How to build an art gallery marketing strategy
Build a bigger online presence while automating the tasks that take time away from marketing and selling.
Marketing is all about making more people – your target audience specifically – aware of your gallery business, the types of artworks you sell, and the artists you represent. It’s also about targeting, engaging, winning and retaining art buyers.
By expanding and strengthening your online presence at a time when more art is being sold via websites and platforms like Instagram, you can benefit from the general shift to online and consolidate your brand’s digital identity to help drive sales.
Below, we outline the basics for how to build your presence online and remain front of mind among potential art buyers through marketing – and how to minimise the tasks that take time away from marketing and, ultimately, selling art.
Define your art gallery marketing strategy
The right art gallery marketing strategy can drive business growth and enable you to better engage with and nurture customers in the online arena. A strategy is broad. It details your business objectives and how various marketing activities can help you achieve them, who your audience is and how you’ll reach them and turn them into art buyers and retained customers.
To define and develop a strategy:
- Establish your short term and longer-term business goals
- Outline your objectives so you can test to see what is working and what isn’t
- Define your audience and segment them as necessary – do you need separate buyer personas?
- Bring together the digital assets you already have and see what can be repurposed or improved and what new content you can create to support inbound marketing activities
- Plan how you are going to create new assets to engage your target audience – what resources do you need? Do you need to outsource or use in-house support to create these assets?
- Choose how to best distribute your content – how can you reach your audience? This may be a combination of owned media (your website, blog and social platforms), paid media (advertising online, industry influencer activity), depending on what your budget allows, and earned media (content others share or write about you, which can include PR)
- Define your KPIs – these need to be measurable, and can include anything from your ratio of new to returning visitors to website conversion or email conversion rates
The most effective marketing strategy is one that closely aligns with your audience and business objectives.
Optimise your website for search and your audience
Website optimisation is a form of inbound marketing that helps you attract and convert a visitor into an art buyer. Through SEO and website optimisation generally, you can drive a higher number of relevant visitors to your website. If you have a physical gallery space, optimise your website to appear in localised searches while making sure it is also optimised to reach potential online buyers.
Your website should be structured in terms of the journeys your visitors/potential buyers go on – use website analytics tools to get a better understanding of these journeys.
Make it easy for them to source the information they need and encourage them to reach out and contact you or a colleague so you can nurture them and increase the chance they become a returning visitor.
Tell the story of your business through content marketing
Once you have a clearer picture of the buyer or buyers’ journeys, create content that meets their needs at every stage of the journey. This may be artist profiles or exhibition notes or information about fairs. In telling the story of your business, explore and expand on the artworks and artistic movements your gallery specialises in and the artists you work with. Tell the story of your gallery but also answer questions that your audience has.
If you haven’t already, start a blog. This will provide another platform on which to nurture your audience with the latest updates and stories, reach new audiences and share this content on other channels you use, like social media and email. If you are targeting different types of potential buyers, be strategic by generating content for each type of buyer.
The blog doesn’t need to promote your art gallery or artworks in a salesy way. Instead, it can discuss topics you/your audience find interesting. If you’re not sure what to write about, our blog on inspiring content ideas for your art gallery may help.
Keep front of mind through targeted social media and email marketing
Leverage your online networks and industry expertise to create original content that can be shared strategically to different audiences via platforms like Instagram and email. Automated email tools can make it faster and easier to segment your audience and send customised emails to specific groups.
To extend your online reach and remain front of mind for potential buyers/your audience, use social platforms to showcase artworks and your blog to provide more information on them. You can also partner with artists and influencers to extend your reach online. For example, if an artist you represent is exhibiting via your gallery at an event of fair, can you engage with relevant influencers to increase awareness?
Streamline the admin to spend more time on marketing and selling
Inventory management software can automate the processes you need to go through to keep your business running – from stock tracking to invoicing – while CRM software can make it easier to nurture customer/buyer relationships and market more effectively to this audience.
By finding a software solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems, you can streamline administrative tasks and free up more time to spend on marketing and selling to support business growth.
Cubist Cloud’s starter package is free and allows busy art gallery owners to test how this type of solution can work for you. To learn more or try the starter package, visit our start subscription package page.