Setting Up Seasonal Marketing Campaigns for Visual Artists

Setting up seasonal marketing campaigns for artists on Facebook

Become a prepper!

Oh, this post was a real gem to write. Or it was character building, or it was, OMG do you realise just how long it took me? Please read it, buy my art, and click everything that might give me a cent that you can find on the page, because I really had to put some hours in for this one! The draft ran into ten encyclopaedic volumes, but I managed to get it down a bit. No really this is an abridged version… I apologise for its length, but this is critical to our Facebook marketing efforts for the rest of 2017 and 2018!

I had no idea about the missed marketing opportunities like Pet Rock Day (3^rd September), Iguana Awareness Day (8^th September), and other days that even Hallmark Greetings Cards missed out on. 

If you paint anything at all, or sculpt statues, or do anything that is remotely commercially creative, you are missing out on some of the best sales opportunities ever because you didn’t even know. I mean just how many of us have pet rocks? (OK I do, but I had never thought of buying it a leash and taking it for a walk until I actually witnessed such an event).

That painting of a Macadamia nut that no one thought you would sell, you missed the marketing opportunity on the 4^th September which was Macadamia Nut Day. 

If you ever get any downtime and think to yourself, oh, I have artistic block, worry no more because I just solved the problem and you will never have artistic block again. You will be too busy drawing nuts, and unicorns, and painting rocks, and setting up your Facebook marketing campaign months in advance to coincide with the big day. 

You know what though, people (yes real human people) literally go nuts over nuts as long as they are Macadamia nuts apparently. They celebrate these days and allegedly they have spare cash which would honestly be better served being in your pocket than theirs. 

You can buy a leash for a rock, and people do as I found out. Mine just sits on my desk with a painting of a crab on it which says “I’m not crabby”, but I wouldn’t take it for a walk out of fear of being sectioned, but I love crabs, I go crab fishing and everything. I am like a one man Deadliest Catch TV season, good eating too, the crab, not me.

Planning

Here’s the fun part, you can start painting Christmas trees in March, prepare the social media campaign in August, and create a Facebook event (on your Facebook business page of course for reasons we have already discussed) for November 1^st, and start your Christmas season off for once in your life, being fully prepared to take advantage.

Retailers have of course been doing this for years yet for many of us artists we usually have a frantic rush to paint a Christmas tree on December 1^st, and hope that someone sees it before the print on demand sites stop pre-Christmas delivery orders around the 15^th. 

Retailers on the other hand put their Christmas trees up immediately after Halloween, except the one shop I visited in Cornwall who started to dress their trees on August 15^th. A bit premature I said, no came the reply, all the other shops down this street will be putting their trees up next week, we are a couple of days late and we are always the first. Been that way since 1868. After an awkward silence I am confident that the store owner witnessed that first erection. That might have sounded different in my head but it is 3:04am and I’m on some heavy prescription meds for my Crohn’s as I write this so anything could happen. Hold tight, bear with.

Retailers plan ahead so why don’t we follow their lead? Most likely because we have other things to worry about like not starving in between cheques from the print on demand site. But if we planned, maybe those cheques might become more regular. Just a theory here but how many of us actually really plan? We might think we do, and we do to a point, but what I am talking about here is proper planning and being prepared for any given sales opportunity at any time. That’s how you stay ahead.

Every year I make a commitment to myself that this year will be different. This year my Halloween art will go on sale the moment it starts being advertised in the local stores, and I will really have some Halloween art to sell. Every year Halloween passes and I think to myself, what a wonderful world, and I try to paint a Christmas tree instead and hope it is finished in time for the next Christmas after this one coming up, or maybe in a couple of Christmas’s time. I will get around to it right after this next commission or after I have mowed the lawn.

Prior preparation prevents poor Facebook engagement. Before I go on I am just wondering who the first of my Facebook artist friends will be to post a Christmas deal, now I know one of you will now go and post one in the next couple of days.

The planning stage should happen months in advance of any given retail calendar date. If you have art already see if it fits in to one of those ‘special’ days we love to celebrate, these can be your marketing bread and butter between the main events.

When to start planning is the question you really need the answer to, and that answer is now, or as soon as you have poured fresh coffee but don’t leave it any later than that.

Posting this article at this time of year for example isn’t the best time of year for me to have written it, but I think I have mentioned seasonal marketing campaigns before, the article will be somewhere in the archive, have a look and let me know because it’s getting on 4am now!

Think before you post

More seriously though I have recently created a calendar of events relevant to my art now so I should start getting ahead if I can remember to consult the calendar periodically. I have set reminders and alerts on my phone’s calendar though so you should probably do this too.

Today it is September 2^nd, well it was when I wrote this article and tomorrow I will be working on some Christmas art or rather I will be finishing some Christmas art I started last year. In hindsight what I should have done is to have finished it off last year to sell this year, but commissions took over my life for a while, and life 1.0, and everything else that gets in the way. By the way, today's date is 14th September, or it was when I published this post. The date matters not just so long as you have the marketing dates in your diaries. 

I think there is a chance that I might have left this too late for this coming Christmas, but I will be having a go anyway. If I don’t get it wrapped up, there’s always next year and I will definitely be prepared by then, maybe.

My next plan once these couple of pieces are completed will be to start writing the social media posts, producing any supporting images for the blog, checking out Christmas delivery dates which guarantee pre-Christmas delivery, and I will be thinking about paid promotion on Facebook to give things a little extra chance. Now I have always said use paid promotion as a last resort but I can honestly say that sales in the online space have been slower this year, in the offline space things have buoyed up the online world but offline sales take a lot of time.

Next week I will be starting a piece I have had planned a few years ago to celebrate Valentine’s Day, and I will then start getting everything prepared because in February 2018, I will be focussing on getting prepared for Easter, and then Summer, and then the fall and before you know it a year will have passed and we will be looking towards Black Friday and Christmas again.

Planning the dates that have a fit with your artistic style will vary from country to country. 

Mother’s Day for example in 2018 falls on March 11^th in the UK, but on Sunday 13^th May in the USA. So there are two very different opportunities which can be combined into a single effort spread out over the two different dates with slight tweaks to each market.

What are the key dates?

As I indicated earlier, today isn’t the best choice of days to publish this article because we are nearing quarter 4 of the retail world’s calendar. Or maybe it is the perfect timing because I can give you some of this year’s final dates and next year’s dates too. 

The next big event in both the UK and USA will be Halloween on October 31^st. You will need to be quick to take up marketing opportunities for this one because the stores are already stocking up on Pumpkins.

Thanksgiving Thursday 23^rd November is perfectly timed to coincide with the traditional post-Thanksgiving sale which happens on November 24^th and is Black Friday. As we already know this is the date that really can drive sales and especially online sales. 

Most Black Friday events run through the whole weekend, so a campaign leading up to the event is needed to build anticipation and excitement, and a more focussed campaign a few days leading up to the day, with an all-weekend campaign throughout the event. 

Many Print on Demand sites offer the ability to run your own offers and promotions but offering these will affect your bottom line. Essentially any discount comes out of your normal commission, but at times such as Black Friday, we are looking for the volume of sales to increase and an opportunity to gain new buyers pre-Christmas and beyond. I call it the hook.

On Monday 27^th November, we will need to prepare for Cyber-Monday. Supposedly the online version of Black Friday but as we all know, the two seem to blend into each other and most retailers seem to offer online deals from the previous Thursday, a few even before.

What you might consider doing over this period is to set up daily offers. Yes there is a bit of work involved here, but if you start now you can on some print on demand sites set the dates a little in advance and get the codes ready.

When you are running a promotion, always offer the code through a Facebook Business Page Promotion rather than just putting the code on your post.

Doing it this way means that whenever someone clicks on the ‘get code’ button, you will receive an email from Facebook telling you who took up the offer. Now here’s another opportunity because they just turned up as your key demographic and you know who they are so you can target them for future sales opportunities or add them to a mailing list. Never just give out the code, and you can even limit the amount of codes available. It also makes for an excellent post too.

You will need to give some terms and conditions, so for example if I were to run a promotion through Fine Art America, I would make it clear that the discount is against my commission rather than the overall price which would include Fine Art America’s base prices for the support and any incidentals such as frames. 

If you regularly run offers it can attract your buyers and potential buyers to click like on your page and to receive all notifications. Just one word of caution though with offers, offering too many results in fewer sales in my experience. People will get desensitised to your normal pricing and will wait for a new piece to be added to the offers in the future. The problem is that there will be a period of time between your existing offer and the new one where those same customers could potentially go elsewhere.

I tend to stick with the pieces I know I can sell whilst they are on offer, and a few pieces I created especially for offers. But on the rare days when free worldwide shipping is offered through FAA, you might want to offer a new piece of art for one day only. That’s when you can really take advantage of offers.

Zazzle and Society 6 always seem to have offers on, but again, issue codes through the promotions tab on your Facebook Business Page. Setting up a promotion is free, it’s not a paid promotion and you can do it any time you want, yet not a lot of people do this preferring instead to just publish those codes and get nothing in return.

November 26^th Small Business Saturday is a grassroots non-commercial campaign highlighting small businesses and encourages consumers to buy from local businesses. Take advantage of this because that’s what most artists are, we are small businesses. 

If you highlight that you are a small business in your Facebook posts it can be a great opportunity to create awareness in the middle of the Thanksgiving, Black-Friday, and Cyber-Monday events.

December 16^th Free Shipping Day and the day that many online retailers will be offering free shipping with guaranteed delivery before Christmas. Not every POD site will offer this but if they do, wrap it up with an offer and customers can genuinely pick up a bargain.

On the lead up to Christmas Day you will want to make notes of guaranteed delivery cut off dates and put your offers out in the days leading up to those delivery cut off dates. 

Where I have had some success over recent years is when I take orders directly and when they have been local enough you could if you have reliable transport and a little time, offer to hand deliver. Staffordshire to London on Christmas Eve has been a constant over the past few years for me taking on a 250 mile round trip, but each year those clients have come back to me, and sometimes well before Christmas too!

It might sound crazy but if you have a few orders it can save courier costs building up.

Another thing you might want to consider is to look at local train operators. Some of them will take luggage and small baggage items to your hotel or place you are staying at or to your place of work, on the day ahead of you travelling. I managed to transport a piece of art this way last year, it just so happened that I didn’t travel down with it, nor did I stay in a hotel and it was delivered to a private address. By the time the piece arrived I was safely tucked up in bed watching Netflix and snacking on Pringles.

Christmas comes and goes and that time between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve is another marketing opportunity that many of us miss because usually we are too busy cooking and entertaining. The fact is that the world doesn’t stop so we can play party games and binge on prosecco, retail is a 24/7/365 day effort.

Not everyone will be taking advantage of marketing opportunities, instead they will be saying they are taking time off over this period and will continue to be on Facebook with Christmas stories and funny cat videos, let them do that because we are about to pick up their slack. Here’s where the opportunity to claim some ground exists.

People will often receive money instead of a physical gift at Christmas because they will get more bang for their buck in the post-Christmas sales, so go to your business page on Facebook and create an event. The event will be the day you release a whole bunch of codes and offers on your Facebook page which people will hopefully sign up for because you are only offering the codes via Facebook. This has the effect of generating some very different content which will then appear in everyone’s timeline. 

On event day itself you can release a brand new piece of art and this is the perfect time to put those newly found Facebook Live skills to the test, and you can wear that new Christmas sweater with the Reindeer on to make the announcement. Bear in mind that this is the only time all year when you will get away with wearing that sweater so take advantage of it. 

People have some time on their hands over this time too, it’s not always about cooking and eating and unwrapping gifts, so many people like to relax with that glass of prosecco and unwind by scrolling though Facebook. With fewer marketing posts on their timelines, yours will hopefully stand out. You just have to give people the opportunity to buy something.

Then comes the horrible part of Christmas, the eve of the eve of returning to work or as some call it, New Year’s Eve. If you are going to take a night off from promoting and Facebook in general, take New Year’s Eve off. No one in their right mind is on Facebook until 11:58pm and all you will see for the next twelve hours are posts of prosecco and firework displays wishing y’all a happy new year!

Don’t even compete, or use the time pre-11:58pm to schedule posts from your business page. Midnight comes around and suddenly the timeline becomes filled, so schedule a post and wish all of your friends, followers, collectors, a happy new year, but remember that they might live in different time zones so you should post more than one, and change them slightly to reflect the time zone your followers live in.

Using the built in scheduling tool on Facebook business pages won’t harm you quite as much as using a third-party scheduling tool because it is posting natively, and remember what I have said previously about native first.

New Year’s Day is great for recovering from the hangover, and I noticed last year that it was like a ghost town on Facebook until around 2pm. This is the opportunity to start reminding people that there’s something else to celebrate and it’s just around the corner. People like things to look forward too. 

Of course this is also the time when we see January sales, so save up some offers for this period too. 

In the USA, January 15^th is Martin Luther King Day, so tying in social media posts reflecting the history of MLK is a great way to remember him. 

Again in the USA, Washington’s Birthday falls on the 19^th February and presents another great marketing opportunity.

February 4th – Super Bowl is a great opportunity especially if you create football related art. This is one of those times when you probably will get away with using a #Superbowl hashtag on Facebook. 

But don’t be blinded to the other opportunities it brings. There are people who heaven forbid don’t like watching the Super Bowl and these might just be your target demographic.

Valentine’s Day is February 14^th, and another opportunity particularly if you create greetings cards through print on demand. My advice is to start marketing in the middle of January for this one because that’s when stores will start to compete with you. Make sure that what you are offering isn’t something that can be purchased from the local greetings card shops. 

St. Patrick’s Day - March 17^th has been commercialised more and more and whilst not necessarily a key date for sales (although it is becoming increasingly so), it is a key date to ramp up marketing efforts and wish everyone a happy St. Patrick’s Day. 

Many brands use humour and convey a sense of fun, but there is an opportunity here to capture a little business from other parts of the retail market who might want to display a poster on the day. I often sell from my chalk-board collection which I had designed with the commercial market (mainly pubs and local restaurants) in mind. 

It is just a series of humorous posters and for independent (non-brewery owned) pubs, they can add a little interest to the environment. In fact, these were how I started out creating designs for restaurant menus a few years ago, and now I get at least two or three commissions each year for new menus and posters. 

Easter (Good Friday 2018 falls on March 30^th with Easter Sunday falling on April 1^st). My advice is to start your Easter marketing campaigns no later than early February. My local shop started selling Easter eggs this year on December 26^th! 

Easter is said to be a $15 billion industry and it is with little surprise that businesses compete so dramatically for consumers on the lead up. 

If you have a mailing list and a physical location why not send out a marketing post card with a code to receive a free gift or a discount. On Facebook you can put your best marketing efforts into running an Easter promotion or ask your followers to submit Easter related photos, or even run a contest. 

Rather than spend money on chocolate Easter eggs you could ask them to donate instead to your supported charity. 

If you have a website now would be the perfect time to give it a little makeover by adding some themed photos or artworks, or why not set up an online Easter egg hunt which will drive customers to click through the entirety of your website. 

Creating a specific themed campaign is great at any time of the year but with social-media you have a real opportunity to get some additional exposure. Try to keep everything similar and never cross-post the same post. Post natively on each platform and tweak each post for that specific platform. A 300-word post on Facebook just won’t work on Twitter so you will need to figure out how to get the same message across in a 140-characters, or just use video because that is just as relevant on Twitter as it is on Facebook. Make sure that the formats are bespoke to each platform too, square video will do well on Instagram and Facebook, but Twitter prefers landscape. 

Spring Break, and in the UK Spring Bank Holiday are great times to look at promoting anything that might be food related as the weather warms up, so do the Bar B Q’s. 

In the USA, Memorial Day will fall on Monday May 28^th, and this is another opportunity to create a new Facebook event and maybe offer another promotion. In the UK, the late May Bank Holiday will also fall on the 28^th May. 

American Independence Day, everyone knows that this always falls on the 4^th July but the planning for this should be started much earlier than that as it should with any calendar event. Again, go to the events tab on your business page on Facebook and set up events leading up to July 4^th.

August Bank Holiday in the UK falls on 6^th August, and this is the indication to start preparing for those Zazzle back to school products such as notebooks and stationery. This is followed by a later bank holiday on August 27^th, just ahead of the kids going back to school.

Think about how you brand your social media posts on Facebook at this point in time because whatever your demographic might be, for a period of time you can go after the back to school demographic or more specifically the parents of the back to school demographic.

Those are the parents who might then notice your more grown up art and designs and this is why I like Zazzle, it offers the opportunity to add lots of your work to lots of products with relative ease, and many of those products will fall in to the back to school category. Kids who might not be interested in art might not visit Zazzle on a regular basis, so creating some targeted social media posts will help things along a bit here. 

One of the things I have noticed during school holidays is that there are some brands who post educational content along with their usual marketing posts. Anything that engages the young audience is going to be time well spent, because the young are our future.

I noticed this when it came to the time earlier in the year when children were preparing for their school exams. Historically the demographic on this blog doesn’t include many people below the age of eighteen, but when I posted some revision tips for art exams, I saw a marked increase in the traffic from younger people. 

Labour Day – September 3^rd is another opportunity. Timing promotions ahead of these days will benefit you and whilst I believe that branding for an artist is different to mainstream commercial branding in that you are your brand, these events give you an opportunity to gain a little more exposure. 

Columbus Day – Monday October 8^th is the time to explore and be a pioneer. Few people the other side of the world might know that you are an amazingly talented artist so let them know you are there and use this day as an opportunity to connect with different countries and cultures. 

Facebook makes it easy, and the Print on Demand sites are global operations so you shouldn’t be limiting your art to your local market. You can now target post demographics on your business page so test it out and connect with a group of people in Australia or wherever the opposite corner of the world is from where you are. Remember there are 7-billion people on this planet and around 2-billion of them are on Facebook. 

Bear also in mind that just because you are taking a day off from the day job not everyone else is. That’s why marketing on Facebook never sleeps, it should be a constant but as I have said before, not every post should be a direct marketing post. 

Many companies abandon marketing campaigns or don’t open on public and national holidays, yet the web is 24/7 and if others are not using that time and space to create marketing momentum, this is when you can step in and provide the content that Facebook will often need on a slow news-feed day. Also there is nothing worse than finding out about the latest offer a day after the event has taken place, so spread out the love and the posts before the event and on the day too.

In the US again, (there seem to be way more opportunities), Veterans Day on November 12^th is another great opportunity but not necessarily for profit-making sales. Consider these kinds of days as days where you put something back and contribute all or at least a majority of profits to a veteran’s charity. 

This is corporate social responsibility and the thing about CSR is that for the other 364 days in the year, you have an opportunity to be remembered for doing good. 

And then we come back around to Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday and a year has passed. There are so many opportunities that if you keep up with the calendar you will never be short of marketing possibilities. 

Before we continue, let’s list those dates in a more convenient format for the USA and the UK:

Key Dates UK 2018

Date	Day	Holiday	Countries
1st January	Monday	New Year's Day	National
2nd January	Tuesday	New Year Holiday	Scotland
17th March	Saturday	St. Patricks Day	Northern Ireland
19th March	Monday	St. Patricks Day Holiday	Northern Ireland
30th March	Friday	Good Friday	National
2nd April	Monday	Easter Monday	National Except Scotland
7th May	Monday	May Day	National
28th May	Monday	Late May Bank Holiday	National
12th July	Thursday	Battle of the Boyne	Northern Ireland
6th August	Monday	August Bank Holiday	Scotland
27th August	Monday	August Bank Holiday	National Except Scotland
30th November	Friday	St. Andrews Day	Scotland
25th December	Tuesday	Christmas Day	National
26th December	Wednesday	Boxing Day	National
Other Notable Days
February 14th	-	Valentine’s Day	Global
11th March	Sunday	Mother’s Day	UK
17th June	Sunday	Father’s Day	UK/USA
Other Events Throughout the Year
Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Posts everyone!)
Wimbledon
Harvest Festival
Halloween (October 31st)
Bonfire Night (5th November)
Remembrance Day (11th November)
St. Andrews Day (Scotland’s National Day)

Key Dates USA 2018

Date	Holiday
Monday, January 1st	New Year’s Day
Monday, January 15th	Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr
Monday, February 19th	Washington’s Birthday
Monday, 28th May	Memorial Day
Wednesday, July 4th	Independence Day
Monday, September 3rd	Labor Day
Monday, October 8th	Columbus Day
Monday, November 12th	Veterans Day
Thursday, November 22nd	Thanksgiving Day
Tuesday, December 25th	Christmas Day
Other Notable Days (Not Federal Holiday’s)
Sunday, May 13th	Mother’s Day
Friday, November 23rd	Black Friday (Global)
Monday, November 26th	Cyber-Monday

Bear in mind that the days outlined for the USA are Federal Holiday’s, but if you are reading this in either the UK, or the USA, you might be thinking why are the dates across the pond relevant? 

Well, if you are on Facebook and you use print on demand sites, or even if you don’t, you are still able to take advantage of marketing opportunities irrespective of where you are in the world. 

Many of my friends in the USA for example have deep family ties to Scotland and Ireland and St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated across the world, not only by ex-pats, but by those with no real familial links to the country too.

We should also remember that whilst these are national holidays and other notable day’s but celebrations and events (not just Pet Rock Day), happen throughout the year too.

We cannot forget many of the religious faiths and observances around the world and whilst we might not want to see these as marketing opportunities we can spread the love to those of different faiths.

And of course who could forget the festivals such as Glastonbury in the UK, Burning Man and Coachella in the USA, there is ample marketing opportunity including running a stall, just be cautious around copyright issues if you are selling T-Shirts, but festival clothing, towels, and those kinds of things which can be used at music festivals are great ways to gain some exposure on the back of the events.

Creating a marketing calendar that works…

A final point is to look at creating a marketing calendar, but one which actually works and can tie into your Facebook events. Many of the calendar templates available online are either out of date or difficult to use.

My calendar has now been exported into my calendar on my phone and I have used Google Calendars to set everything up but first I created a calendar using Excel, although the collaboration of Google Calendars is better if there are a few of you working together.

Business plans are becoming less and less relevant these days. The new (ish) kid on the block is to have a strategy that is concise. Bankers love business plans but for an independent artist, chances are you nor anyone else will want to read a 300-page business plan on how you are going to market your art, OK maybe a bank will, but even they don’t like reading 300-page plans. 

Business plans have always been a bit of a guesstimate anyway but in the days of lean start-ups and home run businesses, having a strategy is the most vital part of becoming successful. 

Spending too much time on strategising is equally as bad, what you need to be doing is developing a plan that indicates what you want to promote and when, and it goes without saying you need to be spending time creating great social-media posts and campaigns too. 

As we have gone through this series of articles we have been talking a lot about your audience demographics and using Facebook’s Insights tool to make sure you know who your audience are, now is the time to start really using that information to inform your posts and campaigns.

The next part is recapping what we have learned so far this summer, so I will skip most of it except to say, you should be using all of the tools that you have at your disposal and which we have covered in previous articles.

Figure out the key dates and events you want to strategise for and start working back from that date to figure out how much time you have to prepare not just an amazing piece of art, but also how much time you will have to get everything else ready like the actual posts.

The great thing about having time to prepare launches of artwork and pre-writing social media posts is that you can test the waters out to see what works and what doesn’t. If you are getting great interaction with your live feeds on Facebook then consider how you can build on that engagement by offering more of what people want to see in their timelines. 

When you are creating posts, as I indicated earlier, there are some nuances specific to each social-media platform that you will need to consider. Instagram needs to be visual, Facebook loves a story and video, Twitter is whatever you can squeeze into 140-characters or less, and Pinterest, well I’ve never really had a great fondness for it despite having over 3600 followers, but then I don’t give it the time I really should.

But the important thing to remember is that no matter which platform you are appearing on, the reader needs to immediately identify that content as coming from you. This is where themes can come into play. 

I mentioned not too long ago that I often use Adobe Spark Post and Adobe Spark video for quick and easy blog post graphics, and this makes it easier to retain a theme. You could have your logo in the same place on every photo, or you could produce a nice textured background and just change the message, and whilst as I said earlier there are differences between commercial corporate branding and you being the brand, creating an identity and them will make you stand out above the random posts of others.

Give each of your planned marketing events over the next twelve-months a theme and add that to your marketing calendar. Ideally you will have something in your portfolio that is relevant to the days and events throughout the year, but if you don’t then create an overarching theme that fits to sell what you do have.

Keeping up with every event is going to be difficult so take a look and prioritise the ones which you know you should be targeting. Never over estimate this and try to set up an event for absolutely everything because you would never create any art at all, your new job would be full-time marketer of nothing.

Using the marketing calendar you have created, add specific notes a do by dates. So for Christmas you will want to find out latest pre-Christmas delivery dates and work back from those, or for something like Black Friday, you might prepare a little each month so that when the time arrives you will have more than enough content to post throughout this marketing free-for-all.

Back to my Excel spreadsheet and I have mentioned this before in my The Art of the Artists Statement post which you can read here but think about the keywords you will be using in your marketing campaigns, and take a look at Google Keyword Planner which you can do here. 

If you are looking for some headings to use in your calendar to plan your Facebook posts, then consider things such as:

• Date of event and then work back from that date setting key milestones along the way
• The headline, being careful not to produce click-bait headlines
• Theme – have you got specific art for a particular event such as Halloween or will your post provide the theme for your other art?
• Where you will be publishing and the key differences between post formats for each social-media platform
• Will the post be video, text, a paid ad, or photo’s
• How many different sets of visuals you need you create so that your posts always look different
• Key words to use in your post and web related activity so that it gets picked up as relevant in search engine results pages (SERP)
• Calls to Action – how are you going to convince someone to respond to your CTA
• Links to previous articles or works which can be inserted as hyperlinks (think about what I said about creating evergreen content)
• And always add a status tracker so that you can keep on top of everything and know what you have already completed or used.
• Add a section on results – which post did better than others, what was the format, time of posting, number of shares and importantly sales. This will provide valuable data for next year.

Once again, it all seems like a tremendous amount of work and it is, but the good news is that this makes next year’s marketing efforts just a case of reviewing current trends on social media and updating your calendar to next year’s dates. Do it now and you will save time and effort moving forwards which can be spent doing what you really love and that is creating new art.

In summary…

Hopefully this article will inspire you to think about those often missed marketing opportunities and will give you a sense of where to look when you hit some creative block. Getting seasonal portfolios together well before the event can save a heap of time on the lead up to the event, and best of all it means that there is less of an urgency or worse that you might miss an opportunity altogether. 

We often see supermarkets selling seasonal products a season ahead and they do this for good reason. They are masterminds of retailing and have a whole load of research which we can borrow from. 

As the art world becomes even more competitive we need to use everything we can to stay ahead of the game, it’s no different for galleries either, they have marketing calendars too. Seasonal and special day promotions are big business and it’s something we can have a slice of too if we plan ahead.

ABOUT M.A

Mark A. Taylor is a British artist and blogger who specialises in abstract and landscape work and also produces art to be used within TV and film, and book covers. You can see and purchase Mark’s artwork on a wide range of print mediums and other products right here and you can follow Mark on Facebook here. Mark's art is also available on Yoga mats now too, you know, just in case you want to join the fitness protection program and save yourself from performing yoga techniques on uncomfortable ground. They make great Christmas gifts too, and come with a 30-day money back guarantee!