An artist visibility strategy: four key steps

Over the past few weeks we’ve exam­ined the key tools for gain­ing on-line vis­i­bil­ity to poten­tial buy­ers. We began with the con­cept of a hub that becomes your on-line home base, then exam­ined social media con­nec­tions  to and from your hub and their use as links to both poten­tial and exist­ing buy­ers. We also looked at the tools avail­able to build a highly effec­tive hub.

Now we’ll use those tools to begin build­ing an online vis­i­bil­ity strategy.

Plot­ting a strategy

A vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy is sim­ply a guide that includes a road map, pack­ing guide­lines based on your des­ti­na­tion and a gen­eral time­line for your journey.

In the over­all scheme of things, a vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy is an inte­gral part of your over­all busi­ness plan­ning. How your strat­egy is built and what it includes is depen­dent on and dri­ven by your busi­ness goals. There are five key fac­tors that under­lie your vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy, they are:

Your per­son­al­ity and style

Every­thing about your strat­egy should be infused with you, your per­son­al­ity, your val­ues and your vision. This fusion is what gives the bright­ness or glow to your vis­i­bil­ity efforts and what catches the atten­tion of those unique buy­ers seek­ing the solu­tion your vision provides.

Busi­ness goals

Your busi­ness goals are the mor­tar that hold the bricks of your busi­ness together, so those bricks must be made from mate­ri­als that will sup­port the rest of the struc­ture. If any of the bricks are weak, no amount of mor­tar will be able to hold the struc­ture together. Your busi­ness goals must be con­sis­tently solid to be effective.

Built to attract

The over­ar­ch­ing pur­pose of your vis­i­bil­ity efforts is to be seen by those peo­ple who share your vision and value your artis­tic voice.

Widen the field of view

Just as a wide angle lens cap­tures a larger view than a pow­er­ful tele­photo, hav­ing a wide net­work  works in a sim­i­lar fash­ion. The wider your net­work the greater oppor­tu­nity to find and be found be those who would be drawn to work.

Four steps to your strategy

For sim­plic­ity sake I’ve boiled down the strat­egy build­ing process to the fol­low­ing four steps:

1. Assess your cur­rent situation

Take a look at who is buy­ing your work, deter­mine how many are find­ing you ran­domly and how many come directly to you because they know or know of you and your work. Fig­ure out the extent any of your proac­tive efforts play in bring­ing poten­tial buy­ers to you and your hub.

Use your sales, espe­cially repeat and referred sales, as indi­ca­tors of the effec­tive­ness of those pro-active efforts. The per­cent­age those sales are of your over­all sales give you a gen­eral esti­mate of num­ber of poten­tial buy­ers  pur­pose­fully com­ing to buy your work whether through own­ing other pieces or the result of a recommendation.

Know­ing this infor­ma­tion can give you a good idea as to the effec­tive­ness of what ever you are doing to draw the right peo­ple to you. Get­ting a han­dle on this level of detail will also help you real­is­ti­cally know the basis of your sales and more impor­tantly help you with the next steps in con­struct­ing your vis­i­bil­ity strategy.

2. Set your vis­i­bil­ity goals

Begin set­ting your goals by using a time line to help you deter­mine where you want to be at a cer­tain point in time. Make sure that the time line fits with your over­all busi­ness goals.

Next estab­lish the steps needed to reach your end goal fol­lowed by what­ever tasks are needed to com­plete each step. Once estab­lished, you’ll have a more com­plete of what you need to do to reach each goal.

Hav­ing goals and steps towards their achieve­ment are mean­ing­less with­out a way of know­ing if and when you reach a goal. You’ll need to have some mea­sure of assess­ing your efforts e.g. sales at a given price point or per­cent of ran­dom sales vs. Over­all sales.

Finally, when set­ting your goals don’t over com­mit your­self, set your goals real­is­ti­cally in a way that reflects your time pri­or­i­ties and your com­mit­ment level. Over stretch­ing your goals will lead to dis­ap­point­ment and frus­tra­tion. Also, real­ize that goals are sim­ply guide­lines, they need to be flex­i­ble because they are linked to an unknown future. The process can be made eas­ier by describ­ing out­comes pro­duced by suc­cess­fully reach­ing a goal, doing so can give you a point of mea­sure­ment that show you if you reached your goal and how real­is­tic the goal was.

3. Define the tools you’ll use

After your goals and  the tasks nec­es­sary to achieve them  are estab­lished, we need to turn our atten­tion to deter­min­ing the right tools for the job. Exam­ine the tools avail­able in light of your intended goals and chose accord­ing to their abil­ity to help you meet your goals. In the con­text of vis­i­bil­ity look for the most use­ful tools for build­ing your Hub and net­work while rein­forc­ing your busi­ness goals.

For exam­ple, you’ll need to deter­mine whether Face­book or Twit­ter will work best for you, like­wise if search engine opti­miza­tion will be a bet­ter choice.

4. Build the frame­work of your vis­i­bil­ity strategy

Your frame­work  is the guid­ing struc­ture of your strat­egy, it defines your focus and direc­tion. In our case it is made up of the paths or chan­nels used by poten­tial buy­ers who fit your pro­file to find you. Your vis­i­bil­ity strat­egy is only as effec­tive as your efforts to know who is search­ing for you and the path or paths they may take to find you. Claim­ing  those paths or at least key points along the paths are nec­es­sary to help­ing your buy­ers find you.

Exam­ine the buyer pro­files, you have devel­oped as part of your early plan­ning,  in light of your vis­i­bil­ity goals. See if you can iden­tify the paths most com­monly used by your ideal buy­ers to find and buy the prod­ucts that fit best. For exam­ple, is she likely to use a search engine or ask a friend?

Hav­ing  deter­mined who your ideal buyer is and the way she is likely to find what you make, you are now able to con­struct and  claim your spot on the path if not the path itself. How your path and or way point looks and works is deter­mined by you buyer’s behav­ior pat­terns. If she is savvy to the inter­net and likes social net­works then Face­book might be a place to start. If instead she relies more on Google then empha­siz­ing search engine opti­miza­tion may be a more effec­tive approach.

Time­less

While these steps are not all inclu­sive they have been forged over time and are con­sid­ered best prac­tices for build­ing any strategy.