Artist Kimberly Cammerata

Join us in this enlightening episode as we dive into the inspiring journey of artist Kimberly Camerata, who transitioned to a full-time art career in 2017. Discover how she navigates the challenges of marketing her work, the importance of consistency in engagement, and the impact of introducing new product lines like petite originals and merchandise. Kimberly shares valuable insights on building relationships with her audience and the power of storytelling in her art. Tune in for practical tips on leveraging social media and maintaining a thriving creative business!

Podcast Transcribe

Kimberly Cammerata: The biggest revelation to me over time is I don't know what I would do without the marketing advice that you guys provide. How to do it, the mechanics of it, right? Yes, it started a lot of conversation. It got like 22,000 views in a day. Alright, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, now LinkedIn and YouTube. We're starting a new series, a new series in which we are interviewing actual Art Storefronts customers, real artists. They've been at it in some cases for just a short period of time or like in Kimberly's case, you know, a number of years here and sort of tell their origin story, what their experiences have been so far, what they're struggling with, what they're finding is working out there. And then this is the first one of these that we've actually done live. So to the extent that you guys have questions for Kimberly, you can definitely just leave comments as we roll along, and some of those we'll answer and get into, and some of them we might ignore. But it gives me great pleasure to introduce a fabulously talented artist today with a very, very interesting niche in Kimberly Cammerata. So Kimberly, welcome.

Patrick Shanahan: Ciao, Patrick. Yeah, give us the origin story. When did the whole art career start for you? Where are you from originally? You have a clearly Italian name, do you speak Italian? These are all the questions that I wanted the answer to.

Kimberly Cammerata: Oh, well, this will be fun. Yes, well, as far as the Italian, I'm half Italian and I'm half Irish, and I'm originally from Pennsylvania. The Italian is a work in progress that gets better every time I travel to Italy. I'm a frequent traveler, and I divide my time between Austin and Italy. And what was the rest of the question? How did the art start?

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah, when did the whole art career start? And then you mentioned you've been with Art Storefronts since what year did you say?

Kimberly Cammerata: 2017.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. You know, and I continue to learn every day. If things change and you know there's always new technologies and new things going on in social media, and a lot of the time I'm so busy painting because I'm all absorbed in you know what I'm doing there, and I don't track that until I see your presentations and you talk to us and say, "Hey, look, this is what's happening. There's this new thing called Reels or whatever." Anyway, it's an ongoing adventure that I've come to love. You know, I started out just doing painting a long time ago. I used to be a portrait artist, and I had my work in galleries in Dallas and Fort Worth and some in Pennsylvania. But I decided that I preferred having my own website. And like most artists, I had a full-time job to get the art career going. And I worked for a book publisher doing their online site in the IT department, so I knew quite a bit about making my own website. And I also knew that that is not something I wanted to do, meaning make my own website, because having done it, that would become my full-time job just running the website. And so that is how I found you guys.

Patrick Shanahan: Got it. Basically, all I have to do is put my stuff on your website, and that part is essentially taken care of, so I can do the part, the only parts that I need to do, which is actually make the art and actually talk to the people. I used to be terrified to do that, you know, thinking, you know, because galleries used to talk to people for me, and now that's the best part. I've gotten to know all these wonderful friends online. They share their stories with me, and it makes me feel like the most fortunate person in the whole world.

Kimberly Cammerata: I love that attitude. Are you a full-time artist now, or do you still...

Patrick Shanahan: I'm a full-time artist. When did you go full-time? From when you started in 2017 until now?

Kimberly Cammerata: I started, I signed up in July of 2017, and by that fall, I had decided I'm going all in. So wow, it didn't take me very long to realize that this was a system that was going to work better than the galleries. I was building relationships with people, yeah, you know, and I realized it's a really good investment of my time. And so over all those years, which I mean, I can't believe 2017, you know, the old cliché of how fast time goes is just so true. What has the growth been like from 2017 until now? Is it been slow and steady, or did you have one year where things took off? Was it the hardest at the beginning, and it's a little bit easier now? I'd love to get a sense of that.

Patrick Shanahan: That is a great question. It has its ups and downs, but at the start, I used to panic because I didn't know any better. But the longer I do it, I realize it's more related to the time of year than it is to anything else. So like if a month goes by and things are a bit slower, I've accumulated enough data because I have to admit, I'm a spreadsheet person, and you know, so from the start, I just tracked everything. And at first, it's not enough information to draw a conclusion from, but you start to see a pattern over time, and then you go, "Oh, that's just January," or yeah. So there's also another side to it too, like first of all, I just don't panic anymore because I start to see patterns. But then I did have a realization sometimes with inflation, it gets a little tough for people to have extra money, and I did encounter that, and I problem-solved for it. I had been mostly at first painting large originals.

Kimberly Cammerata: What size when you say large originals?

Patrick Shanahan: 16 by 20, 22 by 30, like about 2 feet by 3 feet or even bigger. And so those were the only size originals I was doing because I considered the originals high-end, prints the mid-range, the lower range. But when there was a bit of inflation for everybody to deal with, I decided to introduce a new line of products called Petite Originals. Okay, and it's been very successful, and those are 9 by 12. 9 by 12, and the reason I'm able to charge a lot less for those is because I can do those in a lot less time than the bigger ones that take one week to three weeks to do.

Kimberly Cammerata: Oh, wow. I love detail, and so I want to portray every nuance of the location because I love it, and I know the people that travel there love it. Yeah, and so that just takes time. And so by introducing the Petite Originals collection, I made originals available for people that maybe were saving up for a larger one or, you know, it's kind of like another tier, and that's really been useful. What has the price point sort of been on those smaller sizes?

Patrick Shanahan: The smaller sizes can go anywhere from like 250 to 350, and then is completely reasonable and probably priced too low for an original.

Kimberly Cammerata: Well, I wanted to move them along, yeah, but you know, they were received really well, and I noticed like people with those, they often write me letters about why they bought it, and they're most often for gifts, you know, for special occasions and housewarming and stuff like that. So yeah, so that's how the question was about the business and the ups and downs and stuff like that. And so it's been a little bit of both, but mainly year-related and then that for sure.

Patrick Shanahan: Do you feel like over that time the business has grown year after year after year, or do you feel like there were flat years in there, or is it just an upward trajectory?

Kimberly Cammerata: I feel like it has grown every year except it's definitely related to the amount of time I put into it. Sometimes life gets busy with family or, you know, just life in general, and I maybe don't post as much or something like that or don't stay as engaged, and there will be a dip then for sure. You know, because in the busy world that we all have, you know, people kind of forget you exist, and it's, I found out, it is really important to stay engaged. And I can give you an actual example.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, please.

Kimberly Cammerata: There was a very nice couple, you know, I met them on one of my travels in Italy, and they said, "Oh, we're definitely going to get your art to put in our home," and they told me the places they were going to travel, and you know, a couple of years went by, and I never heard from them again. And I thought, "Okay, they didn't mean it," but three years later, she was still on my email list and following me on social media, and she bought like four things and said, "You know, I just had to wait until we remodeled." Yeah, and so that's a good example, I feel like, of always stay engaged because people might really like yourself, but it's just not the right time for them.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh, the wisdom in this statement is so profound. And you know, one of the things that I always mention is that since like a little bit before COVID, I've been running these outbound webinars on like a weekly basis, right? So I've literally talked to hundreds of thousands of artists every single solitary year. And what's crazy is that every single solitary week, it was Monday was the last one I ran, when there are people that are coming on, their artists from every season of life, their 40s, their 50s, their 60s, their 70s, their 80s, and you see that, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, the creative gift and the creative desire is, I call it the Hotel California problem, right? Like you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." You know, the point of that is that you're going to be creating this artwork and wanting to sell this artwork for the rest of your life. And when you sort of zoom out and you realize, you're like, "Wait a minute, I am playing a very long game here. I am playing the long game." And then when you sort of move that idea into marketing, and your story highlights it perfectly, you never know when the customer you acquire today, the email address you get today, is going to come back and have just finished remodeling that house or is going to downsize houses or is going to buy a vacation house. And so it underscores the importance of constantly acquiring those leads all year and then also constantly getting those low-dollar sales to get them in, have them be a collector, and then potentially come back three years later, five years later, ten years later, fifteen years later. And it really just reinforces the importance of the consistency in your marketing now and just knowing, all I know is if I stay focused on this, the score will take care of itself to the best of my ability. And I know you said life happens, life happens to all of us, right? Where we can't market as consistently, but if you just make it a regular part of your process and you frame it through the lens of, "I've got decades and decades and decades likely to keep selling this stuff," those folks are going to come back, and they're going to buy, and you're never going to know when it is. And so the idea is to try to get as many of them in the door as you can, however which way you can, because if you do that, the score ends up taking care of itself. So I think that's such a great way to think about it and to operate. How many of those customer thank you notes do you have, just out of curiosity? You save them all?

Kimberly Cammerata: I save them all, and I have hundreds and hundreds of them.

Patrick Shanahan: I think you need to just some quick tradecraft. I think you need to photograph them, okay, and then highlight one portion of the text in the note that's really awesome, and then start posting them on social, and then up here, up top in your story highlights, get something that says customer feedback, right? Like, you know, what I love about your story highlights by the way is that this just reads like a beautiful vacation in Italy, right? You've got Rome and Chatera and Venice and Provin and Rome, something BR Rome fountains, try Fountain, such Sicily, right? The Amalfi Coast, Tuscany, Greece, that's like a beautiful just travel log through Italy, which I love. But I really think you should get that customer feedback in there and in your story highlights because story highlights are so important. It's basically the story highlights are basically like the header bar navigation menu of your website, right? It's like how somebody can quickly come to your Instagram profile and then dive into these very different areas. It's like I can come here and be like, "Hmm, Cinque Terre is my favorite. I went there one time after college, and it was like one of my most favorite trips ever. It was fantastic," right? And so you've got these beautiful worlds in there, but a very, very important one of those is customer feedback notes, and you know, especially because you're so relational in the way your personality is, and I know people just love you so much, that that would be like a really valuable thing I think to add into your Instagram feed for sure.

Kimberly Cammerata: I would love to do that because I have to say, I mean, I recognize all my followers now. They chat back and forth to me underneath all my posts, and the coolest thing ever is they start to chat with each other, and when there's a new follower, they start talking to that person, "Oh, you're gonna love Kimberly. Her stuff's awesome," yeah, and they're selling for you, yeah. And so it would be nice, that would be a nice way to kind of call them out, you know, and sure, they're really sweet people for sure.

Patrick Shanahan: While we're on the subject of marketing, what would you say has been the biggest struggle, you know, as you spun this machine up, and you know, consistency of course, because consistency is for all of us, but what are the areas that you struggle with the most that you think you've really made progress on over the years?

Kimberly Cammerata: You are going to laugh. You know, I was just posting photos of my art for the longest time, and the only reason I started being in videos is because you tutored me into it on one of the Zoom calls, yeah. And you know, at first, I was, you know, I look back at some of those videos, and you know, I clearly was trying to think what to say, and I look kind of like a deer in the headlights, and now now it's fun, you know, and it's actually easier than making the other posts. It's quicker, yeah, too, you know. So if somebody thinks video is going to be really hard and take a lot of time, in reality, it actually takes less time, you know. And if it's okay, I want to give you another example. You had mentioned the value of posting video that is not just your artwork but more of your daily life, and so I was making dinner the other night, my husband was making dinner, and I thought, "What the heck," I pulled out my phone, did a 4-second video, and wouldn't you know, it got like 22,000 views in a day. Whoa. And I probably thought the least about that than any post I've ever made, but it started a lot of conversations, you know, people started posting, "Well, oh, that looks really good. I have a recipe for that," and you know, and somebody else said, "Hey, I'm making dinner, and here's what I'm making," and it's the conversations that are fun because that's what's been maybe the biggest revelation to me over time. I don't know what I would do without the marketing advice that you guys provide, but then when once I'm out there in social media, it's more just being me. You know, I was always trying to think, "Well, if I was a marketer, I should know what to say here," but I almost don't know how to say this, but I really realized the marketing is knowing where to post, how to do it, the mechanics of it, right? Yes. And then but then once it's on, you're just supposed to be you.

Patrick Shanahan: That's exactly right. And like, you know, the super awesome takeaway of that is this notice of friction, right? And you know, I lecture all the time about the consistency and the importance of the number of pieces of content that you create per week because what that does is that forces mastery upon you. It forces you getting better and learning the platform, and then all of that comes back to this word friction. I've almost gotten to the point where it should be the number one guiding word when you're contemplating social media posts. And what do I mean by that? If there's anything that makes that posting difficult, that introduces difficulty, that introduces extra steps, your chances are you're not going to do it, so shy away from it, right? So you know, you talk about your regular image post, it's like, okay, getting the image all formatted correctly and making sure it's right and then worrying about this incredible caption, and you spend a bunch of time, and then that becomes a burden, and you don't want to do it versus like you turn the camera on, you talk for a few seconds, you post it, you see how it goes, you remove the friction, and you end up getting more posts into your socials, and it's like, "Oh my gosh, it's so much faster, and I actually did it," and it is energy up, and oh, by the way, no one cares whether you have professional lighting, professional makeup, that professional hair care, that you look like Kim Kardashian that just stepped out of the car, right? Like nobody, nobody responds to that. People want to know who you are, what makes you interesting, what makes you tick, right? And that's what they get bonded to. And when you do those personal posts, you know, the reason I advocate that for so long is like you as a previous artist did what most artists do. Artists love hiding behind the canvas. Photographers love hiding behind the camera. Here's my work, here's my work, here's my work. What about you? I'm not showing you me. I'm not, my life's not interesting, right? And then when you start doing that stuff, you realize, "Oh my gosh, this is what people are responding to." And you know, your recipe example or your cooking example, I should say, look at the engagement, 22,000 views and all these people commenting on it. Well, all that does is send a signal back to Instagram's algorithm, back to Facebook's algorithm, it says, "Whoa, this content is super engaging from Kimberly. Do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go show more of her content that is the art-related content because this stuff is so engaging." So it's just this flywheel that keeps things moving, you know, and the easiest way to think about it, the thing that I always pound in is like, "What can I post that has absolutely nothing to do with my art?" and use that as a prompt, right? And it's so guiding, it's so telling because then you're giving a little window into your world, and that little window into your world, some people are going to be like, you know, in your cooking example is the perfect one. You weren't connected with those people over cooking. They didn't know you like cooking, that you know, that those conversations were not happening, that bond was not able to form until you posted it. You know, like the art, the art is not enough. Like artists and photographers are individual brands. You are the brand. Yes, it's about your work. Yes, it's about your creative process, but it's also about who you are and what makes you tick, and it's so important. It's so important, and I know it's hard. You know, I know it's hard to do.

Kimberly Cammerata: Well, you know, it's strange, but you know, coming from, I used to work at the book publisher and all that, you know, and the harder I work at a post and the more perfect I try to make it, the worse it does.

Patrick Shanahan: That's amazing. Yes, the on-the-fly stuff is more successful every single time. Yes, 100%, 100%, and there's just no question about that. Do you feel like, you know, being you started in 2017, so you're now 2024, I mean, we're almost, however you want to sum that up, I mean, whether it's seven or eight years or whatever it is, do you feel like the wind is more at your back now certainly than years previous, and you have a lot more momentum?

Kimberly Cammerata: I do, but I'm always trying to improve, you know, like I do have the wind at my back, but everything feels like a work in progress all the time. It's, you know, certain new things come in, and certain things fall away, and I've learned over time, don't you know, it's so important to understand what you don't need to spend your time on anymore as things change, like for example, Mini Chat, yeah, you know, that was really fun, and I really enjoyed that, but yeah, you know, things just change, especially since, you know, having an online, that's my gallery, and so the way that I connect with people is through technology. You know, social media is a technology, but the thing is, it's changing all the time, and so posts are just constantly moving like never end, but you know, I kind of love that about it. I'm sorry, I don't know what that was, think it might be my watch, but that kind of distracted me.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh, yeah, is it okay if I mention Co-Pilot?

Kimberly Cammerata: Of course.

Patrick Shanahan: That to me, that's one of the recent game-changers, like what I call a work in progress for me, like why I'm always refining things. I signed up for Co-Pilot when it was just three, and for those who, you'll probably do a better job explaining what Co-Pilot is than me.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, I'll take it. So what she's mentioning is because all of our customers, we have their websites, right? And so we have control of all their images, and we have control of the functions of the website, so we can run a sale and issue a coupon code and change the announcement bar at the top and do all those sorts of things. We also have all of their email addresses, and then what we do is we connect to your Facebook and we connect to your Instagram, and we start posting and emailing and executing campaigns on your behalf, and we do this without any interaction from you. So you can look at the things and say, "Okay, I want to change something here," or you could say, "Just go, just do this," and the notion is, I think that the proper takeaway in terms of marketing because everyone hears that, and they're like, "Wait a minute, so I get on this Co-Pilot thing, I don't have to do any marketing?" No, what we're saying is it's sort of like the gallerist, right? Like you know, the way that you guys are now, you are the gallerist. You have to be in the gallery if anyone comes in, you have to have those conversations, you have to be showing off your work, you have to be talking about the prices, you have to be running campaigns. Co-Pilot sort of takes that role away from you. It does it for you, and then what that frees you up to do is work on the other stuff that we're talking about, right? Which is the personal stuff, the stuff that only you can do, you know, the behind-the-scenes, the my process, those types of things. So that's what I would say, but go ahead.

Kimberly Cammerata: That exactly teed me up for what I wanted to say about it and how that was such a game-changer. Thank you. Okay, so when I say it's a work in progress and the wind at my back, like and things are changing, Co-Pilot really allowed the last big change for me because it schedules the whole month, including where the email needs to go. Like, I like keeping in touch with people with my email list through email, but it was so hard to remember to do it, but in Co-Pilot, it's all slotted in there. So, for example, I just go in and I just type my email right in there, and I never miss one now. Yeah, and so I have a closer connection with people.

Patrick Shanahan: So are you often editing the text yourself and rewriting it a little bit before it goes?

Kimberly Cammerata: No, I do. I just let it do its thing because, you know, I have a philosophy. I don't think it's a terrible thing if it sounds like somebody else wrote it. I mean, I do have a team, you guys, yeah, you know, and then the stuff that comes from me, it's obvious because it's really personal most of the time. I'm on there talking, or there's a picture of something with me, and I'm writing, so I feel like it's really obvious to people who did what, yeah, you know. So yeah, but it's also, it's one of the hardest things that all artists and photographers, and maybe I'm not an artist or a photographer, amateur photographer, amateur photographer, but delegation is really hard. Letting go of something and saying, "You know what, they're gonna do it, and you know what, letting them do it, maybe it's not going to be as good as if I did it myself, but it's going to get done, and it's going to free me up."

Patrick Shanahan: The analogy that I always give, like one of the significant limiting factors of an artist or a photographer, and I use the restaurant analogy, you're the cook in the restaurant, right? But because you guys are solopreneurs, that also means you're the receptionist, it also means you're the maître d', it also means you're the waiter, the bartender, the sommelier, the pastry chef, right? The busboy, you know, and if you're wearing all of those hats all the time, your restaurant's only going to be able to serve a couple of diners a night. It'll never be able to get bigger than that. And so this notion of how can we empower you guys, how can we take off of your plate some of those jobs, right? And for instance, print on demand is a great example of this. The order comes in, you get paid, the printer gets paid, it gets boxed, it gets shipped, it gets printed, and it gets shipped off. You don't have to lift a finger. That's incredibly important. You know, that takes one aspect of this business off your plate. My restaurant analogy, maybe that takes the waiter away, right? And so our vision for where we're going in the future is how many more of those things can we take off your plate to get to a point where you're just creating and then you're just doing the marketing that only you can do. If we can get our customers just focused on those two things, it is going to be a huge win, a tremendous win because the delegation is really, really hard. Now, my question to you is, what are you doing with the time we have freed up?

Kimberly Cammerata: Well, that is actually a really good question. Yeah, well, you know, the best thing about that is I have been able to create more stuff and try out some niches, yeah, you know, that Italy is my main thing, but I've been able to spend some time doing some paintings of Greece and, you know, I was able to, well, now I'm much better at being able to get back to people. Like, I start my day every day, I answer every comment, every email, and it's been a good thing. I mean, they send me Christmas cards now, you know, and I have to say, you know, because as you know, I generally don't change what Co-Pilot's doing, and over the fall, there were some challenges to work with for family, so I didn't have time to be as engaged as I want, and you know, Co-Pilot, without me doing anything, still sold a lot. Like, I would make a sale, and I'd go, just for fun, let me just look in Co-Pilot and see if it did a post or an email, and wouldn't you know, like, there'd be a post or an email, and like, within an hour, it sold, like, even stuff that I thought wasn't maybe my favorite piece or something, it was somebody else's favorite piece, you know? So I learned not to judge, you know, to make the art, spend the time making the art, do my absolute best, you know, and just put it in my website, and then Co-Pilot kind of takes over, and then I spend the time doing the personal stuff, and so it's such a great use of time than all of it.

Patrick Shanahan: And you know, this is our 10th year in business, and so we've had a lot of time to be able to see what takes place, and all of it goes back to the central theme. There's nothing more important than consistency. And let's take it out of the digital marketing aspect and let's put it into the real-world example. If you owned a gallery, okay, you would have to be in that gallery five or six days a week, the doors open, making sure that the folks that come in can have a conversation, can learn about the art, can potentially buy the art. Well, what happens when life happens? What happens when you have the aforementioned family sickness or, in your case, what happens when you're gallivanting around Europe? Okay, everyone is clearly envious about. I'll tell you what happens because you're a solo operator. The gallery's closed. And yes, and we watch that happen time after time after time after time, and it's like, we don't, you don't get that time back. If you miss those big events, those big moments, you can't go back in time and fix that. And so, yeah, one of the things that I love that Co-Pilot will do is it'll make sure that the gallery stays open. You know, don't close the doors on the gallery, right? And you know, we go back to like this notion of delegation and how nervy it is to let someone else do this marketing for you, but what is every artist and photographer's dream really? It's to be in a gallery. So if you're in a gallery, guess what? There's going to be a gallerist having conversations about you, your work, and what you do all the time. No artists are ever worried about that because they're like, "My work's in a gallery," right? And so that's really just the takeaway of this whole thing and what this is, and I think like one of the traps that we fall into is that we think for some reason because we're attempting to grow these creative businesses online that there's some new set of rules that apply, and there's not. There's not. The paradigm is all we're attempting to do when we grow an art or photography business is take what works in the real world and move it to the digital world. Don't overcomplicate it, right? And you look what our websites look like. They are all almost all look the same, and what do they all look like? They all look like the best art-buying experience that exists, and what is that? What is the paradigm? It is in an art gallery, in a museum. Every art gallery and every museum the world around all looks the same. Minimalist white walls, art on the walls, light on the art, nothing else, right? That's the paradigm, right? And yet, left to their own devices, so many artists and photographers will create websites that have colors and fonts and slideshows and goofy things going on. It would be a miracle if you saw the art. So that's one in terms of the website side, but on the Co-Pilot side, it's no different than just keeping your gallery open, right? The fact that you can be in Italy painting and having an espresso and enjoying some aqua and not worrying one iota about whether or not your marketing gets done consistently, if we stretch that over a 10-year period, that is going to be a significant increase to the bottom line in the revenue of your business. And we know life happens, and we know it's difficult, and we know burnout is real, and so to the extent that we can keep that machine going, that's going to literally pay dividends in the long run, and so we're really excited about where Co-Pilot and Hub, and it's probably all just going to get included into Hub, is going to go. So exciting times, exciting times there.

Kimberly Cammerata: Well, you know, I have to say that is a big deal, being able to travel without worrying about things being posted because there were times, you know, places say they have Wi-Fi, but that doesn't mean that you're actually going to have a Wi-Fi that can actually upload an image or much less a video or something. There were times that I'd be out in the hall of the hotel, okay, there's the Wi-Fi thing, and I'm trying to hold my phone up toward the Wi-Fi to get a signal enough to do a post. Now, it's not stressful at all because I don't have to worry about going dark for weeks because also, people don't like that. You know, they get used to engaging with you online, and if you suddenly disappear, that wasn't good.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it's definitely not good. So what is your grand plan for the rest of 2024 as we sit here today? What are you doing differently this year that you haven't done in years previous?

Kimberly Cammerata: Well, you mentioned some of the smaller pieces to sort of align with inflation and what that's doing to everyone, which I think is a brilliant strategy, but are you changing anything else to the way you're growing the business in 2024?

Patrick Shanahan: Well, you know, I am going to make another change, which I actually learned from my followers. You know, I was trying to think what else I could post, and I decided to just ask them what they wanted to see, and now, of course, that sounds so obvious. You know, I mean, people are tuning into your social media feed to see certain things, and so I asked them, and they said that they wanted to see long videos about each painting to really learn the story and talk about the place.

Kimberly Cammerata: Yeah, do you have one by the way on your Instagram that we can look at?

Patrick Shanahan: I don't have a long one. I used to do long ones before Reels came out, so it's probably a couple of years ago. Yeah, I'm not doing that. Probably 2020, I used to do longer ones, and I had Streamyard to do it, yeah, and but then, you know, with the advent of Reels, I thought, "You know, with the advent of Reels, I'll just keep everything one minute long, maybe 30 seconds," you know, and because clearly, everybody wants short things, yeah, and you know, I was so surprised when I asked my audience, "What do you want to see?" they so many people said, "Well, we really missed those other ones," yeah, longer-form videos. But you know what I think that's interesting as social media evolves, and you know, obviously, there's a huge critique on where society is going, this short-form video content, more visual things going on, less substance, just, you know, it's like the dumbing down of TV. It's like a whole new terrible worst TV where it just sucks our attention and all that. I get that, but I think the short-form content is best thought of as trailers to the movie. So if you think of those as trailers to the longer movie, the notion is not binary, one or the other, it's how do they both work together in tandem, you know? And like in our marketing, we'll do Reels, we'll do the live broadcasts like these that go sometimes hours, you know, we will do in-between clips, and all of it's important. All of it plays a role because everybody responds differently to certain things. Things like, you know, in old-school marketing parlance or even in speaking parlance, it used to be that hit all of the boxes. Some people like the written word, so you need to have blog posts. Some people like the spoken word, so you need audio, have a podcast. Some people just like watching video, so have the video. And I think that still holds true for sure, but I also think it's about the serendipity that comes with consistency. And so if you have the long-form thing and you can cut it down into the small bits, some people see the small bits, then they want to go watch the longer things. So I don't think it's binary. I think you should do both, you know? I think you should do both, and if you're getting great feedback on the longer explanation, you know, you're talking about a work for an hour, we can show you some tricks where you take the hour piece of content, and that gives you, you know, 20 short-form content pieces of content, and then you just link to the main one, and then there you are, you're off to the races.

Kimberly Cammerata: I never thought to do that. Yeah, it's really powerful.

Patrick Shanahan: Wow, can long-form go on all social media?

Kimberly Cammerata: Yeah, all social media. Absolutely, you can still upload long videos to Instagram, of course, you can do it to YouTube, of course, you can do it to Facebook. So it's nothing's binary in social media land, right? It's all about the mix. And you know, one of the things that I'll always show is like, you know, if you go into your insights report, the way that Instagram looks at it is, let me just scroll down, so this is it. By default, it gives you the content that was shared out to the last seven days, and it says posts, stories, reels, live videos, right? And so you can see sort of the content total that we've done at Art Storefronts, but they're all important. They're all important. One of the analogies that I love giving is that Instagram, and this by default applies to Facebook too, it's not just a social network, it's several social networks inside of one. And the way that I like to think about it is it's multiple rooms in a house, okay? Instagram is a house that has multiple rooms. Well, what are the rooms? Stories is a room, okay? The feed is a room, live videos is a room, reels is a room. So let's just say there's four rooms inside this house that is this social network that is Instagram. Our job as creators is to make sure our art is hanging on the walls in all four rooms as consistently as we can because everybody's use case, everybody's pattern of behavior is different. There's some people that will just go into the story room and then they're out, and that's all they do. And so if your art's not hanging in there, you're getting no exposure to them. Some people will only go on to the feed, some people are only watching reels, some people love watching the lives, and you never know who that person is at what point in time that they're going to do that. So some people will go into all of them, some people will spend morning hours in one and then afternoon hours in the other. So the best that we can do is just make sure our art is hanging on all four of those rooms, all four of those walls. And so that's a great way to think about the content that you create. It's never binary, it's just about how consistent can we get in all of those, which is why Co-Pilot's great because it does some of it for you, and then your job is just to pile on top of it with the other stuff, the other stuff that you can do. So that's what I would say.

Kimberly Cammerata: That sounds great, and so there you go, that's my next initiative, and I think it's going to be really fun.

Patrick Shanahan: I will literally have my team do one for you, Juan, if you're on here. She is going to send you one of the long-form pieces of content when she does. Let's chop it up for her and show her how easy that is to do because we'll show you how that works. It's actually really an amazing thing.

Kimberly Cammerata: Thank you, thank you. And you know, while I'm in the mode of saying thank you, this week, our storefronts released a gift store ability, yeah, and I swear it was so easy to put up. It was unbelievable, and I already have it on my site, and it looks so good. Thank you so much for that.

Patrick Shanahan: Our pleasure. It's so easy for if somebody, merch has been really popular, meaning like tote bags and mugs and things like that, have been really popular because sometimes, you know, people don't have the wall space, yes, or they're not in the market for wall art period at that moment in time.

Kimberly Cammerata: Yeah, well, it's really cool because once I put up the gift store, it was really neat because like you can say, go into tote bags, and on the tote bag page, it shows you the tote bag with every piece of artwork, and so it's really easy for somebody to just go right to the one they want and yeah, add it to their cart. So anyway, I'm super excited, and either today or tomorrow, I have to figure out how to do it, but there's a way to share your screen and make a video, and I want to do that and show my followers for sure.

Patrick Shanahan: For sure, you need to. You know, merch is such a charged topic, right? And as we mature as an organization at Art Storefronts, I think one of the things that we've learned is that it's our job to make as many tools available to our customers as possible so they have them to leverage or not as they see fit, right? But one of the things that I'm struck with that I always say about the merch side of things is like, when have you ever been into a museum that didn't have a gift shop? Exactly, exactly. They all do, and they have exactly the same merch that's available on the storefront website, yeah. And besides that, it's not about what we want, it's what the customer wants. So true, so true. And not everybody, you know, on the subject of merch, like not everybody is ready to buy wall art when your marketing message reaches them. So what the math says is that if that marketing message reaches them, they're like, "Okay, Kimberly's really talented, I really like this," they come to your website, and there's only wall art, they're going to be like, "Okay, cool, I'll come back when I'm ready." The math says they're never coming back. So if you have, you know, merch, non-wall art in one floor, we don't even need to say merch, if you've got non-wall art priced at lower price points, you give yourself the best chance to turn that random person who experienced your marketing message into a potential customer. And if you acquire the customer, your work is in their hands, they are not going to forget you. The math makes it a significantly higher percentage that they are going to come back and purchase that higher-ticket wall art when they're ready. And so it's another one of those things like you stretch that out over a number of years. Like, let me ask you this, how many new customers per year, and you can back of the napkin, whatever rough numbers were, you acquiring when you just sold wall art versus how many are you acquiring now that you're selling wall art and merch? Like, what increase in new customer acquisition is it brought to your business?

Kimberly Cammerata: I have no idea other than I didn't think to track that, but it's a lot. It's a lot. I have a spreadsheet, and I put, you know, what image was purchased and then what it was purchased on, whether it was canvas or a fine art paper or a mug, you know, but I never thought to total up the merch as a total bit, but it's a lot. Yeah, it's, you know, and I'm so glad I have it.

Patrick Shanahan: It's one of those no-brainers that you know, you add in, and you're like, "Okay, before I had this," and again, it doesn't matter what it is, right? I feel like there's such flexibility to what you want to do. We have some customers that hand-paint wooden spoons. We have a lot of photographers that just like doing the photo books. My position is, I think you acquire way more new customers than you would otherwise. And the idea, again, going back to this time horizon thing, is like if you can take your business from where it is now, and let's just say six to seven pieces a year for you is normal, and then you add in prints, and instead of six to seven pieces a year, you're selling 20 pieces a year, and then you add in merchandise, and the 20 can go to 100 or 150, well, if you're acquiring 150 customers a year instead of the low teens, some percentage of those customers are going to come back and buy again. And it's just math. The more new customers that you've acquired, the more are going to come back and purchase again. And so I think it's such an important way to contemplate the overall lineup of one's business. And every museum in the world has a gift shop, so there you go.

Kimberly Cammerata: And people will buy like merch, they'll buy like four or five things at a time, yeah, you know, so I just think it's wonderful. And whoever, like a lot of those are for gifts too because they're always kind enough to tell me. They always, there's an email that goes out automatically from the website saying something like, "Thank you for purchasing," or something like that. I can't remember the exact words, but people reply to that and tell me what they got it, you know, the reason why they bought it, and so if you think about it, a lot of this stuff is for gifts, and so that's people that don't know about you that are going to know about you as soon as they get it, for sure.

Patrick Shanahan: And you know, the notion to the merch, like I mentioned this a bunch, and then did you see my rant about the cell phone cases by the way?

Kimberly Cammerata: I don't think I did, but yeah, you need to see that one. We're expanded upon that. People ask about them all the time.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, yeah, and but where I'm going with it is that merch, this sub-one, non-wall art product category, you're not going to get rich selling this stuff, okay? It's not about high margin, high-ticket sales. It's really just an artist's way to advertise because for someone like me that's been like a digital marketer my entire career, I'm very, very effective at getting your attention with ads, but in order for me to be able to do that, you have to be on certain applications on this guy or on your computer. Otherwise, I can't get your attention. I can never get into your kitchen wall or your kitchen cabinet or your living room couch, right? Or on your shopping runs or all these various different things that the merch opens that up for you. Areas in which you do not, your work would not be, your work is now popping up on a daily basis. And you know, the rant that I made with the cell phone cases, let me see if I have one here so I can show it. My children just move and take everything. I don't know where it is. I'll find it in a second. But I challenged people recently to pull out their iPhone and find out just how many times a day they're picking up their phone, and you know what the too long didn't read version is, those of us that are a little bit later in life pick up our phone about 100 times a day. The millennials pick it up about 200 times a day. So that means 200 times a day, according to Apple's screen time report, or let's just say let's average it out to 125, 125 times a day, this thing is being picked up, picked up, picked up, picked up, let alone the screen time. And so it's like, you look at the ability to sell a cell phone case, okay, and it has your artwork on it. You have the ability to get something into someone's hand that they're going to look at 200 times a day or 150 times a day. That's insane, right? Like that's amazing. And I look at that, and I'm like, "My goodness, what an incredible advertising play a cell phone case is." Even if you make 10 bucks, 20 bucks on it when you sell it, the fact that someone's going to see your work 200 times a day every day, whether they're on vacation or not, is insane. You know, what it says about our society, I don't know, but it's a fantastic way to advertise.

Kimberly Cammerata: Yeah, you're right. Wouldn't it cost a fortune to have an ad that be seen that many times per day?

Patrick Shanahan: Yes, yes. No one could afford to do that for even more than a day, and especially, you know, how insane those are. So we're really hot on the cell phone cases for that reason. But I want to be sensitive to your time. We've been at it 55 minutes. I want to ask you a couple of closing questions. One specifically, if there's one thing about Art Storefronts that we could improve, only one, just one thing, what would it be?

Kimberly Cammerata: Oh my gosh, that's a tough one. I'm so happy with it. Let me think on it, and I might answer in a couple of seconds, but I can't think of anything I'm unhappy with or would like to change.

Patrick Shanahan: Okay, well, you got to let me know because there's always something. That's which is why you ask the one thing, right? Like don't tell me 10 things, just tell me one thing. And then my final question for you is, okay, so you since 2017, let's just say you've been at this for seven years. If you could wind the clock back and give yourself advice year one as an artist that just started on our platform, what would it be?

Kimberly Cammerata: I would have done video from the start and not waited two almost three years to do it. Yeah, it's so much better, and you know, if you just start, it's going to be okay very fast, yeah, you know. It makes everything better, and actually, that might be the one thing. Maybe the ability to add video to Co-Pilot or somehow to associate all the pieces of content that go with a piece because I lose track sometimes. I've got so much now after this many years, and I find myself doing the same thing over and over and over again sometimes just because I can't find it.

Patrick Shanahan: Oh, for sure. The content organization is so staggering. I mean, my whole team and I met on this today just for our own internal content marketing efforts, like where do, how do we organize all this stuff? And the amazing thing is that AI is so close to sorting this for everybody, meaning you will upload all of your stuff to this database. It's already here doing this, but this is the direction that we're going to be in very, very shortly. You will upload everything you've got, and I mean every video you've ever created, every individual still image you've ever created, any designed aspects, and it will go in there, and it will say, "Hey, I've looked at all of this. Here are the groupings that make sense," right? So everything that you've done about the Trevi Fountain, and even if you just mention the Trevi Fountain in it, it's going to group that into a folder for you and say, "Here's all this. Do you want to take a look?" right? And our idea eventually is to have all of this in Hub, what Hub is going to become, and it's going to be your central content database such that you have it all organized, and you can post any of that stuff at any point in time, right? And you know, for you, it's like, do they celebrate the founding of Rome? Do they celebrate when the Pantheon was constructed or the Trevi Fountain was constructed, right? Like you need to know about those dates on the calendar, and then you need to have your whole content armada ready to go, and boom, just be able to drop all of it, right? And I think that's going to be insane. And so we're working on that. We're going to be getting there, and I think we're just sort of waiting for the AI technology to get there, which as fast as the stuff is advancing, it's like, you know, overnight, right? Like crazy growth overnight. So we'll be there very shortly where on the back end of your site, literally will live your entire content archive of all of it, emails too, text-based, video-based, photo-based, organized, tagged by year, and then ideally, in a perfect world, we'll be able to pull the social stats about what worked best when you posted it, and so then we'll be able to rank everything you've done. So you'll be able to, like, let's just say 2024 is over, and you could go in there, and you can run a report and say, "Okay, show me which of my content did best in terms of views, likes, comments, shares in 2024," and then you look at all that, and you're like, "Okay, cool, that's probably the direction I need to do a little bit more of that. I need to do a little bit more of that. I posted that thing six months ago, I can post it again," you know? So all of that is coming in very, very short order, and I think it's going to make all of us so much more effective at our marketing because one of the biggest traps that we all fall into, notwithstanding this whole organizational conundrum we've been discussing, is that we'll post a thing, and because we posted the thing, we think everyone saw it. No one saw it. That's what you have to operate under. You can go ahead and post that thing again and again and again and again. You could, your cooking video, you could post that thing 10 times a year, 10 times a year because not everybody saw it, you know? Not everybody saw it, so post it again. So our goal is going to be getting all of that up into Hub and making that available to absolutely everybody. So excited about where we're going. You owe me one long-form piece of content that I will get chopped up for you. That's number one. Number two, I want to see you scanning those customer feedback messages that you're getting. They're personal, so you don't want to be too revealing about them, but I would take a photo of the handwritten note, yeah, and then I would highlight some text on top of it, and then just, you know, do a pray hand emoji and start getting that into some of your Instagram stories as like a feedback, and your story highlights. I mean, I want to see that up here as like some social proof in some feedback credit, and just knowing how relational you are and knowing like how in-depth you want to get to know your customers, if people start seeing those thank you notes, happy folks that have a piece, and by the way, bonus, every time they write one of those messages, message them directly and say, "Thank you so much for the feedback. Really, can I ask a huge favor? Could you just take a photo of where the piece is hanging on your wall? If you want to be in it, that would be awesome. If you don't, that's totally okay, but I would love to just have that," right? And then if you could start gathering those assets, your originals on walls where they're living in the home, and then the thank you note, oh my goodness, that is going to be such a home run.

Kimberly Cammerata: That's a great idea. I mean, I do have a lot of photos that people have sent me, yeah. I just didn't think to use it. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, we've got to get that going on immediately. And case in point, like, will end up having a folder on Hub that says feedback, right? And all of it'll go in there, and then this will be a way to organize and tag all of the various different things, right? Like, so here's the thank you note, you know, here's Patrick's order that he bought, here's the thank you note, here's the image of the photo in their house. What do you want to do with it, right? And then you'll have all of that ammo there, which is awesome. But huge thanks for your time. I really appreciate you giving me an hour. Guys, go and follow Kimberly on Instagram. Her Instagram handle, let me make this bigger so you guys can see it, is @kimberlycammerata, and leave her a comment, ask her questions. I know all artists follow other artists, and that innates people, but Kimberly is just super cool, and you guys should definitely watch what she's doing. She's doing a great job growing her business. Can't wait to see where you're going to be in year 10, year 15, year 20 as we continue to just move this thing down the line and keep growing. So thanks so much for your time, and yeah, let's get going on those other things.

Kimberly Cammerata: Thank you so much, Patrick. This was wonderful, and thank you, everybody, for watching. Thanks, guys. Ciao, ciao.