Once you have a written marketing plan, with goals for your year, for each quarter and then smaller monthly and even weekly goals, it’s time to create bite-size action steps. Just do a bit at a time. Come on, you can do it!
Pick your goals for advertising, social media, promotion, various events, partnerships, video, special webinars and anything else you’d like.
So you’ve made a marketing plan and you have some goals set for the next year or so. Does your plan include simple, do-able action steps for things you can do in an hour or two each week to help grow and promote your business?
Focus. Baby steps are good. You can only do so much and posting a bit on your website, maybe a blog, too, and sometimes on Facebook and Twitter can take up a fair amount of your time. And you still want to spend most of your time breaking stained glass. So give yourself credit for making the effort and just take things a step at a time.
Just found your site on Facebook via another site and am delighted to see and read your blog. Calculating costs is a real bear cat in this field of art, unlike painting, photography, etc. Also, glad to read your article on marketing as well.
I’m presently in an ‘art gallery’ which is a co-op gallery, run by the artists who are ‘members’. I’ve discovered (after the fact), there are more ‘Sunday afternoon painters’ and crafts people than serious full time artists. I’m the only stained glass person. Most people are water colorists, acrylic painters, jewelers, woodcrafters of small bracelets, boxes, etc. There is too much time spent by members minding an empty store front than there is in selling, to say nothing about the need for time to produce art.
Please understand, I have no problem with painters, as I began art this way. I have a long history of doing a wide variety of art, using a wide variety of medias. Stained glass is just a ‘different animal’ entirely from painting, etc., regardless, as I’m guessing you are already fully aware.
As a result, I will be relocating as soon as I find a better place with more traffic, better window space, and having a better likelihood for showing and selling my art.
While those who come in to see my work, love it, they have no understanding of the time or work involved, let alone the costs for producing it. Thus, it appears I’m going to have to be giving some seminars at my new location on educating the public in the work/time/techniques involved in producing my work, just so they understand what they are paying for. That together with teaching some classes in the Art of Stained Glass, I think will be my next steps. Aside from that, I’m working on getting my personal website for my designs created.
I create all my own designs, usually in either abstract or impressionistic designs, along with using sliced stones, crystals, etc. in my work. Most recently I’ve been having custom frames built for my pieces, but I’m looking at creating more free-form designs and some smaller pieces to ‘hook’ people into feeling they can afford to buy them, as compared to loving my designs, but feeling they can’t afford them. Just as in marketing needs to ‘start small’ so too does creating smaller pieces, unframed, making them more affordable, so the viewer really can’t wait to buy them and take them home, as I have learned. Many thanks for your site.
Thanks so much for your website/blog and I’ll look forward to seeing, reading more.
Hi Jane, Thanks for your kind words! We sure understand about some of the challenges glass artists face. Keep up the great work and stop back and let us know how you’re doing. Thanks again!