Dilemma One: Who is My Target Audience?
Your artist blog should offer content that interests an audience that you can grow a relationship with over time. Because of this relationship, they will take action, such as enroll in a workshop or purchase your work.
When I present my Blogging for an Art Business program, a concern I hear from artists is that they aren’t sure of their audience. Who are they, and how to connect with them? Who are the people that will be interested in the artist’s work?
Have you identified a target audience for your artist blog? Who will benefit and be most interested in following you? In other words, who is the target market that you wish to attract with your blog? Before you start posting on your artist blog, you need to understand who your blog will be serving. Understanding who that audience is will help you to create content that keeps them visiting your site.
Why Can’t Your Artist Blog be for “Everyone”
First of all, if your goal is to sell something – such as a piece of art, a piece of jewelry, a commission, or a workshop – you have to accept a universal law of sales – if you are selling to everyone, you are selling to no one. If you are trying to target “everyone” with your content, you will likely interest no one. You need to understand who will be interested in your work and your message, and then fine-tune your site and message accordingly.
Once you have done this, it is much easier to determine which marketing channels you can use to best find and connect with them.
How to Identify Your Audience
Here are a few strategies to figure out your target audience.
Look at Your Existing Customers
If you’ve are already successful at selling work, one of the best ways to do this is to analyze who has purchased work from you in the past. Write a description of your typical client.
Do they come from a specific geographic area?
Do they have any common interests?
Who are the people that attracted to your work?
Are there topics and questions that they like to discuss with you?
The answers to these questions will give you insight into who your audience is and what kind of content they will want to hear from you. Once you’ve analyzed this group, take some time, and see if you can expand on the group. Are there any common denominators that will help you to grow the audience.
Identify a New Audience for Your Artwork
If you are new to selling your work, you may have to work a little harder to come up with your audience. There will likely be some trial and error involved in this process. Take time to develop one or more buyer personas. Hubspot offers a succinct explanation of buyer persona here.
If you haven’t started selling or found an audience, can you put yourself in someone else’s shoes? What would you want to know about your work? What would you like to hear about your work? Who do you think will be interested in this work? A buyer persona is simply working to build a profile of a potential customer, identifying the same qualities, and you would if they were an existing customer.
Does your subject matter appeal to an audience with a specific interest? I’ve explained in prior posts about how I started working with my father, artist Robert Yonke. In his case, the subject matter was an important detail that led us to a niche. Repeat this process to find an audience within any interest group.
Could an audience connect with the emotion behind your work?
If creating functional art, is there an audience that could utilize your work?
Figuring out your target audience is going to take some time to brainstorm. Then, there may be some trial and error involved as you work through this process. Stick with it, though, and you will eventually identify an audience that could have an interest in your work.
Should I wait until I’ve figured out my target audience to start blogging?
While it’s good to start thinking about this and have some idea about who you want to target, it’s unnecessary to have this in mind to build your blog based website. The first thing to do is tell your story and show your work, and you can do that with or without a target audience. You can start blogging before you’ve identified your target audience. Writing about your work may even help in the process of identifying them.
What’s Next?
Once you have identified that audience, your next step will be to figure out how to reach them. Stay tuned for the future post, Dilemma 2: How to Reach My Target Audience.
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:Photo by Jonas Jacobsson on Unsplash
