One of those processes is building trust in the audience. As the customer first notices an artist, it takes for them to build trust and feel safe in buying their work of art. The artist needs to produce great work consistently in order to build a reputation in the market.
Building a reputation for an artist may take months on any digital platform. This reputation may be alow to build but once people start recognizing you, it gets much easier to sell your work and find buyers. At this point, your website traffic will increase and your social media accounts will increase following rapidly.
Digital marketing for artists can help them establish their personal brand in the world of art. Once a personal brand is created, the need for promotion tactics reduces and customers automatically reach you out to buy works of art from you.
To create this personal brand for artists through digital marketing, here are a few strategies.
Create a portfolio
This is the first requirement of any artist. And with the help of digital tools, it is much easier than before. You just need a place where you can display all your previous works. If you are a writer, this would be a collection of your writings. If you are a graphic designer, a portfolio would contain different campaigns you have done.
You can easily create a portfolio on various websites that offer services for different kinds of artists. You can also build your very own website containing all your works. Creating your own website is better because you can also post blog articles and create an online store for customers to buy your work.
Start a blog
A blog is the best way to get organic traffic to your website and display your works. But according to the principles of digital marketing for artists, the purpose of a blog must not be to market your products. In order to get organic traffic, the blog must be informative, helpful, and relevant to the query of the user.
In other words, a blog article must solve a problem or answer questions for the user. You can write blog articles about commonly searched topics, current developments in your domain, how-to guides, etc.
Social media
Social media is the best tool for the promotion of your work of art. If you are a visual artist, you can make use of Instagram. If you are a writer, Twitter would be a better option. Different social media platforms have different advantages.
The secret to popularity on social media is posting regular, engaging, and appealing content that provides value to the viewer. Once you build consistency, you will start attracting followers. This will gain you exposure. More exposure means more chances of finding a buyer.
You can use all these social media accounts to drive traffic to your website. A good content collection shows your skills and clients would trust your skills better before offering you work.
Videos
You can also start a Youtube channel. All you need to know are some basic video editing skills. Video content is much more preferred than blog articles. You can post videos on many topics, for example, reviews of famous works.
You can also create videos showing how you completed a particular work, or how you approach challenges in art. You can target amateur artists and create videos on topics in your domain that are commonly searched.
You can find popular searches with the help of many online tools. One common and simple way is to use the autocomplete feature when you type in a Google or Youtube search.
Online Magazines
As an artist, you can always submit your works for publication in the leading online magazines and websites in your niche. There are many magazines popular for visual work and literary works. You have to decide which one do you want to send your work to.
Getting published in popular magazines is a great way to get publicity and recognition. There is another advantage though. You can leverage the trust and credibility of the magazine for your own promotion.
You can produce visual art or literary piece of work for the magazine. This will help in the distribution of your work to a much bigger audience.
E-mail marketing
Artists should not underestimate e-mails as a way of marketing. It can generate results in the smallest of marketing budgets. E-mail marketing is an indispensable part of a strategy for digital marketing for artists.
E-mails are not sent to random people. E-mail lists contain people according to their buyer profile. The e-mail lists consist of people who have visited your website sometime or purchased a product from you. They may have subscribed to receive newsletters.
You can use e-mail to promote your new works and bring people to your website. There are higher chances of a person buying something from you if they have already bought your work before.
Paid ads on social media
Facebook ads and Twitter ads are a great way to reach the audience via Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Twitter. There are also other new-age social media platforms like Tiktok, Snapchat. There is also LinkedIn that is preferred when advertising to corporates. You can choose your platform depending upon your target audience.
If you want to learn to use Facebook ads, refer to this article.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is an organic marketing tool used to rank your website high on the search engine results page, SERPs. The benefit of ranking high is many. Your website will have more exposure than your competitors.
This will build a perception of reliability and trust. Do you know that over 75% of users click on the first three results on SERPs? You may need to hire an SEO specialist to perform this task.
Search Engine Marketing
Search engine marketing or SEM is a form of pay-per-click advertising or PPC. Here, the advertiser pays the network only when a user clicks on the ad. This is a very cost-effective way to generate high-quality leads for your work.
SEM saves money since the marketing budget is not wasted upon people who would not be interested in buying your product. Google Ads and Facebook ads are two such ad networks.
In SEM, it is important to optimize various parameters correctly. One of them is the bidding strategy. SEM will erode your budget quickly if allowed. That is why it must be done by an expert.
Network
You can form collaborative relationships with other artists who do similar or complementary work. You can do this by sending direct messages to other artists on their social media pages.
You can also comment on their blogs or social media posts and give your opinion. You can also share their posts while giving them credit. They may also return the favor by getting you exposure.
Online forums
Forums are websites where like-minded people gather and have discussions or post relevant content. They discuss various topics and provide opinions. You can provide your expert opinion by joining these discussions. People will look into your profile and may visit your website or social media account.
Most art communities have such forums for new and established artists. On many forums, expert artists guide amateur artists owing to their expertise and knowledge gained in several years as an artist. You may also get to learn a few things you didn’t know.
Summary
Digital marketing for artists is a perfect tool for the promotion of your work and building a personal brand. It will gain you recognition and trust of the audience if done correctly.
There are many benefits of digital marketing as seen in this article. It is easy. It is cheap. It can be monitored easily with the help of various web analytics tools.
You can also build a website where you can sell your works of art, just like an e-commerce website. You can integrate various payment options on the website itself.
Through digital marketing for artists, you can show your talent and expertise. It is also helpful in helping you stand out in so much competition. You can post comments, publish works on various platforms, make great and helpful content, and help others.
You can just start by building a portfolio of your previous work. You just need to buy a domain or use the free ones in various web builder services like WordPress or Wix.com. These websites have pre-designed templates for creating a portfolio.
You can also learn various things by investing in an online digital marketing course. Here you can learn various aspects of digital marketing for the artist while sitting at home and on your own time.
For more such articles, visit our digital marketing blog.
