7 Reasons Photographers and Fine Artists Can’t Afford to Miss Out On the Holiday Season
Our thoughts on why the holiday season is so critical to a proper year-round strategy for photographers and fine artists, and how participating in it can significantly change your income.
Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years…
The fourth quarter of every year is a non-stop gift fest, and it’s a big deal for photographers and fine artists.
Every October, November, and December, enormous demand for art hits the market, and much of what photographers and fine artists do all year long is in preparation to meet that demand during the fourth quarter.
Are you prepared? Here’s our 7 most compelling reasons no photographer or fine artist can afford to miss out on the holiday season.
1. Up to 50% of all art purchases occur during the fourth quarter. This one is dead simple: when this much art is selling, you need to be a part of it.
2. It is the time that buyers pull out their wallets. The 4th quarter is not just a time we buy gifts for others. It is also a time that we make bigger purchases ourselves.
It is a time that many of us strategically hold out for, refraining from making a purchase all summer and fall long, because we know a better deal is right around the corner when the fourth quarter hits.
This mentality is no different in the art market, even amongst high net worth collectors. If you are under the impression that these people just spend money lavishly and without care, you are completely misunderstanding the savviness of this group of folks. Aside from being great negotiators, they are far bigger and better at hunting and securing deals than anyone. They know when the best time is to get a deal, and they strike.
For example – many of these folks purposefully buy cars on the last day of the month, on the last day of the year, because they know that the car dealer will do almost anything to close his last deal and hit their quotas and bonuses before years end.
Likewise, they know they are going to get the best deal on original art during the 4th quarter. As a photographer or fine artist – you either participate in this, or you miss out.
3. It is the easiest time to make sales.
Let’s face it. Selling art is hard enough already. As a photographer or fine artist, any time or place where sales come easier is a party you can’t miss out on. The Holiday Season is this time.
One of our newest features, Live Preview with Augmented reality, which allows anyone to try your art on their walls, will be a game changer this holiday season. It has already proven to be an effective art-selling tool.
Buyers feel more confident than ever that the art they choose will be a good fit on they open wall space they are looking to fill.
If there is one time of year to work a little bit harder, to put in a few more hours, this is it. Your efforts will be rewarded!
4. It is the ideal time to convert long time prospects into buyers. Have you been building a contact list, as well as a social following on Facebook and Instagram, per our Romance Marketing Playbook? Good.
If you haven’t, do you have a list of prospects who signed up for your email list at some point, or a collection of business cards? Good. You’ve done the hard work of getting people interested in you and your work. This is the time of year you have been waiting for all year long, a time when you finally get to capitalize on it.
The teaser marketing emails and social media posts should begin 2-3 weeks before Black Friday and run all the way through the end of the year. This is a time for constant marketing. We’ll be publishing more advice on how to approach this throughout the year, and Art Storefronts customers should also be studying our complete strategy on the Art Marketing Calendar and our coaching on it.
5. It is the ideal time to convert one-time buyers into repeat buyers. People who have already purchased your work have already demonstrated that they like what you are doing and have an emotional connection to your subject matter. This is the time that you can and should get more of them to make their second, third, and fourth purchases.
Be sure to market to them appropriately (differently than how you speak to prospective customers that have not yet made a purchase). Give them a great incentive – this group of folks have a much higher probability of taking action versus someone who has never purchased.
6. It is a can’t-miss time where you can maximize your exposure and set yourself up for success next year. You’ll get maximum traffic and maximum social shares during the holidays.
To fully appreciate this, take a look at this screenshot which shows the total traffic to all of our photographers and fine artists’ websites. Notice how it practically doubles during the 4th quarter:
2016 traffic data from all of our customers’ online art galleries combined.
You’ll also see the biggest growth in your email list. As such, it is a time when you will get noticed more by everyone — gallery owners, large art publishers, interior designers, licensors, as well as the media.
No other time of year offers this type of frenzy.
What many photographers and fine artists fail to realize is that this massive increase in activity is what fills up your funnel and sets up future sales for next year. This is because many of these people who just learned about you, and who may have joined your email list or followed you on social media, will not buy from you on the spot this year, but they probably will next year IF you continue with proper marketing.
You’ll have your first chance at capitalizing on them during the first holiday of the new year: Valentine’s Day. If you miss out on all this, you’ll be walking into the new year with an empty funnel.
7. It is the perfect way to end the year in a solid financial position.
The fact is, the photographers and fine artists who are fully capitalizing on the fourth quarter in the ways that we have mentioned above are earning far more money from their art than those who are not.
Our final reason to participate in the holiday season is simply to end the year on a high note, and be able to look optimistically towards the year ahead. Who wouldn’t want that?
How to Win this Holiday Season
We hope we’ve convincingly explained just how much art will be bought and sold in October, November, and December.
So how can you capitalize on it?
By having your own art gallery business online. When you have your own art gallery, you have a store that you can direct all of your Holiday marketing efforts towards.
As a photographer or fine artist, one of the most important things to realize is that no other company is going to market your work to the extent that is required to capitalize on the Holiday Season.
No physical art gallery, no online art gallery website, and no art publisher will be sending out emails and social posts completely dedicated to you all season long. But this is what needs to happen. This is what the most successful photographers and fine artists are doing. So unless you take control and do the marketing yourself (like they do), or you hire someone who can do it for you — you’ll continue to miss out on the biggest art selling time of the year.
Is the concept of having your own art gallery business online new to you? Learn more here:
An augmented reality tool purpose-built for artists and photographers. You'll sell more art than ever when your buyers can see what your work will look like on their walls – straight from your website (no app downloads required!).
[…] This will provide you with prices that are not too low, and are also not too high. This will also leave you a little room to run promotions around the Holidays, which are the biggest art selling times of the year. […]
⚠️ THIS WEEK: Get Website Setup and Website Management for Life added FREE and we will do all the technical work FOR YOU.Schedule a 10-minute intro call with the form below and we’ll give you a quick overview, show you how our augmented reality tool works, and fill you in on how we can help you get more traffic from collectors. If you like what you see, you can schedule a more in-depth demonstration for later.
