Start Marketing Your Art Work in Your Community

When it comes to marketing your art work, you should think about starting local. As artists, we often have big ideas. Part of the artistic process is taking those big ideas and breaking them into manageable pieces. The alternative is a recipe for anxiety and burnout. The same is true for marketing. Taking on too much at once can be frustrating, isolating, and counterproductive.

Marketing and art have something in common — they are both about making connections. Too many people take this for granted. What kind of art do you create and what kind of people does it speak to? You can’t always make assumptions about this. The best way to find out who likes your art is to get feedback from people. Sure, you can post your art online and wait for comments. You can also get out of your house and talk to actual humans…face to face!

My advice — get involved in your community. Reach out to local arts organizations. If there aren’t any, start one. Recruit friends and family and contact local artists online. Meet in person, though. Humans are wired for interpersonal contact and exchanging comments online is a poor substitute for being in the same location with other people. Just like with art, you can miss subtle queues if you don’t see the entire picture.

Personal interaction can lead to new perspectives and new ideas for marketing your art work. It can also help you get a better feel for how people truly respond to your work. Both of these things are important in developing a strategy for promoting your creativity. Certain people will like certain things. As you begin to understand who likes your art (and why they like it), you can begin to design a plan to reach more people like them.

Marketing your art work isn’t the only reason to become active in your community, though. Research shows that to feel good about ourselves, we need to feel good about what we are doing. Building local connections will help you see the results of your efforts more immediately. It may provide you with opportunities to participate in public art projects and other forms of artistic collaboration. It can be scary at first, but sharing your work with others will make you a better artist.

In both marketing and art, we need new input to stay creative. Talking to other artists and seeing their work can be refreshing. It can inspire you to try something new or simply inject some new life into your art. Don’t feel like you need to change your art to be successful, though. I would never recommend that. Besides, your art will likely change and grow with you. Just don’t be afraid to put yourself out there. Everyone has something to offer, but no one has more to offer to the world than an artist.