The Circles of Art Marketing - Part IV
Building and Nurturing Your Audience
This article series is designed to give artists a strong framework to anchor their online art marketing efforts. If you follow this framework, your goals for social media, for email, for your website, for each thing that you do online will become crystal clear. It will help you stop floundering or guessing or trying “a little of this and a little of that” and get you on the right track to convert followers into fans and fans into customers.
If you are just joining us, I suggest you catch up on the earlier articles in this series:
OK, let’s dive into today’s topic which is the Audience circle…
As a provider of professional artist websites, the most common question we are asked at FASO is "How do I drive traffic to my website?"
I understand why people ask this question, but it's misguided. It’s the wrong question. Let’s ask the right one: what they really want to know is "How do I use my website to sell art?" Which requires something rather different than "driving traffic."
You don't sell art by driving traffic. You sell art by building an audience.
And in the same way that noise isn't music, driving traffic is not building an audience.
In this section, we’ll walk you through what it means to build an audience.
The goal at the audience stage is to get members to join your inner circle by either purchasing from you or becoming such a loyal promoter of you that they actually become part of your marketing.
Let’s start by defining your audience.
Your audience is the group of people who know who you are and love what you do enough to give you permission to communicate with them in channels that you control. Your Inner Circle, discussed in the previous section, is part of your audience, but your audience is larger and includes people who have not purchased from you. You want to interact with your audience through channels that you own. And there are only a few online channels that you can own. They are:
Your newsletter & blog
Your website
An online community
A podcast
Using these channels, and perhaps others both online and offline, you will communicate and draw your audience further and further into the story about your art. You will send a regular email newsletter letting your audience know about new artworks and exhibits. You will share stories about what inspired you to create those new works. You’ll direct them to your website to see and purchase your works.
An artist typically thinks their marketing funnel looks like this:
1. Drive “traffic” to your website
2. ????????
3. Somehow they signed up for your newsletter
4. ????????
5. Sales!
The problem is that you think that your art marketing funnel starts with your website. In reality your art marketing funnel ENDS with your website.
The real funnel looks more like this: