An artist once told me that after decades of doing exhibitions, the same customers simply weren’t buying his work any more. He hadn’t grasped that people have only so much wall space and won’t continue to buy art ad infinitum. We have to go out and create new customers to sell our wares to and there are two ways to do this: using time and creativity, or utilising ‘paid for’ advertising.
We’d love to become viral stars and never pay for advertising, but unless we have an exceptionally creative idea to do that, and don’t want to grow our following organically, we’ll have to pay. There are two digital routes: social media advertising and SEO (search engine optimisation) specialists.
Re-read my previous sections on how to use social media effectively. This will go a long way to reduce your paid-for awareness because others will do much of that for you by cross-posting, etc. Working with good partners too (a whole section on this to come), will help both you and your partners feed off each other’s client bases.
To reach a whole new batch of clients digitally, however, best use the big boys: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. Do they work? Yes, if you stick to some simple rules. I ran a paid-for Facebook ad for 14 days at £10 a day and sold a £500 painting. The next time I did it, I sold a £1650 painting and got a whole host of awareness to boot, so it can be well worth it.
Before you start, think about what it is you want to say in your ad. Paying to ‘boost’ just one image may be fine, but how about moving images of several pieces of your work? Videos are ‘eye candy’ and it won’t cost any more to ‘boost’ a video with several pieces as opposed to just one.
Using programmes like Ripl will help you do this easily (see previous chapter) and help make the ad you’re going to run look professional and interesting. It’s a waste of your time and money to post a bad image that doesn’t attract shares and comments, so think hard about content.
You may be tempted to squeeze in a lot of copy for your money, but my suggestion is don’t! Keep words to a minimum and let your images do the talking. In some cases platforms like Facebook will block posts with too much copy in them, so keep it simple… it’s your art you’re selling after all!
Whatever you do, NEVER pay for likes and followers on Facebook. This is pure vanity and will only reduce the amount of content your real followers see. Paying for people to click ‘like’ or ‘follow’ generally comes from ‘click farms’ (people paid to just click on things they have zero interest in) so grow your likes and followers organically or through advertising.
Facebook only shows 30% of your feeds to your followers, so if 50% of your followers are from click farms, with no interest in your work, then you’ve just cut by 50% the amount of feeds your true followers will see. Like I said, steer away from these, no matter how tempting having thousands of followers may seem.
The beauty of paid-for ads, however, is they reach your target audience directly. It can even be as niche as ‘women between 35 and 65 living in Stratford who love art’… like it or not, these big guys know us almost better than we do ourselves, so their advertising is incredibly honed!
Why not try ‘boosting’ a popular post and see how it fares? A one-off ad will give you good stats on who saw it and you can then see how many new followers you’ll get for your money… who knows, you might even get a sale! But remember, you can only advertise on Facebook and Instagram if you have a business page… another sound reason not to run your business through a personal account!
SEOs
Website SEOs are really important. I launched BritishContemporary.art on January 1st 2018 and by March I was top of Google search under British Contemporary Art (and Artists) thanks to my SEOs! Your domain name should be your artist name and this should put you up there quickly under your own search term (e.g.: www.SallyBlogArtist.com). But if you’re not top of Google within a few months, it’s probably because either your website isn’t SEO optimised, or a more famous person with the same name has beaten you to it.
Regardless, a good SEO specialist will help with that and they’re worth their weight in gold. I pay mine about £70 month and, once engaged, this shouldn’t increase. You’ll also have to do some work on your website yourself, or pay someone to do it for you, but your SEO specialist should help with advice on that as well.
Good advertising is essential in business so dip your toes into the pool and see how sweet it can feel. Michigan University professor of advertising, Jef Richards said it best: “Advertising is totally unnecessary… unless you hope to make money.”
Working with Partners
Many artists feel they need to work with galleries because they don’t like the idea of marketing themselves. I understand this, but if you’re one of those, I still urge you to read my previous thoughts on this because it’s really not as daunting as it may seem and is a lot less harrowing and costly than doing exhibitions!
So let’s buckle up and get into it, because partnerships are the way to reduce your workload and increase your sales… effectively!
Yes, a partner may be a gallery but I understand they’re hard to come by and not every gallery is as hard working for you as you could be for yourself. So have you thought about making contact with some local or national businesses?
Consider this: you have an accountancy firm with lots of valuable clients and who would love to put on an event, to invite those clients to as a thank-you for their custom. Then, along comes a cheery artist with the idea of partnering with you along these lines. They bring the art, you supply some wine and nibbles and, hey presto!, you have that cracking event whilst supporting a local, talented artist.
There are hundreds of businesses that would love to support you so why not approach them? Maybe even start by holding your own exhibition and inviting the marketing managers of local businesses with the express intention of doing a similar event for their clients at their premises?
It doesn’t stop there. Many local hotels would embrace the chance of an out-of-season event like this to help promote their hospitality suite. What better idea is there than an artist looking for new clients to partner with a hotel looking to upsell their conference facilities? A win|win for all and you’ll probably have the same client base!
As I’ve mentioned in many articles before, YOU are the creative ones here. Use that creativity to come up with inventive ways of marketing yourself. It’s incredibly rewarding for all involved and if you’ve been using your social media platforms well and now have a good following, any hotel or business would be delighted to partner with you because they get to enjoy the marketing benefits of your feeds whilst you get to enjoy theirs.
I do three-day pop-ups to promote my gallery. Why three-day? Well, 99% of my sales happen on the open evening or just before the exhibition closes, so compressing it to three days optimises those times. I give a percentage of my sales to the business I partner with so they can cover their costs or donate it to a charity or cause of their choice.
Again, if you don’t like marketing yourself, how about you find someone to stand there for you and ring the till? If you’re working with a charity, most would be more than happy to supply a volunteer. You just hang the exhibition, then turn up at the open evening like the celebrity you are!
There are many ways you can engineer situations to exploit the things you’re good at and offload the things you don’t enjoy. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. Technology has given us portable cost-effective card readers like iZettle, PayPal and Square, etc. so you can take payment on the spot (even with only a minute signal or Wi-Fi connection) and have the money in your bank within a couple of days.
Make sure you have forms scattered around each event where guests can write down their email addresses to add to your mailing list (yes, they want to hear from you!) and create an inexpensive but professional one-page generic flyer which has your website, social media feeds and contact details that you can hand out, or people can take at the exhibition.
A good quality DL flyer (1/3 A4) on quality, 350-gram paper printed in full colour on both sides will cost around £60 for 1000 and you can use them again and again. These are essential if you’re to be remembered after someone has attended an event. Not everyone will be ready to buy on the night, so these flyers will remind them where you are when they are ready.
Remember: the more seriously you take working with business partners, the more seriously business partners will take working with you!