All right, you’ve taken the time to find your niche and made a product that you not only love, but that fits the needs of your customers. You’re awesome! But now you need to share how awesome you are with your customers.
Sure, you could set up a Facebook page and a Twitter account and a blog. But just because you find your niche and create a page to reach out to those niche customers, doesn’t mean they will come (unless you have connections with baseball-playing ghosts). Promoting art involves getting into the minds of your customers and analyzing your site’s statistics.
Do you remember when you made the personality for your business? That same exercise can be applied to your customers when coming up with ways of promoting art. If you have been running your business for a while, you can ask your customers to fill out a survey to get their demographics and interests. If you don’t have any customers yet, you can create them. Make up three profiles that cover different types of customers. Say you sell feather fascinators. One of your customer types may be a bride in her mid-twenties, another a business woman in her thirties, and the third a fashion designer who makes vintage 1920s dresses.
Then figure out why they are buying. Is it for a big event? For a break from corporate wear? Or for their own business? Once you know who they are and why they’re in the market to buy, break down their demographics: age, gender, culture, location, education, income level, hobbies, etc. In the end, you should have three fully-fleshed out customer types to speak to when you're promoting art.
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After that it will be much easier to find your niche customers' favorite stores and places they go online. It’s these places where you want to put your product or ad. For fascinators, the local boutique shop is an obvious choice, but placing a flyer at the bakery will get the attention of a bride picking out a cake. Online, the fashion blogs are a great place for ads, but don’t forget photography sites (to catch the eye of designers and brides). Get creative and get into the mind of your customer. You can always investigate where your competition advertises to get more ideas.
Another invaluable piece of information is your own Google Analytics. Looking at the search terms people use to find your site can help you determine which keywords to put in your ads when promoting art, as well as your copy to increase SEO. (Caution: many crafters and artists will see a plethora of random search terms, including my favorite from Cabin and Cub: hot collage girls. Obviously some young men need a bit of spelling help, so this would NOT be a term you’d insert into your copy for collaged fire truck notebooks.) Google Analytics can also show you what sites people come from to reach yours, and if you aren’t already advertising on those sites, you should!
In the end, promoting art is a game of knowing your customers as well as they know themselves (if not better). Think outside of the box after you find your niche and grab their attention by catching them in all of their favorite hangouts. And above all, keep changing things up! Never settle for the marketing you have; you can always improve!
photo: fascinator by E. Milliner; photography by Stacy Able
