How we think about tattoo marketing

Tattoo marketing is a craft.

Not a side hustle for an agency that does plumbers and gyms. Not a vertical to add to the slide deck. A craft. The booking journey is unique, the creative rules are inverted from most industries, the audiences move differently, and the platform itself treats tattoo content differently.

You wouldn't ask a generalist house painter to do your full sleeve. The same logic applies to who you let touch your business.

Specialists beat generalists every time.

A generalist agency that takes on tattoo work is doing one of three things: charging you the same as their other clients while learning at your expense, applying playbooks designed for other industries, or churning you out after 6 months when their relationship manager moves on.

Specialists already know what works. Every dollar you spend with us has been pre-tested across hundreds of campaigns. You're not the experiment, you're the beneficiary of one we already ran.

Your work is the creative.

We don't shoot stock. We don't generate AI mockups. We don't recycle templates from other clients. The only ads that go out are built from your actual posts, your actual hands, your actual chair. Anything else is a lie about who's doing the work.

The Andromeda algorithm reads creative as a signal of who the audience should be. Polished portfolio shots tell Meta to show your ad to other artists and magazine readers. UGC and process content tells Meta to show it to people who book. We choose the second.

The DM is the gateway.

For most tattoo work, the DM is where the conversation starts. Not always where it ends. We optimise for messaging conversations because they're the closest signal to a real enquiry, then evolve into lead forms, contact submits, or email capture when the audience and the artist's setup call for it.

For around 40 to 50% of our roster, DMs stay the primary objective long-term. They've always handled bookings through Instagram and the volume is what they want. For the rest, the campaign matures into a stack of objectives sitting on top of the same audience. Both are valid. The audience underneath is the asset either way.

Agencies that report only on click-through rates from cold traffic are reporting on the wrong thing. We report on enquiries started and the audience built around them, because that's the closest proxy to bookings. Everything else is vanity.

Lock-ins are for agencies that lose clients.

If an agency needs a 12-month contract to keep you, the work isn't doing the work. We don't lock anyone in. We recommend a 3-month commitment because audiences need that long to compound, but you can walk any month.

This forces us to deserve the next month every month. Which is exactly the right pressure to put on a service business.

Reports should be read, not displayed.

Most agency reports are dashboards full of click metrics, designed to look impressive and avoid being understood. Ours are written for tattoo artists, in plain English. What ran, what worked, what's next, what changed in the industry that affects you.

If you can't explain what your agency did this month in two sentences, your agency is hiding something or doesn't know.

One operator on every account.

The person writing your ads is the same person you talk to. No salespeople selling lies, no juniors copy-pasting templates, no account directors who've never been in a tattoo shop. If something needs adjusting, the person adjusting it is the one in your inbox.

That's the founder right now. As we grow, that promise stays. Anyone who joins this team will be a craftsperson on accounts they personally run, not a sales layer between you and the work.

This caps how fast we can grow without compromising. We're fine with that.

We tell people no.

Not every tattoo artist is a fit for paid ads. Some don't have enough portfolio depth yet. Some can't commit the minimum spend. Some are looking for results we can't deliver in the timeframe they want.

We tell those people no, and we tell them why. Better to lose a client at the application stage than to take the money and disappoint them four months in.