What's the biggest mistake artists make when thinking about their marketing reach?

The biggest mistake is assuming everyone sees your marketing efforts. This is both naive and arrogant - naive because it misunderstands how attention works, and arrogant because it assumes your content is so important that everyone stops what they’re doing to see it. The reality is that you’re not fishing in a tiny pond where all the fish are right under your boat. You’re fishing in an ocean where the fish are scattered, often deep below the surface, sometimes hundreds of miles away. They don’t even know you have a line in the water most of the time. Once you accept this reality, you realize you need to market consistently and frequently, because you can’t control when your audience will be ‘at the surface’ and ready to engage.

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Asked by an artist learning about marketing · Answered by Patrick Shanahan · art-marketing-podcast · 2020-11-03