Instagram is enough or 5 mistakes of promotion tattoo artist

A small introduction. This material will be useful primarily to artists who joined the industry during the time of smart feeds and high competition in the area. Those who rack their brains every day over: "What needs to be done to be noticed?" It will also be useful for professionals who have reached a certain level of popularity, but are faced with the fact that the movement further slowed down somewhat.

In this article, we will consider the main mistakes of modern tattoo artists in positioning and representing their own brand on the Internet.

How can you be found?

Since our work is based on finding the most beautiful modern tattoos in the world, iNKPPL journalists spend most of their time looking for information about tattoo artists. The amazing fact is that the artists on both sides of the ocean, for the most part, do not think up a scenario of how clients will look for them, relying on Instagram. As a result of this approach, after some time, they notice that Instagram does not growing up, they do not publish in magazines, nobody call them to guest spots or exhibitions, and the booking is far from ideal. But the thing is that you simply cannot be found. There is absolutely no information about you, which means even finding your wonderful instagram isn't a simple thing. In a highly competitive environment like in tattoo, it is a guarantee of obscurity and poverty.

Best Practice: First, you should not focus only on social networks. Now it no longer works as before. According to statistics, people all over the world are much more likely to search for artists on Google than on the Instagram. So, the more mentions you have in the Internet, the more people will know about you. These can be your own blogs, articles in international online magazines, etc. As much as more - is the better. And of course, do not use privated profiles on social networks. This is really a bad manners. It's like selling something forbidden in the alleys.

Life hack: if you use a single spelling of your login on all social networks, it’s easier for people to find you, easier to share your work with thier friends and even for magazines, easier to mark you in a publication. For example, iNKPPL has an @inkpplcom login on all social networks, and no one has a problem finding or marking a magazine in their publications.

Who you are?

As representatives of creative professions, tattooists are largely introverted figures. Quite rarely, you can meet personal photos of the tattoo artist in accounts with a portfolio, not to mention the real name and surname. Masters twist the information, especially on Instagram, with various unreadable fonts, an overabundance of emoji and a huge number of popular hashtags.

As a result, the client found, but did not understand, did not write and did not come.

Best Practice: Any tattoo artist is a personal brand. Therefore, drop the security sink, be open, do not forget to dilute the feed with news from your life. Clients want to see talented people whom they can turn to and not impersonal creators on the unattainable summit of Olympus. And do not forget about «Tone of Voice»: it must be friendly and involve people to communicate. Remember, you yourself build your personal brand and its target audience. And who will come to your session depends on your mood in the social media.

What do we know about you?

Whether you like it or not, but tattoo is a service industry. Already a lot of words have been said that for successful work it is necessary to adhere to certain ethical standards in dealing with clients. The same rules should be observed when you are making profiles on social media. Will you buy a product if there is no information about it, or if it is in some form that not applicable to make some kind of opinion about it? And do not forget that people far from the industry do not understand the styles, features of the tattoo, the process of making and aftercaring for it.

Best practice: in your profiles indicate basic information, work styles, how to make a booking, links for other social media, and of course the city and country in which you work. From dynamically updated data - you can indicate your next travel plans, with a link to the studio or a separate Email for recording clients in this country, city.

Minimum time will be spent on this, but in the future you will gain maximum benefits.

How to make an appointment for a consultation / session?

Another amazing fact is that most modern tattoo artists are presenting information in such a way that a potential client, admired the work, cannot find the recording channel that you use. Someone uses social media, some uses messengers, someone makes it by phone calls, someone uses a phone, but does not answer calls, but only invites everyone to WhatsApp, and someone ONLY has an Instagram account direct messages. Why you complicate life first of all for yourself, and secondly, for your clients?

Best practice is a single channel for booking, for example, a separate email address placed in each of the social media in which you present your works.

Is Instagram our everything?

Sometime ago it really was close to the truth. But with the advent of smart feeds on social media, the world has budged. Who has already managed to acquire an army of thousands of followers may be calmer, but you, who are just starting their journey, read further carefully.

What is smart or algorithmic feed? Despite the fact that the issue has been relevant for several years now, everyone has been walking along well-trodden roads, not knowing that this road will not lead them to success. Smart feed is an algorithm for ranking posts on social media based on user interests, based on data analysis by a self-learning neural network.

It sounds a little complicated, but it quite simple explane on example, it works something like this: you have 10,000 followers, you made a tattoo and posted it on Instagram (in other social media the algorithm works in a similar way), a smart feed algorithm checks your post for coolness and usefulness, showing its only for 5-10% of subscribers.

If a post does not actively gain likes and comments from these first 500 - 1000 subscribers, then the algorithm regards your post as uninteresting and no one will see it again. These are modern realities. How to deal with this, you ask?

First of all, remember that tattoo is a form of visual art, and networks like Instagram are based on the visual appeal of content. In other words, pictures should be bright, juicy, preferably taken with a professional camera or smartphone with a high-quality camera, and the angle of the picture itself should emphasize the strengths of the work. Do not overload publications with spam hashtags, but use only a few that are relevant to this particular work.

Secondly, it is desirable to develop a certain style of publishing so that the feed does not look scattered. We are talking about both the visual component and the style of texts and descriptions of works. In this case, it will not look like machine way, which will not be a reflection of your present self, it will just make your brand (remember, a tattoo artist = a personal brand) attractive, characteristic and understandable for your future clients.

Thirdly, do not forget about advertising. No wonder for what this smart feed was invented to. With the help of advertising, you can target the post to an audience that will interact with it as actively as possible, increasing coverage. It is advisable to do this with each new publication. Advertising also includes posting in thematic blogs and groups.

All these actions will increase the coverage of your publications, firstly, by making it clear to the neural networks that your posts are interesting to people (subsequent posts will also have increased coverage), and secondly, of course, to attract new clients.

Since we are talking about advertising, it is IMPORTANT to remember, that all gray methods of “promoting” an account, such as cheating on the number of subscribers, likes, comments, will not bring you real customers, but they can easily send your account to the ban without the possibility of recovery.

That's all for today, stay tuned for more practical tips ahead!