CEO: What I've Learned About
Selling Art in 2020
In 2019, I saw unknown, spare-time artists and photographers outselling world-renowned creators with millions of fans and major endorsements.
HOW is that even possible?
This video explains it all:
Nick Friend, founder of Breathing Color and an owner of Art Storefronts, shares the approaches he saw amateur artists and photographers using to far exceed their sales expectations in 2019, and the approach that will dominate 2020.
Instead of solving the marketing problem that is actually to blame for their lack of success, they get distracted doing other things that don't actually make an impact on their situation:
- They create more and more art, just hoping to be "discovered" one lucky day
- They launch a website, thinking they have actually "opened a business" but do nothing to bring in traffic
- They do the "spray-and-pray" approach by uploading to art marketplaces like Etsy, Fine Art America, etc.
- They try random marketing tactics that rarely work, waste time, and are not part of a broader strategy
The truth is that you will never build a business from a tactic or two.
When it comes to marketing, your business needs a long-term, on-going solution. This goes for any business in any industry - not just art.
When you instead focus on solving your marketing problem, little by little you'll get more exposure, more traffic, and more eyeballs on your work.
Once this happens, it then becomes critical to have a proper art gallery website with all the must-have features to sell art online. A proper art gallery website allows you to fully capitalize on all the time and effort you put into marketing. It will empower you to convert the maximum number of your site visitors into leads and buyers.
For example, a feature such as Augmented Reality allows buyers to actually try the art on their wall before buying it using their mobile phone. How well does this work? Photographer John Lechner used it to triple his art sales.
There are many more important features that are integral to the art buying process, but the important point to understand right now is that every bit of exposure you get from your marketing efforts is precious, and it must be capitalized on.
When you have the right marketing plan paired with the right art gallery website, your growth potential is near limitless.
It all comes back to solving that marketing problem.
If you haven't found the a solution for your marketing problem yet, you will struggle until you do.
What does a long-term marketing solution look like?
- A system to get you exposure and consistently generate leads.
- Strategies that turn these leads into collectors and fans for life.
- Consistency in your sales.
- Staying one step ahead of the game / never falling behind and avoiding stale, overused tactics.
Unfortunately, talk to almost any photographer or artist out there, and a "long term marketing solution" is precisely what they are lacking.
They're spending years trying to figure it out one complicated piece at a time.
A YouTube video here, a tutorial there.
Maybe a few thousand spent on a consultant to help for a couple of weeks.
No plan. No consistency.
And in the end, little to no progress, just years of struggle and confusion.
The piecemeal approach to learning how to effectively market art doesn't work.
The most successful artists and photographers are following a comprehensive plan
that they execute consistently all year long.
When we launched Art Storefronts many years back, we knew that equipping artists with powerful art gallery websites WAS NOT GOING TO BE ENOUGH.
In order to create a real, "all-in-one" solution for artists we would need to offer a solution for the marketing problem.
As such, we were the first organization (and still are the only) to offer a complete art marketing system for artists.
Not a page with tutorials you have to figure out by yourself and remember to use - our members are following a genuine, 7-days-a-week plan that cuts to the chase, telling them exactly what to do and when to do it - all year long. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.
Check it out:
THE ART STOREFRONTS MARKETING PLAN
Every Monday, we publish The Weekly Agenda – an overview of the marketing tasks we recommend our members complete in the week to come, with links to checklists and tutorials for each task.
Every Thursday, we host a Social Boost event – a community initiative to boost engagement on Instagram by supporting each other on a weekly basis.
Every Friday, we publish a Quick #smallwin Challenge – a five-minutes-or-less task that will show you a new technique or add a small improvement to your marketing strategy.
All of this guidance and education is paired with unlimited access to our art marketing consultants - the very same type of people you would hire at $100+/hr to help you with your business.
And if you could just use some input from other artists, look no further than #smallwins - our private Facebook Community where our members share their wins, ask for feedback, and talk shop on everything from pricing to email subject lines.
We also provide a private Marketing Resource Vault with art-specific email templates, pre-written email copy, pre-designed Facebook and Instagram Templates with pre-written copy, Classrooms on topics like Analytics & Romance Marketing, and so much more — all to save our members time, and to get them using tactics and resources that actually work.
This system was created so that artists can solve their own marketing problem with a backbone of resources and expert support behind them.
It's a plan that actually guides you - today, tomorrow, later this month, and next year.
With this on-going system on your side, you never need to hire an art marketing consultant again. You'll be able to control your own destiny.
I worked hard learning how to make art, but there is a world of difference in making art and selling art. Art Storefronts gives you the platform to sell and teaches you how to market!
–Photographer Jim Livingston
(Art Storefronts member since 2018)
Now we know that Marketing is the #1 problem of every business -- and, you won't have a business if you don't solve it.
So, how are you going to solve it? What changes are you going to make?
