Is it wiser to represent yourself or seek representation through galleries? How can you create a marketing strategy that aligns with your goals? Eric Rhoads answers in this episode of the Art Marketing Minute Podcast.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT of the Art Marketing Minute:
DISCLAIMER: The following is the output of a transcription from an audio recording of the Art Marketing Minute. Although the transcription is mostly correct, it is sometimes slightly inaccurate due to the recording and/or software transcription.
Announcer:
This is the Art Marketing Minute with Eric Rhoads, author of the Amazon best-selling book, “Make More Money Selling Your Art.” In the marketing minute, we answer your questions to help your art career brought to you by ArtMarketing.com, the place to go to learn more about marketing. Now, here’s your host, art magazine publisher, Eric Rhoads.
Eric Rhoads:
I want to tell you guys that you can send your questions to meet [email protected] or you can come live on the podcast during the marketing minute ask your questions. The other thing is I’m doing marketing Mondays now for my YouTube show art school live. It’s on YouTube and Facebook, and I’m answering questions there. And a lot of people are on there live too. So there’s a lot of options on our marketing and more to come. Whatever that means. Okay, so here’s the first question from Tim Matthews, who is near Myrtle Beach, North Carolina. I think that’s North Carolina, or is it south? Tim says, I’m a landscape painter. I’ve been painting for many years, and I want to use my passion to earn a good living. I’ve read your book on art marketing, and it’s a tremendous help. Thank you. In your opinion, is it wiser to seek representation, and sell through galleries? Or simply represent yourself? I’ve heard so many different thoughts on this. I’m not sure what to think I live near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, there doesn’t seem to be much of an art market here. So I assume self representing would mean focusing mainly on online sales. I’m learning more about the art market every day and trying to do and make the best career decisions. I can, Tim, you’re a rockstar man. Thank you for sending in a question. Tim. I, I was I was talking to somebody yesterday. And one of my big frustrations is that I teach art marketing and have taught art marketing for a dozen years. And a lot of people pay attention. But a lot of people don’t do what it takes. And sometimes they don’t do what it takes this because they just don’t want to do it. Right. They want the results. They want the money, they want the sales, they want the customers, but they’re not willing to do what it takes. And this person I was talking to yesterday, was saying, you know, I’m doing things that nobody else is doing. Because they’re not willing to do what it takes. And I think that’s true. So the, you know, the thing you have to understand is if you’re going to do your own art marketing. Well, first off, if you’re going to sell paintings at all, or paintings or drawings, or whatever your art is ceramics or photography, you have to understand that you have to make a lifetime commitment to marketing. As long as you intend to make your living from your art. You have to have a lifetime commitment to marketing marketing is not a one time thing. It’s not like, Okay, I’m gonna run an ad and then I’ll have all the customers I need for the rest of my life. It doesn’t work that way. I wish it did. It’s a matter of fact, it takes three to five years, five years, seven years, 10 years. And the reason I put that in different packages is that, you know, you kind of get to different levels of success. You’re building momentum. It doesn’t happen overnight. And you know, I’ve seen things happen overnight. I’ve orchestrated careers that happened overnight, but there’s a lot of money spent to be able to do that and it doesn’t always work. So you got to do it in a very thoughtful way. So the first thing I always tell people is spend 20% of your time on your marketing and when you’re first launching, build up your your inventory of paintings and then spend 100% of you Your time on your marketing for a while, because you know you have paintings, you don’t need to make more paintings right now. So spend all that time doing all the things you need to do now, even if you have a gallery, or even if you have an agent, which is another option you did not mention, you still have to do a lot of work, you cannot rely 100%. Imagine if you had 100% of your income relying on somebody else. And that person decided to leave decided to get sick decided to die, you know, something like that all of a sudden, you have no income, right? So you as the product manager, product creator, you have to always make sure that you’ve got something going on. And you’ve got to be managing your gallery relationships. And you might want to have other alternatives as well. A lot of people do, a lot of people will sell direct, but you have to work that out with your galleries, because there’s certain things you shouldn’t do. But the idea is that you want to be responsible for your career, and you want to be working it so no matter what you do, you’re going to be working now, getting to your heart of your question, is it wiser to seek representation than sell through galleries? I think the first thing is, you know yourself, you know yourself and you know, am I going to be disciplined enough to do what it takes? Am I going to be willing to spend the time it takes do I am I willing to spend the time studying now the good news is you read my book, thank you for that. And you at least are applying yourself. And so I’d say you probably have a good chance of success, because you’re, you’re you’re already taking the right kinds of steps. So the reality is, you can’t rely 100% on anything. So you really need to do both, right, you need to represent yourself. But you also need to consider representing yourself to galleries. Now, like I said, there is the option of an agent, there are people out there who are agents who can help you get into galleries help you build shows help you do a lot of different things, they’re going to take some percentage of your income, in exchange for that, in some cases, they’re going to ask you to pay them a flat fee up front to get get started. That’s okay, too. But I think that, if I were, if I were starting from scratch, I would probably say, do both. And I like to I’m in three galleries. I’m about to leave one of those galleries and upgrade to a higher level gallery. And and the reason I’m going to be leaving the gallery is going to be closing. And so it’s good opportunity, I don’t want to have more than three galleries because I can’t give them enough work. Sometimes it sells sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes that’s my fault. And sometimes that’s their fault. They always think it’s our fault. And and maybe it is maybe our paintings aren’t good enough. But you know, the reality is you want galleries who are going to be working at they’re going to be selling there, they’re going to be really trying to figure out how to do the best things for you. So I you know, and we all kind of go through this stage of first first level galleries, sometimes you have to get into a first level gallery before you can get into a second tier gallery or third tier gallery. And they’re not rated that way. But it kind of depends like if you know, a top tier gallery might be a New York gallery that carries, you know, Andrew Wyeth paintings. And to get in there, I mean, you you might have to be at that level and it might take you 10 years or 15 or 20 years or a lifetime to get there. So I think I would I would go for it. Get it getting into galleries, you know, I explained in my book, and that’s really an introduction process, you really don’t want to be approaching him directly. I don’t think so. I know how they, they feel about that. And that doesn’t usually work well with most of them, some of them don’t mind. But you want to just get to the point where you know you have you have some way that you can sell direct and you have some way you can sell to galleries. You know, my friend Chun Wong has a deal with his galleries is that anything under a certain size, he can sell direct. So he does the daily painting thing and he’ll you know, he’ll sell a painting every day. That might be an eight by 10, or a five by seven or something like that. But the bigger paintings go to his gallery, and of course the pricing changes for that. So I hope that’s been helpful. And let me know what happens. Reach out when you have your next question. Next we have a question from Evan crest in Tennessee. And sounds like we’re hitting the south this week. All right. We got North Carolina and Tennessee right next to each other.
Evan says how do I create a marketing strategy that aligns with my goals? Well, you know, it’s that’s a difficult question because Evan strategy is as determined by your goals, and tactics are determined by your strategy. So let’s say that your goal is to sell 30 paintings a year at $2,000, a painting net net, meaning that that’s what you keep, right? That’s not you know, if you’re selling them through the gallery, you still got to figure out how you’re gonna get $2,000 painting. So you, you know, that’s, that’s $60,000 in income, right? Minus whatever your expenses are internally. So you’ve got to ask yourself, what, how do I get there? Well, if you already are there, you already are doing it, then you already know how to get there, you just rinse and repeat, right? But maybe you’re doing half of that. And you’ve got to figure out okay, how do I double it? Or maybe you’re not doing any of it? And you got to figure out how do I get there completely. So it’s tough, you know, launching from the beginning is, is tough. But you know, everything is tough in life. And anything that’s good, requires some pain and some discomfort, and you’re okay with that. So, if strategy is your plan of action, it is tied to your customer. So let me just repeat that strategy is a plan of action, it’s tied to your customer. So you need to know who is my customer, who is likely to buy my paintings? Well, the best place to find that out is if you’ve sold paintings in the past, who has bought my paintings in the past, you know, I have a deal with at least one of my art galleries. And I say to them, Look, I want to know, I want to know everything about the buyer, I don’t need to know their name. Although I do ask them to send me a you know, an address and a name. So I can send them a note card and say thank you. And I guarantee them, I’m not going to try to sell them something different, or at least go around the gallery. And I send them a nice, thank you note, but oftentimes, I’ll if I could get a chance to call them, I’ll call him and I’ll just get to know him, I just wanted to thank you for buying my painting and tell me a little bit about yourself, and then just shut up and listen. Because, you know, you’ll hear well, I’m a retired executive from, you know, some company and, and my wife is a retired executive from this company, or are retired lawyers, or we work as lawyers or you know, whatever it is, and you try to, you know, try to get a little information like, you know, what is it about the painting that they love? And where is it going to hang? And what is it about them? And then if you talk to five or six or 10 or 20 customers, you’re gonna start looking for patterns? Is there anything in common? Well, the one thing in common is, it seems to be the people who buy my paintings all seem to be over 50. And they all seem to be professionals. And so that tells you something. And now the question is, and by the way, they all seem to live in this particular community. And that might be related to the gallery, or it might be they’re all on vacation in this particular community. And they’re coming from different places. So you want to learn these things so that you can kind of design your your strategy, your strategy includes your pricing, your packaging, your advertising, packaging, I know seems odd. But when I say packaging, it’s like the back of your painting. How are you going to do that? How do you deal with your customer service for customers? Meaning customers meeting galleries? How are you going to deal with customers discussions with customers themselves? Your follow up your customer retention, your internet plan, your customer engagement, your website, all that stuff? It starts with who your ideal customer is, what do they want? What do they need? Where do you find them? And what do you do to take action to get them to buy what was it that put them over the fence and decided to buy that? And it might have been some little thing like the story? Or it might have been the colors? Or it might, you know, there are a lot of different things. And so you just want to be looking for patterns? And then you know, how do I reach these people? How do I find them? How much repetition do I do to reach them and so on. Now, it’s best to have some background, some experience in a particular strategy, but you don’t always get that benefit. So you can do some research. And the research can help you for instance, somebody was talking to me about wanting to reach retired people. And, and so I you know, I said Okay, well let’s research retired people and we went through and said, you know, okay, how many people are retiring in America every year and how many people who are retired actually have any money? And there are it turns out there are a lot of a fluid people who retire former professionals. And so where do they live? How do you reach them? What kinds of things do they like to do you know, if somebody’s retired doesn’t mean they’re old. And old is a relative term anyway. You know, a lot of people who are rich early retirement age, we’ll buy a new house downsize and they’ll say, You know what, I want all new furniture. That’s what my wife did. We didn’t retire. But it’s like, we bought a new house. And she said, I don’t want the old furniture anymore. I want all new furniture. We’ve had the stuff for 30 years. So that’s the kind of thing that that you okay, if if you’re looking for somebody who’s buying new houses, when they retire, what area are they in? How do you reach them? Where are they going to go shopping? What, what kinds of things are they paying attention to? Where can you put your artwork on display? Are there restaurants that they’re going to, you know, if their high end restaurants than regular retired, people who are on fixed incomes and don’t have any money, aren’t gonna go to those high end restaurants. So be in the high end restaurants where the money is, or in the country club or at the golf club, or, you know, wherever. So try to figure out where people are, and where they want to go. Now I had an artist, he told me, my strategy is to help people who could not normally afford paintings, but I want him to own my artwork, because I can’t afford paintings. I said, Okay, how’d that go for you? He says, Well, I worked really hard at it for a year, and I didn’t sell anything. And he said, because nobody could ever afford anything. And you know, I wanted to tell him, I probably did tell him actually. And I think the idea here is there’s an old philosophy. And the philosophy is stand in the river where the money is flowing it, Tony Robbins said something like this, I was on stage. I mean, he was on stage. And he and he said, no matter how good you are, no matter how smart you are, no matter how good your product is, if you are serving a declining market, or if you’re in an area where nobody buys it, imagine that you’re selling heaters, portable heaters in I don’t know, Mexico or Tucson or something. Your chances of people needing portable heaters is going to be slim. You know, it’s kind of like the idea of selling ice cubes to Eskimos right. So I think that you want to look for places. So this guy needed to stand in the river where the money is flowing. Once he switched his mindset to it, they don’t have to be like me, they just have to be people who love my artwork and want to buy it. Well, that changes everything. Stand in the river where the money’s flowing. So you know, it really boils down to where are they buying homes where they frequently frequently, frequenting restaurants, stores, etc. And then there’s tactics and tactics are okay, how am I going to advertise? Where are we going to advertise how much money I’m going to spend? How much repetition? You know, am I going to do newspaper ads local? Am I going to do the art scene local things? Am I going to do national publications like fine art connoisseur plein air. And it’s going to involve a lot of different tactics, because you can’t just do one thing, you got to do multiple things, because one thing might not work and everything takes time. So just keep in mind that it just got to think all that stuff through. And you know, I have some marketing courses online on paint tube.tv and some things that I’ve done art Marketing Bootcamp, they’re helpful. And they might be able to answer some of those questions for you. But you know, you just got to you got to just jump in and try things. Anyway. That’s the marketing more than a minute. I hope it helps.
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