Today's case study is on Mathieu Laca – a contemporary portrait painter from Quebec, Canada. His work is held in private and public art collections in 12 countries across 4 continents.

The Story

An Artist's Success with Instagram Ads

Mathieu followed Art Storefronts’ best practices and began advertising on Instagram, which led to an increase in his brand awareness, his social followers and the traffic to his site.

"It’s nice to have small wins. I intend to advertise on a continuous basis. I see it as an investment now and less as an expense."

Mathieu Laca, Artist

The Goal

Increase Brand Awareness and Traffic

The goal of this campaign was to increase Mathieu's brand awareness and social referral traffic from Instagram and Facebook, by adding Instagram ads to his marketing efforts.

The Results

Unique Art + Ads = Success

Hi-Fructose saw one of these ads on Instagram and proceeded to share Mathieu's art on their Facebook page, resulting in 416 shares to date. That equates to thousands of unique impressions, massively increasing his brand awareness across Facebook.

Huffington Post saw another one of his ads and requested permission to use this image on their platforms and in their productions.

After only a couple of months running these ads, Mathieu achieved his goals – increasing his brand awareness and increasing traffic to his site.

Final Thoughts & Actionable Learnings

• Hi-Fructose, a contemporary art magazine, also wrote a blog post sharing Mathieu Laca's art on their site. Chances are he'll get even more backlinks now just from people seeing his art on other sites and social pages and wanting to share it themselves.
• Start with regular Instagram posts to get some feedback on what content works well with your audience. Take note of your most popular posts and begin by advertising those. Laca also chose to advertise images of his top-selling pieces.
• For more on Instagram marketing, check out our blog post on effective Instagram Stories for artists. We have also covered Instagram extensively on the Art Marketing Podcast - listen in to a few episodes.
• For our customers – enjoy use of our exhaustive Instagram Resource Vault.