Artist Marketing Tips
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Marketing is becoming ever more important these days. Not just for people trying to sell things (like me) but even for artists trying to get their name out there. The word "marketing" has some negative connotations for most people but if done right it can be beneficial to both parties.
There's a difference between marketing and advertising. Every artist should market themselves on social media. If you provide a service or product -i.e. Gumroad- it's worth looking into advertising.
There's a difference between marketing and advertising. Every artist should market themselves on social media. If you provide a service or product -i.e. Gumroad- it's worth looking into advertising.
In an ideal world, you would just focus on making good content and people would find it, but there's so much noise these days that it's an unlikely scenario.
Does anyone have any tips for marketing? I'll update this post with other people's useful tips.
I'll share what I've learned so far, but I'm by no means a successful marketer so I'm hoping other people can share some good tips.
Tools
Google Adwords
If you're selling a product or service, Adwords is a great way to boost views. The best tip I can give you is to limit your amount of keywords. I get 80% of my clicks from 2 keywords. Try to achieve a good Click-Through Rate. A high CTR means people are more interested in your ad, so they'll be more likely to convert. Depending on what you're offering a good CTR would be 5%+. I average 20% on 1 keyword. Also, it's best to switch to manual bidding, in my opinion, since I don't trust Google's automatic bidding.
If you're a freelancer you could put out an ad for when people search "freelance 3d artist" or similar keywords.
Google Analytics
If used properly GA can be a great asset. For example, I've linked it up to my Google Adwords and Gumroad so I can see the exact ROI of my ads.
Twitter/Facebook ads
I've dabbled in both but I think you still get the most bang for your buck with Google Ads.
Twitter/Facebook ads
I've dabbled in both but I think you still get the most bang for your buck with Google Ads.
Buffer
I use Buffer to plan posts for Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. As well as providing a nice dashboard for your social media accounts.
https://buffer.com/
https://buffer.com/
Hotjar
An interesting tool that generates a "heat map" for your website. It's free for a single page.
https://www.hotjar.com/
RiteTag
Has interesting stats on different Twitter hashtags.
https://ritetag.com
https://www.hotjar.com/
RiteTag
Has interesting stats on different Twitter hashtags.
https://ritetag.com
There's a nice list of tools here https://social-media-tools.zeef.com/constantin.colac
Books
Since I'm not a natural marketer I've read a couple of books on the subject. These 2 stand out as being particularly useful.
Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Likeable Social Media
General Tips
Twitter is not your blog. Sorry, but I don't care what you're having for breakfast.
Don't use Twitter or FB just to market your products at people. Try to engage with your audience and share interesting things. I've definitely been guilty of this before.
Try to respond to every. single. person.
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to engage with your audience. Releasing free products or tutorials is a great way to build an email database to send newsletters.
Timing is incredibly important! Don't post important things at 3 am on a Sunday. The sweet spot for me is 1-3pm Tuesday-Thursday. Buffer has a tool that can find the optimal times to post.
Email marketing is still one of the best ways to engage with your audience. Releasing free products or tutorials is a great way to build an email database to send newsletters.
Timing is incredibly important! Don't post important things at 3 am on a Sunday. The sweet spot for me is 1-3pm Tuesday-Thursday. Buffer has a tool that can find the optimal times to post.
Examples of good marketing
Marmoset features a ton of artwork. This is mutually beneficial as both parties get exposure. https://twitter.com/marmosetco
GameTextures shares a lot of interesting content, as well as creating tutorials and articles. Instead of exclusively marketing their own content at people https://twitter.com/GameTxtures
Replies
What I mean about that is don't use your pro account to live tweet, sub tweet, reply to un-related subjects. Just try to follow industry people, studios, and software companies and strictly share your art or introduce your portfolio links or talk shop. Any other communications would risk your account getting unfollowed or muted. Sure, get blocked too if you followed stupid accounts, like porn spammers, cuz their own tweets would surface in your legit followers' timeline even if you didn't re-tweet (blame Twitter's algorithm). Their tweet of their big butt photos would have say "followed by (your account)".
Don't bother with follower count. Even if you have only a couple hundred (many of which are bots or porn hos anyway), you can tweet to say Allegorithmic or Pixologic's official account with relevant art of yours. If they like it they can re-tweet to their followers who are in the thousands - that's marketing right there.
Following studio leads, executives, and official recruiters can be very advantageous too. I've seen AAA leads just asking directly to be sent portfolios for positions that just came up. Save search filters so you can focus your attention to studios or jobs you reall like instead of waiting a day when a random opportunity shows up on your timeline.
Another feature which I haven't tried is to pay for a Twitter spam blast. One of those "promoted" ads. If you're into it and have the funds launch it from a separate account 'cuz I'm pretty sure you'll be blocked heavily after. You might get lucky though and get promoted or get....kotaku exposure.
Also when you go to post work across your social media networks - make sure they all link back to something like art station which will give you another free bit of exposure as traffic from twitter and facebook being redirected to there will move you up the "trending" page - and also include links to your facebook in your artstation page so the traffic is re-directed there to! It creates a nice little loop for as long as the algorithms allow.
Consistency is key as well, personally I'm terrible for this, but having consistent releases that people can come back to is great. You become a trusted source of info or just nice art to look at.
Using stat tracking tools might be a bit weird at first because most of us start of as "doing this for fun/love" rather than "how many views can I get" - but business is business and knowing what your hit rate is at certain times of day etc.. as joost mentioned is super important. It's also great watching your brand grow.
This is from my main website over 4.5ish years (its not discounting bot crawlers so its not super accurate) and I can see its had a small but steady growth and in 2016 I've been a lazy bum so far and not reaching the same growth rate as last year.
Having said that views ≠ value. Make sure you are being seen by the people you are intending to be seen by, and that your work is damn good.
I gave a somewhat clumsy talk 3-4 years ago that covered that topic (and a few others).
Preface: this turned out to be a much bigger post than I expected :P I won't go too much into it but I am using similar techniques in internet marketing in other niches (non game industry stuff) to make quite a decent bit of side passive income outside my day job, so these concepts work, and I'm not talking outta my ass :P
I would HIGHLY suggest experimenting with facebook ads, either for creating a fan page or directly to your gumroad. You can get views/clicks for only a couple cents if you optimize them correctly. I would probably go for a facebook fan page, it will probably be cheaper, and then you are capturing an audience you can advertise to over and over, with your new content showing up in their feeds all the time. over a few months you could probably build an audience of several thousand fans at least if you hustle it right. And there are more fresh people looking to learn every school semester for game art...
Quick brainstorm of how i would do it. In your fb ad, target a bunch of different cg related groups focused around game art and modding/indie dev, and also ones for people who like things such as the art insitute etc. that way you are pretty laser focused on your target audience rather than just a general settings that facebook will try to do. set a budget of like 10-20 bucks a day and let those ads run for a week and see what the numbers are like. the longer the ad runs, the cheaper clicks get as well, so leaving it for a week, you might be getting clicks/likes for say 40 cents at first, but after about 5 days they will probably be far cheaper. you are already offering free content which will grab people, and you might even get a couple donations. but the main thing is capturing that audience you can advertise to at a later time. even if this completley fails, you are only out 100-200 bucks, and if you are already generating income from random visitors/donators like joost is, this is almost a no brainer, in his case I would probably double those numbers easily.
then what I would do is make a bomb ass in depth tutorial, like the one the guy did for the sci fi office environment. make the minimum purchase price something like 20-49 bucks and if you have a fan page with say 3k people who like what you are doing....multiply that by your conversion rate and you should have a decent idea of what you could make. here is a quick example:
release a product at $35, lets say your conversion rate for your fb fan page is 10% (pretty conservative) and you have 3000 people who you are directly advertising to now, who already like your stuff and know you put out good shit. well do the math.... 3000 fans x 0.10 conversion = 300 sales (low estimate) x 35 bucks (which in reality is cheap as fuck for amazing content) = $10.5k when launching a new product based off a fan page alone, never mind organic shares and sales. In this example 35 bucks is extremely low if the content is amazing. People regularly pay well over a hundred for online courses, and I know of some that are charging over $500 for a course and raking in the cash. The content has to be amazing though and you cant look at this as get rich quick.
if you ask me that's a pretty gangster ass side hustle that will keep generating passive income in the long term as well, especially as you put out more and more. Most successful people who publish books on kindle are making money off the long term when they have a library of content people go and buy all of them after discovering the content producer.
little rambly and losey goosey with the numbers but in my eyes thats conservative for a side hustle project with very little effort in marketing. you could probably even fine tune your fb ads over time so you are spending say 500 bucks a month in ad revenue, but making huge returns off it. I could get more into it but those are the basic concepts. even releasing 2-3 big products a year, you could have total freedom to work from wherever you want in the world, like say live in thailand for 1k a month expenses, banking the other 9.5k into a savings account. Only thing is, you have to take action.
Yep, my situation is a bit different since ~30% of my income is from textures so I'm really trying to focus on that. But as an artist you just need to be pragmatic about these things. The most well-known and successful artists have always been good marketers. This isn't something exclusive to digital art, just look at Dali or Picasso.
Also yeah, I've spent way too much money accidentally advertising Minecraft texture packs!
dustinbrown said: Yep, this isn't really aimed at beginners. Good social media marketing for a beginner artist shouldn't take up too much time. When you're tweeting 10 times a day, posting in 20 Polycount threads, posting on Facebook, Reddit etc... and not getting any work done, then there's a problem.
Thanks Jeff! You're also a good example of having a good social media presence and marketing yourself.
Interesting video, I watched it at the time but I'll watch it again now
Great comment! At the time it inspired me to do a lot more research into marketing so thank you for that! I Still have much to learn, though.
Funnily enough, I am planning on moving to Thailand in a few months so I can focus more on my textures and other ventures
@vertex_ @krraejThanks guys!
- Sales are huge boosters to revenue, putting a sticker on something that says "50% off!" can give a massive boost to sales
- Prices mean almost nothing. Charging less for something does not mean it will sell more.
- People on forums who say they are going to buy something from you almost never do, they are talkers. Waste of time.
- The majority of real, paying customers do not use forums. Most do not even have forum accounts. Most hate forums.
- Email is the #1 way people want to reach you and ask questions. Make that easy for them.
- I've had 125,000 views of videos for my asset packages on Youtube. Most people watch 30 seconds of a video so anything longer than that is a waste for selling assets.
- No matter how little you charge for assets, people with no intention of buying anything will post comments about your prices being too high. Turn off all comments.
- Putting a fresh asset package up will generate job offers and interviews. These will vary in quality but some will be very good.
I think something to strive for is to provide value as much as possible, and tailor it for the room you're in (Jab Jab Right Hook...), so that on Youtube you might be putting out tutorial videos, on Twitter you'll be posting visual updates and having conversations, on Artstation you'll be posting projects with marmoset viewer and lots of screenshots, on PC you'll be posting breakdowns and tutorials and giving C&C, and maybe posting irreverent comments without your shift key, maybe not...
Another point and probably the simplest, one that comes from Antifragile, is to expose yourself to upside as much as possible, and limit downside... watch your email, watch for people asking you things, commenting, @ ing you... respond, engage. Build a network that funnels opportunities your way, be a person that others are excited to interact with. Act like an expert. Be someone that you'd want to buy things from
Hehe, that's not the reason I started this thread but it's a good observation! That's exactly the kind of "marketing" artists should be doing more of. It basically just comes down to engaging with people and sharing interesting content instead of exclusively posting your own art or products. I'll actually create a wiki page for it soon if no one else beats me to it. If I don't do it please judge me and make me feel bad.
Yes, I've started having a limited sale( I.e. first 20 people get 50% off) when I first launch a product and usually those sell very quickly but when the code runs out sales slow down abruptly. I haven't actually tested an unlimited sale yet to see how that performs in comparison but I'll try that soon.
I tend to underprice most of my products, in fact, the majority is free/pay what you want. Part of that stems from insecurity but I also just want to reach as wide of an audience as possible. With my premium packs, I might earn twice as much in absolute terms but I only get 1/50th of the downloads due to fewer views and less conversion. In an ideal world, I would rely on donations exclusively but the market can be extremely fickle, unfortunately.
Splitting a pack up into a premium and free version is a good compromise for me. Like I did with this foliage pack https://gumroad.com/l/kPduo (shameless self promotion!)
Good advice, Ben.
"marketing is any interaction you have with people" That's a great way to sum it up.
I've read all of Gary's other books -except for the one on wines-, JJJ right hook is next on my list. I will add the other 2 to my to-read list as well. Should I add those 3 books to the list of recommendations?
Also, Google just released a series of Marketing lessons for free called Primer, I've been reading it and have found really insightful lessons: https://www.yourprimer.com/
Events like GDC , Siggraph , Pixologic , IFCC , THU etc.etc. and many more popping up lately especially around Europe.
My take on it that if you actually befriend people , they're more likely to help you out , grant you exposure through social media , sharing information about you via business card and will have your back when you need backing on something.
- Always link back to your artstation, because artstation rocks and people are actually willing to click on a artstation link.
- If you have a Facebook fan/artist page use facebook ads to boost your posts if you have 5000 followers or more, won't show up in all feeds if not, cheap and effective.
- Gumroad update emails is gold worth, just don't spam too much, it will cost you around 200$ a month depending on your customer count, but it's very much worth it.
- Artstation ads is my best booster but it can be a bit costly if you are not making a bit already, I see it more as an investment in future customers.
I guess for marketing yourself as an artist you kinda have to find a balance between your skills and marketing, I think marketing yourself isn't worth it if you haven't reached a certain level, but most people are above that, and you can see awesome stuff not getting any likes at all on artstation, as an artist I can see why most people just pop stuff up on artstation and call it done, but for me that is just half the work, if you want a future as a freelance artist I think it's very important to get seen and of course it's a big plus for in house work as well. This past year all my work has been from people finding me on artstation and I haven't had to look for anything myself.
So it's totally worth it to throw away your pride for a bit and share that art, I know the feeling when you start feeling like you are spamming, but hopefully you have made something that others can appreciate or can get something from.
Pretty cool app, I've already learned some useful stuff from it concerning google ads.
I tend not to go to the fancy events because I'm a starving artist, but Polycount meetups are a good alternative. And yeah, I'd say networking is even more important than any social media marketing. If you have the option. Otherwise, there's still the Polycount Slack
I've definitely met a lot of people who got hired through friends' recommendations.
You can send 4 updates a month with the free account. Or are you referring to something else?
Jonas Ronnegard said: Also a good quote
I created a page on the wiki http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Marketing# feel free to edit it.
for free accounts they take 8,5% plus 30 cent per sale and for paid they take 3,5% plus 30 cent per sale, either way I go plus by being a member, but yeah didn't know about that change, thanks for making me aware
I've found social networks FB/Instagram/Twitter/Tumblr to be the most useful. Particularly Instagram, using the right hashtags at the right time to draw in an audience.
I live in Montreal, so I usually post things between 9-10am - which I find to be the perfect spot for getting the most traction. For anyone using FB, each like allows your work to get into another feed. Tumblr, I find to be the most constant flow due to the Notes and the way it works. There are also a bunch of hashtags on Twitter which can be useful.
Additionally, trying to get your work noticed by huge sites can really benefit you and create a never-ending flow of traffic. Kotaku posted a set of my photographs after GDC and it has been non-stop ever since and I can pretty much put it down to being on Kotaku. Their Fine Art section is a great place to get your work noticed, the amount of exposure in terms of hits you get from that is anywhere from 10k-100k, sometimes more.
I set up a Society6 store and have made hundreds of sales for very little effort on my side, other than uploading some JPGs.
This is a stellar thread, by the way. I'm learning so much from y'alls wisdom, so thanks for sharing all of this advice.
Genuine connections have always been the most important thing to me, but they're best made when out of your comfort zone. From Steal Like an Artist: Look around, find the best person in the room, and stand next to them. Hang out with them, learn from them. If you look around and realize that you're on the top, then it's time to find another room.
The greatest improvements and friendships are found outside of the comfort zone, and I've gotten job offers and recommendations by hanging out with folks who I respect that are out of my league. They're my heroes and my friends and I love them to death!