Your Marketing Assistant: From "One Size Fits All" to "Tailored to Your Artistic Journey" Inbox
In this episode of the Art Business Morning Show, Patrick and Nick of Art Storefronts discuss the comprehensive roadmap to effectively grow an art photography business. They emphasize the evolution of their approach, from being general practitioners to specialists, helping artists identify and solve specific business problems. Key points include the importance of having a website that meets best practices, maintaining a diverse range of price points, leveraging open editions, limited editions, and original artworks, and the strategic use of merchandise to cater to a broader audience. They also stress the significance of having samples, taking commissions, and ensuring social media profiles meet credibility standards. Additionally, they introduce the concept of a Marketing Assistant Light and detail the steps artists need to take to achieve minimum viable traction and audience, ensuring continuous growth through regular and consistent marketing. The episode highlights the importance of not missing major art-selling holidays and discusses Art Storefronts' new in-house marketing agency designed to guide artists through this step-by-step business plan.
Podcast Transcribe
Patrick Shanahan: All right, coming up on today's edition of the Art Business Morning Show: the latest evolution in the thicketed art storefronts. Specifically, what would Nick and I do if we were in your office right now and your new business partners? We're running your business from start to scratch. That's the ball game. Normally, I have people, normally the intro music—I don't have it today—so we just jumped in.
Nick Friend: One of the things that I like about this show is it is always representative of the evolution of our thinking, right? I think one of the things that we aspire to do as a business at Art Storefronts is to be the single best place in the world to grow an art photography business. That's essentially it. No matter what we're hacking at and what we show up to work on every day, we're getting better. Getting better exactly, right? Every day that is all we're working on.
Patrick Shanahan: How we approach things here doesn't mean we have 100% of it figured out. It doesn't mean we'll ever have 100% of it figured out. All we're saying is we are hacking at this every single day, making incremental improvements. Incremental improvements, and incremental improvements. One of the things that we are going to go over today is the latest evolution in our thinking, and we're going to get tactical on it. It's going to be interesting. You guys can leave comments or respond to the comments, but really, big picture: the analogy I like to give is this. This iteration represents like the first formal form of going from a general practitioner to specialists. Before, Art Storefronts was a general practitioner. Now, we're going from general practitioner to OB-GYN, ear, nose, and throat, dentist, gastroenterologist, and everything else. Meaning when you come in with your ailment, your ailment is not the same where you can just go to a catch-all doctor for everything. Sometimes you have to go to a specialist. For me, that's an easy way to think about it. I don't believe anything like this exists. I don't believe anything like this exists—a full-time roadmap on the internet anywhere for how creatives might actually grow a business year after year and make sure that they're on the right track. That's sort of my way of analogizing. I don't know if that resonates with you or not, but for me...
Nick Friend: Absolutely. Absolutely it does. When I say it doesn't exist, do you know why I so confidently say it doesn't exist? Because I've spent my entire career building companies from scratch, my own, and working with 6,500 artisans and photographers at Art Storefronts that are entrepreneurs and startups themselves. When you've gone through it and failed your butt off a ton of times, gotten burned, and wasted tons of time and money, you learn the lessons. Not everybody's problem is the same. They're not even close to the same. Depending on what path you're on and how early on you are, whether you've validated your art yet or not, whether you have a big enough audience yet or not, all of these things are different steps in the milestones of an art business. When you're at one stage, you either check the box or you don't. If you don't check the box, then you need to solve that specific problem before you can move on. If you move on and you're doing all these different things, this is where people get like they're working on the wrong thing. They wonder why they're not getting anywhere. They're like, "I don't get it. I watch this guy, and he's doing everything the same that I'm doing, but I'm not getting the results that that guy's doing." Well, let me tell you what the differences are between you. You have a different product. Your subject matter is different, your imagery is different. You, as human beings, are different. They may be better at social media and marketing than you. They may be thinking about it three times more than you are every single day. While you're going to sleep well at night, they're thinking. They've got ideas. They've got a notepad next to their bed, writing down ideas for the next day. Everybody's not the same. Every human being is completely different, and you will get different results based on your education, intelligence level, experience, drive, hard work, mindset, expectations, and whether your expectations are correct or not. There are so many little nooks and crannies to this. When you're saying to the most all-encompassing solution, if you're trying to build the most all-encompassing solution for building an art business, you've got to cover all these different things, and these are all specialties. All these little rabbit holes and problems. When you were saying like the ear, nose, and throat, you've got to be that good at each one of these areas, and you've got to be able to identify what these are. That's what we've gone into, and it is no joke. At the end of the day, how many more people are we going to help, Pat?
Patrick Shanahan: Yes, because what do we see as a big theme? People are working on the wrong problems, and they don't know what their problem really is. They don't know what their problem really is. Step number one is you've got to know what your problem is. Our plan helps you understand and learn what that is. Once you know what it is, you should only be spending your time on what's going to fix that problem. Otherwise, what you're working on makes no sense. The trajectory of your business is not going to go anywhere. You need to work on what's specifically your problem right now, not the guy you're watching down here as an inspiration's problem. He's got different problems than you. You've got to solve your problem, and you need to know what it is first.
Nick Friend: To add just a bit more color to that, in addition to what you just said, the only other pertinent point is it's about how quickly you can execute through these steps. What this map represents is your business. Your art photography-created business is in the best shape possible, such that all you need to focus on is regular and consistent marketing, and the business will grow year after year after year. It's guaranteed. It's not even up for debate. It's guaranteed. The reason is because you've been through this map, and you've been through this sprint. While this should have been taught in art class when you took art classes, it should have been taught at photography school. It should have been taught in any creative school. It never was. Where it has been taught is all over Silicon Valley and in every single startup incubator. If you went to a VC and got venture capitalists and got funding for your business, they have their version of this path nuanced for your business. What we have done is taken those concepts and made the path for the art of photography business. At the end of this path, which we are going to walk you through the linear steps, you are on to regular marketing, and the business will grow year after year after year. It's that simple. It's not any more difficult than that. We're going to share, and Nick and I are going to pontificate and articulate what it is. I have the ability to share this map on Facebook. I obviously don't have the ability to share that map on Instagram, and I apologize for that. It's Instagram's limitations. If you want to pop over to our Facebook page or to our YouTube channel, you can do so, but don't worry. I'm going to articulate it. We're calling it the Marketing Assistant Light. This path can be thought of as a marketing assistant that you're bolting into your business. What we're saying is you start on this journey. The end of this journey is you are ready to go. Your entire business is set up to grow. You have a product the market wants, and you just have to do regular marketing. The first step in all of this is getting your website live. Step number one in the pack, very, very simple: get your website live. We have advocated for years and years and years some initial best practices there: logo, about me page, media types, pricing, some issues like that. Where we've updated our thinking recently speaks to the evolution that we have in thinking. We study the data. We get to see the ones that are the most successful. Why are they the most successful? What are they doing that other people are not doing? The next step in the map is website meets best practices. As you guys are listening to this, for those of you that have websites, if you don't have a website, you need to get a website.
Nick Friend: They need to get a website.
Patrick Shanahan: But if you do have a website, I want you to audit yourself based on how we are articulating what is going on in this box. We are titling this "website best practices," and again, this is taken from data of those that are selling incredibly well. This is just math. There is zero room for emotion in this whatsoever. We are saying that the best e-commerce operators and website operators in this space all understand these rules and do not break these rules. I'm talking about the ones that are truly maximizing their business. You might be able to find some people that are making over $500,000 a year, and they might not be doing some of these things, and that's okay for them because they've reached that level. But guess what? If they did some of this stuff, their business would grow faster in our estimation. Number one: we are advocating in terms of website best practices, every website needs to have price points under $100, price points from $100 to $1,000, and price points above $1,000. This is like a little bit of a sliding scale, a baseline judgment on why you need these price points. If you're someone that's selling at $5,700 and $10,000, the argument still works. You need to have a price point over $50,000. The reason is the socioeconomic bell curve. Every Art Storefronts follower on Instagram, on Facebook, watching on Facebook, watching on Twitter, they fall into the socioeconomic bell curve. We all do. On one end of the scale, the low-net-worth individuals, right? They don't have a lot of money, they can't purchase anything, but they are still valuable human beings and awesome people. You have lower middle class, middle class, upper middle class, and high-net-worth individuals. That is the socioeconomic bell curve that every business has followers and potential customers in. If you don't have a price point that speaks to all of those people, you will never see the full ROI of your marketing endeavors and abilities. You'll never see it because you don't have a price point for everyone. If you're missing and you can't sell to any of the people that are lower on the socioeconomic bell curve, you do not get a beachhead into those people's homes with your products and services. You're not top of mind to those folks. The socioeconomic bell curve is not a fixed entity. There are people that slide up it and down it, and that will be the case for your entire life as you grow this business year after year after year. The pricing is critical. Oh, by the way, there are some people in your ecosystem that, for them, buying something for $50,000 is like buying something for $500. They don't care. It's not the same for them. When I was a kid, Microsoft was exploding in the stock exchange for the very first time. Bill Gates became the richest man in the world. Everyone was saying the analogy: if I sat on Nick's couch and a quarter fell out of my pocket, for that same thing to happen for Bill Gates, the quarter would be worth $387,000. That was the line back then. The point is, the pricing is relevant. I know it scares you in your mind, and you're like, "What are you talking about? Put something for $50,000 in my store?" I'm only recommending that if you're selling higher-ticket items, but have something for $5,000 to $7,000 or $10,000, way more than you think. There are people that will buy it because they do not have the same socioeconomic outlook that you do. No one ever tells anybody that.
Nick Friend: There's additional reasons too. Another way of thinking about it, guys, is that if you have 100 emails on your list—I'm just using that, right? You obviously need to have way more than that. If you have 100 emails on your list, you could break that into percentages of these socioeconomic brackets that Patrick is talking about. There's probably only three to five people on there that are in that upper bracket. There's going to be a big tranche that is below that. Maybe there's 10 or 15 that are in that thousand price point, $500 to $1,000 price point bracket. That's it out of the 100. The rest are going to be lower-budget people. When you're looking at your list, people tend to think, "Oh, hey, I've only sold higher price points. My whole list, who would join my list unless they were one of those people? Who would follow me on social media unless they could afford my work?" Let me break it to you. You've got all these people on there, and we're not saying this as a guess. We have proven this. We've proven this with people selling high price points. I'm thinking of somebody in particular where we were trying to get him to offer some merch and do it in a very high-class way. He launched calendars, and he sold $12,000 of calendars. He was floored. He was floored. These were really nice art calendars that we have automated fulfillment for at Art Storefronts. He launched them, and he just couldn't believe it. He's like, "Dude, I sold $12,000. I made this extra money." He didn't offer anything else on the merch. Now he's looking at everything, right? He's like, "Wait a minute. I didn't realize that those people were there." For years, Pat, he was offering nothing to the vast majority of people on his email list and in his social following. He simply released the lower-priced item in a very classy, elegant, expensive sort of way for that item, and he crushed it. Crushed it. It was amazing.
Patrick Shanahan: As a final point, Debra was asking, "Should I put it on a dedicated page?" It doesn't matter if you put it on a dedicated page or not. This is just a mathematical formula. You have to have the price points for all of these people. Especially on the high end of things. When we talk about the very high end of things, when you go to a car dealership, in the middle of the car dealership is the glass box, right? You have to go in and talk to the annoying finance person that tells you what your payment is going to be. You're in there for four hours, and all you want to do is just drive out with a damn car. What do they have in the glass box? It doesn't matter if you're a Toyota dealership or a Mercedes dealership. They have the six-figure crazy car. It is whatever it is. It's the Mercedes Brabus or the Mercedes M63 two-door convertible SLR or the Toyota TRD, whatever it is. Those cars are in there for a reason. Yes, they're the nicest cars, and they're the most expensive purchases, but do you know what else they do? There is a psychological phenomenon called price anchoring. What we do as human beings is we are attempting to validate why we are making a purchase at this dealership. Why the purchase that we're making is okay. If we're buying the most expensive thing in the dealership, all of our common sense says, "Why am I buying the most expensive thing at a dealership? I can't afford the most expensive thing at a dealership. I'm frugal. I would never spend this much money." When you see that car in there for $120,000, you anchor onto that. Then you realize the car that you're buying at $80,000, $70,000, $60,000, $50,000 is actually a good deal. This also happens in your art store. There's this piece in there for $25,000, and you're like, "Whoa, that thing's beautiful. It's huge. I love it. It's incredible." But it now makes me feel pretty good about that purchase I'm making for $5,000. When we say this is just a formula and it's just math, these are truths that have operated in retail, whether online or offline, for years and years. Yet, everyone breaks them. Everyone breaks them because they think somehow art is special or different or something else. That's on the price front. We can get more on that later. The next is you need to have a combination of open editions, limited editions, and originals. Obviously, there are ways you have to get creative on this. In terms of photography, it's a little bit more straightforward. In terms of paintings, there is an original. It is very easy to do both. There are a whole number of reasons why this works. One, it gives you a spread of price points. Two, there's additional scarcity in limited editions. There's additional scarcity on the originals, and it gives a range of options. How many artists and photographers are breaking this? They don't have any of either. How many of the snobby ones at the top just have the limited editions and no open editions? One of the things that infuriates me so hard that I honestly lose sleep over this at night is, "I can't have open editions. If I sell a bunch of open editions, the limited editions and the original holders will think it's going to cheapen the work." No. All it does is make the holder of the limited edition or the original even more valuable because there's all of these prints in which they own the original. Who's giving this advice? Who's giving this advice? People who have never sold anything or galleries. That's ridiculous.
Nick Friend: You're totally right. It's just insane. There's a question on Facebook from Cheri. She said, "Does merchandise count as having something under $100, or should it be original artwork?" It does not need to be your original artwork. Your original artwork should be your highest-priced item. It's other items like merchandise that allow you to get under that. The merchandise is the easiest way to get there.
Patrick Shanahan: Step number one, you have to obey the pricing rules. If you're in some sort of situation and you're not partnered with us or you don't have merch, you're not going to do that, then technically, you could do it with smaller size works or cheap paper prints or something along those lines. Step one is you need to have it. Where this tailors right into merchandise is merchandise just works so well on a number of different fronts. One, it enables you to hit all these price points. Two, not everybody is ready to buy wall art all the time. I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's a fact. Not everybody is ready to buy wall art all the time. Rather than not everybody is ready, it's like most people aren't. That's a better way of saying it. Most people aren't in the market for wall art right now on your list. Again, I'll go back. I asked you this question like a month ago. We were talking, working through a lot of this with our team. Out of 100 people on a given artist list, 100 people, how many of that 100 actually need a piece of art right now?
Nick Friend: Two or three.
Patrick Shanahan: Two or three. You're sitting there, and you're emailing, bam, bam, bam. You're putting things out on social
media, and everything is about buying art, buying art, buying art. You're sitting here, and you're like, "I've got all these followers, and I've got this email list." Dude, there are two or three people that are even in the market for that right now, maybe. The rest don't have open wall space, or they don't need it. Oftentimes, with the marketing that we teach, we're getting people to buy your art when they don't have a wall. They're finding a wall space or creating one, taking something off the wall because they fall in love with you and your art. They get an emotional connection, and that works. The reality is you have to understand that really, let that sink in. You're marketing something constantly, and very few people are actually in the market for it. That's where the merchandise items change everything because they're impulse items. They're gift items. Somebody could literally buy it the second you offer it. You market it, they see it, they like it, they're like, "I'm buying it right now," and they literally check out on the spot, and you get a sale. You're giving yourself a way to have 100 out of 100 people on your email list in the market for that item rather than three. These are big numbers. These are big mistakes that artists make. They're like, "I don't know why the business isn't moving," and all this stuff. It really comes down to math and these physics. You're not thinking about it right. You don't realize that that's actually what's going on. There's nothing wrong potentially with your email list. It's just that the numbers are not in your favor, especially when you're smaller and starting out and you just don't have a big audience yet.
Nick Friend: Where this has played out in real time and right in front of my eyes recently is this guy's got a little bit of a political context to him, so I don't worry about the political context. Just look at what this guy's doing. It's the My Pillow guy. The reason I think this guy's hilarious is because somebody dressed up as him for Halloween, and it was the funniest thing you've ever seen. That guy started out selling pillows. Do you know what he realized? Not everybody needs a pillow all the time. Then he started selling sheets, then he started selling towels, and now he's selling slippers. He's adding all of these various different items into his store. His bread and butter is still the pillows. He still wants to sell the pillows, but now he's got a bunch of items to sell to everyone else that doesn't need pillows in that moment. What his mental thinking is, "I need to get the highest ROI out of my marketing endeavors and activities as possible. How am I going to do that?" It's very hard to do that with the one-tone, one-trick.
Patrick Shanahan: Every business owner eventually gets to that point, right?
Nick Friend: Yes. This is the logic. My point is these are just rules that all of these other successful entrepreneurs in all these other industries already know, and no one has explained it clearly and succinctly to artists and photographers. That's what excites me about this.
Patrick Shanahan: In addition to that, you guys, when you understand you're in this business for life, you are going to be creating for life. You can't turn your switch off. You're going to be selling for life, well into retirement and beyond. You play the long game. When you play the long game, you realize there is nothing more effective that you can do than get somebody who is not ready to buy wall art right now a product in their hand of your work. Every day that they look at that product, they're going to be reminded of you. That product goes places that your emails can't, that your Facebook and Instagram posts can't, that ads can't. It is with them all the time. Guess what happens? They move out of their mother's basement, or they buy a vacation home, or they move out to the country. Because that piece of merch was sold and they're thinking about you when that wall space opens up, guess who's top of mind? Guess who's top of mind?
Nick Friend: The one gentleman we were talking about with the calendar, he just went from 200 homes in town to 3,000 homes in town. You're on the walls in 3,000 homes in town. Do you know how powerful that is? Do you have any idea how powerful that is? When you don't have this activated, what we're saying is you lack the ability to get the highest ROI out of the marketing spend that you have this year, next year, the next five years, the next decade, the next two decades. It's that simple. It's that simple, and it's a profound statement.
Patrick Shanahan: Then you see it in the context of the fact that Valentine's Day is coming up here, but the marketing is kind of baked by now. One of the biggest art-selling holidays of the year. You can't miss it. You can't miss these. Then we have three big art-selling holidays in the next 30 days. In the next 30 days, three more. After that, you've got Mother's Day. You've got these different things you need to promote. These things are almost back to back. You can't miss these things. You've got your entire list of people that you're going to market to on each one of these. Are you giving yourself the maximum opportunity to make sales on these different big art-selling days? They're all here. If you had Valentine's Day and you didn't have a good enough Valentine's Day, check yourself on all of these things and make sure that you're appealing to the widest audience possible. Make sure that on these next three big art-selling days over the next 30 days, you are properly set up and that you're going to take advantage of all of them. If you keep letting these things pass you by, it's always such a big learning lesson, Pat. They're gone. They don't come back. You can't get those dates back.
Nick Friend: If you want to know what the best-selling artists that we know on our platform, selling hundreds of thousands of dollars of art a year of products a year, with their images on them, they don't miss any of these. They don't miss any of these. Do you know who's not making money? The ones who keep missing these. Valentine's Day, gone. Didn't make any sales. Gone. Didn't do anything. Didn't do any marketing. Wasn't prepared. Doesn't have an audience. Business going nowhere. Next three big art-selling holidays are in the next 30 days, guys. You can be making sales on these. You have to be doing that.
Patrick Shanahan: The merch pivots into the need to have turned on order bumps and one-click upsells. These are not the terms that I came up with or Nick came up with. These are the terms the interwebs came up with, and we are stuck with them, and they are confusing. Let me just explain them succinctly. I come to your website. I add something to my shopping cart. Before I go to the final checkout page, I am presented with an offer. "Hey, Patrick, do you want to add such and such to your order for an additional $40, $50, $60, $700, $500?" You can click one button. It's added to your shopping cart, and you check out. That is the one-click upsell or the order bump. I don't even know which one's which. I always get confused. After you check out, you put in your credit card details, boom, you're redirected to a confirmation page. The confirmation page says, "Thank you so much for your order. I can't wait to ship it to you. Thanks for doing business," all of that. By the way, do you want to add this to your order for another $20, $30, $40, $50, $60, $70, $80? They can click one button and add that to their order. It's two places where you're inserting an additional offer. This is so fundamental and important to growing a business. This is so fundamentally important to having a website set up correctly. When was the last time you were in a grocery store or the electronics store or the hardware store? While you were waiting in line, you're snaked through these rows. You're at the hardware store, and they're trying to sell you cell phone cords and fly swatters and duct tape and ice cream and cookies and beef jerky and all these things you didn't know you needed. Essentially, all it is is an opportunity to increase your AOV.
Nick Friend: What is AOV, Pat?
Patrick Shanahan: Average order value. These things take two seconds to turn on. Oh, by the way, that's why merch is so important because merch works so fundamentally and incredibly. What ends up happening is a thousand shoppers come through that hardware store on a Saturday. Out of the thousand, 200 are availing themselves of one of these various things. Instead of each shopper being worth $10 on average, each shopper is worth $15.60. Patrick, that's not that much money. Okay, now do a thousand a day, 365 days a year for the next 10 years, and tell me what that number is. It's fundamentally significant to a business. This is again an example of not something that is new. It's just not something that's been articulated to artists and photographers. It's just not. Very, very important. Next, you have to take commissions as an artist or a photographer. When I say take commissions, you don't need to take them, like actually do them. You need to be open to the solicitation of them. The reason for this is, as artists and photographers throughout the course of your career, you're going to inevitably end up trying different subject materials. It's what we formally call pivoting. Trying out a new style. The mindset here is you're always looking for a style of art that you can release that significantly outperforms the style of art that you're currently creating. This is something that our most successful artists just have baked into their DNA, and they do it all the time. They're constantly trying new things because they're looking for that new latest and greatest thing. When you open yourself up for commissions, there's a whole bunch of people that love what you do, that love the style that you have, but for whatever reason, what you've created is not for them. When you open yourself up for commissions, you get to hear about what it is that they actually want, that they're ready to pay money for. This information is so insanely valuable, I can't even begin to tell you. With this intel at your fingertips, you might just find your next style. You might just find your next biggest idea. In addition to giving you an additional way to monetize the marketing you are doing. "Hey, Nick, I love some of the pieces that you're doing, but none of it's working for me. But you know what? I love parrots, and I need some parrots in my bathroom. I think if you painted parrots in your style, it would be phenomenal." Then you go and you paint the parrots. Then the next thing you know...
Nick Friend: Can you hear me okay?
Patrick Shanahan: Yeah, it was just cutting out for a second. I know sometimes I get calls. You create the parrots. Nick, you would have never created parrots. You don't like parrots, but you created the parrots, and this hung up in my bathroom. I had this great little decor in there, like Bishop Tropical. You shared it on your social media. Then the next thing you know, 50 people send you a message, "What were those parrots that you created? Can you tell me more about the parrots?" Whatever it might be, you have to keep yourself open to those opportunities of discovery. If somebody was in the audience raising their hand with their cash above their head, saying, "I need art, I need art," would you take it? It's a pretty good place to start. That's on the commissions.
Nick Friend: That's on the commissions.
Patrick Shanahan: The final thing from website best practices: you have to have samples on hand for everything that you're selling. If you don't have a sample on hand for everything that you are selling, you are breaking every rule imaginable. If you offer a fine art paper print, you need to have a fine art paper print. If you offer a canvas print, you need to have a canvas print. If you offer metal, so too with acrylic, so too with wood. Guess what? You need to have these even if you're not selling them. What do your buyers not know? The differences between any of these media types. What are the buyers, your potential buyers, relying upon you to be?
Nick Friend: The subject matter expert, Nick.
Patrick Shanahan: Exactly. One of the biggest misses that's happened over the last 10 or 20 years since e-commerce has become a big thing is nobody ever shows their product. I've got coasters right here. Nobody ever shows their product. They've got their website, and they have their static image, and they have a drop-down menu that's like canvas or metal or paper, fine art paper, Honda Mule fine art paper, whatever. Nobody cares. What is that? I don't know what that means. Nobody cares. Show them the product. You don't even show the finished product to a customer. That's the vast majority of art websites. They literally don't even show the front, sides, and back. You don't even know what it is. They go on social media, they don't even show, "Oh, here is the item." It's called merchandising. "Here is the item, guys. I'm running a special on these right now. These coasters come in sets of four. They're amazing. They're $59 a set. Here's how thick they are. They've got a really nice cork backing which makes them not slide even if they're wet." Things like that. Look at Patrick showing the metal prints, front and back. Nobody shows their products.
Patrick Shanahan: Unless you think, "I can't do that. I'm just getting started. It's too expensive," here's all five media types. Do you know what this costs? $170. Done. Do you know what size these are? They're US paper size, a little bit different based on the image. Do you know what I can do with this, Nick? I don't put this in my car. If I just sold a piece and I'm going to your house to hang it, I'm going to walk in with all five of these just in case you ask about metal, acrylic, or wood. Nick, you've never seen wood. How cool is this? I hand it to you. I show you that I'm the subject matter expert. You didn't know this. You don't even like wood. Nick doesn't even like wood. He doesn't want to offer it, but I like wood because my neighborhood is all about keeping up with the Joneses. I have to have some of these wood prints too, and it's perfect for my lake house. You're like, "Oh yeah, I've got wood. Wood's awesome. Check this out. The detail is amazing. If you're interested, we can do it." I can take this with me anywhere. The same goes for the merch. If you're selling it, you have to have it.
Nick Friend: That's it. This is a detailed feature that we have on our storefronts that we don't talk about enough. We have merchandising videos that we made. We took all of the prints and the merchandise, every single item: canvas prints, metal prints, mugs, just go down the list, and got a professional videographer and made amazing product videos. Like what we're doing here when we're showing it off, we have that in a professional studio. They're on every artist's website automatically. That way, when somebody comes to your website, you don't even know. It needs to be like a robot working for you 24/7. When they're looking at a metal media type, we want merchandising to happen on the spot. We know that consumers don't even have a clue what metal is. They don't even know. Trust me, start asking them. They'll be like, "Yeah, I think I've seen it before." Do they know exactly what it is? No. How many people will buy something that they don't know exactly what it is, especially when it's several hundred dollars or more? Almost nobody. If you don't have these, you should have videos of every single one of your media types. We make it easy for our customers to have it, but that's why we have that. You've painstakingly done the marketing to get that person on your site looking at your image that they like, that they might buy. You need everything that you can to get them over the finish line. If they don't know what every single item that you have is and what it looks like, the odds of them buying it are very low.
Patrick Shanahan: We're going to keep moving. One, you have a website. The website is live. It takes credit cards. Your stuff is up. Two, your website meets best practices as we articulated them. Guess what? Until these two things are finished, that's all you're working on. That's it. You're not doing anything else. You need to get these things done. The next is, do your social profiles meet best practices? It is our argument that as artists and photographers in today's day and age, your Instagram profile and to a lesser extent, your Facebook profile, but still very important, need to meet a minimum credibility bar. Here's what happens. You go and you get somebody's attention through your marketing efforts. Somebody recommends you to a friend. Instantly, do you know what that potential buyer is going to do? They are going to your social profiles to check you out. It is the credit check of the art and photography world. No different than if you saw some bigwig who was spouting off about this and that, you go and look them up on LinkedIn. No different than a buyer on the journey hears about some incredible knife and goes and reads the reviews on Amazon. There are steps in the buying process that are fundamental to that final sale. If you don't meet the credibility bar, the minimum credibility bar, you are losing some portion of that sale because what the buyer is saying is, "This person's not legit. They don't understand the game. They have nothing on their social profile. It's not up to design specs. The posts are not the right type of posts. There's hardly any posting at all." It kills your deals.
Nick Friend: No one wants to partner with you. No one wants to do anything. You're trying to do lead generation and different things like that. No one wants to do anything with you because you don't look like a real art business.
Patrick Shanahan: Unless you think this is something that applies to regular consumer artists, Nick and I have had the benefit of doing this for a long time. If you've been doing this for a long time, you read all the reports that come out in this industry. In this industry, there are two reports that come out all the time. There is the Art Basel UBS Global Marketing Report and another from an insurer out of London called the Hiscox Report. These two outfits survey the high-net-worth individuals that everybody wants to sell to, the people that are buying $50,000 works and above. Every year over the last seven, they survey all these high-net-worth buyers. Every year over the last seven weeks, we watched time after time after time, all of those people surveyed saying Instagram and Facebook made a major impact on their buying decision. It's happening at the top of the tree. It's happening at the bottom of the tree. You need to get the social profiles updated. You need to have them looking best practices. You need to have a minimum amount of followers, what we call the minimum credibility barrier. You need to have posts that look like you're active and you're engaged in the right type of post. Once that's done, we move up to the next stage in our map. The next stage in our map is, does your business have what we call in the startup world MVT? MVT stands for minimum viable traction. We have a loose value here because it needs a value. Have you made $1,000 in total sales? It's best to ask yourself, have you made $1,000 in total sales not over the course of your art-selling life, but in the last year? In the last year, if you've made $1,000 in total sales, it stands to reason you likely have a product the market wants. If you have a product that the market wants, you're on to regular marketing. Your job at this point is just regular marketing, and the business should grow year after year. That's a very simplistic definition of MVT, and there's a ton of nuance to it. We've already gone 37 minutes, and we'll cover these again in later detail. Let's assume you don't have MVT. You don't have that $1,000 in sales. The next question you have to ask yourself, and you can see the map says, "No, do not have MVT." Do you have MVA, Nick?
Nick Friend: Minimum viable audience.
Patrick Shanahan: Minimum viable audience. We're attempting to see whether or not what you've created and are attempting to sell will sell. Without it getting in front of enough eyeballs, you'll never know. We need to ensure that you meet the minimum audience gap, the minimum viable audience. We loosely define this as 250 people on an email list and 250 people on a social platform. We are acutely aware of how difficult it is to set numbers and make them be one-size-fits-all. There are some people who have 250 people on an email list, and some people have 10,000 people on an email list that are really not interested in their person's art at all. They're following them for a different reason. It's not set to rights. You need to have a minimum size audience on an email list and a minimum size audience on the social media platform. You could also argue if you're someone doing a ton of shows, you don't need to have either of those. The shows will tell you. The shows can offer a minimum viable audience. But guess what? One show isn't going to do it. It's probably at least five to seven. It will tell you. Once you have the minimum viable audience, you go instantaneously into a 30-day rapid test. This 30-day rapid test is a playbook we have that is laser-focused on selling activities. Are we just selling wall art in these, Nick?
Nick Friend: Nope.
Patrick Shanahan: What are we doing?
Nick Friend: We're hitting all the price points. We're throwing the book at it to see if you really have traction, if you really have a product that can sell. This is where most artists spend years of their life. You look at their art, and it's not that their art is bad, but the subject matter is a market size that's like the size of a pea. You're a great artist, you're super talented, everything's great there, but do you realize your market size is probably like a thousand people out there? Maybe. How much time, money, and effort are you going to have to put in to find all of those people sprinkled across the globe? Why don't you experiment with stuff that has a much broader market size? We've got to throw the book at it to see if you have traction.
Patrick Shanahan: Correct. We're going to have to cover this in depth a whole bunch of other times later. Let's say we completed the 30-day test. We're looking for that minimum viable traction. We were in a 30-day test. Did we sell $1,000 worth of art? If the answer to that question is no, it's time to go create some new art. Essentially, it's time to pivot, try some new subject material, and then we go right back to the test again. We go right back to the test. This is just a repeatable formula until you get there. If you don't have the minimum viable audience, if you don't have enough people on your email list and social, or you're not doing shows, guess what? Then we have a different problem to solve. We have to get you the minimum viable audience. We have a way that we teach it through this. We work on giveaways. We have some charity partnership marketing techniques and tactics we've developed. We encourage in-person shows. We need to get more people on your email list. I can go into the details a thousand different ways, but that's the plan right there from start to finish. I believe there are a whole bunch of artists and photographers out there who have not gone through this step by step. They're out there working on something, spinning their wheels, going, "Oh my gosh, I'll never make it." It's because you don't have a plan. You don't know where you are on this plan. You need to put yourself on the plan and execute it. Guess what? Every successful business does this. This is just how it goes.
Nick Friend: Well said. I love it. We're going to have to do a ton more articulation on this in the days and weeks and months ahead. One of the exciting things we've done as a business at Art Storefronts is we've launched—we don't usually ever talk about this—but we've launched an in-house marketing agency. The in-house marketing agency services just our customers. Before, we had a bunch of awesome products in the store that you can do. What we were telling our customers essentially to do is, "You don't have a map. You've never learned this map. Figure out where you are on the map and pick the service that's best for you." Now we've bundled all of them into just one product. It's this. You sign up, and you say, "I want the service." We audit everything that you have going on. We audit the business, we audit the social media, we make you be dead honest about your sales, we look at your site, and we say, "Here's where you are on the map. This is what we're going to work on this month. Then we're going to get to the next step, and then the next, and the next, and the next." You get stepped through this map until you come out on the very end, in which your only job is to continue marketing, and the business should grow year after year after year after year. That's the logic.
Patrick Shanahan: That's the logic.
Nick Friend: It's the first step-by-step business plan to grow an art business to the point where all of the odds are in your favor to grow, legitimately grow.
Patrick Shanahan: Where are most art businesses? I would say probably 90% or more of the people that are watching this right now, right?
Nick Friend: Correct.
Patrick Shanahan: They don't have traction. They don't have minimum viable traction. That's why your business feels like you're pushing this cart up a hill. Everything is uphill, uphill, uphill. I can't get anything to happen. What you want to have—it's a better word—is it's a tugboat versus a smooth sailor.
Nick Friend: Yes.
Patrick Shanahan: You want to go from being a tugboat to becoming a smooth sailor. You do that through this process of going through this path and ultimately ending up with better traction. Once you have traction for your art, that doesn't mean that every business is going to be exactly the same. There's a ceiling. This is a really important point, you guys. There is a ceiling on the subject matter you are selling right now. If I could show that to you—it's obviously an estimation—but what I mean is the subject matter that you have has a market size to it. Market size meaning, is it five people, five thousand people, five million people who are actually interested and have an emotional connection to the subject matter that you are either shooting or painting? That's your market size. There's also competition within there, but that's your ceiling. Your business will only sell as much, if you have traction, as that subject matter will allow. That's where everybody goes in a different direction. Every artist will have different outcomes depending on that. Over time, you want to get deeper and deeper traction by experimenting and things like that. This plan will help guide you along in that process so that you can continually make incremental steps to have a more successful art business.
Nick Friend: I think we wrap it up and leave it there and say it's early days. You're going to see us pounding this continually. I saw a comment on Instagram. Yes, we have a podcast. Yes, it's everywhere you find podcasts. Yes, it's called the Art Marketing Podcast, and it's awesome. We're proud of it.
Patrick Shanahan: Get on our email list too because I mentioned earlier, Valentine's Day, it's kind of already baked. You could do some last-minute marketing right now, but look, it's four days away. In the next 30 days after, there are three big art-selling holidays. Three. You can't miss them. You can't keep missing these things because when they're gone, you can't get those days back. They're gone, and demand is pulled out of the market because every smart artist and photographer out there is taking full advantage of them. These are in our marketing plan. If you request a demo, which you can do if you go to our website, artstorefronts.com, talk to our outreach team, and they'll tell you more about it and give you more guidance. If you're taking your business seriously, you have to stop missing these things. You have to be set up and equipped properly with a proper art gallery website that has the features and functionality designed to sell art. Everything else you're doing is wasting your time. You have to make sure you have a proper art gallery website, and then you have to have the right marketing plan so you're solving your marketing problem. You can't keep missing these big art-selling days. It's just a huge deal. You want to do what the most successful artists and photographers are doing. Stop missing these things. If you're on our email list, you will see that we're talking about them constantly. We just sent out an email this morning that the next one after Valentine's Day is like 10 days away, or it's like seven to 10 days away. It's right after. These things keep happening. The next 30 days, there are three. Hit them all. Hit them all. If you do that all year long, you're going to keep incrementally building your business, making steps in a positive direction, and that's the key.
Nick Friend: I like it. We've got a plan.
Patrick Shanahan: We've got a plan.
Nick Friend: There is no doubt. Thanks for the time. Thanks for listening, everyone, and as always, have a great day.