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Have you ever struggled with knowing where to advertise yourself as an artist? There are so many options available today. Some are expensive, some are effective, and some are just a waste of time and money.
I love it when an artist is thinking about advertising because it immediately tells me that they are proud of their work and ready to get it out there to the art buying public. It also means they are stepping out into their journey of becoming a thriving artist. That’s exciting! I was recently asked a question by Deb, one of the members of my Created to Thrive Artist Mentoring Program as she was considering advertising in her local paper. She wanted to know what I did to advertise myself as an artist. My answer may surprise some of you, but before I share it, I want to give you a little backstory. Backstory: I owned a marketing company in Atlanta for several years. We did some advertising, we helped people develop ads and get them placed in magazines, newspapers, and online. We'd help communicate their message, build brand awareness, and build their online presence. Despite my background in advertising, I don't advertise, at least not in the way you might think. Now, I know you're sitting there, maybe in a bit of disbelief, but I've been able to build a six-figure art business with an international following without having to pay to promote my artwork. It all comes down to the way that the Lord led me to develop my art career. You see, I believe marketing your art is not just about finding people to buy your stuff. It’s about cultivating and sharing your artistic uniqueness and then sharing that with the world in order to build an authentic connection with the people in the marketplace who value your aesthetic and connect with who you are as an artist. Are you ready to find out how to do this? Define Your Artistic Uniqueness Let me ask you a question. What makes you different? What makes you unique? What is the "secret sauce" that makes your artwork stand out from other artists in your area who are creating pieces using the same mediums or working in similar genres as you? Defining what I call your Unique Creative Voice as an artist is vital to developing your "brand" as an artist. There are many ways to go about doing this, but I’ve found there are really three key steps you need to take to do it successfully. Focus Your Creative Expression Have you ever heard the saying, "Jack of all trades, master of none?" Unfortunately, this could be ascribed to so many artists I've met over the years. While it's great to have a wide variety of skills and interests, it's vitally important to focus your creative energies on one or two primary things so you can truly develop what I call Masterful Competence; but only if you want to sell your work consistently. :) This focusing may also mean that you begin to put limits on your creative palette while you define the parameters of both what and how you create your art. It's learning to find creative freedom within the boundaries of a limited palette. I realize that might seem stifling at first but learning to co-plan and co-create art with the Holy Spirit while limiting yourself to a handful of supplies, techniques, and mediums supercharges the development of your artistic mastery. Learn To Tell the Story of You One thing I'm always saying is that 90% of the time, people buy art because of connection. Sometimes it's a connection to your subject matter, but serious collectors also value the connection they have with you and your creative process. That's why developing and refining your story is vital to growing your art business. Your story and the story of your art can be one of the most powerful tools you can carry with you as you embark on creating authentic connections with the clients and potential clients you meet. You see, fully embracing your story is so important, because before you can truly grow as an artist, you must be able to speak passionately about yourself, your artwork, and your process. When you're passionate and excited about your work, and you learn to share that passion, people will start to connect with you and your work. The difference between telling your story and advertising is the difference between hunting with a rifle versus hunting with a shotgun. Telling your story, either in person or via editorial content (blogs, podcasts, articles, etc.) is a highly focused, precise way of zeroing in on your ideal clients. While generalized advertising (though it can be useful) is a bit like scattering your seed to the wind. Sure, you may "hit" one or two of the people you're looking to connect with, but the vast majority of your paid advertisements are going to land in the laps of people who don't want or can't afford what you do. There is a better way, and once you've established what makes you artistically unique and you're ready to tell the story of you, then it's time to… Discover Your Ideal Client Creating your business around a niche of people who connect with you and your work is the bedrock of a successful art business. As I've said many times before, "No connection, no sale." The question then becomes, "How do I connect and with whom?" That's what developing a client avatar is all about. A client avatar is a fictional representation of your ideal client, all wrapped into one character. Being able to see your ideal client as a person, rather than an obscure figment of your imagination is super helpful when developing your potential products, messaging, and marketing campaigns. With a client avatar in mind, you're able to create marketing efforts directed right at them. Finally, let me say this. It's best if you can develop your client avatar based on actual evidence you've collected over time rather than just coming up with who you 'think' is your target client. With actual client history, you can analyze how people have connected with you and your work over the years while working on ways to enhance that experience. If you're just starting fresh, give it your best shot and also look at the clients of other artists in your area or medium who are selling to provide you with a starting place. So, you've defined your artistic uniqueness, you're ready to tell the story of you, and you know what your ideal client looks like. Now it's time to… Bring it All Together Have you ever wondered what that secret recipe is for making and selling great art? Well, it's not just your artistic uniqueness, your story and your client avatar alone that make the biggest difference, but rather how you use these three ingredients, or tools, together to develop the perfect recipe for connecting you and your art with the people who want to buy it and pay top dollar for it. The goal is to find the points of intersection where you can connect with your ideal clients. What magazines do they read? Where do they hang out? What non-profits are they involved with? What clubs and organizations are they members of? These are just a few of the questions I've used over the years to find points of overlap in my life and in theirs. And this is key to creating connection. Let me tell you how my friend Julie, a photographer, does this. Julie's fine art portrait sessions are a perfect fit for individuals and families who can invest $2500 or more to capture images meant to be treasured for several lifetimes. She learned early on that her ideal clients were often involved with local non-profits, serving on boards, donating time, and making donations at fundraisers and galas. So, Julie combined her skills along with her love of serving the community to connect with her ideal clients by photographing them at local non-profit events. Again, the goal is to know where your ideal client is hanging out and learning to connect with them intentionally. Through direct connection via mutual interests or by being referred by someone your ideal client is already doing business with are two great low to no-cost ways to promote yourself. Now, if you were going to spend money on advertisements, and please know that I'm not against this, this is where having intel on your ideal client can really stretch and focus your advertising dollars. If your ideal clients are affluent seniors, look for the local publications that are already targeting that market. Some exclusive subdivisions in our area even have their own magazines, each filled with public interest articles on a variety of topics. This opens up the possibility of a public interest piece (which costs nothing) or even paid ads that will land in the lap of an ideal potential client. Final Thoughts Marketing and promotion are a lot like planting seeds. The worst thing you can ever do is to stop sowing the seeds of connection. Some of those seeds are going to come up immediately, some of them are going to come up in a few months, some of them may come up in a few years. You never know, but you have always got to be planting seeds, and then focus those seeds in the places where they are going to count the most around those intersection points. I hope this has been a big encouragement to you. If this article has been a blessing to you, take a moment to share it with a friend. Thanks for reading
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Have you ever considered putting your artwork on apparel or merchandise in order to get it out to the masses? Well, one of my podcast listeners and Created to Thrive Artist Mentoring Program members, Jen, recently asked me about this idea of putting a great piece of artwork on a T-shirt. She wanted to know if this is a good idea or not, but more specifically, she wanted to know if this would cheapen her art.
I love tackling questions like this because it helps artists find focus and bring clarity of purpose to their creative pursuits. Over the years, I’ve found that there are really two ways to go about selling your art. Folks who have been in the biz for a while, usually end up in one of two camps: The Mass Merchandising Camp or the Fine Art Camp. It’s rare that artists have feet in both. The Mass Merchandising Camp In this camp, the whole idea is to sell as much art as possible by placing art on everything you can imagine while keeping the prices low enough to make it affordable to the masses. In this camp, your canvas might be cellphone covers, leggings, pants, shirts, t-shirts, hats, mugs, cups, stickers, towels, or calendars. You get the idea. Now don’t get me wrong, this can be a great camp to be in artistically speaking. Artists in this camp are eventually drawn towards licensing their art. From art and art merchandise sold online and in big box stores, to mass reproduced series of prints for business and hotel chains, art licensing is a multi-billion dollar segment of the global art market each year. To be clear, Mass Merchandising is an excellent camp to consider, but it does have one glaring downside. The more that you bring down the price of your artwork and increase its accessibility, the more you cheapen its value in the eyes of serious collectors, people I consider to be your best buyers. What do I mean by that? True collectors, the folks who spend the most money on art, are usually looking for pieces that are original, exclusive and many times, offered at a higher price point. To them, buying art is not just about the art, but about the ambiance that goes around it, the prominence of the artist, the significance of the piece, and the perceived status that would come from owning it. The Fine Art Camp Now, for me, I chose to plant my feet in a different camp when it came to marketing my art. I learned a valuable lesson early on in the fine craft world. My friends who were potters tended to lean mostly towards functional pieces or towards non-functional work. I began to notice that potters that focused primarily on functional pieces, mugs, bowls, plates, etc., were amazing artists that were stuck on a volume-producing treadmill. To make a living, these artists have to batch produce a larger volume of pieces to make ends meet. Again these are great artists creating beautiful pieces, but at the end of the day, a mug or a bowl meant for daily use isn’t going to fetch fine art prices. Then there were the ceramicists that created ornate vessels and sculpture. Their focus was on unique one of a kind items meant to serve as the focal point of a room, a centerpiece on a table, or a high-end accent to an existing collection of fine art. Sure these artists never sold the volume of pieces that functional potters sold, but they did attract the kind of buyer that I was looking to attract in my art business. Positioning Is Everything Seeing those two schools of thought in action there inside the fine art camp made it easy for me to find my path when it came to creating and selling my art. While my career in basketry began in the “functional” school of thought, I knew I couldn’t stay there forever. Over the years, as my skill grew, I came to love making things that are exclusive, unique, and really special. Consequently, I knew that if I wanted to follow my artistic passions, I had to move away from the “sure bet” functional baskets were for me and begin to position myself differently. My prices had to increase if my volume of sales were going to decrease, but more importantly I had to develop that “it” factor, that idea of exclusivity, that would attract the kind of buyer that could and would pay top dollar for my work. As I did this, I learned a few things about the high-end art market. Buyers in this market are much more concerned about the connection of my values to theirs than they were with the concept of merely filling a blank space on their shelf. I learned that my ideal buyer was drawn in by the aesthetic of my work, the uniqueness of my pieces, and eventually by my reputation as an artist. As I turned off the faucet in my art career on the lower-end stuff, I began to connect with clients that were passionate about my work. These folks never beat me up on price. In fact, price is often one of the last questions they ask when purchasing one of my woven sculptures. The best part is that they started referring me to their friends which only served to strengthen my reputation and increase my value in the marketplace as an artist. I found that I love to do business with buyers like this, serious collectors who appreciate my artistic passions. Trust is Key Choosing your path as an artist is one of the most critical decisions you’ll make in your career as an artist. One of the things that helped me the most in my journey was to set aside some time to examine my heart. I began to realize that when my focus was on “how can I make a buck,” or “how can I get you to buy my basket,” that I was living out of a place of fear and striving. Fear that I would be a starving artist that couldn’t provide for my family and striving to do everything in my power to provide for my own needs. What I wasn’t doing was trusting the Lord, the One who had given me these talents and had called me to the marketplace to provide for me as His son. In my own epic saga of artistic (and spiritual) growth, I reached a point of surrender and trust. I surrendered the idea that it was up to me and that I had to work, sweat, and strive and leaned fully into trust. I prayed something like, “You know what, Lord? I know that You love me. I know that You have called me an artist. I know that You want me to make things that I am passionate about. I know that as I am faithful to be the artist You called me to be, You are going to be faithful to bring the clients, the connections, and the provision.” When I did that and disconnected from all that striving, that’s when things changed for me. It’s been the same for so many artists in my Mentoring Program. When they let go of striving to create and sell and leaned into trusting God and yielding to the direction of the Holy Spirit in every aspect of their art life, things began to change. Doors of opportunity, provision, and artistic fulfillment began to open wide for them as well. I hope this has been a big encouragement to you. If this article has been a blessing to you, take a moment to share it with a friend. Thanks for reading!  Have you ever wondered what to focus on as a creative when you love to do so much?
Often as creatives, we tend to be multi-focused and multi-interested most of the time. That is kind of a normal part of being wired for creativity. But while this is perfectly normal, this can hinder your ability to grow an artistic hobby into a part-time or full-time business or ministry. The key to finding artistic focus in your life lies in knowing what season of life you are in. The Bible teaches us there is a time and a season for everything under the sun. Over the years, I’ve continually returned to this truth in my own life asking, “Lord, what season am I in? How do I respond right now creatively, financially, and in business?” Discerning the Times and Seasons When I got out of college, I felt strongly that the Lord was calling me into a season of full-time ministry. And for several years, ministry was my primary focus. I served as a Worship Leader and did my baskets on the side as my hobby. I would sell my baskets at shows a few times a year, earning my Christmas money and that sort of thing. In that season of my life, my baskets really weren’t a big deal. I didn’t put a lot of expectation on making or selling, I enjoyed it as a pastime and that worked for me at that time. As I transitioned out of ministry a few years later, I moved into a season of serving the Lord in the marketplace. I loved doing marketing and graphic design, so I started a marketing company. And for a season, that was very successful. Again, I was still doing my baskets as a hobby and leading worship on the side as a volunteer at church, but those things were not my primary focus, especially in terms of generating dependable income for my family. Then in 2009, the seasons began to shift for me again. God called me to be a father to artists, to raise up an army of artists, and to do what I am doing right now. During that season, my focus began to shift again. I started writing books for the first time, and I started speaking on the whole idea of what it means to be a Kingdom Artist. But that wasn’t the only shift that happened. The Lord told me that He was going to start using my baskets. Yes, that creative escape I embraced during my college years and had evolved into a serious hobby over 15 years was now ready to become a significant focus in my life. The Lord began to open doors of favor that were incredible, using my baskets as both a source of income for my family and as well as a big part of what led us to move to Asheville, North Carolina. His plan for me in that new season was to bring me to a seat of influence in the arts (Asheville) and to a position of authority in the Kingdom (to raise up an army of artists). As I look back at my 25-year artistic journey, I’m genuinely amazed at what God did in each season of my life. Each season was uniquely focused on a passion the Lord had sown into me that grew into my main focus for a time. Again, for me, the key to knowing what to focus on in any given season of life has been a commitment to commune with God regularly. I challenge you to do the same. Get alone with God. Ask Him the questions,
Before I go, realize there are many other things I’ve shared over the years on creative focus, but two free resources I would love for you to check out are:
Thanks for reading!  Christian artists around the world really struggle with this idea. We all want to honor the Lord with the creative gifts and talents He’s given us, but how do we do that if our creative pursuits seem better suited to the marketplace than the sanctuary.
I’ve struggled with this myself, especially as an artist and a believer that primarily creates woven sculpture. No one has ever looked at my work and asked me, “Matt, are you creating Christian baskets?” (We’ll somebody did once, but that made for a really awkward conversation.) On the one hand, it’s kind of great not to have that pressure, but on the other hand, it has made me wonder from time to time if my pieces are having any impact in the Kingdom or the spiritual lives of my clients. And I know if I’ve struggled with this concept, then those of us whose works employ narratives, story, music, or imagery can oftentimes struggle with this even more. If that’s you, then let me encourage you with this: God cares more THAT you create than WHAT you create. Now, what does that mean? Well, for me, that means it is more vital for me as an artist to recognize and embrace the unique design God has on my life. Once I accepted this, then I was able to faithfully fulfill that design to the best of my ability using the gifts, talents, and skills He has given me. The same can be true for you as well. It’s the same principle Paul shares in Colossians 3:23, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as though you were working for the Lord and not for people.” This advice given to Christian servants working in Roman households didn’t just apply to work that was overtly spiritual in nature. It’s hard to make washing dishes or cleaning toilets seem Holy. Yet Paul’s admonition was EVERYTHING done using one’s full measure of skill and talent without reservation, without holding back, is, in fact, honoring to God in a way that advances the Kingdom. Chew on that for a minute. Now here’s how you can bring this principle to life in your creative practice. Get Creative with God in the Studio Get in your studio, invite the Holy Spirit into that space and begin to cultivate an atmosphere of His presence. Once you are in that place with the Lord, unleash your creativity and do the thing that is on your heart to do. Write, Sculpt, Paint, Mold, or Shape with wild abandon, creating art for an audience of One without fear of how others will view or judge your work out in the world. Don’t just do this once and decide it’s not for you, instead make this a regular part of your creative life. You’ll quickly find that the pieces that honor the Lord are often the very ones that speak to the depths of your soul as a creative. The finished work may be overtly spiritual, or it might just be beautiful with no other agenda. No matter the subject matter of your finished pieces, always remember that when you begin to fulfill God’s plans and purposes in your life, your art will have a profound impact on others. Be Being Filled and Skilled: Always remember your job as an artist is to be the best artist that you can be. I’ve encouraged tens of thousands of artists from around the world to embrace the concept of being both filled and skilled. By being continually filled with the power of God’s Light, Life, and His Presence in your life, you literally cultivate an atmosphere in your studio that invites the Power of Heaven into everything you do creatively. At the same time, you must be a good steward of the skills God has given you. Learn from masters in your field, enlarge your creative capacities, hone your skills. Wholeheartedly dive into your creative process and rise to be everything God has called you to be as an artist. The Results are up to God Now before you start getting worried or fixated on the impact your creative efforts may or may not have in the lives of others, always keep this in mind: the results are up to God. It’s too easy to start thinking transactionally in terms of the impact we want our artistic creations to have in the lives of others. “I’ll paint this so that she feels...” or “I’ll write this song that he will…” You get the picture. The Kingdom doesn’t work that way and approaching your art in that way borders on manipulation. But once you embrace the fullness of who God has created you to be and begin following His plans for your life and art, that’s when your art (and your life) becomes impactful in the Kingdom. It’s when you choose to live and embrace an abundant life of joy, beauty, peace, creativity, and love that your life and your art begin to prophesy the truths of the Kingdom of God to the world. As you do this, God is free to use everything you do and create to profoundly impact the world in ways that are far beyond anything you could have imagined or engineered on your own. I hope this has been a big encouragement to you. If this article has been a blessing to you, take a moment to share it with a friend. Thanks for reading! |
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AuthorMatt Tommey is an artist, author and mentor who is passionate about empowering artists to thrive spiritually, artistically and in business. |
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