Treat Your Customers Well and Gain a Following
Richard Wilde is my guest blogger today in a blog post exchange in which I have participated.
There are no magic quick fixes or techniques when it comes to marketing your artwork, or anything else for that matter. Successful marketers, brands, businesses and creative individuals who achieve sustained success concentrate on providing long term benefits to their customers, treating their customers well over time, and meeting their customer’s needs effectively.
As a creative person looking to get generate business, it is therefore important to treat each and every customer and potential customer well. Doing this will help you to gain a following of loyal fans that truly love what you create, these type of fans can be known as ‘true fans’. The ‘True Fans’ concept was raised by Kevin Kelly on his website; ‘True Fans’ are fans and admirers of your work that will buy and follow just about anything that you produce. They eagerly await your latest work, they buy your latest prints and t shirts, and some of them are likely to buy your latest original pieces of work when you create them.
If you concentrate on developing 1000 True Fans then you can turn a hobby, a tiny business, or a personal struggle to survive into a thriving lifestyle or business for yourself. Let’s say on average a true fan would spend £50 a year on the work you produce, if you have 1000 fans that’s a cool £50,000 a year, not a bad annual take home in anyone’s book, and more than that, it is for doing the thing that you love…producing your artwork.
1000 is an achievable number, if you added one a day it would only take three years, and at the end of it you would be in a fantastic position. 1000 may be too many, if your work sells for a good price then 100 may be enough. Think about this and choose a number that you think you need to reach the goals you desire, and then go for it.
Treat each of your customers well and slowly build up a loyal fan base over time, they will treat you well if you do the same to them, and will also spread word of your work to others, speeding things up very quickly when it comes to expanding your fan base.
On a slightly biased but truly accurate note, a great place to start gaining and developing your fan base is on www.Artybuzz.com. There are loads of people both on this site and who visit this site that have a massive appreciation for art of all kinds, and they buy it. So speak to them, comment on work, create and add work to groups etc. Get involved in websites like this, make an effort, gain a following and get out what you put in.
This article was contributed by Richard Wilde, owner of www.artybuzz.com, an online artists community where anyone can sell and buy art, design and photography as giclee art prints, canvas art prints, t shirts and much more. This particular article is an extract from his free Art Marketing Ebook, which can be downloaded for free and read at http://www.artybuzz.com/ebook.php
