Christy DeKoning on Marketing Art

Tell us about your mar­ket­ing jour­ney… How did you start? When did you dis­cover that you needed to market?

It’s funny, but mar­ket­ing seems to have come nat­u­rally to me. I used to work in offices as a marketing/creative assis­tant, so when I decided that I was ready to work at por­traits on a full-time basis, it seemed log­i­cal to start talk­ing to peo­ple online about it. I joined Etsy and that really got the ball rolling. My work tends to mar­ket itself, because peo­ple love to show off paint­ings of their fam­ily mem­bers to their friends, which in turn leads to more busi­ness for me — mar­ket­ing is almost sec­ondary to “word-of-mouth” adver­tis­ing, which is my num­ber one source of commissions.

Do you have a mar­ket­ing plan,strategy if so please summarize?

No. I just wake up in the morn­ing and decide if I’m going to paint first, blog first, or “twit­ter” away my morning.

Do you use Social media online alone or do you com­bine it with off-line efforts?

I have very lit­tle off-line mar­ket­ing — 90% of my clients are inter­na­tional, which all comes from online mar­ket­ing. I try to stay involved with my com­mu­nity as much as pos­si­ble, so a cer­tain amount of time is spent at local art shows, but I rely on social media for most of my connections.

One of the things Christy has in com­mon with the other artists to be fea­tured here is her will­ing­ness to offer non-traditional ways for her clients to enjoy her work. She taste­fully incor­po­rates her work into post cards, jew­elry, greet­ing cards and other acces­sories.  In doing so she and the other artists show an under­stand­ing of the client/customer courtship process I have talked about. These low cost alter­na­tives give her buy­ers a chance to expe­ri­ence how she treats buy­ers and in the process increase their trust which in the end may lead to larger pur­chases. Addi­tion­ally, she can offer the accesseror­ies as upsells or as com­pli­men­tary gift to big ticket buy­ers or collectors.

Another exam­ple of both trust build­ing and under­stand­ing the client courtship model is Christy’s will­ing­ness to share her process. Scat­tered through out her blog are numer­ous exam­ples of mini-tutorials demon­strat­ing her cre­ative process. Some may worry that doing such a thing is tan­ta­mount to giv­ing away state secrets but research has shown just the oppo­site. Artists, like Christy know the dif­fer­ence between style and tech­nique, they know that no amount of “secrets” can give another per­son the abil­ity to copy her style, her work will always be iden­ti­fi­able. More than shar­ing tech­niques her tuto­ri­als ofer a win­dow into her cre­ative jour­ney and in the process build trust and adds another layer of unique­ness for her poten­tial clients.

To see the mar­ket­ing styles men­tioned above check out Christy’s Blog, Art­fire store and Etsy Store just click the links below:

Acces­sories

Orig­i­nal Paintings

Main Shop

Blog