Promoting Your Art and Design During the Holiday Season
The first festive ads have appeared, puddings and mince pies are on supermarket shelves and our thoughts are turning to the holidays. Bubblers who actively promote their work will be thinking less about mince pies and more about how they might get some extra eyeballs on their art and design over the next few weeks. In the online world, things always kick off a little earlier to allow for shipping lead times so the silly season is well and truly upon us. But it’s never to late to plan a few activities that may help get the word out about your art.
Ideas and methods for promoting your work
Many artists may be already knee deep in promotional plans but here are some tips which may help those of us who haven’t started yet and are keen to get organised. Step one is to decide what kinds of promotional activites work for you. Ideas might include:
- Tweeting about recently completed works
- Posting links to Facebook
- Sending an email to your contacts or colleagues
- Planning a mini sale or promotional offer
- Promoting your work by giving something away
Tis the season to create
Have you considered refreshing your gallery with some new work? Not all artists create new works regularly (or as often as we’d like) and the festive season can offer a little push to work on some new projects. You don’t necessarily have to create work that strays from your usual style or theme. New works of any kind offer an opportunity to talk about your portfolio and to prompt admirers of your work and potential customers to look at your new offerings and revisit some old favourites. Ideas include:
- Producing new work with a festive theme
- Working on a set or series of artworks
- Putting together new calendars
- Producing a brand new work for a challenge
- Tweeting if you’re willing to offer personalised works or commissions
- Reworking or reinventing one of your existing artworks
Find your niche
Think about the kinds of people who may love your work and consider the range of gift giving that takes place over the next month or so. Who are you aiming your promotions at? Can you better target your promotional activities? From office parties to New Years Eve celebrations Is there an angle or an opportunity you haven’t considered? Perhaps there’s blog that features local artists or an interest group that’s related to the art you produce.
And finally …
Think about the timing of your activities
How much do you know about the behaviour of online shoppers? Are you familar with key dates in the holiday shopping season? For example, Black Friday is the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States and is traditionally seen as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season out there in the real world. Cyber Monday is the busiest internet shopping day of the year and falls on November 29. In 2009, people in the US alone spent $887M according to research by US company comScore. So although there may be an almighty din from people promoting their work, it might be worthwhile planning some promotional activities that fall around that time. It always pays to do a little research so why not see what information you can find online about trends and key dates during the holiday season. It may just prompt some unique promo ideas.
