Week 16 Part A: Developing Your Marketing Strategy

     Developing a market strategy for a business is essential for a business to best fulfill their needs while keeping a realistic approach to how much time and effort they are able to put into social media. A business must pick and choose their platforms that will best suit their needs and that they will have time to remain active and maintain their activity on accounts.

    The platforms that I would utilize would be Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and possibly Facebook. My top-most goal is to gather engagement from my posts as my business is dependent on the relationship that my customer base/audience has with the art that I would produce but also with myself. The niche that my own art's subject matter/themes fill is not the only factor but also the style is another factor. Posting with no engagement with an audience only leaves room for the art to be regarded highly which is a very hard goal to meet. In my case, I think it is best to choose platforms that have a higher likelihood to have more engagement with an audience so that I am able to interact with the audience better.

    Instagram is the top platform that I choose to work on the most to post and engage with an audience. While the platform has started to shift to a more video-based format, I have no issues switching to creating more videos of speed-draws or even creating still-photos of artwork. Speed-draws require very little effort on my part as long as I choose to use a program like Procreate or Clip Studio which can automatically record a canvas for me and even speed up the video for a shorter format. Instagram is also a platform that tends to garner more clicks for businesses similar to my own. My approach to keeping up with user engagement is to reply as much as possible as well as follow and engage with multiple other users/followers on the platform by commenting, liking, and following to grow my relationship with other users.

    Twitter is a bit of a wildcard that could prove to be beneficial. One of the most important things to keep in mind is to keep active and relevant to the audience on the platform but to also remain courteous and informed of various issues. The artists and art businesses that I follow on this platform tend to post multiple times a week with progress, finished work, fan works, or collaborative projects; A big reason that many of these artists have success on the platform seems to also be due to committing their work to fan-bases and engaging in them. I think that from my past experience on the platform and the knowledge that I have acquired from this class I would be able to create a new account devoted to my art/business and grow it past the previous point I had with my old account.

    YouTube, like the other platforms I have chosen, is another platform that I have experience in and have had some mild success in. Engaging with an audience and creating content more driven to an audience's wants is a goal for this platform as well. The past account I had garnered decent views but very little interaction so I'd like to work towards getting more comments to interact with others on the platform. Another capability of the platform is being able to livestream which is something that I have been becoming more and more interested in. This again allows for me to interact with an audience while working on projects or even taking in suggestions which can help grow the relationship between the audience and myself/my art. 

    My hesitancy to use Facebook as a platform stems from myself not being an active user for 5+ years and the relevancy my platform has to my younger audience. While Facebook can greatly affect and help a business with their analytical tools and overall platform it may not be the best choice for me. Similar businesses to my own tend to have low engagement compared to other platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. I think that for now I I will refrain from using the platform but would definitely look into using it later on and continue to use the platform if I am able to gain enough insight from the analytics.

    As I am one person working on my presence and business, I think its important that I choose platforms that I am able to remain active on and increase my engagement because I have limited time to devote to social media to. My time ,until I am able to work on this business full-time, has to be split between my own personal life/needs, school,  my full-time job, working on the art for the business, and social media to help grow my presence and the business. For this business, it is important that I choose platforms that are relevant to the business and that I can maintain consistently which is easier said than done.