Visual artists and musicians enrich our lives in more ways than we can count, with their art inspiring us to perform at our peak and being in the background of some of the most meaningful moments of our lives. It takes a lot of creative energy to produce art that resonates, but the modern artist also has to hope she has enough energy left over to capture the attention of people long enough to fully appreciate the intricacies of the project.
The internet represents a gift and a curse in this regard, as you probably know by now — artists have a far wider reach, but they have to compete in a crowded marketplace for the attention of people who can’t help but to have shorter attention spans. In this guide, I will share three tactics artists can use to stand above their peers and cut through the noise to grow their fanbases and keep them engaged and coming back for more art.
In this current climate, most serious artists have solid web presences complete with personal websites (if you don’t, I urge you to get one ASAP — you could easily build one with wix.com without having to know how to code, or you could pay to have a developer make one for you). On this website, you should be doing whatever you can to capture the contact information of everyone who shows an interest in your work. You can use services such as Hubspot or Mailchimp to create forms that capture your users emails, which you can then organize into email lists which you can then blast out updates to in bulk. None of this is as difficult or technical as you think, and is actually quite affordable. Email marketing using contacts from lead capture is also very efficient, yielding $44 for every dollar spent on average.
21.co, now Earn.com, is a site that allows you to create a profile that makes it possible for anyone to message you for a fee. If you already have a following, you can create an account on this site to allow fans to reach out to you personally — your fans will enjoy the access they have to you, and you can earn some revenue which you could choose to donate to a charity of your choosing or fund your projects. This is a great way to keep yourself at the forefront of the minds of your biggest fans, and make a little extra money as well.
I probably don’t have to tell you how much of a role smartphones play in most people’s daily lives. Artists in general are missing out big time by not taking advantage of this. As such, making the investment into getting a mobile app made could be the best decision an artist could make in their career. It may help to partner up with the right development agency that will help get a fully functional app up and running in a relatively short period of time, as that would guarantee engagement, whether there is a release planned or not.