If you’re just starting out, being part of an artist group is a wonderful place to be for many reasons. A group of likeminded or diverse individuals that practice a similar craft can be a powerhouse of creation, because of the mutual support and combined knowledge of all of its members.

But apart from the obvious creation of a think tank, where ideas can flourish much more easily than if we are going at it alone, a group can give us an incredible edge over the competition when promoting our work.

The biggest problem with promotion today is that it costs a lot. Well, not nearly as much as it did back in the day, when the only way to get noticed by the public was running radio or TV ads and being on billboards (incredibly expensive then, and still heavily overpriced now), but even Facebook and Instagram ads cost quite a lot if you want them to actually work.

Sure, 10€ for a sponsored post doesn’t seem like much, but 10€ spent once won’t do anything for your business, even 100€ might not work as well as we’d like it to, and the problem can be found in the way people interact with advertisements — or more precisely, how they don’t.

When you see an ad for a new doohickey on your news feed, do you immediately click it? Or do you just scroll past it and forget about its existence immediately after doing so? Probably the latter. 

Because nobody cares about most stuff that appears in the ads on Facebook — the majority of us have their basic needs covered and for us to exchange the tools and toys we posses for something “better”, we need it to be incredibly better than what we might already have.

So we scroll down, but the best ad campaigns take this into consideration and show us the thing again and again, and only here in this constant repetition of the same product — painting, lawnmower or Masterclass course — do we eventually come to a point where we click on the ad, even if just our of pure curiosity.

But to run such an ad campaign, we would need to spend at least 300€ a month (roughly 10€ a day), and do this for more than just one month to be able to show up on people’s feeds consistently every day.

The thing is though, unlike the amount of people our ads get shown to, what we promote and the amount of products we promote doesn’t affect the price of running the ad. And this is where a group of artists has the big advantage over just one person.

If 10 artists with similar art (let’s say abstract expressionism) decide to run an ad for 2 months, each of them would only pay 1/10 of the price, but would get all of the benefits of running the advertisement. 

Not only that, they would actually be better off even if they had the money to burn! As all ten artists could run multiple iterations of the same ad, that would lead to either a website where all of them have their portfolio of work available and some store mechanism is put in place to directly sell the work to interested buyers. 

And if for example a person would click on an ad with a work by Kelly and get to the landing page page, but then find that Marcus also makes nice works and buy one of both, the group of ten just doubled their profit without paying anything more for the ad!

Connection is important and we all should think about some form of collaboration or grouping amongst our fellow creators. It’s incredibly easy to set-up a nice landing page and get a few of our friends to chip in for an ad (you could do it in half a day, if not a few hours) and the effects could potentially boost your sales immensely. Give it a try!