There‘s an inherent tension between creativity and marketing yourself as a creative professional. Traditional entrepreneurship teaches that you create value by solving problems and listening to your audience’s needs.
Yet creativity doesn’t always follow that path. It ebbs and flows. It asks you to take risks, challenge conventions and develop a unique point of view. Sometimes, creating your best work means tuning out outside opinions and staying true to your vision. Other times, listening to your audience is essential for growing a sustainable creative practice.
Ignoring this tension does not serve you or your work. Instead, embrace it and find a balance that supports both your creativity and your business.
Mike Zimmerlich, founder of Omelette Prevail, a creative management and collaboration company and host of the Creatives Prevail podcast, says, “The number one thing creatives should know when it comes to marketing is that marketing is an extension of your craft. That means the marketing should feel authentic and intentional. It also means the marketing deserves the same level of creativity as the song, film, podcast, art or project you’re putting into the world. If you are a creative, your marketing should be creative, too!”
Let’s go over some ways you can create marketing that complements your creative practice and stretches your creativity.
Create a Personal Brand That Feels Like You
Creating a compelling personal brand is one of the most powerful things creatives can do for themselves. Give your audience a story that acts as a throughline in your work as it grows and evolves. This story allows them to connect with you, root for you and want to see more. If intentionally creating a brand or persona feels misleading, remember that you are not pulling this out of thin air. If your personal brand is built on a foundation that is true to who you are, it will help you consistently act in a way that is in line with your values. Your brand is not a mask you wear, but a distillation of the most compelling and relatable parts of who you are.
Check out the course, How Do I Create a Strong Personal Brand for My Business, to learn more about crafting a brand.
As you craft your personal brand, consider creating a brand guide. A brand guide defines visual brand elements such as color palette, fonts and logos, as well as intangible brand elements such as brand voice, brand promise and market position. Your brand guide will help you create consistent marketing content that your audience will recognize. It will also help busy or small teams streamline the design process, leaving you more time to work on your craft. If you’ve ever spent way too much time picking a font for a flyer, you understand the value of reducing decision fatigue.
Connect With the Right Audience
Once you’ve nailed down who you are, it is time to explore who your audience is. What kind of person will connect with your work? How do they spend their time, and what do they care about? Where might they collide with your work in their daily lives, and what kind of messaging might resonate with them? The answers to these questions will guide your marketing strategies.
You can start to answer these questions through customer discovery. Customer discovery is the process of identifying who will pay for or benefit from your product or service, and getting to know their needs. Organize your customer discovery findings into easy-to-understand qualities with customer personas and empathy mapping.
Dig deeper into understanding your customers with the course, “What is Customer Discovery?”
As you work through your customer discovery process, you may find that you need to refine your personal brand. Emphasize the parts of your story and persona that resonate with your target market, and tweak the ones that don’t. Trust yourself to find the balance between the non-negotiables of who you are, and what can be tweaked to make you and your work more appealing to your audience. Your personal brand is a living entity that can grow and change with you and your audience!
Make Consistency Easier Through Systems
According to Dr. Deanna Swoboda, ASU euphonium professor, creative entrepreneur and author of ACTivate Your Performance Career, “As creatives, we often wait for the perfect idea, the perfect design or the perfect moment—and in the process, we talk ourselves out of taking action. The truth is that progress comes from consistency, not perfection. Be consistent in your brand—your colors, message, tone, imagery and communication—and be consistent in showing up. Over time, that steady presence builds trust, recognition and momentum far more effectively than waiting until everything feels perfect.”
You can help yourself show up consistently by putting systems in place to streamline your marketing tasks and reduce decision fatigue.
Set up a marketing checklist: As a creative entrepreneur, chances are you have some kind of recurring opportunity to promote your work. For example, a musician might have album releases and live shows, a designer or illustrator might have merch drops or a fashion brand might have collection releases. Write down everywhere you will promote this and what assets you will need. With the musician example, you might post a live show to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Eventbrite, your city’s local event listings and put up flyers. So you will need an event description, graphics and video in the specific dimensions of each platform and a ticketing link. Having a checklist means you won’t be scrambling to remember what you did last time and what you need to put together to get it done. This is also where your brand guide will help you create graphics more quickly, and you can build templates so you are not designing from scratch every time.
Have a social media schedule: The content available on social media is endless and it’s easy to feel like you always need to post more. You will not do yourself any favors by overcommitting and burning yourself out. Whether you post every day, three times a week or once a week, a regular schedule will keep you accountable and your audience engaged. As audio producer and IndieVid founder Andy Zulla says, “Don’t worry about going viral, but find your people and create something meaningful.”
You can build your content creation strategy in response to your posting schedule and your work style. Many content creators set aside a few hours every week, or a day every month to batch create content. Find a cadence that works for you. The best strategy is the one that helps you show up for yourself and your audience.
Your social media schedule can also benefit from regular audits. Once every few months, schedule some time to look at how your posts are performing. Determine what your best-performing posts have in common, and use that to inform your content moving forward.
Capture candid content: One of your most powerful marketing tools is probably in your pocket. Modern audiences often care more about authenticity and getting a peek behind the curtain than professional-quality video. A day in your life might seem mundane to you, but a day in the life of an artist is exciting. Capture it! Jackie Gutierrez, Founder of Idea House Agency and creative entrepreneur, recommends that you “show glimpses of your work behind the scenes, special materials, sketches or early drafts so people fall in love with the making of the product, not just the final piece. This really helps differentiate you and helps you compete with competitors with larger marketing budgets in the same space or industry.”
Build a Community
If you only show up when you have something to sell, your audience won’t have a chance to invest in your story. People buy with their emotions, so you want to create an emotional connection. A good guideline for social media is the 80/20 rule: approximately 80% of your content should add value or entertain, and 20% of your content should sell a product or experience.
Jackie recommends that you “get out into the community where your ideal customer might be and share your products, processes and knowledge. This could be at farmers’ markets, festivals, open houses, local gallery nights, mini workshops or pop-ups at local businesses.” Not only is this powerful community building, but it can also contribute to your customer discovery.
Working with complementary businesses and creatives can help you reach new audiences while creating value for everyone involved. In other fields this might look like stealing a competitor’s customers, but audiences in creative spaces are often thrilled to learn about other creators similar to ones they already know and love.
As Andy says, “with so much music being released and so much AI music saturating the market, there is no shortage of great songs and great sounding music. While this has always been the case, I think that the artists who will break through are artists who give people something bigger to connect to: a story, a cause, a movement or a shared experience.” While he is referring to musicians, this concept can apply to any creative field.
Know Your Call to Action (CTA)
In marketing, a call to action, or CTA is a concise message that inspires your audience to take a specific action. Have you ever seen an ad online and thought, “cool, but what do you want from me?” It probably didn’t have a clear CTA.
What do you want people to do when they see this piece? Why should they do it? Does it provide enough information to allow them to do it? Is it easy to complete the action? The answers to these questions can serve as a guide when you create your ad copy (the text in your piece of marketing). You can add some CTA-defining questions to your marketing checklist to make sure that your campaigns are meaningful every time.
Don’t Discount Old School Methods
Social media allows anyone the chance to find their audience, and a strong social media strategy is a great way to market your work. However, as the social media landscape continues to become more crowded, it’s still worth your time to consider analog marketing strategies.
Physical marketing and word of mouth remain powerful ways to reach new audiences. Use what you’ve learned through customer discovery to place flyers where your audience spends time, then extend that effort online by sharing the process on social media. Encourage your community to post photos, leave testimonials or share their experiences in exchange for simple perks such as a shoutout, behind-the-scenes access or a small creative gift. These interactions help build credibility, strengthen community and create content that supports your digital marketing efforts.
In-person events, markets, performances and exhibitions can also make your marketing feel more authentic. As a creative entrepreneur, your work is meant to be experienced in the real world. When you share those moments through your marketing, your audience gains a more genuine understanding of what you create and the value you provide.
Make It Your Own and Make It Fun
With these tips and tricks, you’re ready to get started on your marketing, now it’s up to you to make it your own. No one can enjoy your work if you don’t share it. So find something you can do to promote your creative work this week, even if you don’t feel ready. If you approach audience building with grace and authenticity, your marketing doesn’t have to be perfect from day one. Your audience will be rooting for you, and they’ll love seeing your progress and growing with you.
Whether you’re looking to grow your creative business or connect with a community of like-minded founders, consider joining us at one of our upcoming events.
