Marketing Notes 2

Promoting your Work

In my last post, I briefly discussed Selling Platforms.  In this post, I would like to touch on a few Promotion Platforms and start to outline a strategy for using these.

I define a Promotion Platform as a place where you can market your work and bring them back to one of your selling platforms where hopefully they will eventually want to buy some of your work.

The Platforms I am concentrating on are these and I have included some introductory remarks:

Twitter - the 140 character conversation which enables me to announce new uploads and also to send out campaigns from Hootsuite (more of this in a later Marketing Notes).  Twitter has great search capabilities, you should use hashtags (such as #photographer #photography #art #photo #foto #artwork #painting #(your location) ).  This is a good place for people to find you.

Facebook - much more of an engaged community and it does require you to spend a short amount of time every day.  Set up a personal account but then do your art marketing through a Facebook Page not your personal page.  For one, there are no limits on a Page's "Likes" but you are limited to 5,000 friends on your own page.  Share all your new stuff here all the time.

Google+; Like Facebook, but Google.  More complex to use but it has some advantages too.  I have set up a Page for my Art and promote to this.  Frankly I am still getting to grips with G+ and will share with you as I learn.

YouTube: Really great place to be found and videos are very engaging.  Simply take a number of your stills, label them with a brief descriptive text, put in transitions between them and overlay with some royalty free music.  Time to create in iMovie - 10 mins. Keep the videos under 90 seconds.  Check two of mine out here - Fifties Formula One Cars and London Images.

Blogger - this is a great platform from which to run a blog and then cross link to other places.  See how Juergen Roth has set up his Blogger site.  An excellent example.
Pinterest

I am also doing a little promoting on Tumblr and Stumbleupon.  FineArtAmerica has a Stumbleupon button so this makes it really easy.

Hub and Spoke

A final word for this post on marketing - think of your two categories in terms of a bicycle wheel with the selling platforms at the hub and the marketing platforms on the rim with lots of spokes leading from the rim to the hub

In the next post, a few comments on what I do when I upload an image to FineArtAmerica.

Question of the Day: Where do you promote your Artwork?  How successful do you find these platforms? 

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