The BoldBrush Art Marketing Playbook

Your Guide to Creating and Selling More Art While Spending Less Time Marketing

Clint Watson(our CEO and Founder)

Before we get started, I think it’s important that you understand who we are, how we came up with our system, and why we’re making it available to fine artists like you for free.

It all started 20 years ago when our founder, Clint Watson, launched our company BoldBrush.

Clint is one of those rare types of people that you meet because he is both artistic and a techie.

Clint has an amazing eye for art and is a self-taught musician. You should hear him play the guitar!

He also is a self-taught programmer and loves nothing more than building wonderful technology that makes a difference in people’s lives.

At the time Clint was running a well-known art gallery here in San Antonio called The Greenhouse Gallery. That’s when an artist he represented named Kevin Macpherson approached him about a problem that he was having.

Back then, the only way for an artist like Kevin to get a website was to hire a web designer to build it for him. And every time he wanted to update his website with new artwork, his web designer had to do it.

The problem was that it always took forever because web designers were notoriously unresponsive. It also cost money. Every time Kevin wanted to update his website, he had to pay his web designer.

Kevin reached out to Clint about his problem and asked if he would be Kevin’s web designer. Clint knew if he did, Kevin wouldn’t be any better off (running the gallery kept Clint busy).

So instead Clint built a simple tool that made it easy for Kevin to build and maintain his website himself.

Kevin loved it so much, he started telling all his artist friends. And before long, Clint had several hundred artists using his tool and that number grew kept growing and growing.

It wasn’t long before Clint left the gallery to focus full-time on helping artists with their websites.

Kevin Macpherson(our first member)

Today BoldBrush has over 13,000 members in 52 countries using our platform. It’s called FASO. We’ve also grown a lot over the years. Here’s a short list of the ways we help artists today:

• FASO has grown into a powerful art marketing platform that helps artist market and sell their artwork right from their website.

• The BoldBrush Painting Competition is a free monthly online juried art competition that we run that awards over $38K in prizes every month.

• We publish three daily newsletters to help artists:• FineArtViews offers great advice marketing and sell your art.• Informed Collector promotes the artwork of our members and

our contest winners to over 34K collectors. • And DailyArtStream promotes our members’ artwork to over

70K collectors, gallery owners and art enthusiasts.

• BoldBrush Ads is an affordable ad platform that we built to help artists promote their artwork, workshops, and more.

• BoldBrush Video is a streaming video platform that we launched that delivers the best art instruction right to your studio.

My name is Dave Geada, and I’m the CMO of BoldBrush.

I’ve been a marketing professional for over 20 years, and got my start working for innovative technology startups. I’ve also worked for big technology brands like:

• Network Solutions, the first registrar licensed to sell .COM, .NET, and .ORG domain names.

• CA Technologies, a $4B enterprise software company.

• And Rackspace, a $2B managed hosting company.

In 2011 I launched my own marketing agency called Big Purple Fish where I’ve helped a lot of local technology startups here in San Antonio grow their businesses.

That’s how I met Clint back in 2013. We soon began working together and then in 2015 I became BoldBrush’s CMO.

Dave Geada (CMO)

In my 7+ years with BoldBrush, I’ve literally talked with thousands of professional fine artists about marketing and selling their art. Artists just like Tina Garrett, who’s pictured here.

In that time, I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to selling art.

I’ve taken all that I’ve learned and used it to build a system we call BoldBrush AMP. The AMP stands for Art Marketing Playbook, and its proven formula to help you grow your art sales.

If you follow AMP, you’ll spend less time doing what you dread, more time doing what you love, and all while selling more art.

But wait, it gets even better. Because when you use AMP with FASO, our art marketing platform, you get something we call AMP2.

With AMP2 you’ll spend even less time marketing, even more time painting, and all while selling even more artwork!

Are you ready to get started?

Sooner or later, every fine artist struggles to sell their art. The scary thing is that it can happen at any point in your art career:

• When you’re first starting out and trying to figure out how to get started.

• After several years of steady sales and after you think you’ve figured it all out.

• Even master artists struggle to grow their art sales from time to time.

We call this situation The Artist’s Wall, and it can feel devasting.

Just like marathon runners are affected by the runner’s wall, The Artist’s Wall can hit you fast and when you least expect it. Worst of all, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach that you use take to fix it.

Once initial panic has washed them over, most artists trying addressing The Artist’s Wall the same way.

They begin scouring the internet looking for “expert” marketing advice on how to sell more of their art, and very quickly:

• Get overwhelmed with the amount of advice that’s available.

• Get confused by the conflicting advice that they come across.

• Get disappointed when it doesn’t work for them.

• And then they often just give up.

We call this the Marketing Advice Firehouse, because it feels just like trying to drink from a firehouse.

Have you ever wondered why this happens?

Well, it’s simple. That expert advice was designed to help ecommerce companies sell more of their products.

It doesn’t work because online retailers and artists have very different businesses.

Just how different are they? Let’s look at the it together.

Here’s a quick side by side comparison of retailers and artists:

Retailers:• Sell mass-produced products that

can be quickly made.

• Have many different types of products to sell.

• Have many customers at a given time.

• Only sell their products.

Artists:• Sell one-of-a-kind originals that

take time to produce.

• Only have one type of product to sell.

• Have only a few customers at a given time.

• Make and sell their products.

That last point is the most important difference of all!

Another way of thinking about expert advice is that they’re…

Trying to get us to sell this… Like Amazon sells this…

And it just doesn’t work!

Since retailers only sell their products, they have much more time to focus on marketing.

So when it comes to following the experts’ advice, they can because they have the time and resources to do it.

But artists must make and sell their art. So when they follow the experts’ advice, they find that there’s never enough time to do both well.

That means they’re forced to make a difficult choice between painting or marketing their art, focusing on one at the expense of the other.

What’s worse, every time they must switch between one or the other, it takes time to regain their focus. And all that wasted time adds up.

This effect is something that we like to call The Making/Marketing Pendulum.

The Making/Marketing Pendulum looks something like this:

• An artist spends most of her time making her art, until she is literally tripping over her artwork in her studio.

• So she puts painting aside for a while and starts focusing on marketing her artwork.

• If she’s lucky, and after a lot of trial and error, she finally stumbles on something that works. It’s takes a lot of time to pull off, but at least she’s selling her art.

• Then she runs out of inventory to sell. So she puts her marketing on hold to focus on painting.

• Very soon her art sales stall and her inventory grows again until she’s tripping over her art again.

At this point the cycle keeps repeating itself until the artist just can’t take it anymore.

This back and forth between painting and marketing is rough.

First, it’s exhausting. It makes you feel like you’re on a treadmill all the time and can never quite keep up.

Second, it takes you away for long periods from the thing you love the most, painting.

Third, and worst of all, it prevents you from growing your art sales beyond a certain point.

And that’s if you’re one of the lucky ones who happens to stumble on something that works for you (and are willing to put in a crazy amount of time and effort)!

By the way, if this has ever happened to you then you’ve fallen victim to something that we call the Marketing Guru Myth.

Don’t feel badly, though. It’s easy to fall into this trap.

The good news is that there’s a much better way to go about all this. One that we’ve seen work time and time again for artists just like you.

We find that the artists who are the most successful have discovered a few important principles that theyput into action every day. They understand that:

• Artists must own and control their own marketing in order to drive consistent art sales. They can’t just rely on galleries andothers to market and sell for them.

• The primary goal of marketing is to build a quality audience. This audience consists of collectors, fans, prospects, vendors, and even friends and family who deeply connect with them and their art.

• An artist’s number one marketing asset is their audience list. So they work diligently to build that list up over time.

• Artists must consistently connect and engage with their audience in meaningful ways into order to be successful.

• Artists must relentlessly focus on the most importantmarketing tasks or they run the risk of hurting their art sales.

The other thing that these artists do is that they putthese principles into action every day by doing five things well.

These five things are the heart and soul of the AMP formula :

1. They figure out ways to meet people in the real world who really engage with them and their art.

2. When they meet these people: • They ask them to sign up for their email newsletter. • They ask them to follow them on Instagram and Facebook.

• And they add any collectors they identify to a special list (even if these folks don’t sign up for their newsletter).

3. They use their newsletter, social media and personal emails to stay in touch with this audience until they are ready to buy.

4. They make it easy for their audience to buy their art when they are ready.

5. And as their collector list grows, they focus on the 20% of collectors that generate 80% of their art sales.

It’s not just what you do that matters though, but also how you do it. So let’s talk about the best way to pull off each of these steps.

Let’s start with step one, how to meet quality people in the real world.

Most artists we meet tend to think that the best way to meet collectors and other quality people in the real world is to get a gallery to represent them and then have that gallery put on an exhibit of their work.

This is by far one of the most challenging ways to meet collectors, and here’s why.

Your gallery is not going to let you capture email addresses and connect with their collectors on social media. And without that ability, you can’t market to these collectors directly.

Also, there are fewer and fewer galleries around these days and more artists than ever seeking representation.

This helps explains why so many artists that have representation are seeing their gallery sales dry up.

When it comes to meeting quality people in the real world, it’s important to think creatively.

Here’s a short list of ideas to help you jumpstart your own creativity:

• Enter juried art exhibitions and make sure that you attend the event (even if you don’t get in).

• Hold your own solo show, pop-up show, or home show, invite your audience, and get them to bring a friend.

• Hold a group show, pop-up show, or home show with other artists and have everyone invite their collectors.

• Partner with a local charity to hold an art auction.

The key is to focus on events that will put you in front of new high-quality people so that you can implement step two of this playbook.

Before we move on, let’s address what artists should do during the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s important to follow social distancing protocols. That means you should hold off on holding any in-person events until the pandemic is over.

In the meantime, here are a few things that you can do to keep your marketing engine going:

• Start planning and promoting in-person events that you’ll hold six months from now once the pandemic is behind us.

• Enter online juried art exhibitions like The BoldBrush Painting Competition.

• Hold an online solo or group show on Facebook Live.

• Call your collectors to make sure that they are OK and to let them know you are too.

Most of all, stay safe. The world needs you and your art now more than ever.

Now let’s talk about the things that you must absolutely do every time you meet people in the real world.

• Tell your story and the story about your art. Collectors buy stories, not art. Especially stories that reinforce the stories that they believe about themselves and how the world works.

• Only take the next steps with people that connect with your story. It’s about quality, not quantity. So be picky about who you add to your list of potential collectors.

• Ask people that connect with you and your story to sign up for your newsletter. And have them do it right then and there.

• Also ask them to follow you on Instagram and Facebook. And you guessed it, have them do it right then and there.

• And if any of these people are collectors, ask them for their email and add the to your collector list.

Storytelling is so important to part of this process that it’s worth diving into this topic for a bit.

Storytelling works because our brains evolved to make sense of the world through narrative.

When people tell us stories, we’re much more likely to remember details and emotionally connect with the storyteller.

All great stories have these things in common:

• Every great story has a familiar structure, namely a beginning, a middle, and an end.

• Every story has a hero or heroine who:• Is not the hero/heroine at the beginning of the story.• Must overcome an enemy and great odds to become the hero.• Gets help from a guide (someone who has already made the

journey).• And becomes the hero by the end of the story.

• Every great story is genuine and rings true to the reader.

• And every great story reveals something, which requires your willingness to be open and vulnerable.

Here are some movie examples of great stories to help you get the idea:

• Titanic• Heroine: Rose Dewitt Bukater, who begins the story by being

trapped in an arranged marriage.• Villain: Cal Hockley (Rose’s fiancé) /Patriarchal Society

• Guide: Jack Dawson• Outcome: Rose goes on to lead an unconventional life full of

adventure.

• Star Wars:• Hero: Luke Skywalker• Villain: Darth Vader/The Empire• Guide: Obi Wan Kenobi• Outcome: Luke becomes the hero when he destroys the death

star.

• Rocky• Hero: Rocky Balboa• Villain: Apollo Creed/Boxing Establishment• Guide: Mickey Goldmill• Outcome: Rocky goes the distance and proves he was worthy

to be in the ring.

Now let’s try it with your story:

• Heroine/Hero: You

• Villain:• Some challenge that you set yourself.• Some fear you are overcoming.• Some condition that affects your life and your art.

• Guide:• A family member.• A fellow artist.• Someone who greatly influenced your art career.

• Outcome: It’s still to be determined, but you’re bringing your followers along on the journey.

No matter what your story, the two most important aspects of storytelling are these:

• Be genuine. If you make it up or overstated things, your collectors will know and will stop listening.

• Be vulnerable. The more you put yourself out there, warts and all, the more collectors will connect with you.

The next step in our process is all about regularly staying in touch with your audience.

Here’s how you should go about this to drive the most results in the least amount of time:

• Publish your newsletter once a month. And when you do, publish it at the same time of the day on the same day of the month every month.

• Post on Instagram and Facebook twice a week.

• And follow what we call The Golden Ratio, which is a 3-to-1 ratio:• Spend 3 months telling your story in your newsletter, and then

ask your subscribers to buy in the 4th month.• Spend 3 weeks telling your story on social media, and then ask

your followers to buy from you in the 4th week.• When you’re telling your story, you should ask them to engage

with you in some way. Ask a question or ask for feedback.• Make sure that you respond to everyone that engages with you.

• Personally email collectors on your list at least once a month to connect and make them feel special.

Stick to this method and you won’t annoy your collectors, they’ll connect with you, and they’ll buy.

When telling your story, make sure that you are consistent across your newsletter, Instagram, and Facebook. But tell your story a little bit differently in your newsletter versus social media.

Think of your newsletter like going out to lunch with a dear friend that you haven’t seen for a while. Typically you:

• Take your time because you haven’t connected in a while and are looking forward to catching up.

• Tell a lot of stories that make you laugh and cry.• Reconnect through these stories and leave feeling happy and

eager for your next lunch together.

Social media, on the other hand, is a lot like watercooler chitchat:

• Every office has a breakroom with a watercooler and a coffee machine.

• You often meet people there that you sort of know, but don’t work closely with.

• You typically have very short conversations at the watercooler, where you tell a funny story or catch each other up on what’s going on in your life.

• And these quick conversations keep the relationship going.

So tell the same story, just tell it differently.

The next step in our process is all about making it super easy for your collectors to buy your art when they are ready, and on their terms.

The most successful artists:

• List their prices right on their website.

• Give collectors the option to buy right from their website or to contact them if they have questions.

• Offer their best collectors a more personal buying experience by letting them:• Buy in person.• Buy over the phone.• Buy through social media.• Buy through messaging apps.

The key here is to make it as easy as possible for your collectors to buy your art when they are ready. Don’t make them jump through hoops.

The last step in the AMP process can really take your art sales to a whole new level.

The most successful artists make it a point of focusing most of their time on the 20% of collectors who generate 80% their art sales.

So what do these collectors look like? They are typically the ones who:

• Have bought more than one piece of art from you.• Are the first to inquire about new art that you have available.• Go out of their way to tell you what your art means to them.• Tell their friends who are also collectors all about you. • Go out of their way to put these friends in touch with you.

When you identify these collectors, go out of your way to make them feel extra special by:

• Getting to know them well.• Giving them early and exclusive access to new work.• Sending them birthday and holiday well wishes.• Offering them free gifts like sketches, prints, and studies.

Do whatever it takes to make them feel special, and make sure that your gesture is genuine and tailored.

So now that you’re familiar with the AMP process, here are some immediate next steps that you can take to help get you started:

1. Create your story. Use the template that we shared with you on page 15 to help you brainstorm ideas.

2. Plan an event to help you meet collectors in the real world.3. Start a newsletter and commit to publishing it once a month.

And don’t worry if you only have a handful of subscribers today. Your list will grow quickly if you follow the program.

4. Set up an Instagram account and build a Facebook business page for your art business. Keeping these separate from your personal accounts always works best.

5. Commit to posting twice a week on Instagram and Facebook. Also, get in the habit of taking pictures of yourself that you think will help tell your story as you go about your day.

6. Remember to engage your audience. Regularly ask questions and ask for feedback and respond to any responses that you get.

7. Create a list of collectors that you’ve met, regularly keep it up to date, and commit to personally emailing them at least once a month.

8. Identify the best collectors on your list. Then send them a personal note and a gift thanking them for their support.

Change only happens if you take the first step. So start by creating your story, and then build up from there.

Now let’s talk about how you can use FASO to help with each of the steps in the AMP method to achieve what we call AMP2.

Step 1 – Meeting engaged people:• Add one new artwork to your site as often as you can. When

you add new artwork to your FASO artist website, we automatically promote it the next day in our Daily Art Stream newsletter. This newsletter reaches over 70K collectors, galleries, and art enthusiasts.

• Use FASO to promote your events. When you add a real world or online event to your FASO website, we automatically promote it in our Informed Collector newsletter, which reaches over 34K collectors.

• Enter the BoldBrush Painting Competition often. You get free entries every month with your FASO membership, we award over $38K in prizes every month, and we promote the winners in our Informed Collector newsletter.

Step 2 – Signing engaged people up:• Use FASO’s newsletter signup form to sign up collectors right

then and there on your smartphone.• Tag your subscribers as collectors with our new segmentation

feature.

Step 3 – Keeping in touch with your audience:• Use FASO’s built in Newsletter feature to send your

newsletters out every month.• Use FASO’s Blog feature and your newsletter content to create

an archive of your newsletters that new subscribers can read.

Step 4 – Make it easy for collectors to buy your art.• Add prices and dimensions to all your artwork. This will allow

our Ecommerce and View in a Room features to work properly.

• Turn on FASO’s Ecommerce feature to let collectors buy right from your FASO artist website.

• Check to see if FASO’s View in a Room and Zoom features are working on your artwork pages (you’ll see buttons for them if they are). If they’re not working, make sure you’re using our latest templates and that you’ve specified dimensions for your artwork.

• Use FASO’s Multiple Artwork Images feature to specify unframed and framed versions of your artwork, along with pricing and dimensions for each.

• Enter the BoldBrush Painting Competition every month. We’ve added buy buttons to all the entries so collectors can buy your artwork right from the contest site.

photo with overlay.

Step 5 – Focus on your best collectors:• Use FASO’s Private Collection feature to create a collection of

artwork that you want to show your best collectors first.• Create a subscriber segment for your best collectors in FASO’s

Newsletter feature and send them a newsletter with the secret link to your private collection.

There are many more ways that FASO can help with the AMP method and we’re adding more all the time. We just can’t fit it all into this playbook!

But here are two great ways to keep on top of the latest developments with the AMP program and FASO:

• Subscribe to FineArtViews. our art marketing newsletter. We’re constantly talking about AMP and the latest art marketing strategies and tactics there.

• And if you’re a FASO member, read our FASO Member Newsletter. It’s a great way to learn about the latest features in FASO that make putting the AMP program into action easier.

And remember, if you ever have any questions on how to do any of this in FASO our amazing support team is there to help.

Just click on the chat icon in the lower right-hand corner of the FASO control panel to reach them.

photo with overlay.

Here are some final thoughts to help you on your path to selling more of your art with the AMP program:

• First, don’t try to do everything at once. It will only overwhelm you. Instead, start small by picking one of the steps that we’ve outlined and giving it a try (we suggest starting with your story). Then take another step when you’ve mastered the first step (like sharing your story through your newsletter).

• Second, don’t try to do it alone. Share the AMP program with other artists that you know. Work together to put the steps into practice and keep each other motivated. We’re also here to help, so feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions.

• Third, don’t give up. It takes a bit of time for AMP to kick in and drive results. It’s not an instant silver bullet for art sales (those just don’t exist). But if you stick with the program, it will work for you.

• Finally, share what you learn. The reason AMP exists is because artists just like you shared what worked and what didn’t with us. The art marketing landscape is changing all the time. So as you learn and grow, share that with us and others. We promise to do the same.

We hope you found this material useful and look forward to your success selling your art!

Dave Geada (CMO) Any questions?We’ve covered a lot of material, and I know how overwhelming it can feel to make sense of it all.

So if you ever have any questions or feedback that you’d like to share about the AMP method, please feel free to email me at dave@faso.com. I’ll do my very best to help you.

When you do, make sure that you include AMP in your subject line. That way I’ll know it’s you.

I wish you the best of luck in your art career and look forward to connecting with you again soon!