Art Rabble's first piece of print PR went out today. I’m really pleased. It was in KT Connection – quick shout out to Katie Endeley for her help! It looked good; we got lots of photographs of the artists in and the message hit the right tone, upbeat and fresh. However, I am conscious that these features are not driving enough people online to visit the site. At the moment this task just seems enormous. I can’t quite get my head around the scale of it and how to really make a BIG impact.
I was so focussed on getting all of the artists’ work on the site that I naïvely thought that getting people to the site would be easy. I thought we had such a great proposition that it would sell itself! Well, I do still think it’s great, and that Art Rabble artwork is genuinely awesome but, getting that initial momentum, is tough.
I have a three pronged approach (get ready for it!) -
Number one, reach out to local, lifestyle and news magazines. I am doing okay with this. The publications I’ve approached have all been really receptive. They seem quite genuinely interested in inclusion and promoting the work of disabled artists – win win. I’ve got features coming up with The Wealden Times, Surrey Homes and The Net Magazine.
Prong two, I’m trying to build a presence across social media. We’re on both Facebook and Instagram and I’ve been posting at least once a week since December. I have shared everything with all of my friends on both platforms, but have probably not spammed as much as I should. (Note to self, share with everyone I have ever met after completing this blog post). The National Autistic Society have been wonderful. They shared one of my posts last week and it reached 32,000 people! This only drove 400 visitors to the site but that’s still way more than I could achieve on my own. I’ve tried to reach out to influencers that have a connection to the disability community on Insta but as yet have not had any luck. Paddy McGuiness was my first hopeful but, as yet, this has not yielded any support. Has anyone else any ideas? At this point, any advice would be enormously appreciated!
Finally, I’m going to try an “interiors” angle. The idea for Art Rabble came out of my hunt to find affordable, meaningful art to have in my home. I hope other people might be looking for something similar! Hence, I will be approaching a number of interior design and decoration magazines to see if they would like to include us in their product listings or in a feature. I am optimistic about The Drop which is a kind of “best-buy” subset of the Stylist magazine. It’s specifically for independent retailers so surely they’d love us. Right?!
So, that’s my marketing strategy. Anyone out there got any tips, am I missing a trick somewhere? Pearls of wisdom would be awesome right now, but failing that, I’d take some magic beans.