The Artists Business Lounge
Art Business Coaching for Visual Artists
Debunking an Art Marketing Myth
Do you really need to spend 80% of your time on art marketing?
Last year I attended a webinar on art business and was astonished to hear that the host recommended artists spend 80% of their time marketing.
Eighty Percent!!
I thought that was a one-off crazy opinion, because the only people who should spend 80% of their time marketing are, well, professional marketers.
and another…
and another artist wrote on LinkedIn that that was how much time she spent on marketing.
I know it can sometmes feel like markeitng takes a lot of time, but 80% while you are also trying to make the work you are focused on marketing?
I call BS
Marketing IS important but if you spend 80% of your available time marketing, you are missing out on crucial time in your art practice.
Your artwork is your most important ‘marketing collateral’ there is and only having 20% of all your available time to actually develop, explore and create the work itself won’t do you any favours.
It won’t allow you to create your best work and, surely, it will take you away from the core of why you are an artist in the first place.
But if you aren’t doing ANY marketing, or you are doing it in an ad hoc way, that’s not going to do much for you either.
Unfortunately, that’s what I see a lot of artists do – spend time making sporadic posts and getting frustrated and overwhelmed.
Artists tell me the sheer level of perceived expectation of what they ‘should’ be doing, spending countless hours creating social media posts, maybe even trying Facebook ads is leaving them feeling flat and worse, ‘useless’.
A couple of things I see happening are
1) artists spending way too much time on marketing
2) artists giving up.
Is there another way to manage your art marketing in less time?
Yes!
Absolutely.
Make your marketing work harder for you.
You can market (tell the world) about your work without spending countless hours and certainly not 80% of all your available time.
All you need is a clear plan and some tools.
Here are a few things you can do (not an exhaustive list but if you aren’t already doing these things, you will see a difference).
1) Have one good social media platform and a mailing list
2) Understand what you want to be sharing, to whom and when
3) Create a content calendar (this will tie in closely with your goals and tie into any scheduled activities like launches or exhibitions)
4) Create and Batch multiple pieces of content (this one is a gamechanger)
5) Use a scheduling tool to do the heavy lifting for you posting to your preferred platform while you do other things – like connect with collectors and dealers, make your art, explore opportunities or even rest (I use Planoly but you can use Facebook Creator, Tailwind, Later to name just a few)
When you have a plan and use batching and scheduling you can pull together a lot of content in a concentrated amount of time and have it going out into the world.
I recommend this approach for social posting, newsletters and email welcome series for new mailing list subscribers. If you are doing any physical marketing – magazine advertising, flyers and so on, you just slot those into your content calendar so you know what you are focusing on when.
Will this take 80% of your time?
No, absolutely not.
Will it improve your marketing efforts and reach – yes absolutely it will.
Will it help you do more with less – yes
Until next time, happy creating
Amanda
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