 Well, hello, this video is for you if you are an artist who's really struggling to market and sell your artwork online. You've created this amazing product, you've photographed it, you've listed it and then no sales can be really disappointing, right? Totally disheartening, sometimes even can make you feel like giving up. It's quite possibly the biggest challenge that artists face right now. But you're in luck because I'm going to be talking about six key online marketing strategies that I think are perfect right now to enable you to sell more of your artwork. And drumroll, it does not involve creating Instagram reels. In fact, it doesn't involve social media at all. Throw up the balloons, open the champagne cork, all right, hooray. These are good old fashioned strategies for marketing your art. Hello, welcome or welcome back to my channel, my name is Sophie and I help artists just like you to set up market and grow a successful profitable business doing what you love. Now if you'd like tips and tricks on how to grow that successful business, then you're in the right place because right here we do exactly that. So make sure to subscribe to my channel and of course hit that bell to get notified every time I post a new video. So now more than ever, you want to make sure that you have a crystal clear marketing strategy. That's not where you're randomly posting on socials with your fingers crossed waiting for a potential sale, right? This is where you have a marketing plan that sits alongside your business plan. Yep, I did say the business plan and the marketing plan. If you haven't done the business plan, make sure to check out this crucial video here and get that done. You see everything you're going to be doing now on, you've created the product or service and you now need to market it. Everything you're going to do from this point is simply follow the plan. The plan is going to outline who your audience are and if you're not sure about that, then I've got a video below here that's going to help you with that as well. It's going to work out who your audience are, the chosen sales platform that you're going to putting your listings on and then how you're actually going to get in front of that audience and let them know these listings exist. And of course, then how you're going to make them a fantastic offer that they can't refuse and they're going to buy your work. So today I'm going to share six key online strategies that you can use right here, right now to start moving things towards making sales, getting that audience in front of your listings. And the first one I'm going to say is ads. It's a paid for strategy. Now, very often I talk about free versus paid for. Should you be paying in order to market your artwork? And you might say, well, it's cost me X amount to make the artwork. And now you're telling me I've got to pay for ads in order for people to see it. And what I want to say is, look, you're running a business. You're going to pay any which way, right? If you put it in a gallery or on a third party site, they're going to do the marketing for you and they're going to take a percentage. Now, if you're going to be doing the marketing, you're going to have to spend some money on a marketing budget or you're going to have to allow a lot of time to do a lot of organic marketing, which definitely can be done, but this is a much faster and easier route. So online ads, whether that's Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest ads, YouTube ads, LinkedIn, I think, Twitter, TikTok, any of the platforms or whether it's Google ads. OK, what's the difference between all those social media ads and Google ads? There's a huge difference, right? One can be much more powerful than the other when done correctly. So imagine all your social media ads. We've all seen ads, right? We've all seen things pop up on the Facebook feed or Instagram or amongst your lovely Pinterest pins, wherever you are, there's going to be ads being served up to you. So imagine now that you are the customer, you are somebody that might buy art. So on a social media platform, you're looking for something else and some art shows in the feed and it either grabs your attention or it doesn't because you weren't looking for that at that point. You were just scrolling, spending time on Instagram, for example. And then there's some artwork and you're like, well, I'm interested in art, that could be interesting, but they weren't looking for it as opposed to Google. What happens is the customer, I'm looking for some abstract artwork. I'm looking for, I don't know, abstract landscape of a particular place. I've typed that into Google, some ads pop up that look pretty much exactly what I'm searching for and I click on that thing and I'm taken to that product and I go, well, that's pretty lovely. That's pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I'm going to buy that then. Do you see the difference? So one is based on somebody is searching for it and that's a response to the search on, say, social media. You are just putting your ad out to the target audience in hope that they might be interested in buying it. Do very, very different things. So it's up to you which strategy you use or whether you use both. The ads are really powerful. You can choose the audience, you can choose your budget, you can choose how long it's going to run and of course you can choose what you're actually going to send the ads to, what the ads are actually going to be for. It might be if you run workshops, for example, and you have online listings for courses or workshops, it might be a freebie, some information. If you've got original art, you might say, well, I've also got some prints. Perhaps I'll make a print offer. Hey, grab this 50% off this print. When they go to the print, they realize, oh, did you know you can also buy the original, original still for sale. It could just be that you give someone the opportunity to join your mailing list and then you're going to email from there. So there are different types of ads but ads right now, 100%, you want to be thinking about doing those. And then number two, I've already mentioned it, it's email. Email is the glue that holds your art business together, all right? You need to be building a list of people who are potentially interested in what you have to buy. And you're going to be doing that on an email marketing platform. I have a load of videos, thank goodness, on how to do that. So check out this one, I'll get you started on building your mailing list right here and I'll put links to others as well below this video. So building a mailing list of people who said, yes, please, I would like to hear from you on an ongoing basis until a point in the future where I unsubscribe. This is really important, all right? And this means every time you have a new launch or say you perhaps, for example, supposing you have an online store and you have a new collection of prints or you have some print on demand products, you've listed these brand new listings and rather than them just sitting out there and you waiting for something to happen, you can email your list and say, hey, I'm really excited. I've got this new collection that I've just listed on my website. Have this discount voucher and go shopping now. It happens everywhere else. Why do we think it's gonna be any different for us artists? I often wonder that. All right, number three, well, you're watching it, all right, YouTube. So YouTube is really, really powerful. Why? Because it's a search engine. So remember when I described Google ads over kind of Facebook or social media ads? This is it, YouTube is a search engine. So somebody is looking for information or how to do something on YouTube, right? So I might think to myself, oh, I'd really like to learn a new art technique, for example, where am I gonna go? I'll go to YouTube because I like videos and I'll type into YouTube search. I'm interested in, I know, urban sketching, latest thing. And then a whole load of videos will be popping up as suggestions for me to watch. Now, obviously this is gonna depend on what you do, but actually, even if you're selling originals, you can make videos talking about those originals, put them on YouTube. See, a lot of people like video. And as we know, social media favors video. We know that generally people prefer video, right? It's short, it's sweet, it's easy, it's digital. I can watch it, I can watch it in the office with the sound off. I watched some of the other day on the train just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through all these videos and I thought, this is really interesting. He had the sound off and he was just looking for something that caught his eye. So videos, super, super powerful. You can build up an audience of subscribers and you can also ask those subscribers to join your mailing list and so the whole thing kind of fits together. Did you know there's 122 million daily active viewers on YouTube? If that's not a big enough audience, then I don't know what is. Now, of course, the consideration for any of these strategies is whether your audience is gonna be there. So if you've worked out that your audience loves to watch video and you think that what you can do with your business, you can make videos around what it is that you do, then YouTube has gotta be considered as a really powerful marketing tool. Number four, Pinterest. We've spoken about it before and if you want to know a little bit more about Pinterest, check out this video. Pinterest is wonderful. It is also a search engine. It still is in that gray area of a social media platform. For me, it's not really a social media platform. We don't go on there to chat and have a conversation. We go on there to search for things to search for things that are inspiring, things that we'd like to own, things that we might like to buy down the track, information that we'd like to gain. We go on there to gather and pin things to our boards, all right? If we are the user. Now, if you're the person with the Pinterest account, then obviously you're the person providing that content. Now, Pinterest is a phenomenal traffic source, all right? It sends lots and lots of traffic to your website, to whatever online sales platform that you have. So by having a Pinterest account by actively using it, you've got a really nice and easy way to send viewers over to your website to find your online listings. And yes, you might say, well, Sophie, there's quite a bit of work to creating all those pins, isn't there? And don't I have to pin an awful lot quite regularly? Yes, you do. But if you knew that making those pins and pinning those pins regularly, and by the way, we have a great tool that we use called Tailwind. And you can get a free starter below. There's a link below here where you can give it a go for yourself for a while. And let's see if you like it. It's an awesome scheduler. It does Instagram and Pinterest. That I use it for Pinterest and I love it. So by having a scheduling tool to help you, it's not taking so much time. But if you knew that by doing all that work, you were going to get loads and loads of people looking at your listings, and then you were going to make sales, wouldn't you want to do that? That would be my question, right? Now, and you have to weigh it up. What would you rather do? Create and pin a whole load of pins that are going to send traffic to your website or post on some social media and have a conversation. Now, I'm not saying anything against social media at all, but definitely the algorithm is changing. Definitely on Instagram. And I think Facebook, that happened a long time ago. You want to stay ahead of the curve, all right? You want to be in the places where people are looking and shopping. And we know from the stats on Pinterest that they're not just looking and saving, they're also shopping. So again, why would you not use that platform even if there's a little bit of work involved, all right? All right, the next one, blogging. Now, this again is a firm favorite for me. I definitely started out blogging back in the day and I still think it's a phenomenal online strategy. Is it an overnight quick win? No. Could you get quite a quick result with running some ads? Yes. So blogging is going to be, again, more your medium to long-term burn. But I promise you, it's a really great strategy if you know that your audience likes to read information. All right, so there's a few things that you can do. Obviously, if you've got your own website and you want to have the blog attached to the website, writing and creating a regular blog means there's fresh content going on your website and Google is going to love the fact that you're updating that website often, all right? Really important. But of course, also let's look at some of these other things we're talking about. If you write a blog, you could then create some pins on Pinterest and send people to look at that blog and then while they're on that blog, you can link it to other blogs. People stay on the website and then you could make a suggestion that they look at your shop. And then when they're looking on the website and they're looking at the shop, they might make a purchase. So you see how the whole thing fits together, all right? And my next tip then is SEO. No, please don't turn off, it's super important. It might be a little bit geeky, but it's really, really important. And unless you're going to outsource it, again, it doesn't cost you anything. So only one of these strategy is paid for. Everything else technically is a free strategy, of course you can use tools that are going to enable you to do the whole thing quicker so there could be a little bit of your marketing budget going to those. And SEO, definitely something you probably want to outsource. But let's just give you the bigger picture. So search engine optimization. This is going back to what I said at the beginning. Really want to get in front of people who are already looking. People who are looking to buy what you have are the people that you really want to get in front of, right? As opposed to people who are just spending time online or even worse, they're looking for something over here. You know what I'm really trying to do is buy a bookcase for my bedroom. But I'm having these ads pop up that tell me that I might want to buy this painting. Now I might want to buy this painting, but right now I'm on a project to make my bedroom look great and I want this bookcase. Whereas, you know, if you're actually looking for the painting and you're on Google or you're on YouTube or Pinterest or you're looking for the painting and that result pops up. It's like, oh great, that's exactly it. You know, that's great. That's what I'm looking for. And I really hope that this really, this is the main point. If you walk away from this video, understanding this concept, I think what you do moving forward with your business will be much, much more powerful and you're going to get the results that you deserve. So there's a few things that you're going to need to do to optimize your website. So what does that mean? That means using what we call keywords. So that's that phrase that somebody might be putting into Google or YouTube or Pinterest to find what they're looking for. So you need to do a little bit of keyword research, find out what those terms are and then make sure those terms are on your website, in your blogs, in your videos and in the content of your website. Of course, there's quite a lot to SEO and I'm not here to teach that today, but I do teach that actually in my membership. So if you are seriously at this point looking to build your art business and you're watching this video and you're thinking to yourself, this is great. I really feel like I need some help with all of this. Then I just want to wave a quick flag for my Art Business Academy membership. There's a link below this video that will take you to an information page. And if time of watching, then if the doors are closed, you can get on the wait list, but sometimes we open the doors and it will tell you the doors are open and you'll be able to join. So the membership is an ongoing membership where I provide new content and Q&As and group coaching and ongoing support with building your art business. There's a lot of amazing content in there. One of the trainings is a full 30 minute SEO training with exactly how to optimize your website or third party sites so that you can be found in search by your audience. So again, if that's something you're interested in, then grab a link below this video and find out more. All right, so I hope you've really enjoyed those tips today. Like I said, the one main takeaway really is understanding the difference between randomly posting things online and actually being very strategic and showing up in places where people are already looking. So I hope you've really loved this content. If you want to dive deeper into marketing, I say there's links to videos below this one. So let us know what your key takeaway. If you've watched this video and you've learned something new, which we hope you have, please let me know in the comments below and say, hey, Sophie, I really loved this particular thing or I've really worked this out because my aim is to help all of you to get the results that you want, right? And so we're gonna do whatever it takes to get you there. So thank you so much for watching today's video. Make sure to keep going on the marketing trail and watch more marketing videos below this one and I'll see you on the next one.