Category: MarketingCategory: Marketing

I hear it all the time – “my inbox is overflowing, I can’t keep up,” which usually leads to the idea that your newsletter is going to get lost in the shuffle of your subscribers inbox.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I’m drowning, too. But there are names that pop up in my Newsletter folder that I will absolutely read. Names that make me smile. Newsletters that I know I will read and get something from.

You can be that for someone else. Believe that.

If you’ve got four subscribers, 40, or 400 – there are a certain number of people that will make time for you, week in and week out. Not everyone, but a subset of your total subscriber count. That’s the way it works.

So don’t be dismayed by the numbers, the trends, whatever – celebrate the few people who love the work that you do.

People are getting tired of all the notifications from news apps, even to the point of uninstalling them from their phones. This from The Guardian:

Too many alerts could cause problems for the whole industry. The big smartphone software operators such as Apple and Google have routinely warned publishers about sending too many alerts. This has led to concerns that these platforms could further restrict or mediate their notifications in the future.

You couldn’t accuse most artists from sending too many emails. The general vibe is “I don’t wanna be too spammy.” So then many in the creative world end up sending once a month, or even more infrequent.

There is a balance to be found – for your personal bandwidth, and what your audience will tolerate. Everyone is different, and every audience is different.

But keep the “alert fatigue” in mind – it’s not that what you’re sending is too much, but you’re message, your post, your invite – it’s easy to get lost in the unending torrent of everybody else’s updates.

Recently, Joi Katskee missed a friend’s show. She asked about it afterwards, and they said they posted about it on Instagram, which we all know your social media followers miss almost everything you post.

She followed up with success story of her own art installation, and shared about the win on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Posting to the most amount of people always feels like the right move. But if no one sees it, what good does that do? Does it just let you off the hook?

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Using comfortable tools is important if we want to make the work we’re destined to make.

Note I didn’t say the “right tools.”

There’s lots of opinions and made up rules about the right tools to use, especially in the marketing of our creative work. The Social Media Escape Club is based upon dismissing the idea that social media is the right way to get our work out into the world.

For many, social media is uncomfortable. Dashboard metrics are uncomfortable. The idea of “creating content” to talk about work is uncomfortable. Using certain software tools, or computer programs – they’re uncomfortable.

We’re allowed to not use social media platforms, or perform at noisy bars.

We’re allowed to turn down opportunities that don’t align with our values.

We’re allowed comfort and ease in how we work, and how we make our art.

Says Kening Zhu in “the joy of missing out on platforms:”

“The more I’m nourished by my work, the more that others have the possibility of being nourished by it too.”

This is why I moved my paid members from Substack to Memberful. I don’t like what I’m seeing on that platform, and right now I wanted to ensure I could protect my member and data by moving somewhere else.

Was their discomfort in the move? Of course. But that’s what platforms do – they make it easy to stay. Untangling ourselves from these platforms is difficult work, but if there is comfort on the other side of that, then it’s worth it.

During a recent Escape Pod Zoom call Jes Raymond told us how she got people to a show in a town she never played before.

“This past weekend, we had a little show up in a tiny town—St. Johnsbury. One of those places with a small newspaper. And I just decided that instead of making a bunch of social media posts about the show—especially to a town I don’t know—I’d do the human work.

I figured out who the journalist was at the local paper who writes the arts column. I wrote to them directly and sent them a press release. Then I found the local radio station—Vermont Public—and called them. I got our event on their calendar.

We ended up having about 150 people show up at this little church in a town I’d never played before.”

Yes! Doing the human work! As Jes said, “I’ve been trying this new practice of asking: Who could help me? And how?”

Posting on social media is like buying a lottery ticket, because maybe it’ll pay off. But contacting the people who can directly help you? They either write you back, or they don’t – those are 50/50 odds, much better than gambling with an algorithm and hoping it just “works out.”

And Jes hit the jackpot twice, adding 35 new people to her email list!

“Don’t leave the email list somewhere for people to come up to. Put it on a clipboard and pass it around the audience during the show. Tell them: ‘This is the email list, here’s what it’s for, we’re going to pass it around.’”

Building an email list online is great and all, but imagine the open rate for those 35 people who just joined that list? They were at a show, in the crowd, enjoying the event, laughing with friends – that’s an engaged audience!