From Fine Art Views:
Attracting one new deeply committed fan is worth far, far more than attracting 100 mildly interested visitors to your website.
Consider what Jonathan Mead wrote in this blog post:
I’ve learned that there’s no guarantee that growth will make a difference in your business. You can have more people on your list, and no one actually buying. You can have more traffic, and only crickets in your comments section. There’s a big difference between growth that’s meaningful and growth that’s hollow. The difference is depth….People that buy everything you create…They comment on every post. They tell everyone they can about what you do. – From: The Secret to Attracting 1,000 True Fans
The problem is, if you do what most articles tell you to do, you’re mostly doing the wrong things or, at best, you’re simply doing what everyone else is doing: You’re optimizing for hundreds of mildly interested people instead of a few deeply committed people.
Here are the type of articles I generally see that pass as “art marketing advice” these days:
– “Facebook for artists: 20 ways to get more fans”
– “How to use Pinterest to Promote your art”
– “Instagram for Artists – 5 Ways to Promote and Sell Art on Instagram”
– “Use pop-up forms to increase engagement with your art email newsletter list”
– “SEO for Artists: 7 Website Tips to Help you Rank Higher”
These articles . . . and thousands like them . . . all focus on quantity over quality.
Link to the rest at Fine Art Views and thanks to Felix for the tip.
And you need to make those connections, because without them, you’ll never develop any deeply committed, or true fans. And without true fans, you do/n’t really have an art business.
True fans? Art business? Maybe paying consumers just make a successful business.
All paying customers aren’t equal.
Customer acquisition costs matter. Just look at the quarterlies of content distributors like Amazon, Netflix, and the Cablecos. Those 30 day free trials aren’t free to them.
Or how about the serial returners that Amazon and other online vendors end up cutting off.
Some customers you just don’t want.
And some customers you actively court. Just look at the kind of exclusive content Amazon has been buying for Prime. What demographic do you think they’re trying to entice?
Amazon is trying to get all the consumers it can. Sure they promote to get them. Think Amazon cares if they are true fans of art?
Amazon cares very much if they are regular customers, as opposed to people who decided to give it a try one time. Prime is aimed squarely at the former.
A friend just shared how a company with a very successful mailing list found they had overall better results when they also include a field for telephone number in the sign up form. It seems that people who are willing to give out their phone number are much more interested in what you are offering than someone who wont give out that info. So then the results from their actual newsletters was better when they required that piece of info at sign up, even though they never actually use the phone numbers they collect.
Repeat customers make or break any business.
Building traffic is good but earning sales is better. Earning repeat sales is best; it takes less effort to keep a customer than to get a new one.
Don’t have to look far for proof, do we?