Marketing Your Event

Following on from my last blog post, Opening Your Studio to the Public, this post looks at ways to market your Open Studios Event.


If you are taking part in a wider Open Studios Event then most of your marketing will have been done for you. You will be featured in their brochure with information about your studio and where to find you. And, if you are lucky, yours might be the featured artwork for their flyer. All this information should be on their website too with links to your website and a short profile about you. To see an example of this go to York Open Studios. 


BUT you will not be the only artist that the event organisers are promoting so if you want to drive more visitors to your studio door you can tempt them in with a marketing campaign of your own. 

North Yorks Open Studios

What's in it for them?

You may want to offer a little "sweetener" or discount to every person who buys something from you at the event but don't leave it too late to tell them about the offer. If your Open Studio Event has an official flyer or brochure you can attach your own flyer offering a discount or free gift to every visitor - provided they bring the flyer with them.  The discount might be offered on purchases over £50 or £100. Post out or give the flyers out to everyone on your customer database, friends, family and anywhere that you place your paper advertising.


Reaching Wider Audiences
Your event organiser will probably be using Facebook and Twitter to promote the event, updating their blog and even posting in a Linked In group. If you have a Facebook Page make sure that you "like" their page and ask them to "like" yours. Set up a Facebook Event  and invite all your friends, making sure that your avatar image shows you or your art. Post regular updates about the event and add links to the official website.  Check out your event organiser's Twitter, if they are using a hash tag make sure you add it to every tweet you send about the event, this will make yout tweets more prominent.
Electronic marketing is fabulous and costs nothing but time. this type of marketing is possibly more effective than printed information as it can reach a wider audience. If you have a customer email database then setting up an event on Evenbrite and sending out an E-flyer on Mailchimp makes you look highly professional and you can add images too. Evenbrite will send out reminders to your customers a week before the event and even jog their memories a day before the event if they have booked on-line. 

Suffolk Open Studios 2012

Make Yourself Memorable
Even if the visitor didn't make a purchase at your Open Studio Event you will still want to give them the opportunity to keep in touch and find out about your new work in the future. A prominently placed Visitors Book (with a pen) will give the public the opportunity to feed back about your work and studio. If it is accompanied by a sign that says "Do you want to subscribe to our newsletter? Please leave your details" this will remind them to write down their email or postal address. Also, if you haven't started a customer database this may be the time to start one. 
Keep in touch - send a short email or letter thanking them for visiting your studio, or for saying nice things about your work and personally invite them to your next event. But don't overdo it - everyone who signs up to a database has the right to be removed from it too. 


So all that remains is for me to wish you every success at your Open Studios Event. If you found this post helpful or you have anything to add please use the Comments Box. 

Keep In Touch

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Design Social

DesignSocial >> 52 Projects >>52 Weeks

"Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and the pupil are the same individual" - Arthur Koestler

I am Andrea Eaton, a twenty-something South African creative based in London. DesignSocial is my creative project for 2010.
Over the next year I plan to complete 52 separate creative projects in 52 weeks. DesignSocial was inspired by a 2009/2010 course offered at Central Saint Martins “100 Design Projects” and, from what I understand, its core concept is exercising and diversifying creativity. I have morphed this idea into a project of my own which I hope will also help to broaden my own creative horizons.
I have invited friends, family, colleagues and creative peers to submit briefs from which I will select projects for each week of the year to follow. Each effected project will be displayed on the DesignSocial blog alongside its original brief and notes on how I devised each concept.The project is intended to be social and fun, with 'pretend' briefs that may or may not include real companies/events/situations etc. As a freelancer, it’s not in my interest to do 'real work' for free through the DesignSocial challenge, but my aims here are to learn, to inspire, and to share my findings along the way. I try to encourage other creatives to submit ideas for projects that they themselves would love to work on.
Having received some interesting and challenging briefs so far, I am still hoping for more submissions during early January 2010, after which I hope to have at least secured a schedule for the first few months of the year.

Support the DesignSocial challenge by submitting your own creative brief! I also encourage anyone who is keen, to join me in tackling these briefs - I will gladly display any creative work submissions alongside my own - I think it would be great to share ideas and outcomes!

In the words of the late, great Paul Arden, "Do not covet your ideas. Give away everything you know and more will come back to you".

For more information please visit the DesignSocial website: www.designsocial.co.uk , or email Andrea on: emaildesignsocial@gmail.com
Follow DesignSocial on Twitter: @DesignSocial52 and join the DesignSocial Facebook group.

Making Twitter Work for You

Twitter is pointless - or so it seems. Thousands of people typing 140 character messages about everything and anything. And who WANTS to read about someone-you-have-never-met's allergies, what their cute pet did today or how much they hate (insert politician's name here)? BUT like all social networking tools you CAN make Twitter work for you. The secret to using Twitter to promote your art is Quality not Quantity.




Firstly, are you following a gazillion people but, in comparison, only being followed by a fraction of that number?
Secondly, do you ever get a direct response to anything you say on Twitter or does your message get lost in the river of everyone else's tweets?
Thirdly, are you reading other people's tweets and thinking "well why do I care?"

It's time to organise your Twitter.
Firstly, you need to do some weeding out and stop following people who are not following you. Personally, I only follow four famous people - they are never going to read my tweets anyway. Unfollow all those people whose tweets you are reading but are not reading yours. They probably won't notice anyway.
Secondly, remove all those people who are following you that you probably wouldn't really want a relationship with such as people who bombard you with links with every tweet, people who make political statements that you don't agree with (block those) and people who offer to increase your followers if you sign up to their sites.*

*Once you sign up with this type of site you will be unwittingly displaying their promotional tweets too.

How do you do sort through all these people quickly and efficiently? Friend or Follow.com Type in your Twitter name and go to Following. Click on each avatar and start unfollowing.

Thirdly, sort through your Fans on the Friend or Follow site. These are people who are following you but you are not following them. Click on each avatar and decide "Do I want to follow this person"? If not you have a choice - ignore them or block them. If you DO want to follow them click Follow (duh) and send them a Direct Message.

Now you have given your Twitter account a spring clean it's time to start afresh. Direct Messaging (DM) is your opportunity to send a personal message to your followers and begin a personal relationship with potential customers or like-minded people. for every new person who follows you send them a Thankyou and Welcome to... message. If they send you a similar kind of message respond with a simple message back.

Your Twitter Homepage Have you added your own personal background? Does it reflect you or what you do? If you make art then set your images as wallpaper or create a logo or a cartoon. Update your Bio with a direct profile about what you do and add a link to your website, blog or shop.

Sorting out your Followers It would be very short sighted of you to only accept followers who are artists. Everyone is a potential customer/friend/collaborator unless they are "hard sell" merchants (people who bombard you with links but don't actually interact on Twitter). But let's say you have something of interest that only a proportion of your followers would be interested in, for example - a local event? Well clever Twitter has now added a new tool for you to use - the List. Sort your followers into lists and use your list to DM them (after all, if you have 22,330 followers, like Green Day * has, you can't physically DM all of them at once).

*I'm not jealous...

Tweeting Think about the types of tweets you are posting - are you just continually sending out links (look at me! look at me!) or do your tweets have a more human aspect to them? Nobody wants to click on a link and see EVERY piece of art you have ever made - although they will look from time to time - but they do enjoy a humorous tweet. Keep your tweets friendly and imagine you are talking personally to a real person. Each message is only 140 characters long but don't let that limit you in what you want to say. You can post several tweets in a row to keep the story going and say exactly what you want to say. If your website address take up too much space in your tweet then go to TinyURL.com and reduce the size of the URL.

Links to your Twitter So, in conclusion, there is only one purpose to Twitter which, like all social networking, is to drive traffic to your website, blog or shop. This means you should add a link to your Twitter on your Facebook page, Facebook Group, blog, website, on-line shop and anywhere else you can think of.

If you have found this blog post useful please follow me on Twitter and tweet about it too!

Social Networking For Artists

There is a plethora of social selling sites available for artists to showcase their work and most, unlike eBay, target a specific audience. If you are not familiar with social selling sites, and I'll hazard a guess that this is the minority, then take a look at Etsy, Folksy, Dawanda, Misi, Coriandr and Artfire. (Please add any that I have missed to the comments).

But, if you choose to sell on these types of sites you are not going to make many sales unless you are willing to invest some time in building up relationships - that's the "social" side of these sites. I recently delivered a seminar on internet selling and listed the different ways you can draw people to your on-line shop - Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo, My Space, Flickr, Indiepublic, blogging.... did I miss any? I looked at the faces of my audience and about 20% were looking at me as if to say, Wha'....? Exactly. If you are not prepared to invest some time in promoting your on-line business then social selling is not for you, and there's no shame in that.







But blogging is, in my opinion (feel free to disagree) the second most effective way to drive traffic to your on-line shop or website. The first is to build relationships in the forums of the selling sites. People like to read insights into the person behind the business and look at colourful images, find out how things are made, share experiences. The only down-side is thinking about what to type - but this comes with practice, the more you talk about the easier it becomes to think up new stuff.


A short guide to Blogging
What is a blog? A blog is a free internet site that gives you the opportunity to publish your own words. Most people will use a blog as an on-line diary but it can also be used to promote, sell, discuss, campaign, moan and publicise. It is used by a whole range of people including journalists, political groups, media groups, social groups, subversive groups, idiots and well dodgy people!

What makes a blog? People out there in cyberspace create blogs for hundreds of reasons. Take a look at these examples I picked at random:

Pamela Angus
Kerala Life and Thoughts
Dolphin & Whale News

Some blogs are so specialist that only a tiny minority will ever read them whereas others are global and have a huge following. But blogs have one advantage over websites – they are free. Although it has its limitations a blog costs nothing but time. You don’t have to pay someone to host it, design or update it and you are not limited to how much you can post on your blog.

Creating a blog. There are several blog businesses out there but I am only familiar with Blogger so I can only help you with this particular site. As Blogger was bought by Google you will need to create a Google account using your own email address. Google accounts, like Yahoo, are free and you can receive and send email with your Google (Gmail) account. First log onto Blogger

and there will be a screen to help you set up the account. Next Blogger will take you through the step by step process of creating your blog. Before you create your blog think about the following practicalities:
Title.
Introduction.
Profile.
Links.
Advertisements?
Slideshows?
Apart from the name of your blog address, which you cannot change, anything else, including the title, can be altered, updated and deleted by you. Don’t like the font? You can change it. Background? Change it. Which colour would you like to choose for your text, background, links, headings, subheadings, borders, side bar titles etc? Blogger can do it.

Does and Don’ts of Posting. Once you have set up your blog you are ready to start posting. Here are some tips about making entries to your blog.
- Do insert at least one image for every post. Blogs about artists for artists are boring without visuals.
- Do check your spelling – typos make poor reading.
- Do avoid writing anything slanderous or libelous. They can get back at you by bombarding you with comments and dissing you on their own blogs.
- Please respect the copyright laws as it is easier for “copiers” and plagiarists to be discovered. People WILL and DO sue!
- When posting images of your work protect your intellectual property rights by adding “The images (or paintings etc) are the sole property of the artist. Please respect the artist’s copyright”.
- Do add links to your posts and also on the side bar too. By swapping links with others you will increase your visibility on the web.
- Do not use profane language or your blog will be blocked from some sites.
- Use the tags for each post wisely because search engines pick up on them therefore tags are a useful tool.
- Decide whether you want viewers to be able to comment on your blog. You can set the comments so that you can check them for suitability before you publish them.

Blogging Extras. Now you have a blog who is going to read it? Well no-one unless you tell them about it. There are a gazillion blogs out there floating in cyberspace but only a fraction are read. You need to find ways to get your blog noticed and, once noticed, to keep a balance of first time viewers and return visitors.
Consider the following: who do you WANT to read your blog? Why do you want them to read it? Where will you find these people?

Working on the basis that publicity is FREE and advertising is what you PAY for I have the following suggestions:
Registering with Search Engines – it can take up to six months for a search engines, such as Google, to pick up your site. There is a site that will add you to all the search engines Dogpile.

Joining Chat Rooms and Social Networking Sites – specialist sites, such as Indiepublic, are useful tools to promote and meet other artists. They are also time consuming.
Blog Group sites – such as Bloggernity and My Zimbio are social networks for bloggers. You will be able to view all sorts of arts and gallery blogs. They will be able to view you too.
Art Listings sites – such as Axisartists and The Saatchi Gallery are useful for free publicity.
Gallery websites and artists’ websites – ask if they will add you as a link if you add them as a link.
Business cards and articles for newspapers and magazines, both on-line and hard copy, will increase your exposure.
Advertising – you can add Google Adsense to your site. It is free but it takes Google some time to pick up what your site is about. Then they will paste ads on your site for galleries or art suppliers. Each time someone clicks on them from your site will increase your exposure. If you get enough clicks and then set up an account, you could get paid too! But there is no such thing as a free lunch – you have to pay a fee for payable Adsense and it can prove costly.
Site Counters – Bravenet will give you a site counter for free. It is a very useful tool to help you measure the number of views you received daily and can also break it down into new and returning visitors. If you just get the basic counter you don’t need to pay for extras.

This article is the sole property of Jo Whitehead. Please respect the author’s intellectual rights. Do not copy or reproduce this article in any format.