Advertising Your FAA Artistwebsite

Advertising Your FAA Artistwebsite (Premium Account or Website)

The purpose of this article is to address the needs of the artist on FAA trying to balance their time between creating their art and selling it.

You simple cannot do it all. Not effectively.

When is enough, enough and maybe too much? One of the biggest mistakes that I see FAA members doing is advertising with no advertising plan what so ever. They think that all they have to do is post a few times to Facebook or Tweet here and there and that's it. Or they are out there thinking they have to be on everything. Total market saturation. Neither one is the right way to go.

There are a lot of ways of advertising your FAA artwork. But in order to do that you first have to understand something about basic advertising.

Advertising on the net is not totally different then advertising main stream media. But it is different. The vehicles you use are obviously different but the basic concepts are the same. You have to reach the market place and prospective buyers with your product in a way that is most likely to give you results.

Let’s look at the different vehicles we see most often used by successful sellers on FAA.

Facebook is probably the number one, with Twitter number two. Then you have all the rest of the social media including G+, LinkedIn, About. Me and on and on. Equate those to off the net adverting vehicles like TV, radio, newspaper, billboards, etc, etc. Put these aside for a minute because, for the purpose of this discussion we are not going to use them to promote your AW on FAA but we are going lean form them.

Now let’s talk about the different approaches. To keep this as simple as possible, let's look at two different approaches to adverting.

First there is Direct Advertising or Target Marketing or Market Specific. Someone reinvents a new name for it every year or so, but it is still the same thing that it has been for 200 years.

Then you have Institutional Advertising, Generic, Top of the Mind Awareness and again all the new names people have come with.

I am assuming you have at least a basic understanding of the two different approaches above. Here is a very simple example of each.

If I have a photograph of a cowboy on a horse, I would target the western, cowboy, horse market using Twitter, FB Groups or any other vehicle where I could identify this people. I pretty simple stuff, I know, bear with me. I would do this my using the right hash tags and joining the right FB groups.

Institutional advertising would differ in that I would not necessarily even mention a photograph but would instead just be posting to Facbook or Tweeting "Visit FASGallery.com, see the best artwork on the net". I would be promoting the "institution" FASGallery to everyone, not to a specific photograph and not to a specific market. This goes to Top of the Mind Awareness. Still really boring I know, but stay with me.

What you are trying to do is the same thing All State Insurance has done with "The Good Hands People" or McDonald's with the Golden Arches. It is a form of branding. We do marketing surveys for specific industries. We ask people what is the first think you think of when I say "golden arches" or "the good hands people".

All of these things have to be taken into consideration of any advertising plan. But now we have to talk about the meat of that plan. How do you reach the market in a meaningful way that will get you the best results?

When you get ready to actually launch your plan, you simple cannot do it all. Everyone has limits. We are talking non-paid advertising but it still cost something. The currency is time. And you simply cannot be on Facebook, Twitter, G+, About.Me, LinkedIn, and on and on and on. Not effectively. It is just simply not the best use of you time because the frequency is going to be too thin to really make the impact you need to make. You will not reach the market penetration that you will need to be effective.

This is where we start talking about Vertical Reach and Horizontal Reach, the meat of any plan.

Most people are not in a position to where they can go for total market saturation. They need to focus, limit the number of vehicles you chose to use and then use them wisely.

Here is an example. If you were advertising on radio, and there was 10 radio stations in your market, more the likely you would not have enough money to be on all of them. You would have to choose. If your budget is $1000, you would be much better off running $500 dollars on two stations instead of $100 each on all 10. $100 is simply not enough to achieve decent market penetration. It would be a waste of money.

Vertical vs Horizontal: Vertical: $500 on each of two stations. Horizontal: $100 on each of 10 stations.

In this case your $100 simple will not give you the market penetration you need to get any decent results.

If you are still with me, we now need to talk about one of the biggest reasons, besides the cost why you cannot effectively do all of the Social Media outlets. With Social Media, unlike radio, TV, newspaper and other traditional adverting vehicles you have to build your own audience. You actually have to advertise you advertising vehicle. You have to build up your own followers and friends and circles; your audience.

For advertising to be work, you have to reach some level of market penetration. You have to be in that market, advertising your gallery, often enough to make an impact, to penetrate the market.

Think of it the same way all great speech writers do when they write a speech. To make a point stick in the audience's mind they know they have to repeat that point three times. "Tell'em, tell'em what you told'em and then tell'em again".

Applying what we have known about advertising for 200 years and from leaning what we have from radio and television, 50 tweets a day or posts to Facebook, will be more effective then 5 posts a day on ten different Social Media vehicles. It will also give you more time to create your art because you do not have to manage all of those different outlets. You can actually make fewer posts to a smaller market and have better results and at same time because you are getting better market penetration which will give you better results.

In closing (thank goodness) pick one or two, maybe 3 vehicles, build up a targeted market as best you can and do the best you can to penetrate that market. I personally think two is plenty and the two that I find easiest to build a following on are Facebook and Twitter. It is obvious that if you have the time, and can give the time, the more vehicles you can do a good jog on, the better off you will be.

As this applies to FAA, if you have 1000 images, you can afford to spend the time to be a more outlets. If you under 200, you cannot. You need to be creating art AND doing marketing. The fewer products you have the more effective your limited advertising has to be. The more important it is that you focus and get the biggest bang for your buck that you can.

But the bottom line is you have to have an advertising plan and you have to be committed to it and stick to it. Plan your work and work your plan as the old saying goes.

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