Focus on Your True Fans
Art Marketing Circle V - Your True Fans
We’re continuing our members-only series outlining our Circles of Art Marketing framework. If you’re a new member, or missed what we covered previously, I recommend you catch up on the series at the following links:
Art Marketing Circle I - The Sovereign Artist
Art Marketing Circle II - Your Art
Art Marketing Circle III - Turn Your Art Into a Product
Art Marketing Circle IV - Sales
Alright, with that out of the way, let’s take a look at Art Marketing Circle V - Focus on Your True Fans
What artists, what you can learn is one of the core principles in the Circles of Art Marketing: that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your collectors - your best collectors.
But, to maximize this strategy, you need to engage with your best collectors and prospects personally. You need to make them feel special. Remember what I said about the wine dinners? You just have to be "in the know." That makes people feel special.
Before you send an announcement of a new group of your artwork or upcoming show to your entire list, contact your best prospects personally.
Go through your contact list and ask yourself, "which people will most likely be interested?"
Then you will contact each one of those people personally and via the channel that they prefer. That means that each person will get at least one of the following types of communication from you.
A personal phone call
A personal text
A personal email
A personal social media direct message
A face-to-face invitation
Communicate with these people and share an image of the piece you think they'd like with a short message - "I think this is the one you've been waiting for - would you like to see it in person?"
Communicating properly requires knowing what artworks and what channel work best for each person. And that’s why you need a Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) like we covered when we discussed the “Sales” circle.
In a world full of noise and spam, text messaging people who you know personally can be extremely effective.
For those people whom you don't feel comfortable texting - send them a personal email. Not a newsletter. You will make them feel special that you reached out personally, and they will feel doubly special a few days later when they get the newsletter and realize that you took the time to contact them first. Personal emails have the huge advantage, from a metrics standpoint, of having substantially higher open rates and being much less likely to end up in a spam folder.
So what I recommend is this: When you have a new group of artworks, call, text and personally email your very best and closest collectors and followers. Give them a bit of time to respond, then announce your new work to your VIP mailing list, and a little after that to your full mailing list.
At that point, and only at that point, you can also post it on social media and any other channels you normally utilize.
We will be discussing how to move people into your True Fans circle in the next section, but I encourage you now, if you don’t already have a written list of who’s in your “True Fans” to sit down and take fifteen minutes and list everyone who has purchased your art, who has taken a class, and who has been such a loyal supporter in other ways that you would consider them indispensable to your art business.
That finishes up Art Marketing Circle V (True Fans). We will finish up the last two circles after the first of the year. Starting next week, and continuing through the holiday season, we will be running some special edition newsletters. Some of them pertain to the holidays, some are guest posts, and some we will re-run our best pieces from the past couple of years for those of you who missed them. If I don’t communicate with you sooner - Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Creatively,
Clint Watson
BoldBrush/FASO Founder
Art Fanatic
Apostle of Creativity
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