IXD301 Week 6 – Promotional Strategy

Learning Promotional Strategy

Advanced Marketing Strategies – Talents Mine

In this weeks lecture we looked at creating a promotional strategy to help us promote ourselves as designers. We looked at how helpful social media can be in this context, a great example that came to mind was Instagram and how we create our own design Instagram accounts back in our first year.

Get Social – Start a conversation

This encouraged us to get out there and get socialising with others and to showcase our work. Kyle said to us that we should have a design account alongside our personal account, we can use our design account to start a conversation. We should use Instagram to tell a story about our work. We looked at an example of a guy called Stephan Johnson, we where shown an image of a petrol bomb which we soon found out was painted. Kyle then showed us who made the image and became to tell us about showing the story behind it. This was all done by Stephan who made a video of himself documenting the story of how he picks a subject matter all the way up to finishing the painting. He also uses other way to tell a story about his work too, such as art shows.

Using Social Media Effectively

  • Selling
  • Adding Value
  • Building Audiences
  • Positioning
  • Networking

Selling

Social media opens up under-utilised export opportunties, helping to diversify the potential retail base.

Adding Value

Social media can be used to reveal hidden stories behind objects and makers, revealing: creative process, provenance of materials, and inspiration behind works.

Building Audiences

Social media can introduce work to new audiences, often helping to widen reach to include international contexts.

Positioning

Social media can be used to position makers in a way that creates new professional and creatice opportunities, helping makers support multiple strands of an ever-changing portfolio career.

Networking

Lasting networking, social media can be used to connect individuals into hubs for sharing information, creative collabortation opportunities and companionship. Companionship is essential for sole traders.

 

Socially Speaking

We can reach much much further now, using social media we can reach further than ever before. Using social media we can find people who are interested in our product. When people ask what do you do, instead of trying to explain what you do just point them to your portfolio. Never be afraid to show your work, always talk up your talk!

Using websites like Instagram and Twitter is the best idea as they are discovery engines. Out of both of these apps/websites Twitter is my favourite and is one I would use actively when posting artworks I’ve made onto. Kyle gave us an example of his Twitter timeline and it consisted of UX/UI Designers with tens of thousands of followers.

Twitter also has a great way of getting noticed compared to Instagram, although they both have the hashtag system, Twitter’s is much more active and successful from what I’ve experienced.

  • @replys – Public Messages and replies, these are the main forms of communication between other on Tweets.
  • DMs – Private Messages, pretty self explanatory.
  • #Hashtags – These are group topics, they are usually extremely active depending on the topic. Hashtagging is also one of the best ways for your work to be noticed.

 

Don’t spam, spamming your twitter feed constantly with tweets can get pretty annoying for your followers and it can also drown out any meaningful work you have.

twitter spam problem

Overwhelming your audience is not a great thing to do, you have to think about timing. Currently on my twitter I post art I’ve made every couple of days, I keep my spam to an absolute minimum. Below is some examples of recent tweets I’ve posted, like I said I will usually have a couple of days between posts, this is so I don’t overwhelm my followers.

Here is an example of twitter recommending my work to other peoples feeds based on their follows and tweets, I’ve noticed twitter is lot more proactive when it comes to automatically outreaching your work, it is also compared to Instagram more diverse with the types of accounts on it, Instagram is mainly people and selfies while Twitter is news, peoples work, etc.

 

Conclusion

From what I’ve learnt and from experience, when it comes to promoting your work and yourself, I’ve found twitter to be a great asset, although my account on twitter is not UI/UX orientated, making another account based purely for that would most like have good success.

 

 

 

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