By the way, if you are a paid member of our Sovereign Artist Club or have a FASO website, we have an entire 60 page ebook for you that explains the entire Circles of Art Marketing framework and how to use it to better market and sell your art.
For paid Sovereign Artist Club members the Circles of Art Marketing ebook is here
And for FASO website members the Circles of Art Marketing ebook is here
Note – you must login to your FASO account to access this ebook, if you run into issues please contact [email protected] – support questions asked by replying to this newsletter will not go to FASO support and will likely go unanswered.
On to today’s update:
For today’s lesson in art marketing however, I want to talk about the outer circle: Awareness.
The first step in your customers’ journey to owning one of your artworks is Awareness. Awareness of your art, awareness of you. By the way, one of the mistakes a lot of marketers make is spending too much of their time engaged in awareness activities (posting on social media is an awareness activity) and far too little time in the circles further in, especially the True Fans circle (you should spend a lot more time than you probably do here).
But, in any case, Awareness is the first step, and it is something you have to master to sell art.
You can see on the circle that generating awareness involves activities like posting on social media, running advertisements, entering contests (The BoldBrush contest is free), and in other public communities. PR activities would also fit here – having an article written about you, showing in a restaurant, participating in an art fair. Any activities where you can expose your work to people that have not seen it before can be used to generate awareness of your art.
Awareness is actually one of the hardest problems to solve. If you already have an Audience and True Fans, it’s much easier to make sales because you have a group of people who are already interested in your art and who want to support you. But awareness is a constant and ongoing activity you must keep up with to keep a new flow of potential audience members discovering you.
Doing all of these awareness activities is difficult, especially for one person. To achieve some leverage and help in generating awareness, look for ways you can AMPLIFY your efforts. For social media, this might entail getting friends, especially those with more followers than you, to repost your art, and engage with your posts to help them rank better in Instagram’s algorithm. You might ask existing buyers to refer their friends to a studio opening you are hosting.
While there are a number of ways to amplify your awareness efforts, they take work as well. But here’s one amplification activity that you can take that requires almost no extra effort on your part…..if you host your website with FASO Artist Websites.
While most website hosting companies won’t lift a finger to help show your art to their audiences, we do things differently at FASO. We believe that we are in this together. We think about nothing but helping artists and collectors connect. And unlike, even our competitors in the art space, we actually build channels to help amplify your efforts. While, yes, we do want to sell you a website, we want even more for you to sell your art.
One of our main channels for helping artists amplify awareness is called the DailyArtStream. Every time you upload a group of artworks, we automatically select one and we feature it in an email and on a website we call the DailyArtStream. We also promote the DailyArtStream in BoldBrush Magazine, which goes out daily to over 50,000 art lovers & collectors. We know of several collectors who purchase from these alerts, a couple of whom have purchased over 300 works of art primarily from FASO amplification channels. Artists write to us constantly to let us know a new piece has sold. In fact, here’s something that popped up in FASO’s integrated Art Marketing Center today, as I typed this: