Influencers

 I study marketing a lot, to enhance my career. Artists have to sell paintings to live.  There seems to be a thing now called influencer marketing.  It is all the rage.

I know several artists who depend on this scheme to make a living. The idea is that they must have thousands of social media followers to sell art. The necessary number is a hundred thousand +. They must post a certain number of times a day, follow celebrities, and other “influencers”, have the right hash tags, and many other requirements. They must use sales funnels and landing pages. These formulas will make them successful.

This idea is appalling to me. These are artists who will say that I just don’t understand. In my view, this is like going to a get rich quick convention. Whatever happened to being a real person who actually works hard in the studio every day, who actually cares about the people who follow and share their own lives with their favorite artists? If this is a turn off for me, you can bet it will be for art collectors. No one wants to be constantly sold to and manipulated with formulas.

I am admittedly old school. Most of my collectors are my friends. I actually care about their ups and downs, good and bad days. My collectors are real people with real lives, not numbers on social media. I’d rather have a hundred friends than 100,000 strangers following me because they think I might be cool or know someone cool. 

Life is real for country painters....