Starting a Niche Art Marketing Campaign in Pet Portraiture: Part 1

This is the marketing journey of a new Pet Portrait business. If you’re considering taking the plunge (or testing the waters) of living off your art, I hope some of these experiments will be useful.

I’ll be taking everything I’ve learned selling software, phone lines, gift cards and all manner of other distractions and applying it to the only thing I’ve ever enjoyed enough to become naturally good at: drawing dogs. So come along for the ride, join the conversation in the comments, maybe we can learn from each other.

This was the first draft of the Paws By Zann Pet Portraits site. That was only about a month ago and I’ve already changed everything six times over.

I acknowledge and fully accept that trying to make a career (yeah, that’s right, I called my hobby a career) out of dog art is an uphill battle. I’ve even made a list as to why that’s the case, just so they don’t catch me off guard.

Four Reasons a Niche Art Career is an Uphill Battle:

1. There are far more people out there with creative aspirations than there is a market for creative goods.
2. Nobody really needs a portrait of their dog.
3. These completely unnecessary portraits have to be pretty expensive in order to justify the amount of time it takes to make them, which brings me to my next point…
4. Custom art is exactly the opposite of scalable. It defies scalability like a snowball defies roundness on a hot sidewalk in Mexico: the two simply cannot coexist. That means I’m selling labour and my only chance for advancement is increasing the amount I can sell that labour for.

My Advantage: Not Starting from Zero

I’m a marketing professional. I use automated messages and A/B testing, I stalk people with cookies*, I pay for clicks, follows and lists of names. I do trade shows and calculate ROI’s and produce an ungodly number of PDF’s, PPT’s and Google Docs. And I came into all this from sales where every human emotion is just a string to be pulled for profit. I was an art student once, but now I’m in marketing and sales. And in true North American fashion I’ve conflated myself with my profession. I am marketing and sales.

And sure, I’m kinda sorta good at it. But I really suck at enjoying it.

The Plan:

Instead of continuing as an employee, I’m going to apply what I’ve learned selling other people’s stuff to selling my own stuff.

I’m going to document this process so you can watch what happens. So again, if you also have a laughably impractical skill you’d like to make money off of maybe you can take some of the things I learn during this process and use them to sell your weirdness online too.

At the very least, I’m going to outline a list of tools you can use to self-promote. There are tons of artists out there with talent that dwarfs mine, even in my narrow, dog-shaped vertical, but from what I’ve seen their marketing knowledge is often lacking. I’d like to help.

Up Next, Part 2: Starting Points

* This could be interpreted as either using tracking codes to tell where people go online, or sneaking up on people with circular unleavened baked goods. The answer is both.