The ASF Weekly Romance Marketing Playbook for Artists
Three simple & quick romantic marketing tasks every artist should be doing every week, real world examples from a photographer, and video instruction for implementing each task.
Introducing the ASF “Weekly Marketing Playbook”
Just a few tasks that should take no more than 30 minutes each week.
We feel so strongly about it that we gave it a cool name.
One Romance Email, One Romantic Facebook Post, and One Blog Post.
[UPDATE: You should definitely post to Instagram as well, following the same advice provided below.]
After your first try, these three tasks should take you no longer than 30 minutes each week.
With just these three tasks each week, you will build deeper connections with your audience members and tee up future sales, you will expand your audience size, you will boost your search engine rankings, and you will earn direct sales.
The best part is, these three tasks are an incredibly effective and efficient use of your time.
As we would say here at Art Storefronts, they will provide “maximum return-on-investment (“ROI”) on your time invested.”
Which, as we outlined in our post on The 80/20 Rule of Time Allocation for Successful Artists, is the key to create the circumstances that allow you to allocate the maximum amount of time to your craft as opposed to the “other things” that are far less fun.
Sound good?
Great.
Let’s get into it.
Task #1: The Romance Email
The primary purpose of the Romance Email is to nurture the relationships you have with the leads you have collected, teeing them up for a future sale.
A distant secondary purpose of the Romance emails is to earn you sales, which it will do on occasion, particularly if you provide a time-sensitive discount (no more than 3 days) on the image you are promoting.
A third purpose is that when you really touch the hearts of your audience members, they will forward it along to other loved ones and friends who share the same love for your subject matter.
A fourth purpose is to provide you with direct feedback from your audience and open a direct dialogue, which you can use to learn more about your niche and “why” people buy from you.
The Romance Email is essentially an “image of the week” email, but specifically crafted according to our best practices.
The crux of a Romance Email is the content you write, which tells a story and provides that critical emotional connection to your audience. This is what your audience is looking for.
VIDEO: How to Send a Romance Email in MailChimp
Writing great content should be your focus, because this content will become the basis for the other two tasks. It is the main part of what makes these three tasks so efficient.
By taking a moment to write a few paragraphs of great content, we’re going to show you how to squeeze every bit of value out of it.
The primary purpose of the Romantic Blog Post is to boost your Search Engine ranking (i.e. “SEO”).
Here, you create a blog post using the same image and the same text in your Romance Email. One serious warning before you copy and paste the exact same text: Google has a “duplicate content penalty.”
Therefore, when you create this blog post, you need to make sure that you are not copying the same text verbatim that may exist somewhere else on your website (such as a product description).
Just make sure you change some of the wording to make it unique. Blog posts give you a chance to be a little more verbose, so feel free to take the opportunity to do so.
The more content, the better.
VIDEO: How to Author a Romantic Blog Post in ASF Blog Editor
If you didn’t already know, one of the most important factors that drives the search engine ranking of a website is the quantity of unique, high quality content the website contains about a specific subject.
Therefore, every page you add with unique, high quality content about your subject matter will only help your website rank better for your specific subject matter over time.
Another important factor in SEO is the frequency with which you post new content to your website. Google, for example, loves “fresh websites” that are constantly being updated with new content.
Therefore, by following a consistent posting schedule (every week) with topics about your subject matter, your website will gain favor with the search engines.
Normally, it’s tough for artists to find topics that you can frequently talk about on your blog. Romantic blog posts are the solution to this.
Furthermore, if a new visitor were to go to your blog and read through the last year’s worth of these blog posts, they will receive the same amazing romantic experience that your long time visitors have received, only in a shorter period of time.
Ultimately, your blog will serve as a place where you can confidently send visitors who want to learn more about you and the meaning behind what you do.
The primary purpose of the Romantic Facebook Post is to expand your audience size by leveraging the ease of share-ability that this platform provides.
When you truly touch the hearts of your audience members, they will share your post.
This is extremely powerful, because people who love a specific subject matter always have friends (particularly on Facebook) who share the same love.
Which means your post will not only get in front of new eyeballs, but these eyeballs will more than likely be highly targeted.
Over time, your Facebook audience will incrementally expand and so will your email list – if you are using the Lead Capture Tool.
When your email list expands, it means your business is on a growth path.
A distant secondary purpose is to drive traffic to your site and earn direct sales, particularly if you offer a time sensitive discount for the specific image you are promoting.
Some people will immediately connect with your image and what you wrote, or they will have an immediate need to fulfill (i.e. open wall space in their living room), and they’ll just buy on the spot.
VIDEO: How to Create a Romantic Facebook Post
To create a Romantic Facebook Post, you will want to take the same image in your Romance Email along with a slightly modified version of the text you already wrote.
By “slightly modified,” we mean that you shouldn’t just copy/paste what you posted on your blog. Just make it slightly different so as to avoid any duplicate content issues.
2017 Update: The 2017 Hiscox Online Art Trade Report recently revealed Instagram has emerged as the most important social media channel in the art world.
So what does this mean to you? You must be romancing on Instagram.
Of course, the key, final part of this system, is to send all of this traffic – these highly qualified and interested buyers – to a site designed to sell art.
A site with an eCommerce backbone built specifically to process art transactions. A site that has been created with up-to-the-month best industry practices.
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