I’m an artist, not a marketer. Do you struggle with marketing yourself, too?
When it comes to marketing yourself, many (most?) artists struggle. So while this isn’t really a “how to market yourself” article, we still wanted to share it because sometimes it just helps to know you’re not alone.
I don’t know what marketing to do. I need help with that. I want to be hungry on social media but I’m not. It’s awkward to pimp myself and I kind of just rely on doing shows.
Marketing is hard. All I do to market myself is share a painting or time lapse or something on my Instagram. But I probably only share about 10% of what I actually make. And one reason is insecurities, like, Hmm, I’m still working on this, I’m not too happy with this yet.
So promotion, soliciting or trying to find work or sell myself. I can promote my friends all day long and say, They’re awesome, you should pay them thousands of dollars for this! But if I say, Yeah, you should pay me thousands of dollars, it’s a little different. I know that that’s what I’m worth and I want to value myself, but to just say it, it’s hard.
[M]arketing myself and working on self-promotion [is probably my biggest challenge]. The biggest thing that I would like to get better at is putting more effort into promoting myself and putting the value of my work into a pitch to certain companies. I’m pretty happy with what I can put together from a shoot, but I have a hard time telling companies that they should hire me based on that. That’s just my personality, I have a tough time really selling myself.
And being active on social media because I think that can be a really valuable tool, but I don’t know, I always have a hard time promoting myself, it just feels strange.