Who is your ideal buyer?
In part 1 we looked at what art you create. In part 2, we identified your superpower and origin story. In the last part of this branding 101 for artists, we’re going to identify your ideal buyer, and pull everything together to create your artist bio.
Consider who has purchased from you before, and who your fans are. When you go to shows or display your work, who gravitates toward it? Start to identify this buyer and picture them as an actual person. Are they generally male, female, what age range are they in, where do they shop and what magazines do they buy? Are they likely to hang around on Facebook arguing on a Friday night, or are you more likely to see them scrolling through inspirational quotes on Instagram? The more you can create a person in your mind, the easier it is to identify where you should post and what you should say – just imagine yourself talking to them directly.
Who are you?
Not to get all existentialist here, but what about you as an artist attracts your ideal buyer to your work? While they love your individual pieces, chances are that they also love your backstory, the fact you commonly paint landscapes, or that you only work with natural materials. Perhaps the fact your pieces are constantly dealing with the theme of rejection might pull at dark places in their heart that need some light shone on them. To remove yourself completely from the equation is to ignore the connection your ideal buyers already feel with you.
Create a consistent brand
This is more than just making a logo to represent your business when displaying your art. You want one consistent impression across all the social media platforms and places where your ideal buyer might find references to you or your art. A logo helps, but so does one bio that can be used in various places, one core mission that is driving you, and one place where all posts and mentions of you will take a reader. Ideally, that should be your website, so you have control over what people see and read about you, but it could be a Facebook page or Instagram account, an Etsy shop or a Google My Business listing. If you want to create a coherent bio, download my Artist Bio Work Sheet. Use it to write your own, and if it works for you, let me know, I’d love to hear about it!
If you want me to polish up your first draft, I offer a discounted fee for editing a bio based on this worksheet – that costs $100. And if, after using the worksheet you still can’t get to the essence of what you want to say, I also write bios from scratch. Reach out to me directly either for the editing service or a bespoke bio, and we can work out the details so you have your bio ready to go in no time!