5 Steps for Marketing Your Creative Work

By Dana P. Rowe, PCC, CPCC, CPQC

Every creative artist has their own audience, and while it varies from person to person, some basic guidelines can be followed when trying to reach out to your audience.

If you’re like most performers, writers, coaches, or artists who want their creative work seen by more people, then this blog post may be just what you need! I will outline five straightforward steps that will help guide you in the right direction for promoting your work so you reach more people.

Marketing for Creatives in the 21st Century

There are a lot of ways to market your creative work. You could go the old-fashioned route and try to get as many people as possible at your next performance or hand out flyers on the busy street corners. Or you could take advantage of today’s technology by creating an online presence with social media marketing. One thing is for sure – marketing has changed in recent years, it’s not as expensive a proposition as it once was, and new marketing opportunities are popping up all the time. Even so, it can be tricky to figure out how best to promote your work without wasting time and money on strategies that don’t work.

 

01 Find Out Who Your Audience Is

The first step is to find out who your audience is and how they like to communicate. It’s important to know what matters to your audience – their likes, dislikes, struggles, interests, goals, etc. Basically, anything that will help you connect with them on an emotional level.

Make sure you know what makes them tick – what’s important to them? What do they like? What don’t they like? What are their “pain points,” and how can you help them with those? Once you know these things, it’s much easier to tailor your messaging and style based on this information.

02 Know What Your Audience Wants

If you already have a few fans, clients, or followers, you’re ahead of the game because you can ask them questions directly.

You might create a questionnaire or ask questions in your online newsletter, or follow up with readers who leave comments on your blog posts.

Here are some questions to get you started that could give you ideas for creative work that would resonate with your market:

• What’s the single biggest result you want to have?
• What is important about that result for you?
• What are your biggest challenges?
• When it comes to your career or business, what do you want to change in the next 30 days? (You could create a workshop around this for your followers!)
• What sort of project would you like me to do next?
• More than anything, what would you like me to know?
• What are some video topics you’d like me to tackle?

Using Google Forms, you can create free questionnaires that can even collect their email addresses simultaneously for your mailing list – you know, for your newsletter where you announce your next project and sell merch. It’s a beautiful thing!

 

03 Target the Right Platforms for Your Message

It is important to make sure that you are targeting the right platforms for your message. Platforms can be social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where people will likely use them more often than they would their email or text messages on the phone. Or maybe you want to limit your platform to email or newsletters.

It’s a good idea to limit your efforts to only one or two platforms at the beginning. This will give you a chance to learn what works best and grow your market/following organically. It’s also vital to have a method to measure how effective each platform is at reaching new audiences with targeted campaigns.

All that said, if you aren’t growing at least one social media platform for your business, you could be missing out on lots of potential customers.

 

04 Engage, Engage, Engage

Once you what makes them tick, it’s much easier to tailor your messaging and create engagement.

What is engagement? For the sake of simplicity, engagement could be defined as ANY action you take on social media!

•  clicking

•  liking

•  sharing

•  tagging

•  commenting

•  reacting

•  sending Direct Messages

•  Searching

•  Expanding a post

•  Following a link

When your followers engage with you, it is a measure of how your message resonates with them. And the more you engage with them; the more likely your posts will end up in their social media feed.

Write articles and create posts based on what they want to hear and specifically what they’d like to hear from you. Speak directly to them, in the first person, using attractive headlines and images. Offer solutions that play off of their fears & hopes as well as speak to their values.

Share about the most important things to them and the things that will help them the most.

Here’s an easy formula for creating an engaging post: Make it personal – make it short – make it visual – make it simple.

People will respond more powerfully to personal things, something they can relate to, or inspire them to think about their lives. Things that are too long or boring typically don’t generate much response.

Short open-ended questions usually get the most response.

Take a moment and think about the last e-mail you got from someone who wanted you to buy something or from someone asking for your help. If it was longer than one or two sentences, you probably didn’t really read it.

Visuals are also important because people are visual creatures and respond to things better when they have pictures. They don’t need high-quality images, just something clean enough to see what the product looks like or how something works. They respond even more when you present the information simply like bullet points or numbered lists.

05 Be Consistent and Be Patient

The power of patience is undeniable. Spending time building a relationship with those who believe in you can turn into the best investment ever!

Building your online community takes patience, no matter how much social media content growth seems instantaneous on Instagram and Twitter. Like any other form of marketing or promotion work, it’s important to develop relationships by taking cues from what they enjoy about your product/service while also being consistent when communicating through different networks — they’re worth every ounce of effort spent because these people will likely be the source of life long loyal fans for you (especially if their needs are met).

People often say that people should never give up. Some may have different opinions on the topic, but one thing is for certain: You don’t know what you’re capable of until you try.

 

 

Where Will You Start?

Marketing your creative work is a process that takes time and strategy. As with any marketing campaign, the first step is to identify who you are targeting for the message. Once you have identified your audience, it’s important to know what they want from you to create content or products tailored specifically for them. Next comes engaging on platforms where these people congregate; if there are no groups of potential customers online at all, starting one may be necessary (which is a subject for another post entirely). Finally, consistency in posting updates about your artistry and connecting with followers personally helps build loyalty among like-minded individuals.

Conclusion

I hope this short post has given you some inspiration and motivation to start your own creative self-promotion journey.