The artwork pictured here to the left is ‘Marsha’s View,’ an original pastel painting by artist Kay Gordon of Marshall, North Carolina.
In recent weeks I’ve featured collaborative marketing partnerships among those in crafts.
In Collaborative Marketing for Rural Small Business I introduced the idea of increasing your power to pull visitors to out-of-the-way rural locations by joining with similar local businesses and promoting yourselves as a group.
I featured two groups of potters in North Carolina that work together on their marketing efforts to drive traffic to their individual studios: The Potters of the Roan and The Penland Potters.
And in Handmade Collaborative Marketing,I described the team support system that Etsy has created for its individual sellers.
More artists than ever before are exploring collaborative marketing. Art Marketing Through Partnerships: A Marketing Tip written by Kim Cady describes how artists can take a subject or theme they like painting (in her example, cats and dogs), and joining hands with community organizations and businesses that share that theme.
As Ms Cady points out, the new year is a good time to re-think our businesses and how we might reach out to others and create win-win situations for all involved. Finding ways to promote your artwork locally is especially important for artists, whose work can celebrate that ’sense of place’ in ways few other businesses in a region can.
Marketing Your Art Locally: 7 Reasons to Market Your Artwork Closer to Home encourages artists to take advantage of the stronger motivation many customers have to ‘buy local’ these days, and to enjoy the advantages that being the ‘big fish’ in the smaller pond could bring.
Painting historic homes and buildings or capturing the spirit and energy of your town’s festivals in your art will create value-added products that local businesses and community organizations can sell for you, increasing sales for everyone and allowing you to continue creating.
Many small businesses in rural and small towns proudly feature the work of their local artists by selling not only their originals, but giclees (fine quality productions) in all sizes, and even refrigerator magnets and postcards. Tourists, in particular, often prefer to purchase handmade art and crafts as souvenirs of the places they visit rather than mass-produced memorabilia.
What partnerships or collaborative marketing efforts can you explore for your business?
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Here’s a link for artists, writers, photographers, and all other creative folk on the back roads. 
Many small business owners believe they don’t need a press kit - that because of their small size or rural location, they won’t be asked to provide facts about themselves and their business. 
Welcome to Backroads Business where we explore the challenges of creating and growing rural businesses located on the backroads of small town America. Our areas of discussion will include home business, small business, rural business, seasonal business, mom and pop businesses, arts and craft businesses, artists, farms (agritourism) and tourism.
