| 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 postspersonally
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.
From Awareness to Audience with Personal Outreach
What if I told you "Likes" on your posts, if you do a little more work than just scrolling by, were actually marketing leads that can grow your email list?
We covered how this works in depth in the following article:
How to Turn Social Media Likes into Subscribers.
Advertising
Advertising has a kind of bad reputation, and there are a lot of bad ads in the world, but utilized correctly, advertising can be extremely effective. There are several different types of ads you can utilize.
Print Ads
Social Media Ads
Other online ads
Direct promotion swaps with other artists
Contests
There are some online art coaches who are quite critical of art contests. They are usually expensive to enter, difficult to win, entail a lot of expense in shipping pieces back and forth, and often are more trouble than they are worth. I have mixed feelings on this. For the most part, I agree, but they can have their place early in an artist's career to help build some resume material.
However, this book is about digital marketing and there are also online contests. In fact, I started one years ago called The BoldBrush Contest. We run two versions of the BoldBrush Contest - one on Instagram and one on the web. The contest is completely digital and, in the last few years as we realized that we were entering The Sovereign Artist Era, we made a huge change - we made the BoldBrush Contest Free for all artists.
It's a no brainer for you to enter a free contest, that might recognize your work, that might feature you online, that might payoff in an award. Why would you ever not take advantage of that? Guess what happens if you are recognized with an award, an accolade or, even just entering? What happens is, you now have material for a social media post. You can post when you enter and ask followers to vote for your artwork. You can post when you are recognized and get social proof that other people (in this case BoldBrush) have recognized your work. In other words, it's news that you can post on your social media accounts, which will turn into "Like's" which, if you follow our advice about personal outreach, will turn into new audience members on your email list, who, if you follow our systems, will turn into collectors.
We live in a world where galleries are dying, there are fewer and fewer curators. It's easier for artists to promote themselves, but a bit harder to get external validation of your art. A free contest provides an easy way to possibly get some external validation in a world where that can be difficult. So don't throw out the baby with the bathwater because historically art contests have been difficult and expensive.
With that in mind, I recommend you enter the BoldBrush Contest every month and, if you find other online free, or inexpensive contests, you should enter those too. There are even Instagram accounts that feature nothing but artists that are recognized in online art contests. Here's an example of one: https://www.instagram.com/artdataintel/
Targeted communities
Targeted communities are a special type of forum. Think of them as somewhat like social media, but much more focused around a particular topic or theme. Whether or not there are targeted communities you can join will depend upon the category of art you work in. As an example, let's say you are a painter who paints computers, tech-related art or even perhaps you make your art out of old computer chips and boards. I'm a member of a community called "Hacker News." And it's all about computers, software, programming, and tech companies. It is much smaller than a generalized social network, however, in a targeted community, everyone in the community will be interested in your niche (although they will not all be buyers of art). Being active in these communities can be extremely lucrative if you can find one. They also can become "side channels" to communicate with some of the same people you interact with on the big social media sites. One thing to be careful of is that most communities like this have rules about overly promotional posts, so you can't simply show up and start posting art. But if you are considerate about how you approach them, they can work wonders for your audience growth.
Shows & Festivals
Shows and festivals are beyond the scope of this book, which is about digital first marketing. Many other books have been written that cover the basics of showing your art in festivals, the proper way to design a booth, etc. So we'll leave those topics to the experts. They are mentioned here though because, if you can do them, nothing beats meeting people face-to-face and showing them your art. A show can be a great way to expand your audience rapidly.
Other
The are many other ways to build awareness and each artist has to figure out what unique mix of activities, venues and personality traits work together to work for building out your follower base and generating awareness of your art.
One thing we try hard to do at FASO and BoldBrush is to build additional channels and tools that help our customers build awareness, which leads to building an audience. We try to amplify what you, the artist, is doing. As such, we've created a bunch of channels that are available only to our customers, from the BoldBrush contest to the DailyArtStream. Here is an updated graphic of the Awarenessart marketing circle with our channels added to the outer circle.
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