Marketing for Creatives (Without Selling Your Soul to the Algorithm)

Marketing for Creatives is Part 1 of a series on marketing for people who create work that matters. Coming next: musicians, writers, DJs, artists – more to follow…

“Marketing for creatives” if that phrase makes you cringe, don’t worry, that’s just a natural sign that your artistic integrity is functioning exactly as intended.

You want to express yourself, not sell yourself, but here’s the dilemma, to reach your audience you must bypass the human gatekeepers and appease the platforms who view you as a product and the art you poured your heart and soul into as – eww! – “content”.

In an ideal world you wouldn’t have to you, you could reach your audience directly and let your art speak for itself.

But we’re not in an ideal world, or anything that closely resembles them, which means, like it or not, you’re stuck in the same hyper-connected hustle as everyone else, so you need to find a way to stand out.

Marketing for creatives isn’t about bending over for the almighty algorithm, it’s about adjusting your message to fit the medium in a way that doesn’t compromise who you are.

In a world of algorithmic flatness, where everyone starts to look, sound and speak the same, we’ll show you how to stand out and get noticed.

The Bouncer Doesn’t Care Who’s Playing

Think of algorithm like the bouncer at the door. He doesn’t care what music’s playing, if it’s a band or a DJ, he’s just there to control the door and restrict entry.

Instagram has been unusually candid about this. There is no single algorithm. Feed, Reels, Stories and Explore each run their own ranking system, weighting signals differently. In January 2025, Adam Mosseri named the three that matter most across all of them: watch time, likes per reach, and sends per reach. TikTok describes its For You feed the same way, ranking videos against a set of behavioral signals.

Quality isn’t on those lists. It can’t be measured, so it isn’t. Or to put it another way, the bouncer’s not being paid to be a music critic. That’s why a great piece of art with no metrics behaves exactly like a bad one with no metrics.

That reads as an instruction to perform rather than create. It’s more nuanced than that. Making the work and getting it in front of people are two separate jobs, and the second one won’t do itself.

86% of Musicians Report Creative Burnout.

Ask a working creative if marketing feels sustainable and brace yourself for a rant. Every single writer, musician, performer and artist I know has, at one point or another, told me how sick they are of all the “marketing crap” and “social media bullshit” they have to do, just to get seen, get heard and, hardest of all, fill rooms. 

MBO Partners’ 2024 Creator Economy Trends Report found 41% of independent creators struggling with burnout, and 46% saying it’s hard to succeed in the space at all.

Musicians have it worse. Ditto Music’s 2026 survey of more than 2,000 independent artists and industry professionals found 86% had experienced serious mental strain or creative burnout. 67% said social media specifically damages their wellbeing. Record Union’s 2019 study put symptoms of mental illness at 73% of independent musicians, rising to 80% among 18-to-25-year-olds.

Writers get no reprieve either. Written Word Media’s 2023 survey found authors spending an average of 31 hours and $617 a month marketing their own books, and rating marketing as the hardest part of the job. Harder than writing the book.

One thing they all have in common – creators, musicians, writers, artists of every kind – they’re now all locked in an existential war against AI and the tech-bros who would happily replace all forms of human expression with automated slop.

These are the same tech bros who hollowed out the creative industry in the first place, everything from publishing to the music business. The old model was exploitative, sure, but at least you had a marketing department behind you.

Not anymore. Now you have to do it all yourself. You need to prove you have the numbers first, before you ever get a shot. The problem is, learning to be a DIY marketer is tough, especially when most of the advice online comes from chirpy tech boosters at best, or downright sleazy information product-peddling “marketing gurus” at worst.  

Be Predictable About Exactly One Thing

Before any tactic: people need to be able to guess something about your work before they see it.

This usually gets called a brand, a word that makes creatives flinch.

Full disclosure, I hate the word “personal brand”, it’s a phrase that belongs on LinkedIn where everyone performs the same nauseating dance of personal brand blandness.

So don’t think of it as a personal brand. Think of it as your stance – what do you stand for?

Both audiences reward it, the algorithm because it can file you somewhere, it needs a box to put you in, so give it a box you at least feel strongly about, people then know exactly what you’re about, in a single word ideally, it could be a political stance, a social sentiment, a style, an aesthetic, a vibe – the more succinct you are, the better because once they see it, people know exactly what to expect, and both your fans and the algorithm will reward you.

If your last five posts could belong to five different people, start here. Everything below works better once this exists. Some of it doesn’t work at all without it.

Stop Building on Rented Land

Here’s the bit the so-called marketing gurus leave out of their $497 course, somewhere between the guaranteed system and the rest of the bullshit: the more media you own, the more you control.

Every follower, every scrap of algorithmic goodwill, every impression on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok is rented. Your landlord can raise the rent, change the locks, or decide overnight that your street is out of fashion. All three have happened, repeatedly, to people with far bigger audiences than yours.

Maybe it’s an update to the algorithm which wipes you and countless others our, or perhaps it’s a shadowban, because you said the wrong word, supported the wrong cause, or otherwise done something which the techbros don’t agree with, so you were silently punished for it.

There’s an old joke about Facebook events. Take everyone who clicked Interested, add everyone who clicked Going, and that’s roughly the number of people who won’t turn up. It’s funny because social platforms exist to maximize scrolling.

The Importance of Owned Media in Creative Marketing

This is why owned media is so important and the two most important ones are your website and your email list.

The website doesn’t need to be super flashy. In fact, better if it’s not. Something light, fast and clean, clearly displaying all the vital info, how to book you, where to buy your work, where to buy tickets and merch, upcoming events, examples of your work, images, videos, clips, all your best stuff.

You don’t need an expensive web agency or a search engine guru, a quiet weekend and you can build all that yourself.

The other heavy hitting channel most creatives, and indeed sometimes so-called marketing gurus tend to skip is Email. Why? Because there’s no glamour in it.

The numbers tell a different story. Organic reach on Instagram sits around 4%, on Facebook nearer 2%. Out of 100 followers, two to four see a given unpaid post. Average email open rates run 15–25%.

If you have a core group of super fans, your performance will be higher still, provided you give them what they want. Think about the emails you get, which ones do you open and read, which ones do you delete – now ask yourself why? It’s the difference in value. Give your subscribers value and they’ll respond with loyalty.

Everyone’s on TikTok. Your People Might Not Be.

There’s a piece of advice fired at every creative regardless of what they make: you should be on TikTok. Maybe. Its reach is enormous, an estimated 1.54 billion people. But scale and relevance are different things, and being brilliant somewhere your audience isn’t is a very efficient way to lose your evenings.

Apply the 80/20 rule properly. If 80% of your real interaction happens in one place, 80% of your effort belongs there. Chasing a platform because everyone says to means optimizing for a hypothetical audience while ignoring the one you already have.

Find where your people already are. Everywhere else is optional until the first place works.

The Twelve People Who’d Show Up in the Rain

Growth advice treats every follower as equal weight. They aren’t. Twelve people who turn up in bad weather and tell their friends will outperform ten times as many passive scrollers who never convert into anything.

That group doesn’t need a content calendar. It needs access. Unpolished footage of the actual work, phone camera, no script, consistently beats produced content for building this kind of loyalty. It’s the one thing a casual audience never gets to see.

The instinct to hold something back is right, though. Share what you’re comfortable sharing, not what a content strategy says you should. Everybody runs some kind of persona: the stage one, the studio one, the “this is me online” one. Fine.

You just need to ask yourself whether or not what you’re doing feels authentic or, worse, pretentious, if it does, then you’re going to feel good about it and, besides, it’s counterproductive because it doesn’t help you stand out.

And remember, just because everyone acts a certain way online doesn’t mean it actually works because..

If It’s Already Trending Then It’s Already Played Out

Trendjacking is the fastest route to looking like everyone else, which defeats the point of having a stance at all. If a style or sound has reached you via an algorithmic suggestion, it’s because it’s become mainstream so now everyone knows about it. Jumping on the bandwagon is a surefire say to tell your audience, “yeah I got nothing better going on this week”

Again, the test is simple. If participating feels inauthentic, or worse, pretentious, don’t. That instinct is nearly always right. Overriding it because “the algorithm likes trends” is how a distinct voice turns into content-shaped filler over about eighteen months.

Curation Counts, and It’s Faster

Not everything has to be made from scratch. Finding something worth sharing and adding a real take is a legitimate strategy, and it’s the one that gives time back instead of eating it.

In digital marketing this is known as “content curation”, and it’s also a great way to align yourself with likeminded publishers, creators and fans.

Best of all, it’s something which can be posted in minutes, if not seconds; a reaction, a repost with your own authentic commentary, a “here’s why this matters” breakdown.

So instead of working overtime to create content, you leverage someone else’s, that way youavoid feeling crushed by the algorithmic hamster wheel while still showing up often enough to matter.

Plus it always beats trendjacking because instead of following the crowd, you’re consistently adding value.

Pick a Pace You Could Keep in a Bad Month

Every burnout story opens the same way. An ambitious schedule designed during a burst of motivation, abandoned in the first difficult week.

Choose the cadence you could sustain in a bad month, not the one that felt achievable in a good one. Consistency beats intensity, and it isn’t close.

Marketing for Creatives Existed Before the Internet

If you came up believing marketing means posting, this takes a second to compute. Some of the highest-leverage moves available to a creative happen entirely offline.

• Rooms with people in them. A gig, a pop-up, an open studio, a reading. Nothing makes a core fan faster than being in the same room as one.
• Local and niche press. An alt-weekly, a genre blog, a zine, a specialist podcast. Smaller audience, dramatically more qualified than a random algorithmic impression – and yes, they still exist.
• Cross-promotion. Guest spots, collabs, shared bills, swapped newsletter shoutouts. You’re borrowing someone else’s earned trust, which is the only real shortcut here.
• Word of mouth, engineered on purpose. Ask happy fans to bring someone. Put the ask in your email footer. It converts better than almost anything you can pay for.
• Objects. Stickers, postcards, a business card that doesn’t look like a template. Cheap, and they sit in someone’s physical space long after a post has scrolled into the void.

None of this is nostalgia. “Marketing” and “social media” were never synonyms. An entire generation was taught to use them that way, but that’s gradually changing.

Old skool methods are gaining pace, real spaces, even printed pages, all experiencing a renaissance of late. Gen-Zs, in particular, who are more sceptical of big tech than previous generations have come to embrace the same alternative DIY ethos once synonymous with punk, hiphop and the rave scene, none of which would ever have happened if Silicon Valley was calling the shots.  

Four Things You Can Safely Ignore

“Post daily or the algorithm punishes you.” Mosseri’s stated position is that posting more doesn’t cost you reach, because every post is ranked on its own merits. That cuts both ways. There’s no bonus for volume either. Frequency buys lottery tickets. Five strong posts beat seven tired ones, and the real price of the daily grind is your nervous system, not a hidden penalty.

“Go viral first, figure out the rest later.” Virality without a stance recruits an audience for the moment rather than for you. Watch how fast those follows evaporate when the algorithm moves on. It will.

“Engagement bait works.” Meta has been demoting it since December 2017 and named the five varieties outright: vote baiting, react baiting, share baiting, tag baiting and comment baiting. If your caption is “comment YES if you agree,” you’re optimizing for a documented penalty.

“Just get the follower count up.” The signals that matter are ratios. Likes per reach. Sends per reach. Padding your following with bought or reciprocal accounts that never engage inflates the denominator and drags every ratio down. You’d be paying money to look worse to the ranking system.

The discipline is fine. The problem is that most of the advice comes from people who’ve never had to make the thing they’re selling advice about.

Now Get Out There!

You don’t need to become a marketer. You just need to stop thinking of it as somebody else’s job. As an artist, it’s your job to get noticed, to get seen, heard, to make an impact.

After all, it’s not somebody else’s unique voice and story, it’s yours.

So stop waiting to be discovered. Discovery isn’t something that happens to people. It’s something people arrange, slowly and unglamorously, over months, until it looks from the outside like luck.

Next in the series: marketing for musicians. What changes when your content is also your art, and why the framework above needs a rewrite for anyone selling sound.

Marketing for Creatives: FAQ

What’s the first thing I should set up? A simple website and an email signup, before you touch a single social algorithm. Owned channels first, always.

Do I need to be on every platform? No. One platform done with intent beats four done half-heartedly. Expand once the first one works, not before.

How do I do this without feeling like a salesperson? Reframe the job. You’re making sure the people who’d want your work can find it. If that still feels grim, the framing is the problem rather than the activity.

What if my niche is really specific? Then you have an advantage. A small precise audience converts and engages better than a broad disinterested one ever will.

How long before any of this works? Longer than the gurus imply, shorter than your anxiety imagines. Months, not days. Consistent, not intense.