The Artist 101 Promotion Guide
Whether you're an old-timer here at DBH, or just starting out, self promotion is a big tool in helping you sell your artwork. There are a number of ways to generate buzz in this highly competitive industry, and your artwork isn't going to promote itself. Don't worry, we're here to help you out! We've gathered a ton of our resources together to give you our top tips for promoting your artwork and DBH store. In this post we'll take a look at our Top 10 best strategies to market your artwork and produce sales in your DBH store.
For even more tips & tricks, CLICK HERE to download the full Artist 101 Promotion Guide. (Updated February 2016!)
Upload all of your best artwork to DBH. Everything starts with uploading your artwork. Your DBH store works best with more than just a few designs. The more designs you have in your store, the more likely your artwork will show up in our search results, and the more searchable your store becomes on DBH. You can have as many as 60 designs in your store. Work the "Long Tail" and give customers as many product options as possible. Visit your Artist Dashboard to start enabling more products.
Add a relevant title and description to your artwork. For example, if your design has a panda in it, make sure panda is in the title and description. Don't stop there, make sure to describe everything in your design. What is the panda doing, what style art did you create, what's in the background? Search engines like Google have an easier time finding your products if you tag them with keywords and more potential buyers have the chance of discovering your art. See our Artist 101 Promotion Guide for more tips on tagging your artwork.
Add your social media accounts to your store. Make sure to add your social media accounts to your artist shop in your DBH Artist Dashboard. This helps us tag you when we promote your artwork and it will help your fans find you and follow you on other social media sites.
Visit the DBH Forum for a critique. Getting objective feedback from other artists is a great way to improve your designs and to help self-promote. Build credibility and respect for yourself as an artist by not only talking about your designs, but giving constructive feedback to other artists as well.
Build a social following and tell your fans. This may be the most difficult part of self-promotion, but it has the biggest pay off in the long run. Start building your social media accounts, add other artists and existing customers, and start posting! You can enhance your posts by showing work-in-progress photos and describing what inspired you to create the design.
There are additional tips and information on social media promotion in the Artist Toolkit. CLICK HERE to download the complete Artist 101 Promotion Guide.
Promote your artwork with a website or blog. It's not uncommon for designers to have their own website or blog that shows off their work--it's another great way to promote and gives you a chance to show other work. Showing off your latest designs can help your fans and followers track your progress as a designer and will have them eager to see what you'll design next.
Show off your tees on other promotion websites. There are some great websites out there that just focus on sharing t shirt designs, and it's a great way to generate a ton of buzz about your work. Some of the most popular sites other artists are using: MinTees.com, Fancy-Tshirts.com, IAmTheTrend.com, and Shirtoid.com (to name a few). TeeHunter.com for instance allows artists from DBH to upload their designs for extra exposure. Check out their easy to use upload feature here.
Ask bloggers and promoters to help share your store. Many artists take advantage of t shirt blogs, fashion blogs, art blogs and more to help promote their artwork. Reaching out to these promoters and asking them for a review or critique on their website can possibly send you a ton of customers. Some popular sites our artists use are hideyourarms.com, rawtee.com, and shirthunters.com.
Update Your Store Regularly. Upload artwork into your store that you are the most proud of and re-vamp your profile on a regular basis. Managing your artwork shows your fans that you care about your work and will show your customers that they should as well.
Talk to your fans, friends, and family! Did we mention talking to your fans? We can't emphasize this enough! Gaining as much customer feedback as you can will help you have a more successful store at DBH. Do they like your colors? Is there something they want to see more of? Ask your customers why they like your work so you understand what your audience enjoys. Also, don't forget the easiest fans you can promote to are your own friends and family. You can ask them to share your artwork on their social media accounts too!
Is Design By Humans helping to promote my store?
We've got a few tricks up our sleeve for helping drive traffic to your store. We rotate artists in our "Featured Artists" slide, feature a new piece of artwork every day, feature trending designs in ads all over the web, and we promote artists on our social media accounts every day. We also run a number of paid advertising campaigns on sites like Google, Bing and Facebook. This includes re-targeting campaigns, so that when buyers visit your products, we'll customize our ads to highlight previously viewed products.
Remember that the work you took so much time and effort to design deserves the right exposure. Next time you post a brand new design, go through some of these steps to increase your following and traffic. Good Luck!