My artist-mother has been involved in a variety of business ventures. She often says this: If you want to make it in the arts, you might want to study business while you perfect your craft. I decided to study psychology and forget about a creative career entirely. Ultimately, I ended up working a series of jobs that weren’t right for me. In 2020, I decided to write my way through a personal crisis. I sold one essay and then continued to publish. I had always preferred writing nonfiction to fiction, but I never knew enough about writing careers to identify that the type of writing that I was interested in was journalism.

But this accidental shift from writing about myself to writing about culture and technology led to a fulfilling and creative career that became my primary bread and butter. Somewhere along the way, thanks to the ever-blurring lines between marketing and communications, I became a marketing consultant because it turns out that people really like having journalists do their marketing.

But none of this would have happened if I hadn’t done two things:

Market myself as a writer
Understand the value of my expertise

So when I work with creatives on developing their marketing strategies, I draw from this experience of marketing myself. While creatives are natural marketers, they often don’t want to worry about the details of creating a strategy, developing brand goals, identifying appropriate channels for marketing campaigns, or dealing with anything related to money. But there are a lot of different approaches to marketing yourself as an artist while also focusing on doing what you do best: creating art.

In this article, I will offer a comprehensive guide to developing your marketing strategy as an artist.

Know your personal and professional brand

As an artist, your work is the product and you are, too. If you are a working artist creating a marketing strategy, you have probably developed a unique and recognizable style. But if you are working on your marketing strategy, it’s time to be able to identify and define that style.

What is a personal brand?

Harvard Business Review defines personal branding as “an intentional, strategic practice in which you define and express your own value proposition.”

Recently, I visited an interior design tradeshow where a collaboration between British-Nigerian artist Yinka Ilori was premiering a collaboration with the textile brand Momentum. Yinka has strong personal branding. His signature style is inspired by Nigerian textiles and patterns and he creates bold, colorful designs which have earned him the nickname, “the architect of joy.”

When I met Yinka at the Neocon tradeshow (Note: the Neocon tradeshow has been in existence for over fifty years and has zero ties to the neoconservative movement), he was wearing bold colors that perfectly matched the color palette of his art. Yinka the brand and Yinka the artist had an aesthetic consistency and blended perfectly like the fabric on which his work was printed.

How do I define my personal brand?

You can start by brainstorming and thinking about what you’re drawn to. I like to put my favorite photos or illustrations into a Canva design and write down the hex codes for the colors. When I created the branding for Springer Creative Associates, I wanted to a playful color palette with a pop art aesthetic But a brand is more than colors.

Your brand should be defined with your emotions, your skills and your stakeholders in mind. Once you’ve got an idea of your branding strategy, you can move to the next step.

Define your ideal client or customer

Your ideal client is the person who is most likely to be moved by and invest in your work. Often, I ask my marketing clients who their ideal clients are, and they reply “everyone” without skipping a beat. This is never the correct answer.

Your ideal customer is the person who gets the most value from your product. When you define your ideal customer, you need to consider who they are. How old are they? What do they do for work? What are their interests? How much money do they make?

Defining your ideal client or customer will help you avoid marketing your art to an audience that lacks enthusiasm or interest in what you do. You get the right eyes on your product, which creates a return on investment for your marketing strategy.

Identify the correct marketing channels

If you create art for neutral corporate spaces, your marketing strategy will be completely different from an artist who creates art inspired by comic books because your ideal client will likely be using different channels.

Your corporate client will probably be easier to find on LinkedIn and your pop art client will occupy spaces like Facebook or Instagram. So choosing the right channel for your marketing is going to be one of the most important things that you do as an artist who is looking to market your work. And if you create an artisan craft, you may want to consider Etsy or an e-commerce platform like Shopify. There are specialty platforms for photographers to sell their work. So they type of work you do and the people you want to reach are all going to affect where you want to market your product.

Have an easy-to-find portfolio or one-pager

There are many digital spaces where you can share your portfolio (and don’t forget to link your portfolio to any marketing channels that you use so that it can be accessed easily). If you don’t want to pay for a complicated website (and honestly, you probably don’t have to) you can use a site with an easy block editor like Squarespace, Shopify or Hubspot.

Many of these platforms are designed for or have e-commerce integrations to sell your products and additional customer relationship management (CRM) tools where you can continue to connect with and engage your audiences.

Network, network, network

Just like how I talk about human-centered marketing campaigns, remember that the world is human-centered. Building connections with people who are likely to know and refer you to your ideal clients can bring more success than any targeted digital marketing strategy. If there are local networking meetups for artists and professionals, go. Getting to know people can be one of the best ways to drum up business and open new opportunities.

I would not have found out about Yinka had I not been invited to attend the interior design show by a PR team — and I also connected with other journalists and found ways to tie a new subject (design) into my arts and technology beat. It can be tempting to stay in and stick with what you know, but getting into new spaces almost always opens up new opportunities and can inspire you to think in new ways.

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How to build a marketing strategy as an artist