Social Media Experience
Though Patrick has never formerly held the title of “social media marketer”, he provided work for various clients looking to change their tone and move their brand in a new direction. Much is under NDA. In his own time, Patrick built a social media following to apply the social marketing skills he was learning to his own brand. This is the path he took and the strategies applied.
Instagram Platform Building
In 2014, Patrick was looking to expand his sources of online revenue. He created an Instagram account to share his art and expand his audience. In order to develop a profitable online presence, he needed to determine what sort of projects his following would support.
Creating Content for Trending Tags
In explore what his following would be most interested in, Patrick turned to his own fandoms. Given much of his following knew his work from comics, he focused on pop-culture elements. This gave him a collection of potential social media tags for which to create content. Examples of these include “Inktober”, “Halloween”, and “Onelinedrawing” to touch upon broad, niche, and trending tags. After two years, the account had more than six thousand followers.
Original Content to Establish Brand
The Imaginauts combined watercolor and cardboard cutouts placed against backgrounds that meaningfully completed the picture. The first character was a blue and orange astronaut, but the audience was most responsive to comic book character, specifically Batman.
Original or distinct content helped elevate the account in the eyes of his followers for its unique approach to art.
Exploring Merchandising Opportunities
In 2017, the account was approach eight thousand followers. Patrick had long been searching for art product he could sell to his audience. Sharing aspects of his personal life allowed for him to test the waters about where his audience would follow. Most significantly was when he began sharing from personal enamel pin collection.
Online Selling
In 2017, Patrick created He + She Pins to make money from his art but in order to do that he had to rely on his marketing skills. This meant not only creating products but the promotional images, sales promotions, newletters, and maintaining engagement on the account. These product built on what Patrick’s audience had been most responsive to, including comic book characters and monster movies.
In 2019, the account reach 3.4k followers.
TikTok Platform Building
In 2023, Patrick began creating a TikTok account to begin building a new audience for a forthcoming book regarding neuordiversity. With a sharply defined content, he created a week worth of content. A week later, he chose the highest performing video and put $40 into promoting it. Within a month, he had more than 700 followers.
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