Hello, everyone. Welcome to this week’s hot tip. It’s a little bit tricky for me to do this and be so succinct because you know that this is a whole section of my book, No More Starving Artists. We’re up to number five. This is the series of the 10 things that I learned about running a successful independent arts business that took me years and years to learn, that I put them all together. That’s why we do what we do here at the Auspicious Arts Incubator, and that’s why I wrote the book.

The book covers these 10 things, so what I’m doing is giving you a bit of a sneak peek or a slowdown and go through the 10 things. Number five is called marketing. In the book, the book is divided into five sections. In the third section, it’s called Marketing and Message. The first part of that is the thing that I learned about marketing. The fundamental thing that I learned is that there’s a big difference between marketing and advertising. What typically happens in the arts is we were taught to advertise. In the arts, we call that spray and pray, so that’s creating a poster or a flyer and distributing it around and praying that someone will find that, pick it up, decide that it’s of value, and figure out how to become a customer.

That’s not marketing. That’s called advertising. The mistake that we often make in the arts is that we advertise before we market. Just to be clear, marketing is finding the people who love you and love what you do, or find the people who need you and need what you create. It’s just finding them. That’s the job, finding those people. Where are they? How do I connect to them? Finding them, that’s the marketing job. That’s the job that we don’t do. We just start advertising. If you haven’t found the market, to just fling a flyer in there or fling an email in there or fling an ad in there doesn’t always work. Better to spend your time doing actual marketing.

What I tell all artists is that the marketing effort to build a business, the difference between the successful business and an unsuccessful business is customers. To grow that market, to find those customers, to do marketing is 30% of your time. If you look at your work week or the number of hours that you’ve set aside to work on your arts business this week, and you’ve decided it’s X number of hours, 30% of that should be spent on marketing, which means finding your customers, finding the people who are going to love you, finding people who do love you, finding the people who need what you have, okay?

There’s three questions that is your challenge for this week. Who are your customers? Who are they? A niche is good. Second question, why do they want you or what you create? The third question is, how do you find more of them? The fourth question … No, that’s it. There’s just three questions. Sorry. My little notes had the fourth question. We had a little technical glitch. I hate when that happens. Password.

Using Google Text-to-Speech engine.

Well, that was painful, okay. The joys of doing something live. I wish it were easier, but it’s not. Carrying on, so those are the three things that you’re doing this week. Finding out who your customers are, finding out why they want you or what you do, and then, the third challenge is, well, how do you find more of them, all right? You’re going to spend 30% of your time trying to find this market. Your art isn’t for everyone, right? There’s a niche. You’re going to say, well, who … I know my work could be loved by anyone. The challenge is, how do you find more of them? How do you find who’s going to love you the most? I think that’s the key, so if you think about your customers and you say, “Well, that’s great,” but who is it that’s going to love it the most? Who’s going to really get it the most? Then, find those people, okay?

That’s called building a customer avatar. We don’t have time to go into the customer avatar thing. Those of you that do the bigger programs with us, the Artist Transformation School or the Art of Selling Art Online, you’re going to go through a whole customer avatar exercise. We don’t have time in this little one to do that, but that’s what you want to do, is to find out who are these people. Where do I find them? What are they doing? Where are they hanging out? Putting your stuff in a gallery or just leaving it to the theater venue and plunging everyone 300 seats just living in the dark, facing forward where you have no idea who these people are, those are good for the one-off purchase, but to build a customer for life, you really need to do this work on marketing. Figure out who they are, where are they, how do I let them know that I exist, because they’re going to go on a customer journey.

Again, you really need to look at the book or you need to do one of our courses to understand, but the customer journey says that a potential customer of yours finds out you exist, and then step number two is they do some research about you. Step number three, yep, is that they engage. They contact you. They commit. They commit, they engage, and then they experience what you do, and then they share about you. Then, the cycle starts over again. The next person … I think I said that in the wrong order for you. Sorry about that.

The next person discovers you exist. Then, they do some research to find out who you are, where you are, do they want more of you, right? Then, they commit. They sign up for your newsletter. They send you an email. They buy a ticket. Then, they engage. They actually attend. They actually purchase, and then they share, and it starts over again. That’s the cycle that you want to perfect because that’s your marketing, right? That’s meeting the needs of a customer, building relationship with that customer, and helping that customer to find more. That’s marketing, okay?

There’s a couple other things that are important in marketing. Networking is a key one. We tend, as artists, to be introverted or isolated, and that doesn’t help. What I mean by networking is having conversations. If you’re not having a conversation about you and your art, you’re not building a market. You’re not growing a market. Always have conversations with the people about what you’re working on, the challenges, sharing who you are. It’s sharing, not selling. We’re going to cover that in the next tip, which is called message, right?

Let’s review. Your challenge for the week is I want you to write down a statement about who your customer is. Who is the person? Who is the niche? Who is it that’s going to get you and love you the most? The second thing, why do they want you? Why do they want what you have? Why do they want you, okay? Then, the next thing is to think about when you got those two things, think about, well, where are you going to find more of them, okay? All right. That’s your challenge for the week. There you go, so, we’ll see you next week when we dig into message. Bye for now.