Considering Digital Marketing As An Artist

On the Patch website, Robert Henry writes a short but comprehensive article about artists wanting to be seen and heard. His solution is to consider digital marketing as a way to boost a career, describing it as using “an online realm as a tool for advertising”. Artists should start with a plan and a basic knowledge of what marketing themselves online actually involves.

SEO Skills, Keywords and Tags

The first skill mentioned is search engine optimization, and a core understanding of keywords and tags. Knowing who your art appeals to, and the search terms they would use, is where it starts. First-page results matter, because only a small proportion of people go beyond them.

Social media and video sites use those tags to help the work get found — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube among them — and there are plenty of other metrics worth watching for extra visibility.

The example given is the term “pencil drawings”, and Robert walks through what happens in that scenario. Posting regularly on social, and deciding what to post so that visitors actually engage with the work, is the other half of it.

Interesting as it is, there is probably too little there for someone to start a digital marketing campaign in Vegas or anywhere else. Social media does make sense, since it costs so little beyond time. But an SEO campaign is not cheap in any niche that delivers real traffic, and a search term as broad as “pencil drawings” is far too vague to build on.

Does The Customer Need Educating First?

Another thing to consider with online search is whether the customer needs educating before they search at all. Put better: what kind of pencil drawing are they looking for — what size, what subject? They are far more likely to search for something long-tail, such as “pencil drawing Las Vegas strip”.

Then there are the marketplaces. Millions of people use eBay every day, and it can be a huge showcase for artwork, provided people can find what you are selling.

There are also the more visual networks such as Pinterest and Instagram, which centre on images and have a large following among artists and photographers alike. Marketing online also means the target audience can be worldwide, never mind local to Vegas.

A short article, then, but hopefully enough to get your teeth into and set the brain thinking about selling art through the internet.