Transcription
This podcast is short, but it's packed with information. I'm going to be reading to you today from several short sections in an audiobook lecture style. But first, I'd like to share some news. I'm running two art galleries now, one is physical, The KD Neeley Gallery, and it's located in the heart of downtown Albuquerque over on 4th and Central at the Crossroads building. We've been open for over a year now, so that's exciting. We've got what could become an annual show coming up with the New Mexico Veteran Artists. We're showcasing their "Best Of" Exhibition in July and you can join us on July 6th from 4pm-9pm to see some of the best works from their many years of annual exhibitions. If you're a veteran and you're interested in participating in that show, all you have to do is become a member of the NMVA to participate. You can find more details about that at the event on my Facebook Page and under the Upcoming Events section of our website at NeeleyArts.com that's N E E L E Y Arts.com.
The other gallery is online at NeeleyArts.com. The website is live and now when you click on Art Gallery you can actually purchase original paintings by myself and soon to come, other artists including Roe LiBretto. I'm very excited about the online gallery because it gives us a chance to tap into the online art market which many argue is growing now and it's an opportunity for the Gallery to have worldwide exposure. On that note, it brings us to the subject matter of today's podcast.
I'd like to tell you about a company I've started working with that's changed my outlook on the potential available to independent visual artists. It's a company called Art Storefronts, and I'm going to share with you some marketing tips I've picked up since joining the ASF family. If you want to see what I'm talking about you can visit Blog.artstorefronts.com.
Art Storefronts is website editing software developed especially for artists and galleries to sell original works of art and run print on demand shops from the United States. Art Storefronts has made building your online art gallery as easy as you can make it while making it as successful as it can be according to their market research. That said, know that there is much time you'll have to invest both in building and marketing your website. It's not for everyone. If you're interested in being a professional artist and selling your work directly to collectors online, it's the perfect fit for you. If you're more comfortable having the buffer of a middleman between you and your collectors, then you'll want to stick to galleries and maybe find a gallery that is utilizing the Art Storefronts software. When you sign up for Art Storefronts, they give you access to a private Facebook Group called Small WIns. It's there for their users to reach out to the ASF community with any questions and share success stories with fellow artists. It means the entire community learns from both the questions and success stories of each member. Using the Small Wins group is the best experience I've ever had as a business using Facebook.
Art Storefronts is more than specialized software designed for artists. Their goal at ASF is to help artists succeed. Go to the website, blog.artstorefronts.com, and you'll see both the Art Storefronts blog and the Art Marketing Podcast. If you get anything out of this podcast, you are going to love the Art Marketing Podcast.
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Now, I want to share with you just a handful of the fantastic marketing tips I've picked up since diving into the Art Storefronts universe. We're going to talk about the importance of emails, the features that every artist's website needs to succeed, why you need to be able to describe your work and talk about your art, niche marketing, and the caveman vs. romance approach to selling your work. All of these topics have one thing in common, and that is the consideration of the Collector. We're going to take ourselves out of the equation for a few minutes and put ourselves in the shoes of someone who needs art.
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First I'm going to discuss the importance of emails because their significance wasn't clear to me. My thoughts these days have been that I don't need anybody's email because if they want to keep up with what I'm doing, they can visit my website and email me, or keep up with my posts on social media. I was putting all of the pressure on the Collector to do the work of reaching out. It's far more considerate to take down someone's email and be willing to put forth the time and effort to reach back out to them with anything you may want them to know about your work. An email is also a way of targeting a specific audience when you start advertising on social media outlets like Facebook and Instagram.
Through Artist Storefronts, I've learned that there are three temperatures to an audience and that not all traffic is equal. A cold audience is an audience that's unfamiliar with you or your work. A warm audience is more likely to respond to your work because they're familiar with you in some way. A hot audience is a group of people who love what you do and follow you to see what you've got coming out next.
Once somebody gives you their email, they're entering into your warm audience. A warm audience is more likely to recognize your work and remember you when you reach out. Somebody warm might scroll past your email or newsletter, knowing it's from you and plan on perhaps getting to it later. Somebody warm may delete your newsletter without ever opening it, but remain subscribed because there's still an interest in what you're doing. Your audience gets warm before it gets hot and you don't want to send your newsletter out to a cold audience.
When you do send out your emails, you want them to look beautiful and professional and deliver meaningful information to your audience. Give them something significant for their time, and they're more likely to share your newsletter with a friend they know might be interested. Your warm audience can reach out to a cold audience on your behalf with more success.
MailChimp is easy to use and offers you a way to send out emails to your subscribers. Not just any emails though, but emails designed with great layouts that let you drop in images where you need them, put in headlines and titles, and publish something professional that's easy to look at and fun to read. MailChimp also gives you the ability to let people sign up for your newsletter right from your website.
On the subject of collecting emails is the Fishbowl technique, a brilliant tactic that Art Storefronts shares with us. Next time you set up for your art fair, put out a fishbowl so that your visitors can drop in their business cards. The fishbowl tactic makes it as easy as possible for the people interested in your work to connect with you because they'll be expecting you to reach out to them.
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Now let's talk about some of the features that an artist's website needs to succeed in the art market. One of the first things you want on your website is to give your visitors the ability to sign up for your email list as soon as they land on your page and not to bother them with that message once they make their decision or signed up already.
Think about this for a minute. It might seem like an irritating little thing to do at first, having a pop-up message asking someone to subscribe, but consider the fact that it won't bother any of the people genuinely interested in your work, and those are the people you want to keep in touch. Those are the visitors who matter most. Those are the people who make your website valuable. Once someone visits your website, they're already getting warm. If they sign up for your email list, they've joined your warm audience and have permitted you to get more familiar. They're telling you that they want to know what you're up to and see more of your work.
Another feature you want your website to have is a shop. You want a real store that immediately shows collectors what you have available for them and delivers a one-stop checkout. Keep it simple and let your visitors decide for themselves how they want to experience your online exhibition. Don't make anybody sit through a slideshow before showing them what you have that they can buy. The introductory slideshow is one of the biggest mistakes that artists make when designing their online portfolio. People who are shopping for art don't want to have to sit through a slideshow before deciding which images they want to view.
Another feature people want is the ability to choose. This ability is limited when it comes to collecting the original, but you can surpass that limitation by offering prints in a variety of sizes and print mediums that the collector can choose. Some sites offer so many choices that it makes the shopping process too complicated for the average visitor. With print on demand technology today it's become a common practice to offer art for sale as everything: towels, shower curtains, pillows, blankets, mugs, T-shirts, magnets, greeting cards, calendars, bags, phone cases, and on and on. Unless you're pasting the image tastelessly onto all of these different mediums or relying on your visitors to do all the cropping and resizing necessary to make the item look good, it requires design work on your part for every item you offer.
At the very least, you want your collectors to have the freedom to choose how they want the artwork to look on their wall, but you don't want to make your visitors sort through an overly complicated array. You want a website that strikes a balance between what benefits you as the artist and an excellent quality product for your collectors. I'm not saying you should never sell calendars or T-shirts, just that less is more.
The last two features I want to highlight are the wall preview and Art Storefront's augmented reality. A wall preview option gives your visitors the ability to see how the artwork appears with the color of their wall, and at the size, they're choosing, and in the context, they imagine hanging the artwork be it in a bedroom, living room, office, or conference room.
Augmented Reality, or AR, is Art Storefront's newest feature. It allows you to use your mobile device's camera to see how a work of art appears hanging on your wall.
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So with all this technology why do you still need to be able to talk about your artwork and why should you have to describe your artwork? Why not let everyone see the work for themselves and enjoy their interpretation?
The answer to this is three letters, S.E.O. or search engine optimization. You've probably heard the term SEO. Most of us know it has something to do with Google and keywords and you may have heard the term metadata. If I'm speaking another language already, imagine this scenario:
You've got a blank space on your wall that you'd like to find the perfect image for and you get online to start your quest. You may want something original, or not, depending on the quality of the print.
What words would you type in to start your quest for that perfect image? You can do keyword research to see what phrases and words are famous in search results. You'll notice that when you do an image search, there's a variety of results you get depending on the keywords you chose. Those results are more than the terms separated by commas, or more than what we call merely the keywords. The top results are not a mixture of the keywords alone, but match entire phrases from your search. These phrases are in something called meta descriptions, SEO titles, page headings, and other essential page parts. These are the page parts you need to have published along with your image if your image is ever to be found by someone searching for anything like it.
Taking the time to describe your art is valuable to you and adds value to your work. Sometimes the story behind the artwork is what makes it significant beyond the image itself. Any number of aspects may attract the viewer: subject matter, colors, history, symbolism, meaning, the atmospheric quality created by the work. People may not know why they like the artwork, but they'll likely know how they found the artwork. Your descriptions are what connect you to the viewer so that they can come across your work in the first place. Your descriptions also influence what the viewer thinks of you and your art.
It doesn't mean that every painting you create needs an elaborate story behind it, but it does require that you describe what is significant about the painting in one or two sentences. Use your creativity and imagine why somebody might want your painting in their home or office or collection.
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Now let's talk about niche marketing. This goes back to those precious page parts that make up the meta description data important to search engines. Your niche is your most common theme or subject matter and it needs to be more specific than broad. If you do abstract art, for example, talk about what kind of abstract art you do, like Fluid Painting. If you do portraits mention what kind of portraits you do: pet portraits, memorial portraits, famous portraits, wedding portraits, or business portraits. If you're a surrealist or fantasy painter look into popular terms that better describe your work so you're not competing with every other fantasy painter out there. At the same time, you don't want to make your niche so narrow that nobody looks for it. Find that middle ground.
Your niche could be a style, a subject matter, a cultural theme, a location, or a purpose.
If you're hesitant to choose a niche because it feels limiting to your creativity, then think about it this way; it's not that you need to limit yourself as an artist, but that you need to discipline yourself as a professional whose technical acuity proves itself to be worthy of collecting. If you can make one great painting you've shown that you're talented but if you can make that great painting over and over again in a variety of visions that tell a deeper story you're a professional. Aside from proving yourself to be a professional artist, focusing on a niche gives you an audience you can market to.
Sometimes artists look down on having a niche because it makes them feel pigeonholed. What I'm asking you to do, is to expand your vision and make more great art. If you look like ten different artists then give each of those ten voices a whole body of work. This is how you attain collectors, by presenting them with more than one version of the thing they love.
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The last thing we're going to talk about is what Art Storefronts calls the Caveman vs. Romance approach to selling artwork. I've been a caveman in the past, safely hiding behind my work and letting the art go out into the world unattended and wild. I've left it to the viewer to translate and said nothing for myself. I admit I'm much more comfortable hiding behind the mystery of my paintings. The caveman approach is aptly named: you see my art, you like my art, you buy my art. It's a way of imagining that you hit your collector over the head with your artwork and they fall for you. The romance approach requires more work on your part, more effort, and more vulnerability. You have to expose your feelings about the artwork to the Collector, and you have to make more than one bold move. The romance approach puts a lot more pressure on you as the artist, but all of that effort is meant to give the collectors more to value about you and your work.
Perhaps, the secret to success is that it's not easy. We've barely scratched the surface and all we've talked about are five things: the importance of emails, the features that every artist's website needs to succeed, why you need to be able to describe your work and talk about your art, niche marketing, and the caveman vs. romance approach to selling your work.
All of this information and more can be found online at blog.artstorefronts.com.
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If you want to see the Art Storefronts website technology in action go to NeeleyArts.com and click on Art Gallery. If you want to hear more podcasts like this, but much more entertaining, check out the Art Marketing Podcast.
And I should have said this sooner, but you don't have to take notes. You can find the transcript to this podcast by visiting the Wet Stuff Podcast at NeeleyArts.com. Thanks for listening!
