The Biggest Art-Selling Time of the Year is 3 Months Away

In this episode, Patrick and Nick discuss the importance of the fourth quarter for art sales, emphasizing that October, November, and December are crucial for maximizing annual sales. They stress the need for artists and photographers to prepare early by growing their audience and focusing on lead acquisition. The conversation highlights the impact of the pandemic on traditional art selling methods and the shift towards online sales, forecasting a potentially record-breaking Q4. The hosts advocate for a direct marketing strategy and consistent engagement with potential buyers to capitalize on the upcoming holiday season.

Podcast Transcribe

Patrick Shanahan: Who wins? Who wins when the biggest art-selling show or excellent time of the year comes in three months? Who wins? Who is the person positioned? Yeah, better question. First of all, let's just let, for those who don't know, the biggest art-selling time of the year is only three months away. What is that? If you didn't already know, first of all, where have you been? Where have you been hiding under a rock for the last how many years? Spicy. The biggest art-selling time of the year, you guys, is the fourth quarter, i.e., October, November, December, right? Biggest art sale. You should be doing 50% if not more of your sales during that time for the whole year. So if you're an artist or photographer and you haven't taken advantage of that, and that's not how it went for you in 2019, or in 2018 or 2017, you've been strategically missing out, not executing properly during that time of year. That's to set the stage first off. You got to know that that's the biggest art-selling time of the year. So now you're looking at 2020, what can I do to position myself to take advantage of the fourth quarter, the biggest art-selling time of the year? What is it that you need to do? That's the way you need to be thinking right now because it's only three months away. When we say three months away, we're talking about when the marketing starts, when you're supposed to start your marketing for the fourth quarter. This is what we're advising our members. It's in our playbooks, in our marketing calendar. You don't just put up a sale on Black Friday or expect sales to come in on Black Friday or throughout the whole Christmas season. You have to do marketing to make that happen. I think right now it's just so important, given that it's the beginning of July, to sound the alarm to everybody out there. If there was any time to become extremely serious about your marketing and growing your audience and changing your business, it's now. It is right now. That is the most important thing. You gotta grow your audience and you gotta warm them up in order to have this amazing fourth quarter holiday season. We are constantly, during the holiday season, talking about all the photographers and artists that are killing it, selling ten thousand dollars or five thousand dollars on this day or twenty thousand dollars or whatever it is throughout the whole season. You guys have to understand, the people that are doing that put in the work beforehand. They didn't launch in October. They launched way earlier and they put the work in and they've been building their audience. We had our private members workshop today for Art Storefronts, which is customers only, and I must have emphasized no less than five times, you guys have got to be growing your audience. I said it over and over and over again, specifically referencing the marketing tactic that we have that's the most effective at doing that right now.

Nick Friend: We can't talk about it because it's private, but I must emphasize that.

Patrick Shanahan: First rule of Fight Club.

Nick Friend: Exactly. Can't talk about the playbooks, can't talk about the marketing tactics, because otherwise there's no advantage on them anymore, and we want everybody to have an advantage. I must have talked about it at least five times, and we're dedicating... I am literally... nobody even asked me, "Hey Nick, what's the workshop going to be on this upcoming Tuesday?" I just said, "You guys, I don't even want to know what anybody thought it was going to be. It's going to be on lead acquisition because it's the only thing that matters. It's the only thing that matters is lead acquisition, is growing your audience." Between now and then, it's something that you need to focus on at all times, but everyone wants to not focus on it and do other things. It's the craziest thing to me, but this is the only way you grow a business is just by constantly thinking about it and actually doing it. We got a crazy confluence of events going on too. Really strong economy before the pandemic hit, pandemic hits. I've got a question about that. Everyone is not going back to work full-time. My wife just got a job in Los Angeles that would have been a job... I lived an hour south of Los Angeles. She just got a job in Los Angeles. She wouldn't have got that job pre-pandemic. They have this insane office in Malibu, beautiful building, incredible, and they're just like, "We want to go back to the office. Don't even know if we ever will." Roaring economy pre-pandemic. Honest question for you: Have you ever spent less money in your entire life? Three children, I have two children, then the three or four months of the pandemic.

Patrick Shanahan: Three or four months, never. No restaurants, no outside shenanigans, no babysitters, nothing. None of it, right?

Nick Friend: Yeah, I stopped having to pay for school for three months. I'm blown away. Then coupled with, I honestly do not believe, call me cynical, and I am a deeply cynical person, that this pandemic is not going to end until the election's over. I said it, I said it, I'm sorry, I'm an optimist. I don't think it's going to end until the election is over. It's not trying to... I'm not trying to place just a little bit on anything. We live in a crazy part of the time. I don't think it's going to end until the election is over. Couple all of that, not going back to work, economy turning around, economy coming back to where it was, people have more disposable income than ever, and you're in your house still more and more. What does that portend for this? And oh, by the way, all of the traditional ways that people went and acquired art, very difficult to do. Shows and fairs, galleries, I don't know. I think it could be a monster.

Patrick Shanahan: You're literally hitting the bullseye. This is going to be, mark my words, mark your words, right? Remember, that's your flag, play your flag. The flag is being planted. This will be the biggest Q4, the biggest holiday season for artists and photographers who have a direct strategy and are selling online. It will be like two to three times the volume. We've been talking about this, right? We have seen Black Friday levels of sales every single week since the beginning of April, since the pandemic happened, and since the lockdown happened. Every week, including last week, there was like 204% growth in sales from the artists' and photographers' websites on our platform. This is their own websites, this is them driving their own traffic to their own websites with our marketing strategies. It's not us doing it for them, it's us consulting for them and giving them a way to do it, and it's them doing it. The sales were up to 204% year over year.

If it's Black Friday levels of sales now, and we also show Google Trends, right? We do that in all of our non-customer workshops that we do, which by the way, you guys should check out. We'll talk about that in a second. We show Google Trends a lot. If you go to trends.google.com and you type in "buy art online," you can see what happened during the pandemic versus 2019. It's been ridiculous. The search volume for "buy art" has gone through the roof. If it's Black Friday levels of sales every week right now, what's going to happen when it's actually Black Friday and that whole period, which you and I know, you and I know the psychology that happens during that time. Everybody watching this, you guys know it too. You're in a buying frame of mind. You know you're going to get deals. You're looking at everything you possibly might need, and you're getting ready to make those purchases for anything that you might need.

You take that mentality and multiply it by the entire economy. Most of that's going to be done online, and here you have this perfect storm of a situation where it's going to be a monster. What is the message right now? You've got to acquire leads and attention and build your audience right now as hard as possible. The quickest route to failure is thinking you're going to get there, not going to plan, not going to do anything. You're not going to be the squirrel stocking nuts away for winter, and you're going to just run a sale to your email list that you've not worked on, to your social channels you've not worked on, and expect a good result. Not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

Nick Friend: Even if you run our live show playbook, but you know what's so funny? I don't know deep down if more art is necessarily selling than at any other time throughout the year, or if all of it has just been squashed into the online revenue channel. That's okay.

Patrick Shanahan: That's exactly what's happening. Demand is moving from offline sources to online. That's what happened during the lockdowns. E-commerce sales globally doubled. You could make an argument that art sales actually increased. My wife now working at home went to get a desk, it's like eight weeks out to get the desk. We have a ton of customers that have been jumping into the live streaming game on our advice. Try to get a webcam, try to get a green screen, try to get lights, try to get any of that equipment, and everything is sold out. That product wouldn't have sold out period if things were moving along status quo. I have to say that their sales, as well as home decor sales, is way up, and art is just an extension of that. All of these people with their blank white walls would have just gone on going to work and not being at home all day and not have done anything. Whatever art they would have bought, they're doing the same. I actually think the sales are up overall.

Art is just an extension of this whole crazy "everyone's in their house" trend, and I'm telling you, it ain't stopping. People are not going back to work. This pandemic, unfortunately, is going to be with us for a long time to come, at least till November. Guess what? That's Black Friday time. Make it rain.

Nick Friend: I don't see it. I was optimistic. I was hoping we would get back to normal. I could make some points about the death rate being extremely low, but dude, beaches are closed here, people are terrified, restaurants are opened up, we're already closing again. All the bars just got shut down. I sent you a text message last night, a screenshot. The city of Austin literally texted me and robo-called me and left a voicemail saying, "Stay home." Literally, it said, "Stay home." And then it had a whole explanation, but those were the exact words. Last night, about five o'clock.

Patrick Shanahan: There's so much nonsense. Everyone's saying, "The minute the temperatures get warmer, this thing's going to be killed off and it's going to be done because it needs cold weather to transmit." Yet here we are, spiking cases everywhere. I don't know. Who knows what to believe?

Nick Friend: Exactly. Make rational decisions on the data. They make rational decisions. First of all, who even gets the real data? I hear cases are spiking on the news in my county, and I'm like, "I don't know a single solitary person that has it." But I have a friend that works in an ER, three different hospitals, and she's like, "No, actually, there's way more people in these things." So it's like, okay, I've got my data point there, I know it. People don't make decisions based on rational intel. They make it based on the best facts that they have. I'm sorry, until November, until this election is over, all of the rational facts are going to be, "This thing's going on. Don't go out. Stay home."

I'll give you the perfect example. July 4th, they finally closed the beaches in my hometown. July 3rd, we were supposed to have a party with all the kids on the beach in the afternoon. Someone was going to go straight to this area of the beach, and it's on the bay, right around your corner from your mom's house. The order came in, people are talking about the COVID, and half the moms and dads are just like, "Look, we're out. We're gonna play this thing safe." You can say there's... Everyone plays it how they want to play it. I'm not making any value judgments about that. The larger point that I'm making is we are not going back to normal.

Patrick Shanahan: Exactly, exactly.

Nick Friend: We are not coming back. If there was ever a time to focus on building your online presence, building your lead list, building your marketing so that you might be in a position to actually share in what will likely be the biggest Q4 that we've ever seen, now is the time. Now is the time.

Patrick Shanahan: Exactly, exactly. The thing is, as art business consultants, we don't... The politics, it doesn't matter to us. None of this stuff matters to us. All that matters is what is the right strategy given all of the circumstances that everybody is in. The right strategy is you can't rely on anything retail, third party, none of that. You're not going to be able to for the rest of the year, so just write that off. If you're able to get anything going with a gallery or art shows at all, that's very lucky, but that world has just been blown up. We talk about this all the time, but you have to build a direct business where you're marketing directly to your customers, and you own your lead list, your customer list, and you're making the most money off of your art. That is the only model that actually works. That's how you get consistent income. It's not because it works in the art industry; it's because this is what works in every business, every industry. You talk to any business owner or entrepreneur, and you will know that going through indirect sources where there's middlemen, the rug can always get pulled out from underneath you. You can get dropped from galleries, a publisher will stop working with you, an art dealer, a pandemic hits, you can't do art shows anymore.

You have to invest in the model that is actually stable, that gets you consistent income. Surprise, surprise, the most successful artists and photographers out there, have you ever looked at them? Have you ever looked at what they're doing? They're all direct. 100% of them are all direct. They are not indirect. Maybe 5% of their sales are indirect, maybe. More often than not, it's zero. They own everything. They own their whole distribution channel. That's what all of you need to be doing. It's what we're all about at Art Storefronts. When you work with Art Storefronts, all of our members, all we're doing is trying to build your own valuable business according to that philosophy because it's just what works. For some reason, in the art industry, it's been standardized or whatever you want to say, this layer of BS that, "Oh, hey, the first thing I should do is upload my art to online galleries and then work with offline galleries." Then all of a sudden, something like the pandemic hits, and all the galleries are gone, and people are wondering, "What happened? My whole world just changed." It's like you had the entire wrong strategy. You had a 100% indirect strategy, which everybody knows is the bad way to go.

Where are we at right now? The biggest art-selling time of the year is coming in the fourth quarter. This is your chance to build your direct business and have a great fourth quarter, maybe for the first time. Maybe for the first time.

Nick Friend: We've already had a good fourth quarter. We realize that we're way, way, way early on this, but let me tell you, we've been through this too many times now. You can't start setting reminders to get your ass and get your butt in gear. Comment on it. I'm gonna get censored by Facebook for vlogger language now. If you don't get your butt on it now, you're not gonna be in the right frame of mind for properly taking advantage of what I'm not kidding, and believe me when I say this, you're not going to have to look to us for the data. The data is going to be clear. I really do think it's going to be the biggest fourth quarter of large sales in the history of the world, like that's ever happened. Or at least, I don't even know how you would compare it. It's going to be out of control. We're not talking about the Picasso-style pieces, 160 million sales, but although that might too. We're talking about the standard issue price point, call it zero to fifty thousand dollar pieces below. It's going to blow the doors off of anything.

Patrick Shanahan: Everyone's gonna get it. Can you imagine what the e-commerce figures are going to be growth-wise for the fourth quarter this year compared to 2019? It's going to be one of the biggest stories.

Nick Friend: You guys are going to see those news stories when it's all happening. The big story is going to be the shift to e-commerce. It won't be our advice. You want to take it from us. It'll be all over CNBC, which is why on July 2nd, he and I are banging a drum because we want you to win. I want you to win.

Patrick Shanahan: Exactly, exactly. The more we start prodding you right now, the more you're going to be like, "Wait a minute, okay, what do I got to do then? What am I going to start doing now?" When no one's thinking about it, and I start thinking about it, and I'm just taking legs up the ladder of my competition. I'm just climbing it. That's the game.

Nick Friend: That's exactly right. I love that you said that because that's dead on. We say this because we come from experience of where somebody joins a week before Black Friday and thinks that they're gonna be like, "Okay, I'm last minute. I gotta get in. It's the biggest art-selling time of the year." It's like, "Hey buddy, you just missed it." You should have heard us back in July. You should have heard us back in June. You're already late to the game. You're already late. You need to get started right away because you're already late. If you didn't start building a direct business five years ago, you are really late. You are really, really late. If you're just getting started with your art business, you're not late. But if you've been in the game for 5 or 10 or 15 years and you still haven't learned that, you are really late to the game. You've got to change that. You've got to change it.

Patrick Shanahan: There's a question from Sid Amico on Instagram. "What price range is the online demand?" This is a head-in-hand moment. But no worries, Sid. I'm not putting you down at all because we get this question all the time. But it comes with this layer of BS assumption that's in the art industry where it's like, "What price range is the online market?" Like the online market is any different from the offline. Who said this? Whoever said this? We have photographers and artists on our platform selling $20,000, $30,000 original paintings. It doesn't matter. There's limited editions, there's originals, there's open editions. Everything sells. It's no different. It's just a business that is operating and marketing online and offline as well.

Some people have... We're not getting that underpinning. That is the failed premise. The premise is if I just knew what the hot selling price point was, I could create all my work to that price point and I would be successful. Erroneous. That's never been true. That's just not the way to work. It's a wrong understanding of the online market. Do you understand that Tesla is selling $100,000 cars online? $100,000 cars. You can't buy a Tesla unless you buy it online. I don't know if anybody knows that.

Nick Friend: Their stock price, by the way, today...

Patrick Shanahan: Oh yeah, I know. They're killing it. They're just totally killing it.

Nick Friend: Amazing.

Patrick Shanahan: But I'll talk about it. You want to talk about a high friction purchase. We talked about how art is a high friction online purchase, and it is. You talk about a car, a car that you're buying for $100,000 or $30,000 or $40,000, $50,000. That's the only way that Tesla sells, and they are now the most valuable automobile company in the world, in history. So it's important to understand that whoever told people that the online market is its own arena with some sort of convention to it is completely wrong. It's just the offline market in a digital form. That's it. The same exact products that sell offline sell online. We publish all this data as well. Sotheby's in April had the most online art bids in any of the things they have. They're selling $1.8 million pieces in their collector auctions.

So I hope that answers your question. It's great. I'm glad you asked it, Sid, because so many people get held back because of that assumption. You just need to throw that out and go, "Wait, oh my gosh, that's so right. Where did I even hear that from? Why did I think it was any different than what happens offline? It's the same thing. Doesn't matter. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense."

What else are we doing tomorrow? I got my kids home tomorrow. I just got the message from the preschool, "Your kids will be home tomorrow," which is a day off holiday, which I'm pleased about. Love holidays, but you know, got kids running around here. Are we gonna do it on customer tomorrow? No, we're not. Next one's Monday.

Nick Friend: Let's talk about that. The next non-customer free art business consulting session, you guys, is Monday at 1 p.m. Central. That would be 11 a.m. Pacific and 2. So if you're not a customer of Art Storefronts, and you need some art business consulting, we ask you to come and bring your number one problem. What is the one thing holding you back? What do you think it is? What is the one thing that you really think is holding your business back from getting to the next level, whether it's getting started or you're stuck at a certain sales level? We want to talk to you. These sessions have been amazing. In fact, if you want to watch one, just watch the one that we did yesterday. It's in our Facebook feed. You can scroll down our Facebook feed and you'll see. It's a Zoom call, and we talk to you guys with video and audio, and we unmute you one by one and we go through and we help you with your problems. We help you get through it. The sessions have been so amazing because people are coming back two, three times, multiple times.

I should also say this too. We've now started piping these sessions into our podcast. If you download our podcast, it's the number one podcast on iTunes in the art industry, the most downloads for art marketing. It's called the Art Marketing Podcast. Search it on whatever podcast application you use.

Patrick Shanahan: Wherever you get your podcasts.

Nick Friend: Wherever you get your podcasts. It's called the Art Marketing Podcast by Art Storefronts, and you can listen to it. It's just the audio version, so you obviously won't have the video that you would in our Facebook feed, but you could binge those and get a ton of value. There was somebody who put a comment the other day on our last session that was like, "Every time I come, I leave with something that I can go and implement in my business." I just love that. It was amazing. If we can help you guys move forward, that's where you want to go. Again, join our email list and like us on Facebook if you want to get notified and you want to get the Zoom link so that you can join that actual session on Monday. Again, it's at 11 Pacific, 1 Central, 2 Eastern.

Patrick Shanahan: The other thing too, another big announcement that we almost forgot to mention. We extended the summer special today. Did you see that? We extended the summer special. We were running a big discount to join Art Storefronts in June. We just decided to extend it. Part of the reason for that was this pandemic. The pandemic is resurging, and we thought that we needed to have a more... a deal for everybody that's struggling out there and run it through July. So if you're interested in joining Art Storefronts, or you want to learn more, what you need to do is request a demo. There's always a button in the upper right-hand corner of our website that says "Request a Demo." Click that. On Instagram, you can click the link in the bio and then you'll see a "Request a Demo" link. Request a demo, and then what will happen is you'll get on a call with one of our... you'll get a one-on-one call with one of our onboarding team members, and they'll learn about you and what you're doing and what your goals are. Then they can also do a demo and show you every single feature because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of features that we offer here in regards to the website product that we have and the marketing product, which is more important because that's where we help you grow your audience and get more people seeing your artwork. It's our secret sauce. It's the thing that we're best at. So request that. You want to check that out.

Nick Friend: Everybody wants to think that the website is the most important thing. "I need this product, this technology." We've got it. We've got the best art-selling website technology that you can get. It's a Ferrari. But we will truthfully tell you that it just doesn't matter. All you got to do is learn. You can Google it right now. 99% of all Shopify stores fail. Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, it doesn't matter. Google it, you'll see. It's because when you have a website, it doesn't mean you have a business. You don't have a business just because you have a website. I'm sorry. You only have a business once you have a successful marketing program in place that is consistently generating you traffic, eyeballs, leads, which are email addresses. That's the only time you actually have a business. Many of you out there right now are probably like, "Yeah, you're right. I don't have consistent traffic. It's not growing. I'm not generating a lot of emails." That's the point. You don't really have a business yet. You've got to solve the marketing problem. You've got to either hire a consultant, hire an employee, or whatever it is, but you've got to solve the marketing problem. Otherwise, you're basically wasting your time.

Patrick Shanahan: Correct. All right, so should we leave it there?

Nick Friend: Yeah, leave it there. I'm spent. Biggest art-selling time of the year is only three months away. Jim Livingston, Andy Love, you guys, these are members of Art Storefronts. You guys focus on the lead generation right now. That difference. I am single-handedly commandeering the workshop on Tuesday just to make sure that we focus on this. All of our members, this is a private member session for Art Storefronts members, but I'm going to be hammering the lead acquisition for months. I'm not going to let up on it. I'm not going to let up. I'm not letting anybody not be acquiring leads for the rest of their life. It's permanent for life. If we don't focus on it and we don't constantly talk about it, what happens? People don't do it. Nobody does it. We have to keep everybody focused on the right thing, the metric, the only metric that matters. Everyone wants more sales and they want to grow their business. I'm going to get you that if you focus with me on the right thing. I know how to do this.

Patrick Shanahan: Don't fight it. Do it.

Nick Friend: Don't fight it. Do it. All right, let's leave it there.

Patrick Shanahan: All fired up. Ready to get into the weekend, right?

Nick Friend: Yep. Have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Patrick Shanahan: Good luck with the kiddos.

Nick Friend: You too. Happy July 4th.

Patrick Shanahan: Talk soon. All right, guys, you.