What is the fundamental problem with artists trying to become marketing and tech experts themselves?

Artists face an impossible situation: they have to create art, run admin tasks, manage their website, and somehow also become experts in constantly changing marketing disciplines like email marketing, social media, blogging, and more. The trends in all these areas change every three to six months—tactics that worked before stop working, emails that once got opens now land in spam, social media post formats that drove engagement become ineffective. Even successful artists who are relatively good at marketing are only operating at maybe 15-20% of what they should be doing, leaving enormous amounts of revenue on the table. The real leverage for an artist’s business isn’t in becoming a marketing expert—it’s in iterating on their product (their art) and creating more marketable work. When artists spend time learning marketing instead of creating, they’re fundamentally misallocating their most valuable resource.

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Asked by a podcast host · Answered by Nick Friend · art-marketing-podcast · 2023-05-22