We're back for our continuing weekly adventures in art and business progress! (Last week here.) This past week was not art-ful. I was feeling unmotivated and out of creativity due to spending so much of last month on social media, and not seeing huge results.
I've been meeting with a free Score mentor for the last few months and we came up with a (seemingly) great idea last time: a marketing calendar to prevent being surprised by holidays & events I could base my posts around. I wrote out what days I would post and what topics in a monthly spreadsheet, and then spent days preparing the content. But oh my god! Prepping and scheduling the content was SO TIME CONSUMING! I use the scheduling service Hootsuite, and there are limitations on posting videos, and you can't tag products, so even though I spent all that time trying to prep things in advance so I wouldn't have to worry about it for a week, I still had to log on and fix tagging products in sales posts, post videos, and obsess over whether my posts were doing well.
And then the results were underwhelming: from 12 posts, 87 stories, 3 IGTV, I had +24.6% accounts reached, -41.5% interactions, +2 followers. So I absolutely felt like I spent all of my time last month on marketing and not making art and not seeing much for the effort.
I also released my new Spring 2021 collection. It's a ton of work to take photos, touch them up, write descriptions, and add them as products to my store. Last time I released a collection I had a few sales right away, so I had high hopes for this one too...but so far nothing. I haven't made a sale in months now. So while I am glad I got new products in my shop, I haven't seen a sales or marketing benefit from it so far.
As a result of both of these very time consuming projects and the lack of results from them, I was feeling like my time & efforts were wasted, and thus I didn't feel like creating.
I have events this week so I didn't not work on the business, I just didn't do much art--the thing that takes creative energy. I prepped art and signs for my artwork that went up at the Brewkery yesterday, and took inventory & prepped for the pop up shops this weekend.
That was the major accomplishment this week: hanging my art in a local business for the first time! The Brewkery is a local kombucha place here in North Kansas City and they have 10 of my paintings on display in their back room! We are going to have a gallery opening meet & greet with happy hour kombucha next Thursday so if you're in KC you should come by!
My goals for this next week are the same ones as the last two, since I haven't managed to complete them yet: paint more than once a day at least 2x in the week, and use some of my "needs more" pile.
