Why Your Art Business is Destined to Fail
In this episode of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick delves into the essential reasons why many art businesses are set up for failure. He highlights the importance of mastering the basics, such as in-person sales, maintaining a functional website, and conducting live art shows. Patrick stresses the futility of relying solely on Facebook and Instagram ads, sharing his experiences and data to debunk the myth of quick success through paid traffic. He emphasizes consistent marketing and patience, illustrating that true success comes from long-term dedication and not shortcut solutions.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: So bear with me for a second, I think you'll enjoy it. I hope you enjoy it. Could be suboptimal. All right, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Mornings, we're talking about why your art business is destined to fail, specifically, the basics. How art really sells and why you're failing at your Facebook ads.
(coffee machine hissing) (coffee trickling) Okay. Welcome to another edition of the Art Business Morning Show, the show that will put you on the path to a six figure a year plus art business. And, as I was writing this one, it occurs to me that all of these shows recently sort of follow the same trajectory. People attend the Art Business workshops.
They ask questions. Oftentimes, they tell me how something they are doing is working really well for them. I know they are lying to me. I know this because I'm the professional and I do this for a living. Stated another way, I've already made all of those mistakes that you're currently making. I've already wasted all my time, all my energy, all my effort, all my money making them.
Sometimes I've wasted other people's money making them. It's way better when you do it that way, by the way. Oftentimes, I make those same mistakes again. I continue. I forget the lesson I learned and I make them again. I could care less about the lying part. I want to help them. I want to help you get these erroneous thoughts out of your heads.
Get off the path to nowhere, and get on the path to actually growing the business. I already made the mistakes for you. You don't have to do it. I already did it. You don't have to do them again. I already did 'em. So lately, and for whatever reason, I don't have a good answer for this, I've been getting bombarded with people just talking to me about Facebook ads, Facebook ads, Facebook ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, and how well they're working for their business.
Whether we're talking about Facebook and Instagram, Facebook ads, we'll just call them, or paid traffic in general, Pinterest ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, Google display ads of any kind, the same rules apply. The same rules apply for both. So I wanna cover this and then I wanna give you some context.
I teased the basics, and I've mentioned the basics a lot. I'll continue mentioning the basics a lot. It's like, really you're going over this again? The loyal listeners will have heard me say this a bunch of times, but I'm gonna repeat it again. Why? Persistence is essential, because knowledge is rarely imparted on the first attempt.
I stole that quote from somebody. I don't know who. Persistence is essential because knowledge is rarely imparted on the first attempt. I like that quote. Your art business is destined to fail because you are ignoring the basics. What are the basics? And these are the basics updated to version 3.0, the 2021 and beyond version.
What is the best way to sell art or photography? It's in-person direct face-to-face. You should be doing as much of that as possible, as creatively as possible, given the pandemic that we're living through. Problem, though, with just relying on that is you're geographically fixed on this earth.
You have to sleep. And you're incapable of having 25 concurrent conversations. So yes, you need a website to take care of these problems for you. And yes, you need a website to take care of additional problems for you. The website needs to be set up to sell art, to take a credit card, and do this while you sleep.
Also an important part. So you wanna sell your art or photography. So I have in-person to the left of me. I've got on my website to the right. You have those covered. Let's get stuck in the middle. I love that song. And I believe that the live art shows, the Zoom calls, the FaceTimes, the whatever type of video chat, Google Hangout, Microsoft Teams, whatever you use.
Doesn't matter. Whether you're doing those one-to-one with a potential buyer, doing a showing, or whether you are doing one-to-many, a live broadcast, a live art show. You have those three covered. In-person sales whenever you can do them, website, the live art shows, which is sort of in the middle. You focus on that and your regular consistent marketing.
So you have the three. You're doing regular consistent marketing. You start off doing what you can and what you're capable of doing, what your technical acumen gives you the ability to do, and you just keep leveling up. You get better. You have the perspective of how long things take. The basics often get put aside or passed aside as unnecessary or too difficult, or I could never possibly do that.
In Art Storefronts, we run office hours, and these are Zoom sessions wherein we'd bring our customers in, we teach them a thing. Had one yesterday on how to sell art commercially. So how to sell art into commercial gigs, banks and hotels and the like. It turns out we have a customer shout out to Jim Livingston, incredible human being to boot, but we have a customer that's really, really good at this.
And he's been doing it a long time. So he recorded a session on that that was just straight fire. Great work on that, by the way, Jim, if you're listening. Why am I telling you that? At the end of the session, we drop a feedback form. And the feedback form says, hey, what topic do you want us to cover next on a future session? So we can get some feedback from our customers on what else they wanna learn.
And the form is completely anonymous. The form is anonymous. So whoever you are, I don't know who you are. So I don't have a problem calling you out but I'm gonna call you out. Because you're anonymous. And again, I feel zero guilt for this. So the prompting, what topic would you like us to cover next? And here's the answer in quotes.
"Another idea is to hear from artists who are able to be successful early on in their careers. Not folks have been doing this for five plus years and who have thousands of followers." Read that. And I was scared that I was gonna fall out of my chair, in rage when I read that. I've got this other quote that I really like, which is, "In this age which believes that there is a shortcut to everything, the greatest lesson to be learned is that the most difficult way is,
"in the long run, the easiest." That's from an author, Henry Miller. There is no shortcut. There's never been a shortcut. There's no hack. There is no secret Facebook ads formula that exists to target high net worth buyers, or any special Facebook ads targeting, or Google ads targeting.
The most difficult way, from that quote, truly is in the long run, it's the easiest. And I learned this again and again and again and I don't mean to pick on that anonymous person but it's like "another idea is to hear from artists who were able to be successful early on in their careers.
"Not folks who've been doing this for five plus years." There are no artists that have been really successful early on in their careers. There never will be any artist that's really successful early on in their career. There's not usually anybody that's really successful at anything really early on in their career.
The reason Jim's session was so good is because he's been doing it for five plus years, probably 15 in his case. And so everyone is just constantly looking for a shortcut. They're constantly looking for the shortcut. There is no shortcut. There will never be a shortcut. I feel like I'm just being redundant on this recently.
Maybe I'm reminding myself because I spent a career looking for shortcuts in my youth. And it's like, you start to get older, and you realize that there never was. There never will be. Let's talk about how people think art sells versus how art really sells. And first, I will give you the regular version.
And then, because I'm talking about Facebook ads, I'll give you the Facebook ads version. The regular version says people, for whatever reason, and I see this almost universally, they think art and they think photography sells online, offline, sorta the same way it does, let's just say lumped in with a myriad of other goods in which you show the product, and the particular piece of art or photography.
Strangers see the product. And whether they're searching for it, or they have an actual need, a white wall in their house, or it's an impulse buy, or they're generally inspired by it. The artist makes money. Great, good job. Go find another one. And perhaps let's just say that the people that think art sell this way, they're following the rules then.
They understand a sale and the mechanics and where you need to have an incentive plus scarcity. You need to have a percentage off, and it needs to end at a certain day. Okay, great. You've got that sorted. You sold one, rinse and repeat, let's go find another one. That is the way that people think art sell.
**Speaker
1**: So you just go from stranger who does not know you to next stranger who does not know you. You show an ad or a post and they see it and they instantaneously buy it. Like the Facebook ads version is the exact same version except instead of a regular post or however they found you, they found you as a result of a Facebook ad because you understand cold targeting, or you took some course or whatever.
This infuriates me. It absolutely infuriates me, because, one, of how infrequently it happens. And I'll get to that in a second. But two, it is impossible. Impossible. Never been done to earn a positive ROI by showing your art, your photography, to cold traffic in this fashion and thinking you are gonna see an ROI on that investment.
You are lighting that money on fire. You are lighting that money on fire. And whilst it does happen, okay, what I just outlined, occasionally, very occasionally, someone will put an ad on Facebook and they will show that ad to someone that's never seen their art before and that person will buy it. It does happen.
But I've got data on this. And I could tell you, back of a napkin, let's talk about how often that happens. Stated another way, let's say, 1,000 people saw your ad on Facebook. Maybe one out of that 1,000 people will buy a piece of art in that fashion, maybe one, but there's no way you're ever gonna see the ROI on that.
Stated another way, if an artist sells 100 pieces of art, one out of those 100 will maybe come from a post to somebody first time that doesn't know you, that's never interacted with you, that buys it for the impulse reason or any of the other reasons. It just doesn't, it just does not work that way.
There is no way that you could build a business on that, that anyone is building a business on that. The odds are just too low. The numbers are just too low. And yet people keep telling me time and time again, this is what they're doing, and they're having a great level of success. I'm just like, no, you're not.
Stop it. Stop telling other people this, like you think you are gonna boost posts on Facebook and Instagram instead of doing the basics and somehow build a business. It's just not gonna work. You cannot run ads, cold Facebook ads, with fancy targeting or whatever core audiences you think you have and somehow pull that off.
And what is normal? Oh, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, I'm getting a ton of likes and comments and shares. You wanna see my impressions? Patrick, let me tell you the impressions I'm getting. Impressions? Impressions? You're not in business of impressions. There are no impressions that come spitting out of an ATM machine and pay for the ads.
Ah, it gets me fired up. So people wonder where the starving artist moniker come from and I'm looking at Elizabeth. Thank you for that, Elizabeth on Instagram. She's like, yeah, I spent a bunch of money on Facebook ads and I lit it on fire. Trust me, I know, I know. I've done it myself. I get it.
Every time somebody comes on these calls and they tell me that they have done this successfully, which is now getting to be like a weekly basis, it causes me to cringe inside. This is what I picture every time these people say this to me, and I'm sorry if you were the ones that did. I still love you, but this is how I picture it.
I picture a morbidly obese person saying that the one thing they want in this world is to be fit and healthy. They're saying this to me while sitting in their bathrobe on a couch with a half-eaten cheese pizza box rested on their fat stomachs and the cell phone's in their hand, and they're saying, Patrick, I wanna be fit.
Don't worry. I'm gonna get fit and healthy. No, I don't I need to get my butt off the couch. No, I'm not gonna put the pizza down, and no, I'm not gonna start exercising. I'm just gonna boost this post. I'm just gonna boost this post. You wanna see how many impressions I'm getting? Don't get me started on impressions.
I mean, do you, do I, does anybody know someone that is fit and healthy that does not watch what they eat, work out regularly, and try to keep their vices at bay, to do the best of their ability to keep the vices that they know... That person does not exist. Just like earlier, that person does not exist that has had a great deal of success in their art career in the first two months, or three years even.
Like it takes time. So another idea, okay, I hear from artists who were able to be successful in the first five years of their career, I mean, it's just the weight loss example, or the person that gets the instantaneous success, or the person's seen success with their Facebook ads. It does not exist. It does not exist.
It will never exist. I love, I love this Henry quote. What's his last name? Henry. I'm so bad with names. Hold on. I feel like I'm hacking it. I think it's Henry Miller. Yeah. American author. "In this age which believes there is a shortcut to everything, the greatest lesson learned is the most difficult way in the long run is the easiest.
" And that guy wrote that quote, I mean, I think that guy died in the 1980s. So he had to have written that in the 60s or 70s. Imagine what he would say about today's day and age. I see these folks. They're coming onto these things and they're trumpeting the course, especially the one on Facebook ads and targeting, and how great this is, and how wonderful it's gonna be for their business.
And I just wanna stop them. I wanna say like, look, I've been there before, okay, I know this is not gonna work for you. Please stop. And truth be told, on courses, I always have this memory whenever I think of courses. But early on, I went and saw my grandma. And she lives far away. She lived in Hawaii. We lived in California.
So we had to fly out there. So my dad grew up and I'm the oldest grandkid, so she's gonna give me this awesome gift. And she's like, Patrick, and she's laughing when she tells this. "I have a special course for you." But she's laughing when she tells me this. And I'm like, what is she laughing at? She's like, "I bought it online" and they're not online.
"I bought it off the TV commercial." And this was back, this was like 30 years ago. So she saw some sort of infomercial or something and bought this thing. And it came in like a plastic container with all these cassette tapes. And she's like, so she starts telling me about, she's like, "It's called Mega Memory.
" And I was like, Mega Memory? What does that do? She's like, "It's a special hack." Or she wouldn't have said hack then, but you know. It's a special trick such that you can have incredible memory and remember everything. And I actually Googled it and still saw it. It's still a product.
And it's called Mega Memory by this guy, Kevin Trudeau. And it teaches you how to memorize things. And I saw that and I was like, "But grandma, why is this so funny?" She's like, "I can't remember where I put it, Mega Memory. "I can't remember where I put it.
" I thought about that today and it made me laugh. And it's like, I'll always remember my grandma with that look on her face, smiling, like she bought the Mega Memory tapes to grow her memory. Then she, you get the irony. But the funny thing is things haven't changed in 30 years. She bought a course back then and didn't finish it.
And what does everyone do today? They buy a course and they don't finish it. I'll always remember my grandma with that smile, though. It really makes me laugh. Anyway, I'm not anti-course. I'm definitely not anti-learning. And I'm especially not anti-Facebook ads. Quite to the contrary. I am anti-shortcuts, silver bullets, and anti-lack of perspective.
So let's get out of the negative title of this thing, how your business is gonna fail, and let's get on to how we're going to succeed. How art really sells. And I thought about, I'm always using my fishing analogies and I'm trying to steer away from the fishing analogies 'cause I'm a complete imposter.
I go fishing like once a year, if I'm lucky, like I have all these fishing analogies, but we've covered the basics. If you wanna stand a chance at running paid traffic, and I understand why everyone does it. It's the shortcut, it's the easy route. We hear so many impressive things about how well are people doing, and you can target these high net worth buyers, and it's so easy and you don't have to do anything.
Like it's extremely alluring. But you're never gonna
make it that way. And I use the example of 1,000 people, I said earlier. Like one out of 1,000 people. You get in on cold traffic, you target your ads, you reach 1,000 people. So you spend the money to reach 1,000 people. And let's just say that one person that bought, they had their hand raised up out of the 1,000 people.
There were the only one that had their hand raised, and said, yes, I'm ready to buy. You got that sale. That's amazing. So what about the 999 that didn't buy? Are they worthless? No, they're not worthless. So, okay. Let's say out of that 1,000 people, only one was ready to raise their hand.
That's fine. And instead of going for the sale, we went for the email address. And you didn't get all 1,000 people, but you got 350. That would be an incredible conversion rate. We'll just use that number. Let's say you got 350 people. So you now have 350 people on your email list. So let's go to that one person that bought.
You've got the one person, they raised their hand, they were ready to buy. 349 people, though, had their hand down. They were not ready to buy. So what you've done by capturing their email address is essentially saying that person didn't have their hand up. I don't know why they didn't have their hand up.
I don't know when they're gonna have their hand up. I just know that their hand is not up right now. But by getting the email address, you now have the ability to obviously send them content and do regular marketing. But just to stay in our analogy, you have the ability to look in and see if they're raising their hand in the future.
So you start marketing consistently. You market consistently, you send them emails, you post to the socials, you run live broadcasts. Everything that I covered in the basics. You're doing the one-on-one showings. Your website is there to service them while you sleep. You don't know when they're gonna raise their hand.
Attempting to time things or understand when they're gonna raise their hand, when they're gonna be ready to purchase art, and just think of all the various different things. They have roommates, nine months from now they move, or two years from now they buy a second vacation house, or God forbid, they get a divorce and they're gonna get an apartment.
All of these various different things that happen in life. We never have any idea when they're gonna raise their hand and say, you know what? I'm actually ready to buy art now. And so you have to market to them consistently all year long. If you don't do that, you don't ever stand a chance to make it with any advertising at all, any paid traffic at all.
It doesn't matter whether it's warm or it's cold. You have to do the basics. You have to be marketing consistently all year long. Your job is to just get a bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger list of people that one day are gonna raise their hand. And then your job is, because of your marketing consistently, you are gonna have an offer in the water when they do raise their hand, and you'll never know when that is.
No one's smart enough to know when it is. And you've gotta do that for the next 30 years. That's the game, that's the game. And when you play it correctly, you're actually destined to win. When you run Facebook ads, you do so confidently knowing that you're gonna see an ROI. And it's even better than that.
The smart marketer knows, and the person that has the right perspective, and the person that's not looking for a shortcut, knows you can actually afford to lose money on those ads upfront. You can afford to spend $1,000 on ads in a month and lose 950 of it, because over the course of the year, out of that particular cohort, you're gonna make five or six or $7,000 because that's the way advertising works.
That is the way that paid advertising works. And yet I keep seeing these people who think you don't need this, and you don't need that. Just get on and target people on Facebook and Instagram. It makes me cringe. Don't do that. The hardest way, the most difficult way, the basics of what I'm suggesting is actually the easiest way over time.
Like Henry taught us. I would even go further and say, not only is it the easiest way in the long run, it's really the only way that works. It's the only way that works. Practice the basics. Sell some art from your website. Start running ads to warm traffic first, people that have interacted with you, not that don't know you, that have never met you.
Once you've mastered that, then you're ready to go to cold traffic on Facebook and Instagram or anywhere else. People that have never met you, never interacted with your brand, don't know who you are. That is the only way to make paid marketing pay is just consistent, consistent, unless you're selling your pieces for like $1.5 million.
In which case, maybe you're a little bit different. But that's never gonna happen. So that is the only way. Doing the basics. Plus consistent marketing. I love Facebook and Instagram ads. They're incredible what you can do. But if you're trying those things before getting the basics in place, you're gonna be lighting your money on fire.
Do not ever boost a post ever again. Save the money, go do something fun for yourself. Just don't light the money on fire. Done. I just saved you a whole bunch of money on that course. I just saved you your paid traffic expenses, your lost time, et cetera. Now on that note, I'm gonna go find my Mega Memory tapes.
Sadly, I, like my grandma, I've forgotten where I placed them, which is for the best 'cause I don't have that cassette player anyway so couldn't play the tapes anyway. As always, thanks for listening and have a great day. I'm gonna stop this one, too.