The content that sells during a drop
Most artists do not have a content problem. They have a content mix problem. They post plenty, but it is all the same kind of post, so the audience never builds and the drop never lands.
So we went and looked. Our agency studied hundreds of the best performing reels and posts from artists selling well on social media, and sorted them into the types that actually do a job. Seventeen of them, on two axes.
Content that builds the audience
This is the work you do before there is anything to sell. It earns the attention you will later ask something of.
Story and premise
Open with a premise the viewer has to see resolved. The strongest hooks promise something in the first second and pay it off in the last. Brooke DiDonato's on-screen premise “photos I took in order of how painful they were” carried a countdown of surreal self-portraits to 15.6M views.
View this reel by @brookedidonato on Instagram
Making-of and process
People stay for the making. Long shots of the work coming together outperform the finished piece on its own, almost every time. Margriet's wall-sized ink-and-pencil drawing of dense futuristic architecture reached 7.2M views on close-ups of pen strokes alone.
View this reel by @maargriitt on Instagram
Signature technique
The one thing only you do. Show it close, show it often, and it becomes the thing people associate with your name. James Cook typing the Arc de Triomphe character by character on a typewriter: 18.4M views.
View this reel by @jamescookartwork on Instagram
Being an artist
The life around the work. Less polished, more honest, and often the post that travels furthest. Caro Wendelin painting with her kids is her biggest reel by far, at 21.7M views.
View this reel by @carowendelinart on Instagram
Content that sells the drop
These only work because of the ones above. Used on their own they fall flat, used after a run of good audience content they convert.
Drop announcement
Date, time, edition size. Say it plainly and say it more than once. Assume most of your audience missed the first one. Riona Buthello put a drop date and giveaway on a premise reel that reached 13.1M views.
View this post by @rionabuthello on Instagram
Drop closing and last chance
The deadline is the reason to act. A genuine last call, on the day, is usually the highest converting post of the whole drop.
View this reel by @polina.bright on Instagram
The other eleven
They cover the reveal, the tease, the materials, time in the making, hand and eye detail, events, recaps, honest scarcity and viewer interaction. Each one has a job, and a moment in the drop where it belongs.
Knowing the order is the hard part
Which is really the point. Knowing the seventeen types is useful. Knowing which to post on which day, in the two weeks around a drop, is what actually moves sales.
That is what your marketing plan does. Every drop you create in creativehub comes with a day-by-day plan: what to post, when to post it, and what each post is meant to achieve, from the first teaser through to the final hours.
Examples shown are posts by artists we work with, embedded from and linked to their original Instagram posts, with credit.