Twenty Five Marketing Fails Of Visual Artists and How to Avoid Them

Twenty Five Marketing Fails Of Visual Artists and How to Avoid Them

Time for a wakeup call…

Each week I try to cover the most relevant marketing tips for visual artists who use social media as their platform to promote their work, this week I am writing about something that most of us will be able to relate to because we have all been there and done that! 

At some point or other we have made a marketing fail, or we have wanted to give up, or we have seen nada nothing in return for our efforts. It can be brutal at times when we put so much time, effort, and energy, in and get so little out other than creative joy, but that doesn’t pay the bills!

This could just have easily have been called a million marketing fails but that would have taken me forever to write and it would have totally depressed you. Twenty-five fails seemed enough to highlight and I am reasonably confident that we have all made these faux pas in the past.

Worry no more because along with each of the marketing fails I offer a glimmer of hope, or at least a way to reconsider how you market your art on Facebook and every other social media platform and offline too. 

Even the very best marketing departments get it completely wrong at times so we are in good company. Marketing is the art that we as artists are not always comfortable with, it can take too long, it can be mind-numbingly boring, and it can cost us a small fortune in the energy we expel doing it and in monetary terms too. 

Humans are inherently impatient. The instantaneous response of Facebook fills us with an expectation that results will be instantaneous too, except they’re not. This my friends is going to be a hard hitting post and I make no apologies, we have to come to terms with the reality that from time to time we need to be patient and we need to recognise where we are going wrong. Time my friends for some tough love, but only because I care, you have been warned!

 Ready? Here we go… hold on tight!

1. The Campaign

We always hear about marketing campaigns and as I have said on this site so many times, we should prepare them even earlier than we do. 

One of the things us artists (me included) are really great at is preparing an entire marketing strategy in five minutes flat. Then we post it online everywhere we can, and then we move on to the next project. Rinse and repeat seems to be what we tend to do just as well as our art.

Start your campaigns early!

2. The Plan!

Planning is critical to the success of any marketing campaign. It is worth remembering that the plan is not a wish list, wish lists are entirely different things altogether. Yet we don’t plan enough and sometimes we never plan at all. 

As with any plan you also need a timeline with key milestones. As you work back from the release date each of these milestones will keep you on track to reaching a successful outcome. 

The marketing plan is a map that shows you the route to your goal, so include the things that will act as waypoints. Did you plan the theme of the marketing campaign, does it have a story, and how will the story of your art unfold?

Include in the plan the ideas that you have to bring the new work to the market but again keep it as a plan and not a wish list. Do you want to launch it in a gallery, or do you want to launch it on social media, or in the local park? What matters is how you generate enough buzz on the lead up to the works release so that people really engage with the release when it happens.

I know why you don’t do this and we’ll get to that later!

3. Collaborate

We see other artists as competition. 

Artists who are on Facebook are not your competition, the competition comes from the large volume discount retailers who hawk generic prints for ridiculously low prices, but which won’t last anywhere near as long as your art will.

Artists become stronger when they work together and support each other. I have mentioned sharing each other’s posts before, this not only keeps your timeline fresh, but when the favour is reciprocated, your work is introduced to other artist’s followers too. 

You can also collaborate on Facebook Business pages, share content with each other because chances are you will both have a different set of followers and a different target audience, but sharing will introduce new demographics to your work and you will inevitably both find some overlap.

There is one thing that all print on demand artists could do, and that is to follow each other on the print on demand sites and like and favourite works from other artists. In return they will hopefully return the favour and both of your works will start to gradually gain more exposure on the platforms. Let me know if you have done this with mine, and I will return the favour. 

Print on demand search engines work in a similar way to Google, The more relevant an artwork is in search, the higher it ranks. If you’re not getting sales already you need to make it relevant by other means. 

4. Reality Check

We either don’t have the time for this stuff or we’re lazy. Marketing needs time to be found from somewhere, and if it is a lazy attitude to marketing that fails you, you need to ditch that attitude quickly.

It might not be that you are lazy at all, all of the artists I know work their fingers to the bone but a few forget that there are tools that we all have access to which will allow us to work smarter, not harder. You will need to find some time to better understand what those tools are because no one else will or can do it for you. 

You have to be ready to do whatever it takes to get your work out there, finding an excuse why you can’t is one of the reasons why so many give up.

Here’s a harder one and perhaps this one is the elephant in the room. Any marketing should avoid the continuous me, me, and me, approach. Any inflated sense of self just doesn’t work on social media, and I think that’s just the same in real life too. Harsh words, but we need to find our own faults at times so that we can move forward more positively. 

5. You are not worthy!

Oh my, how often have I heard this from some of the world’s most brilliant minds and artists? This feeling of self-doubt is doing nothing to get your work exposed and sold. It’s driving you bat-muck crazy and doing nothing at all for you or your art. They also call it imposter syndrome. How can you be this good?

Enter those competitions and if you don’t win at least you tried. That’s one way to look at it, but you are so much better than you think and I think you know it. You could be looking for validation or recognition but none of that will come if you don’t enter those competitions and gallery events or you don’t submit your work anywhere. 

You want validation or an accolade? Go out and get it.

6. Get a website…

Forget that you haven’t got the time to build a website. If you are serious about selling your art you need to find some time. No one is saying that it needs to be done today or tomorrow, but don’t come with the excuses that “I just don’t have the time or the skill”, see I told I would be brutal, I ain’t finished with you yet.

This is the most often used phrase I hear whenever I do any consultancy work. There are plenty of web building services that require the simplest of skills. If you can use a word processor or create a piece of digital art (I’m not talking complex art here either), then you have the skills. 

There are a myriad of options and many of them are free. Some look too generic, but others look as good as sites created by web developers. Pro tip here, the web and search engines love mobile first, so make sure that you are using responsive templates and code, and that it doesn’t look like it was built in under a minute. Check for overlapping graphics and text, and make sure that there aren’t too many spelling mistakes. Even I get this wrong and I have a proof reader!

The site has to look fresh, but just as important, the site needs to have a constant flow of quality content. Not some ramblings or filler content, but something that someone will get value from.

It is the same for authors of books as well as bloggers and website owners, no one reads what they have written, but the one thing that neither the authors, bloggers, nor website writers do is write enough. Authors, you need a portfolio of work not a single title, just as artists need a portfolio too. It’s the same with blogs and websites. 

It could be notes about what you are up to and pictures of your work, or you can copy and paste the code that the print on demand sites give you to present your work on your site. If you are a member of the premium program offered through Fine Art America, why are you not using the built in website from there? $30 a year for a secure site that allows you to also add a blog as well as your art is beyond doubt worth it to get an online portfolio alone.

You can create a Google website in under 20-minutes, admittedly it won’t have content but you will be able to fill it eventually. Others will choose the HTML 5 route, others will use one of the hundreds of other drag and drop builders. 

Other artists might want to collaborate, and this can mean that there is so much less work for all of you. Most people never ask, but I would collaborate with so many artists if they asked and I am sure others would too.

Once you become disciplined in finding the occasional twenty-minutes to write a new piece of content everything becomes easier. I have been online in one way or another since the public web went live, trust me it becomes ingrained in you and it’s pretty addictive too! If you have twenty-minutes to seek out the latest memes, then you have twenty-minutes to seek out something new for your website.

7. Network…

You do this on Facebook already but you might not think of it as networking in the traditional sense. The clue is in the name here folks, it is a social network and it is full of people within the arts industry who are looking for networking opportunities too. 

Visit gallery events, museums, craft shows, and talk to people. Pick up the phone and make a connection. It’s time to lock that shyness away and communicate!

Networking isn’t just about physically meeting or talking to new people. Sharing ideas with others, and again using that thing called collaboration will achieve great results.

8. Don’t hang around…

Another one I often hear is that someone is waiting for the outcome from something else. Waiting around when you test the water to see what the results are going to be is wasting time that you could be spending on something else. 

Run experiments on social media with your marketing campaigns, and if something doesn’t work, you will already have something else to replace it with. If it doesn’t work you can always delete those posts. 

You don’t need to sink everything into every campaign, in fact never throw every piece of resource and content into one campaign. If you plan sufficiently you can test individual things out without wasting time, and when you find what works you will still have plenty of resources left.

9. Money…

Sometimes it is impossible to do something without opening up the wallet. Social media campaigns can work if you pay for ads but you have to make sure that you are spending money in the right place and at the right time. 

This is why it is so important to know who your audience is, where they live, and what age group responds best to your work. If you have those insights then targeting your ad campaign will become a useful cost, rather than you just hoping that it will work.

One of the earliest lessons I ever learned was when I set up Beechhouse Media. I started on day one thinking I could set a company up for £500 UK sterling, well £497.53 to be exact. 

The very next day I had to invest another £5,000 and have never stopped investing since. You literally can’t do what you need to do without occasionally having to break open the wallet. If it’s not new brushes it’s a new server or a monthly subscription, and the costs keep on coming as they do with any business. Never underestimate the cost of running a business even if it is a small one. 

If you really haven’t got the time to spend building a website there are some great web developers who won’t necessarily cost the earth. 

There is a resource though that you have ignored because it is not always so obvious, but some artists (especially digital artists) have diversified into creating things like web banners and buttons, or watermarks for your social media photo posts. 

Many of them will charge less than you will find anywhere else, sometimes just posting a question such as “Doe’s anyone create watermarks for social media photos” will give you a lot of replies all offering to create them for you for very little compared to what you would pay a design house for. If you have diversified into areas such as this, please do leave a comment so people can get in touch with you.

10. Widen your focus…

When it comes to selling art I have a pet hate that drives me insane. It is those multiple posts into twenty different groups on Facebook which say 24x30, oil, $300 and that is all they say. I have covered this so often before but still I see them. 

One of the rules which is strictly enforced in my Facebook Group ‘The Artists Directory’ is that these kinds of posts are not allowed. The group is a community where you can drive business to your entire portfolio, it is a resource for the artists and their portfolio to become known as opposed to a dingle random work, so posts focussing on a single piece of art are not allowed.

There’s good reason for this. Not everyone will like your current work, it might not be as good as your last piece, but it might also put people off from looking through your portfolio. If you post a 12 x 12 piece and someone is looking for a 24 x 24 piece, how will they know they can get that from you?

Posting the links to a Facebook business page (more about this later), and to your portfolio online, will drive traffic to those pages where all of your art can be found. More people then visit your Facebook page, more people click on like, and the search engines also start seeing your page or portfolio as relevant. 

Individual works should be promoted but these should be promoted as part of individual campaigns and never at the expense of everything else that you have created and they should have a better description or at least something that tells everyone you care enough to provide a statement about your art and allay any fears that they’re not buying something that will never turn up. Even if it does turn up, this is how it looks.

Focus on the back catalogue. This is something that most of us forget to do, and when I look back through my sales history I often forget that certain pieces have sold lots more than others. Bring these out and run a new campaign featuring those works. If they remain sat in the back of a dusty portfolio they will never sell again, yet these could be your signature works and be earning you a living while you create new works. 

If you are a print on demand artist this is going to be critical in driving the number of views up on those older works which may have stagnated or might have never been revisited since your last campaign. 

This is why every campaign needs to have a follow up campaign planned out in advance. You can even get away with running the same campaign each year which cuts down on the work required, although you might want to make a few changes to make it look a little fresher.

11. All in or nothing…

With social media comes a heavy commitment and that is time. It is so easy to build a Facebook business page (the reasons I will make clear later), but it is also so easy to just leave it empty and neglected. There should be a retirement home for some pages. 

This is the number one reason why artists and even organisations who come to me to work on their pages think that they are not getting enough engagement and exposure. They spend an hour a week at most, never plan content, and groan that it’s not working.

We know that Facebook made significant changes to their algorithm a few years ago and engagement levels dropped. However, that is not an excuse that everyone has. You see the engagement levels dropped significantly more for the major publishers and those with large volumes of followers. My engagement actually zoomed right up. If the bar is set low now, things can only improve. 

There’s another thing too, you are way too focussed on the number of followers you have and probably haven’t realised that the number of followers a page has isn’t the most important factor at all. The number you should be focussed on is where it says “the number of people talking about this”. 

This is the number that tells you how engaged the whole of Facebook is with your page and here’s how we know this. Some of you will have been reading my articles which I started creating in the summer around using Facebook as a tool to market your visual art. I have mentioned engagement, and I have mentioned that the number of followers you have has little meaning for the most part. 

My business page isn’t huge. In fact I am still under 500 likes, but and here is the weirdest thing, the direct views on my posts can reach three and four times this number and sometimes many more, the reach is often greater but that’s another myth. 

Not all of my posts do well, in fact a post I had made last week reached only a total of 39 people in three days. However, a post marketing this blog reached over 2,500 people in one day. The people are talking about this figure increased, as did the number of comments, shares, and reactions. What this told me was that people knew this was far more relevant than the earlier post. It was sharable, so those people who saw it when others had shared it had probably no idea at all that I existed until that point.

That’s great you say, but it relied on shares. Well, that’s not really true either. Another post that wasn’t shared still managed over a thousand views and these converted to 50% when I checked website analytics. 500 readers from one social media post. 

There is a reason for this and that is that I am now starting to use my business page as the space I spend most of my time in. I am slowly driving up the engagement which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t, but I am being persistent in this approach. More about Pages later, and look out for my future article about collaborative marketing and social media myths where I’ll be explaining reach, and how the Presidential election might or might not have been “allegedly” swayed!

12. Be informed…

It’s too much work to find out what’s happening in the world of social media and you don’t want to take the time to understand it. 

To get the best out of Facebook or any other marketing strategy, you have to stay on top of the current trends. What worked well yesterday might not work at all well today. The algorithm might have changed, or the number of people online might be fewer, there are many factors that can have a negative effect on reach.

However, keeping up to date with all of the new tools that become available, or even reading the updates I post on this blog will hopefully keep you well enough informed so that your marketing is always as close to great as you can get it.

13. Resources and Groups…

I sometimes want to write a behind the scenes guide to Facebook Groups, but I don’t think I can do that without upsetting a lot of people. If you are reading this there is a 99.9999% chance you are not one of them so I will spill a secret here.

There are many people who join Facebook groups (one member I declined this week was a member of 4,497 groups) and only participate for blatant and almost spammy self-promotion opportunities that groups can provide, and sometimes it’s not even something that is relevant to the group at all. 

I try to weed these out wherever I can but as soon as one goes, another one arrives. They are the headaches of every group admin I know on Facebook. We then spend an hour writing a polite post to remind people of the rules, delete the 15-posts that shouldn’t have been posted, and then ban them forever more because they did it again right after that post was posted. For heavens sake just read the rules!

Hair tearing moments and also totally unfair for the good players who do play by the rules and whose posts are swamped out by the few bad players so that they cannot be seen. 

If you are still reading then you are obviously a good player, so let’s stop with the therapy session I think I might need, and move on to something more positive.

Join groups on Facebook but engage with them. As an admin I get to see some useful group insights and what I notice are that posts from those who positively engage in the community and do not post in a spray and pray fashion, receive the most engagement and the most sales.  

Groups are communities of like-minded people not a readymade sales platform for spammers. 

The most engaged and engaging users are those who want to commit to learning new techniques, being introduced to new art, and positively engaging in discussions. Funnily enough, those people also become the most respected, and they are the ones whose art sells. 

I frequently see the same post cross-posted in multiple groups and they are all the same. Whilst some of those groups might have an overlap of the same members, others will have a totally different demographic.

Here’s the thing with cross posting multiple times. If those you are reaching out to are in the same groups, they will see that same post multiple times. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing, multiple posts showing up right? Well it is, because most people scroll right past them. 

Each group will have a uniqueness so you need to craft your posts to resonate with the demographics of the group. If it is an abstract group then posting non-abstract works is not necessarily going to resonate with the group members expecting abstracts.

If you do cross-post, refine those posts for each group and make them fit with the groups niche, and spread them out over a period of time so that they appear fresh in other people’s timelines and no one gets a timeline dedicated only to you. 

14. Have patience…

I mentioned patience earlier and that we have come to expect instant responses from everything and everyone on Facebook, but this is where the algorithm can slow things down. 

Initially your post reach will be low, but as people discover that post and start commenting, sharing, and engaging more broadly, the algorithm will notice and start to reveal that post on more timelines. I will be explaining the myth behind Reach in the next few weeks and you’ll really want to take a look. 

This is why your post has to be relevant, the more relevant it is the more people engage, and if it is more relevant than someone else’s post, yours will be shown.

This might not be as instant as you think. A post I made last week didn’t gain any traction until the next day, another post took three days, so if you believe a post is relevant, share it from your business page to your personal timeline, and that keeps you within the community standards of Facebook too. 

In short, stick with it, never give up, use Facebook business pages and stop moaning about levels of reach for now. Reach doesn’t necessarily mean people have engaged. 

15. Launch and pre-sales opportunities…

I have gone through ways to launch a piece of artwork and we covered this when we discussed planning your campaign too, but there is another reason why a launch is important.

Even Facebook posts get scoured by search engines and other websites. Those rely on relevancy which plays a part in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). So pre-launch campaigns will eventually converge with your release and the SEO will already be in play.

Offering pre-launch sales opportunities is another factor that will eventually converge with the work you will be releasing. 

It is not just Google or Bing that will be looking for relevancy, but any search on the print on demand sites will be looking for relevancy too. A carefully executed marketing campaign is not just good for Facebook and Google, but can be an influencer on POD sites and especially when people start seeking your previous work out ahead of any launch.

16. Think before you ink…

Some posts should never have been posted. 

Before committing anything on paper or in a post, revisit your marketing plan and consider any changes you might need to make. Has something happened in the world that has shaped the direction your art has taken, or has something happened that could influence how your latest work is perceived? 

Maybe a piece of work carries some political message, and maybe now would not be the best time to release it, or of course the opposite can be true too.

Think before you commit to anything. 

17. Be original…

We have all heard that one where Picasso once said that good artists copy, great artists steal. Actually, Picasso might never have said that all. Steve Jobs assimilated it to Picasso but many other artists and poets might have coined it first.

In 1920 the major poet T. S. Eliot published “The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism”, said that ‘to imitate was shoddy, and to steal was praiseworthy’ but way back in 1892, an intriguing precursor appeared in an article titled “Imitators and Plagiarists” published in The Gentleman’s Magazine at the time. The author was W. H. Davenport Adams, and the terminology he used was transposed: “to imitate” was commendable, but “to steal” was unworthy.

Whoever coined the phrase though doesn’t take away that artists should be original. Originality is what really sells art today. Or at least that is where the market currently is. So be original. 

Showing your original work will show your real passion for the arts. Stealing an idea from Picasso will mean that you are more likely to only ever come second to Picasso and you want to be in first place. 

Everybody has a unique thing that they can bring to art, and honestly we have seen Picasso before so if that’s what you do, it has to be better.

In short, never chase a cornered market unless you know you will win.

18. One size fits all…

No it doesn’t. There is no right way nor no wrong way. A one size fits all promotional strategy will not work for the reasons I pointed out earlier when we spoke about cross-posting in groups.

Dare to be different! 

If you cross-post between social platforms then consider the size of the post on those platforms. I have written about sizes for each of the main platforms before, so don’t try and put a rectangular peg in a square Instagram hole.

19. Up the game when you have a real-life conversation…

You are totally unprepared to speak to someone who is interested in you and your art. 

I really don’t like business speak. However, having an elevator speech ready is a really useful thing to have as a marketing tool. 

You never quite know who you will meet, it could be someone who has no interest or it could be an art critic. So always have 20-30 seconds of an elevator speech prepared. 

An elevator speech is about the time it takes someone to climb from the ground floor to the top floor of a building in an elevator. During this time you have around 20-30 seconds to communicate the key points about you. 

This could be to communicate who you are and what you do, and how you can benefit the person listening. It is nothing more than a very quick synopsis of you and your background, and experience. If you get the elevator speech right, it helps you stand out when you introduce yourself to a career or sales connection.

Whilst you do this, think about creating an elevator speech for your latest piece of artwork too. You might want to continue the conversation on the way back down.

20. Use positive comments and reviews…

You don’t let the world know that people like your art. 

If your artwork has been reviewed (not by your nearest and dearest though) but by anyone not associated with you, ask them if you can use a sound bite in your marketing. 

If you get great comments on your print on demand site, point people to the link where the comments can be found, and consider asking someone who has some connection to the art world to write a comment or review or critique a piece of your art. 

If you appear on Google my business, ask a client if they would place a review on Google. Anyone in the local area will be able to read it, or anyone who uses Google my business from further afield. 

21. The event…

Events are stressful at times. Not only do you need to more often than not build a display stand, if they are outdoors you will be worried about what the weather will do to your work and then no one buys anything from you and you start worrying how you will cover costs.

At one time I did a number of events frequently and I didn’t always get it right. I have turned up on the wrong day and set up in a field on my own, and I have turned up to an event with only two people going through the gates during the entire day and another event when everything from the catering not turning up to the electricity failing made the day a technical disaster, yet that was a great day for sales. 

I’ve seen some great exhibition stands and I have seen some which have been totally pointless. The pointless ones are when the exhibitor just places a bunch of business cards on a table and will maybe have only one or two pieces of work on display, and they are precariously hung up with pieces of string. Where’s the artist? He was in the bar. 

If you are at an event you need to make everything look as professional as you can and you also need to be on hand to respond to client’s questions or maybe just have a chat. Never and I really mean never, just sit there talking on your mobile phone and ignore those who come and visit. Queuing up for an hour to speak to the busy artist who is on the phone all of the time doesn’t present a professional image at all. 

Buyers want to connect with artists and they never expect to have to wait until you have finished making a call about your lunch order, yes I’ve seen this happen too. 

Make sure that the event is relevant to your work. Turning up at a photography exhibition with oil paintings of dogs might not be as good as turning up at a dog show where you can take commissions. Remember that these events are not Facebook groups where you might or might not get away with posting a photo of an hearing aid in a group about Van Gogh. Please, please, read Facebook group posting rules while we are on the subject. 

22. Relying on everyone else…

Seen this too. Relying on everyone else to get your work exposed is what I think of as asking your friend to ask their friend to go on a date with you. If only I had realised this when I was 16 because it doesn’t work but that’s another story for another time.

I have seen this over the past thirty-years in this world we call art. Artists should never be lazy or have expectations that just because they paint something, someone just has to buy it. 

Build it and they will come, paint it and they will buy it, no, and no. No one is in the unique position that you are in to sell your art for you. Even galleries will have a reliance on you to become engaged in the process of selling your work, and if you are a print on demand artist then it is down to you to make sure that you are not making the mistakes and faux pas we have been through today. 

Just one more thing about being a print on demand artist, it’s not for the faint of heart. You really do have to work incredibly hard. Forget 8-hour days, those are for wimps. 18-hour days are quite normal and you still need to find time for the day job. Think that’s extreme? Ask any successful POD artist and they’ll confirm it. 

You need collaboration but it takes effort on both parts. If someone helps you, help them in return, but remember that you have to do something for yourself if you want to get your work seen, everyone helping you is a bonus for which you should be deeply grateful.

23. Diversify your product range…

If you rely on selling the big ticket items and you don’t make your work accessible to the people who can’t afford a huge museum quality canvas, then you will miss out on a steady flow of business. 

If you are selling enough of the big ticket items to sustain a living then you are one of the lucky ones. Selling things like phone cases or even postcards, greetings cards, stickers, or coffee mugs can provide a small revenue stream that quickly racks up. It is better to sell $10 worth of small items than it is to sell nothing at all. Some weeks I would be grateful to actually make $10 from a print on demand site!

24. Overlook customer service…

You take on commissions or sell a piece of art and that’s it, job done. What many businesses in general and a few artists too fail to realise that any sale can be the starting point of nurturing those clients and bringing them back time and time again.

Good customer service isn’t just about putting things right, it is about making the customer feel valued. Offering them advice rather than going for the jugular of a needless upsell will give you a far better return than getting them to pick a cherry wood frame over something made from compressed cardboard.

If a client needs a piece of art installed and this isn’t something that you do yourself, figure out a way to get that piece of art hung for them. If they ask if the frame can be changed change it, and if they need help deciding which piece to buy, get to understand exactly what it is that they want. 

25. You do all of your marketing through your personal profile…

Now we get to the big one and yes I think I might have mentioned this before, but if you are selling and marketing on Facebook through your personal profile you could very well end up with no account at all.

Is this a community standard which is policed by Facebook? Yes. Categorically yes. With 2-billion users it takes time for this to work its way through the system but eventually there is a chance that they will at the very least suspend your account. 

Business pages are for business. We have already gone through the notion that pages don’t get the attention we want them to get, but whilst you might be getting more likes on your personal profile, are you really getting more views?

If you are worried about losing your 500 friends, you can convert your personal profile into a page and carry those friends over, but setting up a personal profile and a business page keeps business away from pleasure. 

It’s not to say that you cannot still use your personal profile to market, but that should never be its sole purpose. Share a post from your business page to your personal profile and it will increase the number of views you will get for that post. 

You will then be able to track the demographics and see what is and isn’t working, and you will be able to use the other tools available with business pages that you don’t get with a personal profile. 

Ask your followers to switch on notifications for when you post something, and spend time building up your engagement. Setting up a business page is free and you don’t have to use paid advertising or pay to boost posts if you don’t want to. 

The most important thing about business pages is that you do have to be patient, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither are businesses. 

Conclusion…

Marketing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, even the simplest marketing campaigns can bear low-hanging fruit. Making sure that you use the tools available to you and the support that is out there is going to make everything even easier. 

I still make mistakes as do others who do their marketing far more effectively than I do, but we can learn what not do if we recognise what we are doing wrong. In fact doing it wrong is the best way to ensure you don’t do it that way ever again!

This post is hard hitting in that you might recognise some of these mistakes as a regular occurrence and some of you might not think that any of this is relevant to you at all, but for those who do take a deep look at what they are doing well, they might notice that they continue to work with the same mistakes that I have outlined today along with a million others. You have to critique yourself if you don’t want to carry on blindly marketing your art. 

The best way of marketing anything is to be honest with yourself. If something doesn’t work, move on and try not to make the same mistake again, but it doesn’t matter if you do. Try and try again is the old saying and that’s true when it comes to marketing.  The art world is tough enough so don’t make it even harder for yourself, but perhaps the biggest reality Check is that only you can make it happen. Never make an excuse to not do something because it’s difficult, that’s exactly where the real rewards sit in waiting and remember we’re all behind you.

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 will be releasing some brand new artworks before Christmas which will be available from his Pixels site above, Fine Art America, The Great Frame Up, Framing and Art Centre, and Deck the Walls. If you would like to pre-order one of Mark’s signed original proof prints please use the contact form on this site for details. These prints are only available directly.