How to market art: tell them how you made it

You might expect that a blog about ‘marketing your art’ is about getting as much twitter followers as possible, or a how-to on targeting your audience with flashy banners and spectacular commercials on TV. While that might work for some, real ‘marketing’ is about getting your message out there and reaching those people that actually would want to listen to what you have to say. Why do you need 1,000 twitter followers when only one of them would love to buy your work or hire you as a client? I’d say focus on this one person, and have them experience your work the best way possible.

Explain how you made it
As you might have noticed, one of my strongest beliefs about running a successful art business is telling your story to the right people. Part of this story, next to telling them the ‘why’ of your work, is a piece of education, where you educate anyone you’re talking to about your work. You know there’s more to it than at first glance, but nobody else does, unless you tell them.

Things you can refer to, depending on your profession, are:

• What materials you used
• The choices you made during the process
• What is in the picture/painting/sculpture/writing (is it just a woman, or your mother? what happened right after you captured the moment? why was that moment special?)
• How many versions you made of this particular work
• What your inspiration was
• How you felt when you made it
• What message you put in the work

Have them tell your story
Make your story very visual and interesting, so your audience can relate to it and will be able to remember it once they either bought your artwork or they want to refer you to someone else. It’s always great to own a piece of art you can talk about to your friends, with great detail of how the artist made it and what choices were made in the process. It’s your responsibility to tell them this story, so they can pay it forward. And as you know, word of mouth is one of the best ways to market, since we all trust our friends’ taste and advice on things, more than we trust someone spamming twitter with messages in capital.

Again, it’s very important to understand that when people are buying your work, they are not buying the materials, or the techniques, but they are buying your story. As someone in a Linkedin discussion on a previous blogpost said: ‘So, sell the sizzle, not the sausage’. (And I understand that in the US, it’s ‘not the steak’. Whatever you prefer, I think it’s true. And a funny sentence I will keep in mind to use in moments I want to come across as extremely clever.)

The painting in the featured image is ‘Purple Layers of Abstract Digital Art’ by Terry Mulligan. Want to have your artwork appear on my blogposts? Contact me!