Tips for Marketing Your Artwork

While you might want to ignore the job of marketing your work, it’s a crucial part of being a successful artist.

If you are in the process of starting your marketing efforts and don't have incredible contacts, begin by focusing your initial outreach locally and then expand from there.

Some tips you might follow:

Email campaigns work. Setup and do your best to maintain an email newsletter campaign. Send your newsletter monthly or bimonthly. Portfolio website services like FolioLink.com let you integrate your site with MailChimp making it easy to capture an interested audience. MailChimp is popular among artists because the service is free to use if you have fewer than 2,000 contacts. Keep a clean list of only people who signed up for your newsletter and have not opted out of it. Keeping a clean list means getting your newsletter delivered to more inboxes and not marked as spam. Want to test your email for its deliverability? Use a tool like https://www.mail-tester.com/.
Build relationships. Focus on building your relationships with your suppliers, photographers, buyers, gallery owners, and others. Ask if you can add them to your mailing list to let them know about your studio news and upcoming shows. Send personal handwritten notes to anyone who buys your work or who is a potential buyer. Also, be sure to ask your buyers for photographs of your work on display so that you can incorporate those images into your marketing materials.
Print still matters. Don’t forget about sending color postcards of your work to anyone who has purchased your pieces. Postcards are often saved by past buyers and passed on to friends.
Use competitions to build your resume. Finding a competition that is a match for you as an artist, gives you the opportunity to get discovered by a new arts organization and build your resume. Look for competitions with jurors who are interested in work like yours.
Your website needs to look good. Maintain an up to date professional website and an Instagram presence. Both will help you reach a larger audience and give people an easy way to contact you. There are many popular website services for artists, but check out FolioLink.com for its personal approach.
It’s basically free to send a press release. Send press releases to local newspapers whenever you have a show. Include your website address so that it can be added to the article.
Behind the scenes peek. Visit galleries where you want to show your work, but don’t let them know that you are scoping them out. Use your visit to help you decide whether the work they exhibit is a good fit with your own and whether the prices they command are on par with your work. Spend time talking with the gallery reps to see how they treat you as a potential buyer. It will help decide whether you can build a relationship with them.
The power of blogging. This one is tough for many artists because frankly, you would just rather be in the studio. If you can make a blog fit into your schedule on a weekly or biweekly basis, it can be a great way to keep your audience engaged. Use your blog to show your work in progress, give them views of your studio, and share promotions of inexpensive "artist proofs." Your blog can be more casual and fun than your portfolio website. Make sure, however, that your blog is attached to your portfolio website domain name to help you build out your search engine footprint.

The C4E Team

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