Marketing for Small Businesses in 52 Parts
Promotion for Art-Lovers
If you are one of the growing number of creators of art without an agent, then you will have to do your own promotion. This was the realisation that I came to three years ago, when I joined the not always so merry throng of indie writers and artists. Promotion is tough and must be relentless, because it is so often futile.
Why do I say futile?
Because a lot of people’s promotional activity leads to nothing. The first example of pointless advertising that springs to mind is throwing up dozens of adverts like ‘Read My Fantastic Book’ on Facebook. I shouldn’t think that Facebook has sold one book for me in three years. So why do people keep doing it? (Myself included), because it’s easy and gives the satisfied feeling that you’re doing something. To be fair to us, a lot of automated advertising produces these useless ads too. Everything cross-posts these days.
Put a good ad-post on Tumblr and it’s automatically cross-posted to Twitter and Facebook, further adding to the junk posts that are already there. Sometimes less is more, as the saying goes. Cheese someone off once too often and you are consigned to the ‘undesirable alien’ bin, yet one of these ‘posts too many’ could have been an auto cross-post.
That’s how it goes, something else to bear in mind.
That’s not to say that Facebook is a waste of time, it clearly isn’t, since many, many people equate using it as ‘going online’ or even emailing. However, it doesn’t sell artwork well, but Twitter does.
Don’t ask me why the promotion of books works better there – I’m not sure, but I think it’s because a Tweet is short so people expect to have to click through to read more, which is where your sales buttons are. Once on Facebook, people don’t want to go out into the wild Internet. Facebook is a safe environment.
One of my wife’s girlfriends complained bitterly for months that I was ignoring her online and not passing her messages on to my wife. So, one evening I got her to show me how she was emailing me. It transpired that she was entering my email address into her Facebook Status Field and writing her often lengthy message there.
And she is not alone by a long chalk.
I think that the average member of LinkedIn has a lot more knowledge of the Internet, but does that make them art-lovers? I have yet to find out, but it is the next task on my list how to use promotion more effectively.
All the best,
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Podcast: Promotion
