People watch your way to your perfect buyer

So the show sea­son is almost in full swing and you are begin­ning to shlep your stuff hither and yon to all cor­ners of this coun­try. If you are a gallery shower you might be shlep­ping or you may just be busy cold call­ing local gal­leries. Either way now is the time to start think­ing about some very impor­tant stuff…like where is this art­sy­fartsy biz of yours going and how can you not starve.

Now is the per­fect time to start pay­ing atten­tion to those mys­te­ri­ous folks who buy that stuff you make. While you are on the road start to look closely at who these peo­ple really are? We call that, get­ting to know your tar­get mar­ket, demo­graphic or audi­ence, but for now we’ll just refer to them as those nice peo­ple who buy your stuff and keep you from starving.

So what has to hap­pen to get the ball rolling so we don’t end up in a card board home? Well, those nice folks

• Have to find us
• They have to like us
• They have to have some dough to hand to us

Get­ting to know them…

But that’s just the begin­ning… so get up and talk to some of those folks milling around your stuff. Treat’em like long lost friends espe­cially the ones who have some of your stuff in there hands. Talk to them about their day, their lives, their fam­i­lies, where they live. When they are gone write some notes about them… what do they have in common.

• Are they moms or grannies?
• Are they mostly look­ing for gifts?
• Are they young cou­ples look­ing for hand­made wed­ding gifts

This is the best excuse to peo­ple watch! My favorite way to do this is to try to guess people’s sto­ries and try to fig­ure how that story helps them decide what they buy, or where they go etc. When I was doing the art fair cir­cuit I often myself doing this when some­one entered my booth. An impor­tant key to this work­ing is to pay atten­tion to your intu­ition, most of us can feel the energy from peo­ple and can often Know if we have some­thing in com­mon. So…

• What is that lady with the sun hat and water bot­tle slung across her neck likely to buy or not?
• What’s up with that mom all tan­gled up in kids … is she look­ing to pam­per herself?
• Do you think that bored guy with his wife is going to buy any­thing that doesn’t have horse­power as a key feature?Or is he secretly look­ing for her birth­day present?

What’s their story?

Now, after you have spent the sec­ond day observ­ing and tak­ing copi­ous notes try to sum­ma­rize what you have learned, are there any trends?

• Where do the peo­ple live, in the city, the coun­try or…?
• What do they tend to do for a liv­ing and how much green do they bring in?
• Are they par­ents with young kids?
• Are they child­less couples?

These are the things you need to know to get a feel for who your ideal cus­tomer might be. Know­ing this helps you know what is impor­tant to them, how they think, and what they might need of yours so you can spend your time in your stu­dio focused on mak­ing the stuff that they are most likely to buy. And hav­ing stuff that the right peo­ple can’t resist will be one step closer to not starving.

Finally, once you have a good col­lec­tion of char­ac­ter­is­tics, per­onal­ity, val­ues etc. give this col­lec­tion an form…name her. After you have named her then write a story about her, what does her life look like, what does she do with her time, what does she think, who are her friends, where does she hang out? Giv­ing her form helps you visu­al­ize her so you can eas­ily see her when she walks into your booth, gallery or shows up on your web site.

Related posts:

1. The Miss­ing Piece in Sell­ing your Work. How do describe your work? When you are talk­ing to some­one about your work, be it some­one in your booth, gallery or just the person…
2. Fea­tured Blog: Inspi­ra­tion Flir­ta­tion Today is the first of our Fea­tured Blogs, to read more about the What,Why and Hows check out the descrip­tion page. Today’s first came to…
3. How to use your win­ter to help your sales Start the brand­ing process Now is a per­fect time to step back and take a look at how your buy­ers see your and eval­u­ate if…
4. 14 ways to come home empty handed Regard­less of how or where you sell you stuff you may be uncon­sciously caus­ing folks to move on down the road. Because, even though they…
5. Fea­tured Blogs…something new Over the past few seeks I have been work­ing on cre­at­ing ways to fea­ture Artists and their blogs in a way that encour­ages them to…

Tagged as: Artist, Business, Marketing, perfect customer