I let an algorithm optimize my studio workflow for a month and it was useless
A marketing consultant reached out saying she could "systematize my audience growth." I told her I don't have an audience, I have maybe 400 people who care about industrial salvage installations in Prague. She said that's exactly the problem.
So for a month I let her try. She had me post on a schedule, use certain words, track when people engaged most. I did it. Numbers went up slightly. Total new people who actually came to a studio visit or wrote something that showed they understood what I'm doing: zero.
The thing is my work takes six weeks to build and you walk through it in ten minutes. You can't optimize that. You can't gamify someone standing in a room full of old factory parts and feeling something.
I told her I think the disconnect was that my work is slow and her job is to make things fast. She said I was being resistant. She wasn't wrong. But neither was I.
I don't know what the proper social media strategy is for work that takes months and asks for patience. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe the answer is just keep making the rooms and the people who need to find them eventually will.
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This really resonated with me. I paint in acrylics and when people give me advice about "growing my brand" I always feel like they're talking about something completely different than what I actually do.
I think the disconnect is that for people making things that take time and thought, the audience that matters isn't the one that finds you through keywords. It's the one that wanders in because a friend dragged them to a show or they saw something in a window and got curious. You can't algorithm your way into that.
What are you doing now that the month is over? Back to just making the work?
Yes, totally. I feel like there's this assumption that if you're making something, you must want to turn it into a business with a growth plan. But sometimes you just want to make it and have the right people find it, even if that's slow.
I've had people tell me I should be on TikTok doing time-lapses of my paintings. And I'm like... I have 45 minutes after the kids go to bed and I just want to paint, not film myself painting. The audience thing feels like a second job that I didn't sign up for.
Right. That last bit is the whole thing. The 45 minutes after the kids go to bed, that's not buffer time for content. That's the work itself. And someone's always ready to tell you you're doing it wrong if you're not also performing it.
Exactly. The brand people and the making people are speaking different languages. Nothing wrong with that, but the advice lands like it's meant for someone else.
Yeah, back to just making. First thing I did was throw the schedule out. Working on a piece now with a hundred kilos of rusted factory chain and some glass I've been hauling around for two years. Nobody's gonna find that through a keyword and that's the whole point of it.