The Art of Being a Beacon

Last week we talked about the impor­tance of know­ing who is likely to buy your work and  what it is your work does for them that makes them want it. The impor­tance of really get­ting down and work­ing out some­thing that reflects both you and your work, helps you by giv­ing you a strong under­stand­ing of your mar­ket and the begin­ning of a real tool to help you both stay focused and remain flex­i­ble in chang­ing times.

The other main pur­pose of know­ing your Who and What is the foun­da­tion it gives you when you actu­ally start find­ing those folks who are gaga over your work. It is like hav­ing your own crib sheet handy at all times. Today we’re going to cover this in more depth  as we talk about how you let peo­ple know you’ve the stuff they are look­ing for how you can be a bea­con guid­ing their search.

So what does this have to do with the price of beer on Sun­day? Well, it is the all impor­tant key stone to expand­ing your Who & What into a way of describ­ing the prob­lems you solve and who you solve them for. This what we call “Mar­ket­ing Sytax” a con­cept made pop­u­lar by Robert Mid­dle­ton and Mark Sil­ver. The con­cept con­sists of boil­ing down all of the infor­ma­tion you have gath­ered thus far about your buy­ers, their prob­lems and how you help them.

Have a message

Iden­tify the prob­lem your buy­ers face, you described this in your What descriptions.

“I help young cou­ples who are look­ing for unique locally hand­made table­ware”
Or “I help fam­i­lies who want to memo­ri­al­ize the key events in their lives but don’t want the stan­dard por­trait style.”

Here’s the key and impor­tant part of this…a prob­lem ori­ented state­ment whether it stays in your brain or you use it answer ques­tions about your work will, 99.9% of the time if worded right lead the per­son you are talk­ing to to ask a “how do you do that” kind of ques­tion. And that is where the  the solu­tion based fol­lowup comes in.

Focus on ben­e­fits when you fol­lowup so the state­ment above would look like this when ben­e­fits are added:

“I help young cou­ples who are look­ing for unique locally hand­made table­ware. My pots are designed to make you smile when you dine and be great con­ver­sa­tion starters when you entertain.”

“I help fam­i­lies who want to memo­ri­al­ize the key events in their lives but don’t want the stan­dard por­trait style. We cre­ate visual con­ver­sa­tions of your fam­i­lies impor­tant events by  cap­ture you as you are and build­ing a story of the event. By build­ing a mem­ory book   fam­i­lies will always be able  to relive the event through the con­ver­sa­tions the mem­o­ries stir”

As you can see this is a whole lot more thought pro­vok­ing and curios­ity gen­er­at­ing than the sim­ple Who and What and that is the goal…you want to engage peo­ple so they even­tu­ally iden­tify or not iden­tify as a mem­ber of your fan club. You can expand the state­ments above for use through out a con­ver­sa­tion by includ­ing sto­ries of how your work helped some­one, or the effect your work had on their lives. For exam­ple, your paint­ing might have just the right feel to a neglected room that it is now a favorite. Or your pots may have cre­ate such a fun enter­tain­ing expe­ri­ence that the cou­ple bought a cus­tom table set.

Hang with them

This stuff is impor­tant when you are out mix­ing with with poten­tial fans, it you iden­tify you as the one and only per­son who can solve their prob­lem. I t does this by giv­ing you a way to engage them as the nice per­son you are instead of the way that used car sales man in the poly­ester ‘70s vin­tage suite can’t even imagine.

Now that you are fully armed with the best tools you can start to really hone in on find­ing the best places the hang and hang with them. So what might these places be? Every­body likes to hang out with peo­ple who they iden­tify with. Brain­storm all the places you think these poten­tial fans might hang out for example:

On the internet

Forums
A  jew­eler who has iden­ti­fied young pro­fes­sional women could look for on-line forums where these women hang out. They  could be every­thing from Mommy ori­ented forums to pro­fes­sional soci­eties or clubs. Painters and pot­ters iden­ti­fy­ing home­own­ers inter­ested in redec­o­rat­ing might hang out in home improve­ment or dec­o­rat­ing forums.

Blogs
There are a lot of spe­cialty blogs out there that might match up with your fan base or be aimed at help­ing them but don’t do so for what you have to offer. Find­ing those blogs and com­ment­ing on posts rel­e­vant to the prob­lem you solve will go a long way towards dri­ving poten­tial fans your way and help estab­lish you as the nice cre­ative per­son you are.

Your blog
Set up your blog in ways that let peo­ple learn about how you can solve their prob­lems. For exam­ple, don’t just limit your­self to describ­ing and show­ing your process show how your work can be used. So if you are a fiber artist and your work can be used for walls or table tops write about and post pho­tos that show how your work can be used to solve dec­o­rat­ing problems.

Off-line

Teach a class
This may not appeal to all but it does work for find­ing poten­tial fans and buy­ers. Most folks tak­ing classes at art cen­ters aren’t there to learn how to com­pete with you they just want to do some­thing cre­ative. Teach­ing them how to do that and includ­ing how they could use the work your are teach­ing them cre­ate will help them iden­tify with you or at least spread the word to their friends.

Talk to groups
Talk­ing to groups is not an easy thing, in fact I hate it, and it does work pretty much in the same way as teach­ing does because you are actu­ally teach­ing folks about both your medium and your work and how your unique has helped oth­ers resolve their prob­lems. So you might talk to ASID (asso­ci­a­tion of inte­rior design­ers) if you are a pot­ter, painter, pho­tog­ra­pher or any type of artist pro­duc­ing work that can be used to improve the envi­ron­ments of home or office.

Write
Quite often mag­a­zines are on the look out for arti­cles that address prob­lems and issues you may be inti­mately famil­iar with. It doesn’t hurt approach­ing them with a problem/solution based arti­cle like how hand made work is bet­ter than stuff bought at K-Mart.

Draw a map

Once have stirred inter­est you need to help these folks find your stuff AND buy it. No, I’m not talk­ing about being a pest I’m talk­ing about mak­ing the paths to buy­ing your stuff obvi­ous and easy find and fol­low. So here are some sim­ple ways to do that:

E-mail
put all of your con­tact infor­ma­tion on your e-mail sig­na­ture and include your state­ment we just talked about. Include links to your web site/blog, face­book, twit­ter etc.

Your biz card
First don’t print your own busi­ness cards unless you don’t want folks to really take your seri­ous. Design the card to have two sides one that gives your basic con­tact infor­ma­tion the other that has your problem/solution state­ment on it.

Sell­ing on-line
Design the page that shows only the work a cus­tomer is inter­ested in to also show other items they might like, check out the way Ama­zon does this. Don’t give your cus­tomers to many options at one time gen­er­ally any­thing more than three wil tend to freeze their brain caus­ing them to wan­der of in a trance. Finally, put a clear call to action on your sales page like “buy now” or “click to pur­chase” or “learn more”. Your call to action should only give them two ways to go… buy or don’t buy.

Become vis­i­ble

The point of all of this is to light your­self up in such a way as to be a bea­con for all those  with a prob­lem you solve bet­ter than any­one else. You don’t have to spend a lot if any money to do this here are some easy ways to get your mar­ket­ing mes­sage out there.

Videos & pho­tos
Put pho­tos on your blog that illus­trate how you solve the prob­lems your fans face. You can turn those pho­tos into slide shows and post them on your blog when­ever you talk about that par­tic­u­lar prob­lem. You can also cre­ate a Youtube chan­nel and link the videos on your blog to that chan­nel. Flickr is a great place to show your work espe­cially if you use their pho­to­stream which can be eas­ily embed­ded into your blog. To see what this looks like check our fea­tured artists.

Busi­ness card
Make it fun and make it reflect not only you but also the prob­lem you solve.

Web site
In this day and age a web site is imper­a­tive and it needs to reflect you and who you work with. If you are think­ing of using some free­bee lame set up don’t even bother because you’ll waist your time. Blogs are the best for­mat for get­ting and grow­ing your vis­i­bil­ity,  there are a lot of options avail­able. Remem­ber… a blog is just a web site that has more flex­i­bil­ity  and ease of use on your end than a sta­tic web site.

Images of work cour­tesy of Kris­ten Stein and Jane Campbell