As a creative myself, I tend to work with a lot of creatives. They’re some of the best people – big ideas, great thoughts, unique offerings. Yet, there is an issue I see cropping up with creatives again and again, and we really need to talk about it.
I don’t have a term for it, but I think for the purpose of this article, I’m going to call it service and marketing cannibalization.
Oh, that sounds dreary. Horrible, frankly. But it’s accurate! The short form is: when you put out so much marketing efforts that actually conflict with your other marketing efforts, that you confuse your audience and leave with no money/sales/what-have-you when you could be landing those sales.
Let’s take a look at what I mean and how you can avoid falling victim to this.
Understanding the path of creative endeavors
If you’re been doing creative work for a long time – or really any work – chances are you have a large repertoire of offerings for your customers. For creatives especially, we’re hardly standing still and waiting for the next big thing to come to us. Instead, we’re actively searching out projects, having projects come out as we’re working on the next thing, and just moving from thing to thing one after another.
It seems normal and usual to simply add the next thing you’re doing to your site or your pinned post. It makes sense, even. If you’ve written ten books, why not list them all and let the customer choose?
Where it goes wrong
We all think that’s the best way to do it. Just keep adding more variety to your shop, more places to find you, more ways to purchase. Make it easy for customers to give you money, no matter the platform. Give them options and they’ll come!
Unfortunately, the truth is that we seldom have the undivided attention of our customers, especially on the internet. We have mere seconds to impress or get people to what they’re looking for to land that coveted sale. When we keep adding options and features and services, we end up causing decision paralysis in our customers, resulting in no sales at all. Get it? We’re cannibalizing our own services and products. One too many and they start “eating” each other.
This happens a lot with websites too. Over the years features and sections and services get added, one on top of the other, and then many years down the line you end up with a large, bloated site with a million different avenues, and not all of them used or used appropriately. Everyone languishes when a large site goes through a site revamp, but it’s inevitable – trying to reorganize services and features to highlight the most important parts of your business is critical! Terminating seldom-used areas means cutting costs for many websites. It’s really an easy business decision, even if everyone hates it at first.
Take a long hard look at your website and marketing efforts. Does this look familiar?
- Welcome to my website! Here’s my artwork
- If you like my artwork, you can buy prints here
- If you want merch, you can buy merch at this other place
- If you want to support me, you can join my Patreon!
- But you can also join my Ko-fi
- You should also subscribe to my newsletter!
- And follow me on Instagram
- And Facebook
- And Tumblr
- And Bluesky
- Did I tell you that I have a book coming out?
- And a crowdfunder?
- But you should also read my blog, I post things there too sometimes
- If you want to commission me, you can do that on Vgen
- Oh, also, I’m doing an in person event… You should come say hello!
Feeling called out right now?
How we fix decision paralysis/marketing cannibalization
The easiest way to fix decision paralysis and your marketing cannibalization is to give a very clear call to action that points at just one place. I know, I know. This is the short of it. However, I understand that it’s important for creatives to have all of these different avenues and options, so in reality, we have to instead look at structuring our call to action and honing in on the current focal points. How do I mean exactly? Ask yourself this question first:
#1: What is the primary goal of my website, linktree, social media at this point in time?
Your goal can and will change. If it’s “be a portfolio for my work”, then you should focus primarily on that. If it’s “drive commission sales”, then focus on that. Like I said, it will change based on the projects you are running and evolve over time, but determine what the first and foremost goal of your marketing efforts is.
#2: Is my website, linktree, social media, etc pointing at that singular goal primarily?
If your goal is to take commissions, commission prices and terms should be the very first thing on any of these areas. It should be the first thing a visitor sees and has to scroll through to get to anything else. If you are also competing with your commission services by providing, say, an equally as visually important shop link or shop coupon via popup, then you need to consider downgrading those efforts to refocus on commissions.
#3: What items can be downgraded?
You may not want to get rid of your newsletter subscription call outs and social media icons, and that’s fair, but they should not be using the same amount of visual space and marketing depth as your primary goal. Make sure these areas are appropriately relegated to “secondary” or even “tertiary” – footers and sidebars, or less frequent posting, helps keep these present and visible, but not driving traffic away from your main goal.
#4: What can I get rid of?
Purging out old projects, old titles, old inventory, old artwork is something you should do regularly. Pruning your portfolio to show off what you can do now is important. Removing the 17 books you published 5 years ago from your Linktree doesn’t mean you have to pretend they don’t exist, it’s just not your current primary marketing goal. If it doesn’t support your current goal, no matter what it is, get rid of it. It can always be re-added later.
#5: Utilize landing pages
The golden standard for marketing anything is utilizing landing pages. This keeps your main website clear of clutter and your product laser focused. Landing pages can be used for all kinds of things. A good landing page should focus on one item or service, and nothing else. Remove distractions such as newsletter signups, Patreon call outs, etc, and use the landing page to funnel traffic to that one specific thing. Landing pages can come and go with projects, and become a more in depth part of the archives of your site, but will help you keep from the dreaded too long, too confusing, and too many choices navigation bar.
How’d you do?
After you’ve gone through everything, you should be able to identify some areas for consolidation or even removal. The big thing you have to remember is keeping up with this. Come back once a year to clean up your website and marketing efforts. Archive old, no long accurate posts on social media. Remove pins that don’t make sense. Shuffle around your navigation and remove items that aren’t necessarily super important right now. Laser focusing your efforts means you can land sales and leads quicker, and that’s what we need right now.
Let me know in the comments how you fared! I’d love to hear from you.