 Well, you probably know by now that I love talking all things art marketing strategies. So this video, seven marketing strategies for 2023, it's not really going to come as any surprise. However, I've gone a little bit deeper and maybe a little bit more advanced with some of the strategies in today's video. Now don't panic if you're right at the beginning of your art marketing journey because I have a ton of resources to help you out, including my brand new online live masterclass art marketing 101, which is for total beginners, although so just not getting the results from marketing that they really want. This workshop gives you a solid base for your marketing and covers some of the following, the foundations of effective marketing, defining your ideal audience and that perfect customer, the key marketing strategies and tactics you need to be using, your core content and that content marketing routine. Completing your artist marketing plan and also creating a weekly routine. Now you're going to leave this workshop with a, a completed marketing plan and be a weekly routine that you can start using straight away to make those consistent sales so that you too can start to build a sustainable, enjoyable and profitable art business doing what you love. Now if you'd like to find out more about this workshop, then please check the link directly below this video. Now if you're watching this after February the 16th, 2023, when I'm going to be running this class live, I have the workshop recordings available for you to purchase directly as a product from my website. So again, check the link below this video where you can get all the details and purchase your workshop. Okay, let's talk marketing specifically those seven strategies to use for 2023. So here are some things to consider as you complete your marketing plan for the year. It's definitely not everything that you're going to be doing, but what I've tried to make is a mixture of some old, some new, some slightly different. So there's a little bit of something for everybody. And of course, we live in an ever-changing world where marketing is concerned, right? New trends, new ways of doing things. This is in, this is out. And my job is to provide you with the simplest and easiest strategies that I think are going to work really, really well for us creatives. Number one, focus on building your customer list. Now before you turn away and you think, oh my goodness me, I'm going to already know these seven strategies. I bet this is probably the only one that you're going to know. Why do I talk about this first? Because I talk about it all the time. You cannot build a successful business if you do not have your own mailing list. So this is really a reminder that the one thing you should be doing for this year is setting your core marketing goal as a list building goal. IE, how many people do you want on your list by the end of the year? That really is the simplest, easiest and effective marketing goal that you want for yourself. Now if you haven't got your mailing list set up and you're listening to this thinking, oh my goodness me, I've heard Sophie talk about it. I know I should be doing it. When you haven't got there, then I have just the video for you. Check out this video here. Why you should have a mailing list. That's going to give you a few benefits and overview of why you want to set up with a mailing list. And I'm also going to put links below to once you've got the mailing list, different ways and different strategies you can use to grow that mailing list. Number two out of our seven strategies for 2023. And that is influencer marketing. Yep, you're right. I haven't talked about this before on this channel at all, but I think I'm going to be talking about it quite a lot this year. So what do I mean by this? Working with micro influencers on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Your micro influencer might only have a few thousand followers. They might only have a few more thousand followers than you actually have right now. But what they will have is a super engaged audience. Now unless you're doing an incredible job out there on your socials, you might not have that right now. So here, the influencer that you choose to work with is going to promote your product or your service. And they're going to do so via a post. Could be a static post, could be a video. And that is going to be up to them how they decide to do that. That's going to work in one of two ways. You're either going to give them a free product or free access to the service or you're going to pay their fee for a post. And it's going to depend where you are, again, on your art marketing journey. If you're right at the beginning, you might be looking for that free exchange. So gifting a free product, if you're a 2D artist, you might gift a print, for example, or a small original, especially if you knew that influencer was going to get that post out in front of thousands of your ideal audience. Would you be prepared to gift something? I imagine you might be. All right, and if you're further along on your journey, then you might find someone that you can pay to post about your product or service. Now, like I just said before, you need to bear in mind that they will choose how they're going to do that. They're going to choose how to post it, whether it's an image, multiple images, whether they're going to make a video. They're going to choose the content of that and the description, the hashtags and all of those things. So you want to make sure that you do your homework and find the best possible and compatible influencer for you. Examples might be original artwork to an interiors brand or an artwork shop to an art materials brand or maybe some jewelry to an personality or somebody that you know and you really admire and ideally has the same values as you. Of course, you want to partner with the right brand for you, ideally staying the same niche and make sure that you have a clear goal for what you're going to be doing. But influencer marketing, it's already out there well and truly. And as artists, we should be using it and getting the maximum exposure we possibly can for our work. Now, let me know in the comments below whether you have used influencer marketing or whether you planned to add it to your marketing plan this year. Number three, user generated content. Now, this is probably a term that you may or may not have heard before. Sounds a bit techy, a bit dull. You might be saying, Sophie, what is that and how am I going to get on top of that? I don't really understand. Now, you will understand when I say, for example, you send a product to a customer, the customer makes a video of them opening the box and then they put that video on social media and tag you in it and they say something like, thank you so much to XX person for my beautiful, amazing, I don't know, t-shirt with artwork design on or my incredible art print that I'm putting up in my apartment. Now, that is absolutely fantastic marketing for you. You haven't had to create it, you haven't had to do it and it's actually endorsement. Your fans and your customers are putting out on their feed how much they love your product. So this content, of course, can be photos, can be video, could be simply reviews or testimonials. Anything that has been created by a customer or by a fan. Imagine when you've got a raving fan and they absolutely love your work. For example, if you're an artist who has designs over all sorts of products, they become a fan because they're buying it all, right? They've got your artwork on their phone cover, on their iPad cover, they're wearing your t-shirt, your trousers, your jacket. They've got your pencil case, they've got all the pieces on the go. They're a raving fan. Now, when they make a post or a video or they write a testimonial, everybody again is gonna be watching this person post. This is the outtake part. Hello, Gracie. How can you help in this video? Would you like to be on YouTube? Would you like to be an influencer? Gracie would like to be a YouTube influencer, I think. Is that right, darling? You're just gonna sit right there while I make this video, aren't you? And you're gonna sit really quietly. So simply ask and be surprised what content that your customers can come up with. Hello. Hello. We might have to just do the outtake bit in a minute. Somebody's really enjoying the videoing process. Number four, live. What do they say? Never shoot with animals or children. Number four, live video. Thank goodness this isn't live video because it would be more about the dogs than about the content. Now, we all know it, video is absolutely key. Video's been key for a really long time and it's even more so and it's gonna get more popular as time goes on. So if you're not providing any video content for your customers, I think now is the moment to make that change. Going live on your network to talk about your artwork or to provide a live demonstration, share your process or materials or talk about upcoming events and promotions. It's super easy for your customers to engage with. Imagine you're going live, you're talking about a workshop that you've got coming up, they ask a question, you can answer it then and there. They've got the answer. You can send them a link where they can book the workshop. I mean, how wonderful is that? Do you know the real benefit of live video? No editing, no uploading. Once you've gone live, that's it. You do need to do a little bit of preparation. You wanna think about what you wanna say, have a few bullets in front of you. So for example, obviously this is not live, this is pre-recorded. I try and treat it a bit like a live so although you'll see edits, I don't have huge amounts of edits. I do have an iPad in front of me with some notes of what I want to talk about. And when I stumble, I can stop and I can edit it out. But it takes a long time, right? Either for myself or somebody else to edit the video. It's a whole different process. Making a YouTube video can take a whole day or more whereas going live, you make the notes and really you press go live, all right? And if at the end of the day it wasn't such a great one, you're not so happy with it, you don't have to upload it to the platform, you can just go delete and nobody else will ever see it. Number five, short form video. So we're staying specifically in the video topic. Think about reels, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts. There are some form of reel or short which is effectively the same thing. Sort of 60 seconds, 90 seconds, short, short video. And on Instagram, sometimes the shorter it is the better, seven seconds, 10 seconds. It's something that's gonna stop somebody in the feed, right? They're looking, they're scrolling, they see something and they go press play and it just is there for a few seconds. And the idea is if it's shot really well it'll engage that person. They might wanna say, I want more content like this. Who is this person? I'm gonna click to the profile, they might follow you and they might look for more content like that content that they just saw. Now the caveat, although they might be 60 second videos they can take a little while to shoot a good engaging short or reel, right? You've got to plan out what it is you're gonna shoot. You might have to shoot multiple different places. Of course you can make them out of images. There's so many editing platforms out there that really it's a creative absolute dream. So if you love video, you love being creative you found a couple of apps that you want to use and then this could be a perfect strategy for you. I'm a little bit impatient. I'm not so great on the phone with editing short video. I've done a few but honestly it's not my primary thing. This teaching, training, talking a long form video it's much more where I feel in my zone of genius. And we all need to be there remember. Number six, interactive content. Now as an internet user, you probably come across interactive content all the time without really realizing that it is interactive content and B, it's a key marketing strategy. I'm talking quizzes, assessments, calculators, games, et cetera. If you want to increase your audience engagement grow that mailing list with a flood of new leads then what better way for example to use a quiz. So imagine you've got an online course or a workshop or you're an art teacher then you could create a simple quiz where are you on your artist's journey? People fill it out, they get all excited. I'm and you might give them each a different name the end say I don't know four or five stages that you might be at someone goes oh I'm at this stage and then it says you know at this stage the best thing for you is X, Y and Z. Perhaps of course leading to a course that you might have. It's an absolutely easy way to get somebody onto your mailing list and now they feel like they've engaged with you already. Or as a painter you might want to say what type of wall art suits you take our quiz to find out, you get the idea. And number seven, improved customer experience. Now I can't stress this enough. Marketing and sales are all about your customer. They're not about you. So in order to give someone the best possible experience we need to jump through a few hoops and you might listen to what I'm about to say and you might say oh guilty Sophie I really need to fix that all right. You're going to know it's you as I start going through this section. So first up you want to think about every single step or touch point that your customer has from the first time they meet you and they might meet you for example seeing an Instagram post or a Facebook post or a blog article and they've Googled or it might be a Pinterest pin. They've Googled the topic, they found a Pinterest pin so they click on the Pinterest pin that takes them to a blog article on your website and from there that might take them to other articles and it might take them to an email opt-in where they've now joined your mailing list. So at each touch point the customer has an option to continue or leave and this is going to be based on the customer experience and we are fickle humans. If we don't like something or it doesn't work properly or it doesn't look right, we're gone. You don't know how many customers or potential customers you could be losing through customer experience. So when your customers first engage with you and they take that customer journey with you and they're going to have a smooth, exciting, easy, brand-driven experience or are they going to stumble from one link to another that doesn't work properly, that has information missing and they're like, I'm out, I'm leaving. You know that broken link you've been meaning to fix for ages but somehow there's always more important things on your to-do list. Well, I've got to tell you if you are losing customers through that broken link you want to put that right to the very top of your list and bold it and get it done today. So why not pretend to be a customer and look at each of your touch points through customers' eyes? You could go and land on that Pinterest pin in our example and really look at it. I think, would I click? Is this Pinterest pin interesting? Would I now click forward? If I click forward onto the blog article, is it obvious? Does it load properly? Does it read properly? Are there things in there that are outdated that need to be taken out or updated? Have a look at every single point and really rate yourself honestly on what your customer might be going through at what point might they just jump off and leave. Now, of course, there are tools as Google analytic tools that you can install to actually be able to measure each one of those steps but let's not get too advanced here. For the moment, you're going to use your human eyes. You might even want to ask a friend, could you go through and give me honest feedback as to how you experience my website, my socials, my email sign up, all of the different steps a customer might take. If it doesn't all work, make some notes and fix it up, upgrade it. This is a great year to do upgrading and I promise you that all those potential visitors and possible customers that you've been losing are now going to stay and think how that's going to end up with more sales in the future. What if your customer journey leads people to the gallery page where they immediately leave because none of the gallery images work properly, there's no pricing, there's no information, nothing works properly, it doesn't look good, it doesn't show up on mobile properly. Make sure things are optimized for mobile and if you don't know how to do it, outsource. But remember, put it to the top of your list and get it done. So there we have it, the seven art marketing strategies you can use to grow your art business this year. And as I mentioned, if you're right at the beginner stages and you need to build your marketing foundations, then don't forget Art Marketing 101. Whether you're watching this right now in January when I've posted this video out or whether you're watching sometime in the future, you either have the opportunity to join the live workshop on February the 16th or to watch the replays have been created for you as a product. You can go ahead, jump ahead and purchase that and get stuck in straight away. As usual, if you've loved the content, don't forget to give me a thumbs up and consider subscribing to my channel so you never miss another video. Thank you so much for watching. Get stuck into the next video that's on the screen now and I'll see you on another one. Take care, bye-bye. Sit, sit, sit. No, no, no, no. You don't wanna be in the video. Trust me, Gracie. You can come over there. Over there, there we get. Now lay down.