Marketing for Makers

For most creatives I know, the idea of marketing can seem daunting, draining.  Creating your art is the thing you love to do.  Marketing is the thing you know you have to do, but can’t quite muster the excitement or enthusiasm for.

But what if, instead of being a burden, your marketing became the fuel that drives your entire business?

What if your marketing was the creative catalyst that kept the rest of your business running?

What if your marketing was just as much a creative process as making your art?

These are the questions I set out to answer with the completely redesigned Marketing for Makers (and designers, crafters, and artists, too) e-course.

I’m Megan Auman, designer, metalsmith, educator, and founder of Designing an MBA.  My products have been featured in national magazines like Cooking Light and Delta Sky, on major blogs like Design*Sponge, Decor8, and TreeHugger, and sold in stores across the US including boutiques, galleries, and major museum stores.  Since 2009, I’ve been sharing creative focused business thinking through my website, digital products, and e-courses.

Like you, I know that marketing is important.  But I also know how uninspired we creatives can feel when it’s time to market our businesses.  So I set out to find a new way to market, one that draws on the skills I have as a creative person AND that resonates more with my potential customers.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at successful creative individuals and asking myself why they get all the attention.  Why they seem to get so much buzz.

And the reality is that the successful business owners are always marketing.

Not because they believe that marketing is the secret to growing their businesses.  (Which it is.)

But because their marketing is a central part of their creative process.

And that’s what we’ll be doing in Marketing for Makers.  I’ll be showing you how to make marketing an essential part of your creative process.

Successful marketing isn’t about blogging or social media or any of those other buzz words, per se.  These are merely the distribution channels for your ideas, stories, and creative acts.

Truly effective marketing comes from the same creative place as the rest of your art.

And in Marketing for Makers, I want to show you how to make that happen.

The Marketing for Makers e-course will take place from January 23rd to March 9th.  That’s seven weeks filled with information and inspiration to turn you into a creative marketing machine.  You’ll get all access to the information in a private class website including video and audio lessons, lots of worksheets, and Q&A calls to get all your questions answered!

The Marketing for Makers e-course was critical in helping me to get passed the mind block that just because I enjoy what I do does not mean I should not take it seriously or make decent money at it. At one point I caught myself saying to a friend “I’m afraid of money” What was that all about? I knew something wasn’t right when I said that out loud! The course made me take a hard look at numbers and helped me realize I was practically giving my work away. I am now not ashamed to ask for a fair price for my work. I still have a ways to go in implementing all the info provided but changing my mind set was the first step in the process and my business has only gained momentum by giving it the proper focus it deserved.- Heather McNair Horsey | Sway Silver

Ready to get started?

*You must register by January 12 to take advantage of the 3-payment plan.

Marketing for Makers is completely redesigned to help you feel empowered when it comes to creatively marketing your business.  But I understand you’ve still got questions about some of the nuts and bolts of marketing:

Do I need a blog?

Is Facebook more important than Twitter?

How does email marketing work?

How can I get my products featured in magazines?

In the completely redesigned Marketing for Makers, we’ll still be answering all those questions.  But more importantly, you’ll learn how all those tools are secondary to the messages, ideas, stories, and art that you’ll be putting out into the world.

You’ll learn what successful creative marketers already know: that these tools only matter as a vehicle for getting your ideas out into the world.

The lessons in Marketing for Makers are designed to give you a healthy balance of creative sparks and concrete information.  We’ll balance essential marketing fundamentals with exercises to get your creative marketing juices flowing.

The Marketing for Makers course was exactly what I needed to take my young business to the next level. I entered the class not really knowing what all marketing entailed, I just knew I needed to do it. I left the class armed with all kinds of helpful and actionable tips. This was timely as I finished the class just before starting my first open-air market season. Now I have a much better understanding of who my ideal customer is, I’ve started an email list, created a central location for my business online, and overall have a more focused feeling to my business efforts.- Jessica L.R. Landry | Jessica Rogers Photography

Course Schedule:

Week 1: Creative Marketing

In Week 1, I’ll share the groundwork of the creative marketing philosophy.  We’ll discover why marketing is more than just social media, look at the three core principles behind creative marketing, and talk about the difference between a marketing strategy based on tools, and one based on ideas, messages, and stories.  And you’ll have plenty of opportunities to identify your creative strengths to help you feel energized moving forward.

Week 2: Marketing Fundamentals

Just with any creative skill, you’ve got to understand the basics before you can create something truly unique.  And Week 2 is all about laying the groundwork for your marketing efforts.  You’ll identify your target market and USP (that’s Unique Selling Proposition), establish an online home base, and learn to write killer product descriptions and about pages.  We’ll also look at some of the basic tools for marketing your business.

Week 3: Visual Creative Marketing

A lot of online marketing advice focuses solely on copy.  But as an artist, designer, or maker, your creative marketing really centers on the visual.  In Week 3, we’ll explore the central role that visuals play in selling and marketing your products.  You’ll learn strategies for creating visual marketing content, the role photography plays in creative marketing, and the tools to share your photographs online.  And, we’ll talk about my favorite underutilized visual marketing tool, video.

Week 4: Fantasy, Story, and Personality

In Week 4, you’ll learn some powerful tools for selling and marketing your products – story, fantasy, and personality.  The most successful creative marketers create a fantasy world that their customers are just dying to buy into.  In this week, we’ll focus on helping you craft the stories and build the fantasy that will help set your products apart from the rest.  (And give you a steady stream of inspiration for your marketing content.)

Week 5: Creative Connections

Creative marketing is about more than just engaging in creative acts.  You’ve got to share those acts with the rest of the world.  In Weeks 2, 3 and 4, you’ll learn some of the tools for sharing your creative marketing with the world.  But in Week 5, you’ll learn to get comfortable sharing your creative marketing with influencers in your field.  We’ll explore ways to network and share (both online and in person) and how to reach out to influential press and bloggers (in more ways than one).

Week 6: Overcoming Marketing Fears

My philosophy to creative marketing is based on simple principles.  But if it’s so easy, why aren’t we all doing it?  Because fear holds us back.  In Week 6, we’ll look at the fears that keep us from creating and sharing with the world.  You’ll get plenty of exercises this week to help identify which fears are holding you back, and to develop concrete ways to create and thrive beyond your fears.

Week 7: Marketing Strategy

Week 7 is where we tie everything together.  While some of my creative marketing inspirations seem to market automatically, the rest of us need a strategy to help develop creative marketing habits.  In the final week of the course, we’ll look at the difference between ongoing marketing tasks and short-term marketing campaigns.  You’ll develop strategies for generating and assessing marketing ideas.  And you’ll come up with a plan for your marketing.

For each week, you’ll get exclusive lessons on the course site in the form of video, audio, text, and worksheets.  (Each week will be a little different depending on the content we’re covering.)  Everything on the course site is completely downloadable, so you can go through it offline, on your own time, as many times as you want.

In addition to the lessons, we’ll also have four live Q&A calls so you can get all your marketing questions answered.  And don’t worry if you can’t make the calls.  You can submit questions in advance and all calls are recorded so you can listen at any time.

Call schedule:

Friday, February 3 – 1 PM Eastern Time

Monday, February 13 – 7 PM Eastern Time

Tuesday, March 1 – 3 PM Eastern Time

Final call date/time TBD

I was able to get a big picture about marketing my business and the methods available, as well as the details of how to implement each method within my own business. I was then able to come up with a marketing plan that was specific and helped guide my daily action steps and achieve my goals. It was worth every penny.- Tiffany Baca Lamoreux | TIFFANY BACA Design

Ready to get started?

*You must register by January 12 to take advantage of the 3-payment plan.

And to make sure you’ve got all the information you need to market with confidence, you’ll also have access to these bonus modules from the original Marketing for Makers e-course:

• Marketing Goal Setting and Budgets
• Email Marketing
• Blogging and SEO
• Video and Social Media
• Advertising
• More Marketing Tools
• Creating Sticky Marketing Campaigns

Reserve your space now!

*You must register by January 12 to take advantage of the 3-payment plan.

Frequently Asks Questions:

What do I need to participate in this class? Ideally, you want some kind of online shop where you sell products that you design and create.  This can be a shop in a community marketplace like Etsy, Artfire, or Supermarket; a shop set up through a host like Big Cartel or Shopify; or a self-hosted e-commerce site.

In addition to that, all you’ll need is a computer with Internet connection, the ability to listen to MP3s, view PDFs, and watch videos, a desire to learn, and a passion for your products.

What if I don’t have an online shop? If you have a website or blog that you use to promote your business, you can still benefit from the class. But you’ll get the most benefit if you have some sort of online shop. And with sites like Big Cartel making it so easy, what’s holding you back?

Does it matter what part of the world I’m in? No. Once the lessons are posted on the class site, you can access them at any time.

What if I get behind? The course is designed that you can work through at your own pace.  The website will remain up for a month after the class ends, and you’ll also be able to download all the components of each lesson to work through and review as often as you’d like.

What if I’m going away during part of the e-course? That’s ok.  You’ll be able to access all the content that was released whenever you get back.

What if I can’t make the live calls?  All the calls will be recorded, so you can access them afterwards.

I’m not sure I’m ready to take the class yet. When will it be offered again? I’m planning on offering the course again in the spring, but my experience is that most makers have the most time to commit to the course during the winter session.

How does it all work? After registering, you’ll receive a confirmation email letting you know of your place in the class.  Shortly after that, you’ll receive an email with the URL and login information for the class.  Once the class starts, you’ll be able to log in to the site to access the class site.  You can download each lesson as they’re available, and you can work through them at your own pace.  (And since each lesson will be in audio format, you can even listen to them while you work in the studio!)

Can I wait to register until closer to the start date of the class? I wouldn’t.  Space in the course in limited to make sure that everyone can get personal instruction from me.  Don’t hesitate.  Use this as an opportunity to invest in the future of your business and start marketing in a way that really works for you!

How is payment processed? Payments are processed through PayPal and can be made with your PayPal account or a major credit card. Payments are 100% secure.

What if I have other questions? You can email me at megan(at)craftMBA.com.

Looking forward to seeing you in class!

Registration is now open! Don’t wait. This is the perfect opportunity to jumpstart your business in 2012!

*You must register by January 12 to take advantage of the 3-payment plan.

I’m a serial Megan Auman student!! After taking one course, it lead me to another and then another… All of your courses give great guidelines, information and action steps that can be used immediately. After taking the Marketing for Makers course, I was able to define and refine my branding and marketing strategies. Your course has given me a great “go to” bible that I continue to use as my business grows. I look forward to the next course!- Ann Chikahisa | Chikahisa Studio