Study task III-b : Marketing

Having the benefit of having started my freelance career online quite early on means that now I have more than 3 years worth of experience in marketing and promoting my business across a wide range of audience, and if all things goes well, it will continue to evolve form the base for my marketing strategy for the years to come . And with my shift from individual commissions to the subscription base service of Patreon, I think I also have a pretty clear idea of how to go about doing it in each environments.

At the core of it, personally, I think understanding who your core audience are and what you are specifically providing for them is the most crucial part to a successful marketing campaign. For me, I have had a long history with RoosterTeeth and their i.p RWBY, ( which still enjoy immensely, another crucial aspect), and therefore my works and audience are related to that i.p heavily. With that in mind, I'd promote my piece on specific RWBY fan pages and social media sites, and taking advantage of the # across the web. On top of that, having the benefit of being part of the community itself means that you can catch up with the latest trends, stories, events happening around the fandom, and therefore can formulate your art to response to it and maximise the interest in them due to the relevancy of the topics. This doesn't just limit to RWBY but any type of community out there, as the reality of the online media now is extremely fast-pace and saturated, therefore you only have a narrow window in which you can most efficiently promote yourself.

Of course, all of this is done the purpose of drawing the "hardcore" fans, who are the one will be most willing to become a commissioner, customer or patrons. And the more your presence grow, the level of these audience will also evolve from individuals to actual big name studio offering professional roles. This fact was proven to me from the fact that all of my professional projects up to this point has been brought about a direct results from my online presence. This leads us to my pricing options, as I had to considers the type of customers im getting for each projects. For the regular individual fan, I'd tend to introduce them to my subscription services, therefore keeping the price affordable for them and provide consistent level of income for me. In the contrary , for one-off contracts with bigger studios, I'd charge standard professional price, usually on a xxx/per day basis.

Its important to note that all of this focus on RWBY doesn't negates the fact that I do diversify the topic of my art now and then, either to other i.ps or my own personal projects, with a 2 RWBY-related to 1 other I.p posting shceme, keeping my already attained audience, while reaching to new ones. I'm also gradually transitioning my art style to cater more for concepts and visual story-telling apart from just character-focused. Eventually I would aslo like to move in to the 3D as well, which would reach out to an even bigger crowd. And with that, I think I have an sustainable marketing strategy for success.