Clever ways to promote your arts business
“As an artist, your role is to affect people on some level. A real artwork out in the wild is the best way to reach people and have a lasting impact.” – Geoffrey Gifford, Visual and Conceptual Artist
As a creative – whether that be an artist, a writer, a painter, a storyteller, a performer or anything else that gets your creative juices flowing – the most important thing is to create for the joy of creating. A close second, however, is making that work profitable.
Converting your creative passion into a profitable business has its own set of unique challenges. However, when the time comes that you want to start creating for an income, it’s important to promote yourself in ways that are both creative and cost-effective.
We recently found a great article by The Big Idea, which has collated several Clever Ways to Promote Your Arts Business. This includes thoughts around building your digital presence, telling your narrative or story in an interesting way, breaking through your own mental barriers, and how to manage charging clients for your work.
As the article outlines, building a strong and creative digital presence is key for so many creatives. Your online presence is really your way of marketing yourself – therefore, your skills, work, and creative expression should be implicit in your digital presence. Right from the first moment your potential audience sees your work, it should speak to your calibre as a creative as best as possible.
Another common issue among creatives that the article touches on is that so often, clients expect artists to work for free. Or, as they’d put it, in return for exposure. And yet, you wouldn’t ask your plumber to work for good exposure instead of real money in their bank account, so why is it so often expected of artists? And how can we change this narrative? A recent study from Creative NZ (July 2021) explores this idea further, proposing instead to establish a remuneration policy for artists and art practitioners in Aotearoa.
“Establishing a remuneration policy is a step towards ensuring that creative work is valued, that artists and arts practitioners are treated fairly when forming a work relationship and are better supported to develop a sustainable career in their chosen field.”
The article above chats through these ideas in more detail, as well as touching on several other interesting thought-starters for creatives early on in their journey to make their creative passions a profitable business.
Posted: 6 December 2022
