How To Turn Buying Questions into Selling Conversations

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick delves into strategies for transforming buying questions into selling conversations, focusing specifically on Instagram. He explains the importance of content creation over other metrics and highlights the benefits of engaging directly with potential buyers. Patrick also discusses Instagram's new feature for responding to comments with reels, offering tactical advice on leveraging this tool to enhance engagement and drive sales. Additionally, he underscores the critical role of real-world and video conversations in building lasting relationships with buyers and collectors.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: [Music] Coming up on today's edition of the art marketing podcast, we're going to be talking about how to turn buying questions into selling conversations. Specifically, I'm going to revisit the only metric that matters from a past episode. I'm going to outline what buying questions are, how to turn them into selling conversations generally, and then how to knock them right out of the park on Instagram specifically. If you've been listening to any of the recent episodes of the podcast, you know the following: the OMTM, the only metric that matters as it pertains to marketing on the socials, specifically Instagram, is the number of pieces of content you create per week. Not likes, not comments, not shares, not post saves, not views, not reach—all of which is nonsense, right? We are not, despite Meta's best efforts to make us so, hamsters running on the dopamine wheel to a wasted life and lackluster business that they all want us to be on. We have unplugged ourselves from the Matrix. We know that we have to be marketing on Instagram, the most important platform for selling art and photography. Yes, it applies to Facebook secondarily or by association, but you know, I always say this: we are just humble fishermen, and Instagram and Facebook are where the fish are. So we get in the boat and we go to where the fish are. That might change in the future, but right now it's Instagram and Facebook. 

We know that what matters on these platforms is, number one, that we're selling our art or photography, and number two, that we are starting conversations that can potentially lead to sales of art or photography. Which is why starting with a strategy of focusing completely to the detriment of all the other BS metrics on how many pieces of content we create per week is how we win. So let's say, okay, great Patrick, you're on board, you agree. Well then, let's start working on some strategies, some tactics that help us create that content so that we can hit our numbers, that we can focus on the only metric that matters. And moreover, let's focus on some strategies and tactics that will help us cultivate, encourage, and start the selling conversations that we're after.

And I should mention briefly, as it just so turns out, Meta, Facebook, Instagram—Meta in their insatiable desire to copy everyone else has yet again copied TikTok. We can go ahead and water ski behind their lack of creativity and make it work in our business here. Many of you guys have heard me. As much as I absolutely despise TikTok and everything that it stands for, how utterly, totally, and completely feckless our pathetic country is in regards to even allowing that data-spying, Chinese state-sponsored Trojan horse into our app store and then sadly into the future generations' mobile devices and tablets, i.e., the kiddos, I'm still contrarian enough to know it does serve a beneficial purpose. TikTok's purpose for us anyway is to force innovation and competition into an industry that was otherwise devoid of it. Meta had a complete monopoly otherwise and could care very little about us, the users, right? They did what they wanted to do. So TikTok, by doing what it's doing, continues to force Instagram into making changes to its platform that are beneficial to you and me, us creatives trying to do our marketing there. So credit where credit is due. Like I said, I'm contrarian despite the fact that I despise them.

More on that in a minute, but I feel like we need to talk about a, and I quote, conversation. Can we talk about a conversation? I do not believe we talk enough about conversations and the role they play in selling art or photography today, our creations today. What is the best way to sell your art or photography? You know, I say this all the time, it's in person, face-to-face. Why? Because you get to have a conversation. What's the next best way to sell your art? Face-to-face over video, which is why I never shut up about the live art shows or the live broadcasts or Zooms or webinars. It's why I run so many webinars at Art Storefronts. There's literally no more valuable use of time than an artist or a photographer either talking face-to-face or talking via video directly to a customer, potential customer. There is nothing higher leverage that you can be doing aside from creating the art. 

I feel like we exist in this world right now where everything being taught and talked about is marketing automation and put this up on your website and they're going to check out automatically and this contactless e-commerce transaction, for lack of a better term. I don't like it one bit. Every once in a while on office hours, which are the customer webinars, I'll have a customer talking about some tech-related issue where somebody tried to buy something and something wasn't configured with their merchant, with Stripe, or some credit card snafu happened. They're coming to complain about it, and they're totally valid complaints, right? These things happen, but inside I'm just burning up because I'm like, why did you not call that person on the phone directly and take care of the entire transaction over the phone? Have them give you their credit card number on the phone or on a Zoom, put in the order for them and make it easy? Yes, because that's great customer service, but more importantly because then you get to meet this person that is purchasing your work. That is a fantastic use of your time, right?

You go back and you listen a couple episodes back to Jonah's episode, and did you catch this? That since that kid signed up, if you just listen to this podcast, Jonah is a kid in his 20s, he's been a customer. In his good months, he's selling a hundred thousand dollars a year of his photography. Absolutely phenomenal level of success, top one percent of the artists in the world. Do you know how he handles his transactions? If they're in person, obviously he handles them in person, face-to-face. For everything else, he doesn't even want people to check out on his website. He wants to have a Zoom call conversation with every single solitary one of them, and he has done that for his entire career. 

Let's not forget the most important thing you artists and photographers need as we stretch out your career over the years: it's collectors, right? Your job is to turn a potential buyer into a first-time buyer, into a repeat buyer, into a collector. A collector, they say, is with you for life. It is the base salary of your business, it is the 401K as you continue to create for the rest of your life. You need as many collectors as possible, okay? It's much easier to turn a buyer into a collector when you have conversations with them in person, which is why I find it to be one of the most valuable uses of time, period. 

This last weekend, my wife and I have some friends that are obscenely successful, massively successful. I went to their house, which is ridiculous, and I noticed just this last weekend that they had a second George Condo original on the wall. You can Google him, he's a big deal. I think his pieces start at several million dollars a piece. Obviously, I was asking my friend about it. It was a beautiful piece, I was admiring it to myself. Number one, my friend really likes the art, they're a genuine art lover, so he bought it for that reason, but he's also buying it as a hedge, as a way to place some of his money as an investment in different asset classes. That's not the important part. The important part is he and his wife have met the artist multiple times, had multiple conversations with the artist, and guess what? Now he's a collector. It doesn't matter at the small end of the scale, the high end of the scale, or anything in between. Conversations are so, so important. I would go as far to say that there's probably nothing more valuable than an artist can do than have a real-world, in-person, face-to-face, or video conversation with potential buyers, buyers, and collectors, okay?

Yes, of course, step one in this whole process is creating the demand, but step two is having the actual conversations, leaning into them, not shying away from them, not hiding behind our e-commerce site or our social media presence and hoping that they will just magically go purchase this thing and you don't have to do anything. Look, I'm not saying that that doesn't happen. That happens all the time, right? Our primary product is e-commerce websites, and it's fantastic when it happens, but the ability to have those conversations and to get to know those people, it is my firm belief that if you over-index on that, if you lean into that, your business is going to grow quicker. Single buyers are going to come back and be repeat buyers, you're going to meet spouses, you're going to understand who the decision makers are, you're going to start forming relationships. Everything in your business will get better. It just will. 

I would even go as far to say, until you reach a point, and most artists never reach this point, where you are doing so many transactions per day that there are physically not enough hours in the day for you to spend time talking to your customers and taking the orders over the phone, you should be doing it. You should be doing it, right? But anyway, enough on that, that's a topic for another day. I want to stay on today's topic and let's talk about how we can turn some of these conversations into selling conversations and specifically how we can turn buying questions into selling conversations, my title, and specifically how we can leverage Instagram to do so. 

First, I want to talk about buying questions generally. What are they? We need to define them, and then we can get into the specifics. What exactly is a

 buying question? You've been getting variations of these your entire art or photography creating lives. They usually sound something like this: Your work is amazing. You are so talented. You should really try and sell your work or create a business. It's incredible. What a beautiful piece that is. The colors are amazing. Fabulous work here. Reminds me of my childhood. That was so beautiful. What an amazing piece. What was your inspiration for it? Etc, etc, etc. If you are the recipient of a sentence with your work being the topic and then a complimentary adjective used to describe it, that is what I define as a buying question. 

Yes, I realize some of them are comments and they're not technically questions, and that others might define these lovely sentences as compliments or flattery or good manners, but not to me, they're not, and not to you, they're not either. Statements like those, when you get them, wherever you get them, are buying questions, and it is your job as the creator of said work to turn them immediately into selling conversations. Doing so usually sounds something like this: You get any of those aforementioned buying questions, right? Thank you so much. Just to let you know, that piece is actually for sale. I really appreciate that. What size piece are you looking for? Would you like to have that on your wall? Do you want to potentially acquire it? Good timing on your part, I'm actually running a sale in a few days and that piece is included in the sale. Not, thank you very much, or I appreciate it, or liking their comment, or the pray hands emoji, or three hearts, or some nonsense like that. No, no. Those are buying questions, and we want to turn them into selling conversations.

It's been my experience and my learning over the years, both with my customers and others, that most artists and photographers are absolutely horrible at this. Horrible. They cringe when the thought of going into sales mode comes up. They get paralyzed with fear when the thought of shifting to a business type of conversation happens, and they're just shy, and they wish someone else could just take care of this part for them. All of that is A-okay, you guys. I've just come to realize it's just normal. It's just normal. It's really hard to be an artist or photographer when you have to do absolutely everything. You have to create the thing, you have to market the thing, you have to do the business portion of the thing, you have to run all of that, the back end, stop, all of it. It's a very hard job. You have to be good at everything. No one's good at everything. 

But on these ones, on turning these buying questions into selling conversations, it's no different than exercising or learning a new skill. It just gets easier with practice, with repetition, with rote. Better still, the skill in all of this is really just not letting the opportunity pass you by. It's not necessarily being salesy or going for the jugular in business conversations. By all means, you can do it your way, your style, your tone of voice, your panache, your niche, your daily work, whatever you want to say. The important thing is that you start the conversation. You start the conversation. You can't let those comments go without attempting to start the conversation. It's just starting it and not letting the opportunity go by. That's the whole ball game. 

When you train yourself to do this and you get comfortable and you practice it, it just becomes so easy to do. It becomes second nature. One of my buddies, long-time Art Storefronts customer, dear friend Matthew Locka, is legendary on this. Legendary. He is shameless. It's a big surprise he's as successful as he is because I see on his Instagram post, he's like, if you're that interested in it, make me an offer, and then he shuts up. He doesn't say anything. I realize that he has honed his craft through that same repetition, practice, and rote over and over and over again. My position, without question, is your career will start to pick up speed and momentum the more that you work on this. Every single solitary one of my customers, when I dive into their socials, when I see some of their email responses, are getting these buying questions. You get them all the time. You plein air painters that are outside doing this or that, people are walking by, you're getting them all the time. 

There are so many different ins and outs and contexts and experiences where it happens, and all you're looking to do is just start the conversation. Understand, you need to know whether this person is just being nice or whether the work is good enough that they actually do want to buy it. It's all good if they're being nice. We love nice people. But at least you can move on and stop wondering and stop worrying about it. You need to know if they love your style, but they want you to create something else for them. That takes a conversation. You need to know what the potential objections are, who the decision makers are in that particular scenario to get the sales over the line, helped by a conversation. It's great to know how they found out about you. I'm a marketer. I always ask that. That comes from a conversation. You need to know if they're on your email list. That comes from a conversation. All of it starts with the conversation.

I think further, multiple times per week, I get the question on my webinars, Patrick, I've never sold my work before. I've been creating for years. What should I do? What should I do? My advice has been the same for the last 10 years. It's always the same. Do a local show or a local fair or fake a garage sale and put your art into the garage sale. You've got to have real-world experience. Everyone is like, well, what can I do digitally? Can I boost a post on Facebook? No, no, no, no, no, no. The best way to sell art or photography, notwithstanding in person, is the easiest path to a conversation. That is why I always advocate it. It is the fastest, easiest way to have conversations in person, face-to-face. It's all about the conversation. Yes, it's the best way to sell art, but really, it's also about just starting these conversations. 

That is buying questions generally. They will happen to you all the time, both in the real world as you're going about doing whatever you're doing and of course in the digital online world that we exhibit, right? Responses to emails and Facebook comments and Instagram comments, it's going to come from everywhere and it will continue to come throughout the rest of your career. When you come to terms with the fact that the biggest struggle that absolutely all of you have in this business is getting attention or marketing, if you like, then you realize these potential buying comments, you've earned those through the sweat of your brow in active, proactive, getting out there marketing. That is the hardest part of the equation, to get the comment in the first place. When you realize that you're killing yourself doing all of this marketing, trying to get good on these platforms, you don't like it, you go through all of that, and then you get the buying question and you don't respond, what are you doing? You're never going to see the ROI and you're self-sabotaging yourself. The hardest thing to do is get the comment in the first place. So, very important, very, very important that if you get those questions, you start, you at least attempt to start the selling conversation. 

This is an insanely valuable skill set to cultivate, to get good at. Start practicing. Never let one go without you trying to start the conversation. As long as you attempted to start the conversation, you won. So many good things will come as a result of being personable and attempting to start the conversation. Hugely, hugely important.

Now the table is set. We know what buying questions are. We know how to turn them into selling conversations. I can now plate and serve the meal as it pertains to Instagram. What did I start with at the top? We really need to focus on the number of pieces of content we create per week, the OMTM, the only metric that matters. We also know that when we get a buying question, we need to practice turning them into selling conversations, and it does take practice. If only there was a new-ish feature on Instagram that made it easy for us to do this. As I alluded to earlier, my nemesis TikTok, thank you, they came up with this technique, this particular feature. It's not a technique, this particular feature, and Instagram copied them verbatim once again. 

This will be a little bit difficult to explain in a podcast, but don't worry. I am going to go to YouTube, search how to do this on YouTube because the fastest way to learn anything, and I'm going to throw a link of how this whole thing goes down, what it looks like from a technical spectrum, buttons you have to push, how you find the comments. I will put that in the show notes. If you want to watch how it's done, you can watch how it's done and you don't need to stress about it right now. But here's how it works. When you create a reel on Instagram, you can respond to the comments on the reel by creating another reel. In layman's terms, you post a video to Instagram, which they call a reel. Somebody leaves a comment on the post. Before this feature, the best you could do is just respond to that comment in a back-and-forth threaded text way, like comments that we're all used to. Now, with this feature, you can respond to the comment with a video. 

How this essentially works: You've created a reel, the reel has a buying comment on it, a buying question on it, you

 hit reply and it turns on the video, and you're able to create a reel that responds to that comment and then post it to Instagram. It's actually really, really slick the whole way that it works. Let's use a real-world example to try and better explain it. Let's say you create a reel on Instagram standing in front of one of your recent pieces. Let's say in this case, it is an iconic drone photo, because that's what you do, you're a drone photographer, of the Harbor Bridge in Sydney with an amazing sunset behind it in Sydney, Australia. You post that to Instagram, you go out and get a nice lunch, and then somebody comes and leaves a comment on that reel and they say something like, "What an amazing photo, Patrick. I got engaged on that bridge. This takes me back." You hit reply to that comment with a video along the lines of something like this: "Well, in that case, Steve, let's just say Steve, I would be honored if you wanted it hanging on your wall to commemorate that special day. Just to let you know, it comes in a few different sizes and a few different media types." That's it. You just record that video and you hit send. The person that left the comment then gets a notification inside the Instagram application that you responded, as well as the fact that anybody that sees the reel also sees your response to this person. 

We have to unpack the awesome here, and then I'm going to even add some short-term arbitrage to sweeten the deal even more. This is essentially why this whole thing is so awesome and why you need to be doing it. Five bullet points to why what I just described is so awesome and why you need to be doing it. 

Number one, you just created a reel and it took very little cognitive load. You were just responding to a comment. You didn't need to think about it or plan out your lighting or plan out your background or think about what you were going to say. You have to come up with your response, but it's not like it took a ton of cognitive load to just respond to a comment. You can do it in just seconds, and you just created an additional piece of content, an Instagram reel, that is going to work towards your OMTM, the only metric that matters, the number of pieces of content you create per week. That's number one. 

Number two, you just took a buying question and turned it into a selling conversation or attempted to start a selling conversation, and you need to be practicing this anyway, and now you just practiced it. The response went to the person who left the comment and you created a quality piece of content, so it's already a twofer. That's one and two. 

Number three, as a result of that reel now living in your Instagram feed and in your reels tab, which is on your Instagram profile, you've also planted the seed to anyone else that sees that reel that, number one, your work is in demand as you're getting buying questions, and number two, that you're prepared for a selling conversation with not only the person that left the comment but anyone else that sees the reel. As a result of that buying question comment and then you highlighting it with an additional video reel, you're sort of hacking social proof in demand into your marketing. A whole bunch of people that will see that, like, "Whoa, here's Patrick, here's an artist or a photographer whose work is in demand. He's got people asking buying questions." This works especially well if you're selling originals because there's only one of them. Not only that, because you organically took the time to respond with a video showing your lovely smiling face and who you are, it shows you're an artist who cares, and you're not being salesy. It's not like you're doing outbound cold-calling sales. No, you are responding to a loyal fan, a loyal follower, a potential buyer, a buyer, or collector, depending on who leaves the comment, which makes you look like a pretty awesome and approachable artist. It will make you look like an artist that cares. That's number three.

Number four, we're still winning. You can take that completed reel, you can place it into your Instagram stories both today, next week, next month, next year. You can put that reel that you created with this social proof in which you're responding to a buying question and turning it into a social conversation. You can throw it in your story. You can have that story now contribute to the only metric that matters, number of pieces of content per week. You can go back to the well again and again and again. If you're having a flash sale on that particular piece, you can use that piece of content. You could say, "Flash sale today only." There are so many different ways that you can use this piece of content that you just created that has the social proof, i.e., the question of somebody interested in your work.

Number five, this is the sweetener. I hate talking about these, but I will talk about these because I need a fifth bullet point that works. When you're an operator on IG and you are really hammering the only metric that matters, the number of pieces of content created per week, you start to learn things, which is why I developed this whole thing in the first place. You learn things from being an operator and creating that no one else can teach you. In this case, for whatever reason right now, early September as I'm recording this, Instagram is really incentivizing us, its users, to create this type of content, responding to comments. I'm not sure why they want to drive adoption, but what you will notice is that when you start getting aggressive on your content and you're creating all sorts of reels per week, for whatever reason, the ones where you respond to comments tend to get a significantly higher view count. Yes, the view count is a metric, but still, I look at it. Right now, Instagram, for whatever reason, is incentivizing us to create these. This is just even more incentive for you. There is a short-term attention arbitrage that exists in this moment of time that will go away inevitably, always does, but it's just a little sweetener on this whole thing for doing it right now.

You sum all of that up and that is a whole lot of winning for not a whole lot of work. It just is. Not only is this important all year long, important for the rest of your career to get good at this, but it is particularly important with Q4 coming because the buying questions will be coming thick and fast, as the English like to say, especially coming up here quickly. Get started making reels, respond to the comments with video reel responses, and start turning your buying questions into selling conversations. You do that, everything in your career is going to start improving. Mark my words on that note. Thanks for listening and as always, have a good time. [Music]