Apr
Marketing 101 For Illustrators
Marketing is probably one of the most unpopular tasks for many aspiring illustrators who’d rather just be creating - and yet it’s probably one of the most vital skills to learn if you are going to build a successful career in illustration.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have my wife handle most of the marketing for our business Kinetiva whilst I get on with the web and graphic design work. But now that I’m trying to transition from graphic design to illustration, it’s time to take the bull by the horns and get my marketing skills up to scratch.
Here are some of the things I plan to do…
A Marketing Strategy
Before diving headfirst into creating websites, postcard mailings, using social media tools and all of the other marketing options available in this digital age, it’s important to create a Marketing Strategy to ensure that all of your marketing efforts are focused.
An effective Marketing Strategy should be based around your target markets - if you know who your target markets are, it will be much easier to focus your marketing actions to a few, specific places/people rather than a blanket approach to everyone, in the hope that someone will be interested.
Building A Community & Network
With all of the Social Networking options available these days, it’s hard to know where to start. My wife’s a dab-hand at this but it’s something I’m just getting started with.
Here’s a run down of the some of the options and how they can help you:
A great, informal way to engage with Illustrators and Art Directors from around the world, send out updates on new pieces of work as you do them and share illustration resources with others. Remember it’s not all about you though - don’t be me, me, me all the time or you’ll soon find yourself with no followers. You can find me on Twitter here @jonwoodward.
Flickr
Flickr is a great way to share all of your process work as well as your finished illustration and is a nice companion to your main portfolio site.
You will need to put a bit of work in though and comment on other flickr users work to engage with people and get them to head over to you flickr page.
Keep your main FaceBook profile for friends and instead create a companion/business page to your main profile dedicated to your illustration work. Join other illustrators pages and get involved. Write on their walls, comment on their illustrations, ask questions and share your experiences and resources you have found along the way.
Marketing Resources & Materials
Portfolio Website
A portfolio website will be your main promotional vehicle online and it’s vital these days to have one. There are so many options available to build a professional-looking website that there’s no excuse to have an ugly, badly-designed site because you can’t afford to hire a professional web designer/developer.
One such solution is a Wordpress-powered website - it is a powerful and easy-to-use system which is no longer restricted to just being a blogging platform. There are so many free and premium themes to choose from, that you are guaranteed to find something that you like.
If you can’t afford to hire a professional to set up a site for you - and you’re a bit of a technophobe, then you might like our affordable step-by-step website tutorial which takes you through the process of setting up a Wordpress-based website right through from sorting out your hosting/domain name to adding your content.
A Blog
A blog could be one of the most effective marketing tools in your arsenal. Search engines love them due to the fresh content regularly being added (providing you update it frequently) and they’re an ideal way to build a community and following around what you do.
Business Cards, postcards and other printed promo materials
A time-honoured method of getting your work in front of art directors has always been the postcard mailing. This isn’t something that you do just once and hope for the best though, you will need to send these out every three months or so and think about following them up with a phone call too.
The big thing I have to get over when it comes to marketing myself as an illustrator is just knowing where to start and what to do…you can follow my progress on this blog and find out what has worked & hasn’t worked so well over the coming months.
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