Ever since I was a child, I loved drawing. That’s it—no boring, long stories about why I decided to start my own art business. I made this choice because I love creating and sharing it with the world. While it would be nice to make this my primary income, it’s not an easy journey.
Selling your artwork online is more than just opening an Etsy shop, uploading items, and waiting for people to notice you. I don’t know exactly what needs to be done yet, but I’m going to find out and share it with you in this series of posts. Hopefully, it will help you take your first step toward starting your own business!
First step: understand your audience
When the idea to sell your artwork crossed your mind, you probably had a few ideas and items lined up. However, the question is, do people really want those specific items? For instance, I initially thought that greeting cards were not as popular anymore. Yet, during my research, I discovered that they still sell pretty well!
Where to start?
First, I ran an ad on Instagram for a week to gain a better understanding of who views my work. At that time, I only had around 160 followers, but the follower count doesn’t really matter now. I selected one of my drawings to boost, with the goal of getting more profile visits (and potential new followers).
While some argue that the Instagram algorithm is not the best, my feed is 80% filled with art-related content. It’s not necessarily from the people I follow, but at least it’s relevant. In conclusion, I hoped that the people who saw my boosted art would be my target audience.
After a week, I reached 2753 accounts (number of accounts who saw my post) and got 3609 impressions (the number of times when my post was on screen).
This resulted in 116 likes and 48 new followers.
I think it’s not bad, but the true gain here are the details of the people who saw my ad!
93.7% of the audience were women which confirms my hypothesis that women are more likely interested in such content than men.
The most common age range was 45-54 with 25.4% which is followed by 55-64 with 24.7%.
Nothing surprising here, younger people choose TiKTok over Instagram these days.
I’m uncertain about the accuracy of the location targeting. Although I selected specific locations, Instagram indicated that I chose too many without specifying any narrowing down or potential impact on results. However, the majority of visits, 6.2%, came from Cataluña. The second-highest was Budapest, the capital of the country where I reside.
While these numbers are not definitive, they provide a good understanding that my Instagram audience consists mainly of middle-aged women from Spain and Hungary.
Survey
I’m a UX researcher by profession, which means I’m skilled in conducting market research and competitive analysis. With a few hypotheses in mind, I decided to check their validity. I created a survey about people’s art shopping habits, inquiring about who they shop for, occasions, types of items purchased, whether they buy online or in person, etc.
Unfortunately, only 50 people filled it out, which is a very low number—anything under 100 is almost considered useless. It was challenging to find the specific participants I needed. Additionally, the limitation of Google survey not supporting multiple languages for the same survey made it even harder. This likely led to people in Hungary (where I live) skipping it, possibly due to the survey being in English.
But still got some answers which gives me a solid understanding of what people [might] need.
54% were women (same like on Instagram), 36% were 35-44 years old and 86% were from Europe.
They express a preference for supporting small businesses (75.8%) and choose them over large chains. Interestingly, they equally trust platforms like Etsy and similar online shops as well as the artist’s own webshop (I will explain later why I was curious about this).
The primary motivation for purchasing artwork is personal pleasure and home decoration. Over the past 6 months, art prints and paintings emerged as the most popular categories, closely followed by greeting cards, stickers, and planners.
While I’m still only scratching the surface, these research findings have already provided me with a good understanding of the audience I am working for.
Luckily, most tools and applications offer basic analytics. Even if you can’t put a survey together, you can still check them out! This becomes especially handy when you’re contemplating visiting local markets with your items. For example, if the market caters mostly to kids, it’s likely that my items wouldn’t sell as well.