The most important metric nobody talks about; focus on this and win

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick discusses the crucial metric that all art businesses should focus on: sales. He emphasizes the importance of creating and selling art consistently, highlighting how misleading analytics can distract beginners. Patrick argues that early-stage artists should prioritize the production and shipping of content rather than diving into complex data analytics. Using examples like Picasso's early sales and The Beatles' relentless practice, Patrick underscores the significance of the 10,000-hour rule and introduces a more manageable 100-hour rule. He emphasizes the importance of consistency in content creation, particularly on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Ultimately, the episode promotes focusing on the number of pieces of content created per week to achieve marketing success.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Coming up on today's edition of the art marketing podcast, I'm asking you what is the only metric that matters in your art business. Specifically, what is it, why it's important right now, and how focusing on it will properly align your priorities. Now let's all agree first and foremost that the most important metric in your business is sales, the bottom line. It's the real only metric that matters. Is the art selling? How much of it is selling? How many new customers did you acquire this year? You know, what's my favorite Picasso quote? Early on, my drawings did not command high prices, but they all sold. Your art must go out into the world, and it's the most important metric, and without question, it always will be.

But if we're going to be growing in our business, we're going to need another one. Yes, for those that are just getting started, and yes, for those that are rocking and already selling great. If you listen to my last episode, you know that if you want to make it in this business, it's either a cover road warrior or get good at marketing yourself. The second train on its own track, the road warrior path, is not an option for most. So if it's get good at marketing yourself and knowing that it's going to take some years, then we need a metric we can align ourselves with to help us achieve that goal.

This notion of the OMTM, the only metric that matters, is really all about focus. What we're trying to do is pick a metric that we want to focus on such that we can ignore all the rest of them to the best of our ability. Of course, it's not easy to do, but in any and all businesses today, we are drowning in data. There is so much to look at. There's visits to the website, time on site, source medium reports, add to carts, likes, comments, shares, reach, engagement, etc. One of the most common questions that I often get on office hours, and office hours are internal Zoom sessions where we consult with our customers and give marketing advice, one of the questions that I often see, especially from folks that just signed up and are early in their journey of learning how to market for themselves and grow their businesses, is this trend where they do a couple weeks' worth of work and then dive into their analytics. They learn about analytics for the first time and look at all these things and look at the social media marketing analytics and everything that the apps throw at them. Then they'll come on office hours and be like, "Hey Patrick, I was looking at my analytics and I saw this, this, and this. Can you explain this?" My answer to these folks is almost always the same. I'm like, "Who told you to look at your analytics? Do not look at your analytics. I don't want you looking at those. Stop looking at those."

I'm mostly not kidding when I give that answer as well. In 90% of my customers, like many of you, you're really just getting started on marketing your business, going through that journey, especially the digital parts of it. Early on, the focus just needs to be on the production and shipping of content rather than worrying about getting in the weeds on the data and the rest of those metrics. I'm telling you, they are shiny objects that pull your focus away from the only one that matters, the only one that will actually grow your business. This continues for years in the early days. For years. Not only do you need to produce more content, but you're not going to have enough data, even if you are looking at it, to properly make any important data-based decisions that are rooted in the data with confidence because you just don't have enough of it. There's not statistical significance.

I remember back to the early days of starting this business at Art Storefronts. It would be a blog post a week, then the podcast came in, maybe a podcast and a blog post a week. We would email the tiny list that we had. We would put some ad dollars behind the posts. We started at like ten dollars per day. It went on like that for years, four years. Eight to ten years ago, when all that started, I was still such a neophyte in my marketing practice that I would get caught in the same trap that many of you guys do today. Back then, I would read some tweet or a case study or a blog post about A/B testing and then play around with button colors and language to increase conversions or silly tactics about what to do on email and different segments and A/B testing there. I can't begin to tell you how many of these shiny objects over the years that I went and chased to the detriment of actually growing this business. I ran a ton of tests. We even hired some consultants to help us with it, and all of it was a huge and massive waste of time. Not only did we not have enough data for it to be meaningful in any of these tests, but it killed our focus. It pulled my focus away from the only thing that mattered, and none of those silly tests even proved anything. They didn't move the needle in the business in the slightest. Had I just stayed focused on continuing to create quality content and get way better at that and continue growing the email list, if I remained laser-focused on that, the business would be in a much better place than it is today. I had to learn that lesson the hard way.

For the point of clarity, I would like to highlight the following. "Patrick, are you saying as an artist or a photographer that I need to become a content marketer and a storyteller?" Yes, I am. Yes, I am. It is the most effective way to get attention, i.e., people bonded to you, your story, your art. Have you ever read the book *Outliers* or heard about the book *Outliers* by Malcolm Gladwell? In his book, Gladwell talks about this thing called the 10,000 hours rule, and this has become a major part of the zeitgeist on how to achieve success. It gets quoted and referenced all the time, all over the place. People for it, people against it, whatever. Succinctly, the key to his 10,000 hour rule is to become world-class at something, you need to spend 10,000 hours practicing it. 10,000 hours. In the book, he highlights a few world-class performers, and one particularly stuck with me when I read it. It's this story about The Beatles. It turns out, before The Beatles were huge hits, they did something extraordinary, namely practiced and played super consistently. When they were coming up, they took some extra gigs in Hamburg, Germany. I think it was actually in a strip club if I remember correctly. Let me quote from the book:

"The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five hours or more a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs in November and December of 1962 involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated 1200 times. Do you know how extraordinary this is? Most bands today don't perform 1200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg Crucible is one of the things that set The Beatles apart."

I know you're thinking, "Patrick, you're not seriously suggesting that I have to work 10,000 hours at marketing to become world-class, are you? I have a full-time job, I need to create my art, I need to be present for my family, for my spouse." No, although I am sure the 10,000 hours rule, whether it's 10,000 hours or 8,000 hours or whatever it is, there's merit to it. I have no doubt that if you did put your focus that way, it would be extremely beneficial and pay off. But we don't need to worry about Beatles levels of success right now. We need something a little more tangible, which is where Instagram has come in. God bless Instagram. I was casually browsing reels like a year ago or so when I saw and heard this clip for the first time, and I've seen it a bunch since. It's been repurposed a few times, and I'm not totally sure who came up with it, I should just stop being lazy and look, but I really, really appreciate its message. Let me just play it and let's listen to it together:

"If you spend 100 hours in a year, which is 18 minutes a day, all of us, in any discipline—karate, violin, whatever—if you spend 18 minutes a day, which is 100 hours a year, you'll be better than 95% of the world in that discipline. It's just the consistency of whatever you do, more than anything else."

Now that sounds manageable, right? If the rule of 100 is correct and we need to apply it to getting good at our marketing on the socials, let me just tell you, I am perfectly comfortable with you, my loyal listeners, being better than 95% of the fellow artists and photographers in doing so. If that rule is correct and we apply that rule to an artist or photographer getting very good at content marketing and storytelling and Instagram, if you followed that rule, my contention is that because artists and photographers are terrible at marketing, thrown it in, treated like New Year's resolutions, you're going to be better than 99.9% if you just follow this rule.

It's my position that we need a metric that properly focuses us to put this

 rule to the test and aids us in ignoring all the noise that stops us from chasing the shiny object. What is that kids' movie where it's like, "Squirrel!" You know, the dog goes off chasing nonsense or whatever. What you focus on is just as important as how to hold the focus and ignore the rest that will derail you. This is an art form in and of itself, within an art form, which is getting good at content marketing. My position is that the metric is not likes or comments or shares or reach, but the number of pieces of content created per week. That will focus us on this 100-hour rule and make the biggest impact in our business.

I want to come back to that in a minute because I want to continue to build my case. But for the record, the buzzword, the 10,000-hour rule, the 100-hour rule aside, if I asked you to write a one-word summary of either of the two, what would that word be? Consistency. It's just consistency.

The good news for us here is the primary focus of these efforts here is, as we said in 2023 but likely for the foreseeable future, that our efforts need to be directed towards the two most impactful places or networks in this case: Instagram and Facebook. It's lovely that both are owned by the same brand as it simplifies things a bit, while at the same time making things a little dangerous because all our eggs are in one basket, but that is a topic for another day. We have to be contrarian about where the attention is. The attention is on both of those platforms, and those two platforms are the best, the highest-leveraged places that you could invest your marketing dollars to build a business, to get known, to get that attention. For now, for the rest of this as I lay out the argument, assume every time that I reference Instagram, it also applies to Facebook because they're both owned by the same company, because they're essentially two sides of the same coin of networks. All the content touches, post types, metrics, and opportunities are on the platforms and more or less the same. You can insert Instagram when I say Facebook and Facebook when I say Instagram. It's all the same.

In order for me to clearly lay out my only metric that matters rant, I need to break down Instagram for a second. Let me talk about this. Instagram is three social networks in one. It is three social networks in one. You have the feed, you have reels, and you have Instagram stories. Within these three completely different social networks, you have five different types of content. You have posts, which can be single images, single videos, carousels, carousels and videos. You have reels. You have stories. You have videos. You have live broadcasts. Facebook, for the most part, has all of these placements as well, and each and every one of them is important. An easy way to think about this is, let's assume that all of these social networks and all of these different post types, each of them represents a room in a house. Your job as a marketer on Instagram is to make sure your art, your photography, your creations are hanging on the wall in each room of the house. Your art needs to be in the kitchen, it needs to be in the living room, it needs to be in the bathroom, it needs to be in the master bedroom. The reason being is that some people will come into the house and go into only one room, others will go into multiple rooms, and then that person will leave the house. Some folks will hit Instagram and only watch reels, some will scroll the feed, some will only watch stories, and some will hit multiple spots, which means you can get their attention twice or three times in a single session. That is huge. Your job is to get as much exposure for your art, your photography, your brand, what makes you tick as an artist, while those people are inside the house, while they're on those platforms. If you're not creating content consistently for all of those rooms, then your art is not on the walls. People are coming in and out of the house and not seeing it. Every time that happens, it is a lost opportunity. It is time that you can't get back.

When we contemplate that situation, how those networks work in that capacity, we can get back to the metric, the only metric that matters, and reframe it all through what we've learned so far. We need a metric that will focus our efforts on the highest-leverage thing that we can do for our photography businesses. We know that unless we become road warriors, the only other way our business is going to grow is if we take the marketing of our business seriously. No one else is ever going to do that for us. If we want success, this is the way. Two trains, two tracks, no brakes. We know the most impactful venues to find art buyers are Instagram and Facebook. We know that the 10,000-hour rule is out there and the short-term rule of 100. If we stay consistent for a year, the fact that we could potentially be better than 95%, even 99%, of other artists and photographers out there, if we stay consistent and work harder than the others, the game is actually simple. Simple, not easy. The only metric that matters for us, this is my contention, my point of this entire episode, is the number of pieces of content created per week by you. That's it.

The beautiful thing is Instagram makes this dead simple to track. Assuming you have a business account on Instagram and not a personal account, it has to be a business account to unlock this particular report. Anybody can switch from a personal account to a business account, and if you're not happy, you can switch right back. It's totally reversible. Just Google "how to switch my Instagram account from a personal account to a business account" and you'll get a quick tutorial. It's very, very easy to do. Once you do that and you open up the Instagram app, and you go to the profile icon at the bottom right-hand corner, it's the little person icon, then you look at the little hamburger menu, which are the three lines, it pulls up a menu and it says "Insights." In the Insights report, at the bottom of it, it defaults to the last seven days and it says "Content you shared." In the menu here, as I'm looking at it, it says posts, stories, reels, videos, live videos. You can just grab a calculator or, if you're good at the math, look at that number, add it up, and you know instantaneously in two seconds exactly how you did last week. It breaks down the type of content that you posted and gives you a total number. That total number per week is the only metric that matters. That total number per week, and keeping it consistent all year long, is how you achieve this rule of 100, is how you achieve this consistency.

The beautiful thing about this metric, when you commit to it, you don't care about the other metrics. I don't care about any of the rest. I don't care about reach, I don't care about likes, I don't care about comments, I don't care about direct messages or any of the rest of those because in the short term, by which I mean the next three to five years of your business, those things are just distractions. They're going to pull you away from getting good at being able to create these various different pieces of content. You need to be consistent, and if you force yourself to be consistent, you're going to learn to get really good at storytelling, you're going to learn to get really good at marketing on the most important platforms, Instagram and Facebook. It's a complicated platform. There is so much room for creativity, and I'm talking about tons of it, in each of the social networks within the social network. The number of pieces of content created per week, when you commit to this, when you measure this, when you judge how well you did on your marketing on this metric on a week-by-week basis, it turns out it's going to force you to get good on each of them. It's going to force you to get more comfortable on video. It's going to teach you just how fun and easy marketing there can be, how you can leverage your insane levels of god-given creativity, which is why you are the artists and photographers that you are, the creators that you are, into creating a different type of piece that can be just as enjoyable. You create those beautiful pieces that are hanging on the wall, but you're also now creating ones that are hanging on these digital walls, which is Instagram and Facebook.

This metric is just all about consistency. If you only focused on one and you only focused on this one, and you multiply that by a year spent, you working harder on the only metric that matters, times years, you will win. You will win. It's that simple. It is no different than those early days of trying to grow the business at Art Storefronts. When I focused on all the nonsense, the business went nowhere. When I focused on continuing to create quality content, building the email list, and making sure people saw the content, we ended up growing. We ended up growing.

Going forward, I realized, part of the reason that I'm recording this episode is like I get questions from customers all the time. My default response now, when they ask me questions about their marketing, again, we have these weekly sessions, so I see my customers every single solitary week, 52 weeks a year, except for the two weeks I'm on vacation, whatever it is. Anyway, I'm going to say, "Screenshot your Insights report and send it to me." "Hey Patrick, how do I do this? What do you think about this?" "Screenshot your Insights report and send it to me." Because the majority of the questions that you are asking me are nonsense. They're

 about nonsense. You need to ship it. You need to ship content on a weekly basis for a long time. You do that, you win. I'm probably even going to get some software where I can monitor my customers' accounts and pull it up without them even screenshotting it. When my customers get frustrated or they're down in the dumps and they think things are going slowly, the default thing to do is to say, "Ah, yeah, Art Storefronts, I signed up for your service and it's done nothing. I've had a website for ten years and it's done nothing. I'm on Squarespace and the marketplace and I sold two pieces last year. Art doesn't sell." It's like, "Dude, what are you talking about? Show me the Insights report. What have you been doing to actually grow your business? How long have you been working at it? Have you been doing it consistently?"

Fish do not jump in boats. Customers don't appear just like flipping a light switch. It takes time and consistency, and focusing on the number of pieces of content created per week will get you there. That will get you there. I'm so happy that I now have this episode in the can with a very suboptimal explanation.

Two episodes ago, I talked about setting the proper expectations and the realization that if you want your business to grow, you're going to need to market it. There's never been a better time in history to do it, but no one's ever going to do it for you. There's no service, there's no magic marketplace, there's no list that you can buy. Facebook ads are not going to do it. You are responsible for doing the marketing. If you do it, the upside potential is the best it's ever been in history to create a successful art or photography business. With today in the can, we now have a metric that we can focus on at a high level that is going to force consistency into your business as a marketer.

This opens me up to my favorite part of this whole podcast: the tactical type of episodes that will get us to hit that only metric that matters, that will teach us some of the nuance and the tradecraft of how it's actually not that difficult to make sure that your art is hanging on all of the walls in the two houses, Instagram and Facebook, that matter. I've got a ton of work to do on that. Episodes will be forthcoming on how to approach stories, how to contemplate stories, how to approach reels, how to contemplate reels, how to share reels and stories, green screens, comment replies, a whole slew of stuff that we can go over. I gotta be honest with you, I'm going through it in real-time with you.

Art Storefronts right now is creating 225 pieces of content per week on both of them, and we are learning at an incredible level. I'm doing it, our CEO is doing it, and we are not doing it for our health or because we are particularly really enjoying it, which is sort of not true. I'm starting to really enjoy it, but it's because this is how you get attention in today's day and age, and the only person that can prevent you from doing this is you. So I figure with this foundation, with this framework in place, with proper expectations, and then with the tactical, we're going to be cooking with gas. We're going to be cooking with gas. I'm very, very excited about that. More episodes to come. In the meantime, number of pieces of content per week. Thanks for listening, and as always, have a great day.