Now that people are more comfortable shopping online for luxury items such as art, investing in your gallery business to enhance your gallery’s online sales and marketing skills is a smart strategy.
You will need the right tools and skills to optimize your art gallery’s online presence to attract new art buyers and close more sales. The best place to start is refining and enhancing the digital experience your gallery provides to both discover and buy art.
In this article, we will look at strategies for your art gallery to differentiate your business in today’s art market. We will also explore areas where you might want to focus your efforts for online sales and marketing strategies.
How to differentiate your art gallery in the online art market
A key to online success is building into your strategy and communication plan a way to differentiate your gallery business from other art market players. That can be done through:
- Your artist roster
- Your gallery’s company culture
- A unique online art-viewing experience
- Gallery services you provide
- Your gallery’s brand story
As you plan how you can differentiate your gallery from other online art sales channels, ask yourself these questions to guide your strategy.
- What value can your gallery add that others cannot? Often these are little things that count for a lot with your buyers.
- What additional content can you promote online about your artists and gallery services to support an online sale?
- How can you weave storytelling into your art gallery online sales and marketing experience? This is how you make digital more human.
- What unique client insight can you leverage based on what you know about their art interests and past collecting habits? Consider surveying clients every year.
Using your gallery’s brand story online as a sales and marketing tool
To help make your art gallery distinctive from competitors, use a compelling gallery brand story that you continuously communicate over the long-term. Highlight the people, staff, and artists within your story to elevate the emotional connection art buyers form with your art gallery business.
Being clear about your gallery’s mission, values, and point of difference is essential to attracting new art collectors. You also want to regularly remind existing clients why they already love your gallery and artists.
A way to do this is to create 12 social media captions/posts that are purely a brand story message. Do this in a single setting for batch efficiency. Then, schedule them for each month throughout the year. This way, you can set it and forget it. You could also reinforce the message by using these texts you created for social media content and regularly incorporate them into your gallery newsletter.
Focus on getting your gallery’s digital sales and marketing basics right
According to recent retail studies, as your gallery seeks to elevate the experience you offer, consider three core elements of a positive online shopping experience.
- Joy of discovery
- Buying experience is easy and convenient
- Great customer service
These three elements remain constant and help ensure your art gallery’s online sales strategy is evolving with your collectors’ digital habits.
Your target art collector expects a baseline level of capabilities for buying art online. If you can get these basics of digital sales and marketing capabilities incorporated into your gallery’s strategy, you will have a solid foundation to build upon in the future. That baseline includes:
- Transparent pricing
- Flexible return and payment options
- In-depth information about an artwork, including story, technique, and multiple visuals of a piece
- Convenient delivery and installation services
- An integrated and distinctive shopping experience online and off
As your gallery looks to upgrade its online sales and marketing capabilities, these are the areas you should examine first. If any are not as strong as they should be for today’s online shopper’s expectations, there is where you should prioritize your efforts.
Create 1:1 connection with online art buyers
Find ways to design one-to-one connections using personalized, digital communication tools. You probably already use techs like facetime, video conferencing, and messaging apps. Now, let’s look at a few others you may not have considered yet.
- Video Ask is a fantastic tool that allows you practically to get face-to-face with visitors on your website. It uses conditional logic to guide them through a series of questions so you can make their experience more personalized and meaningful. Viewers see your face and your personality.
- Viewing rooms are used to showcase an exhibition, but they could also serve as a custom virtual presentation room for a hot lead. Some art gallery management software includes this capability and makes it so easy. But are you taking advantage of this feature?
- You could create a series of virtual experiences, similar to how Airbnb began doing when social distancing went into effect? I have participated in cocktail and art pairings done by museums that were fun and insightful. In Boston, galleries collaborated on an online Art Relay to complement their First Friday event while social distancing is in place. This gallery collaboration involved five SoWa art galleries and an iPad. Someone from each gallery gave a tour of the show before passing the baton (iPad) along to the next gallery.
- Try responding to an inquiry about a work of art with a short 40-60 second video instead of the typical email with jpg attached. Check out these tools that are designed to make this type of personalized communication easy. They also integrate with many email marketing systems, such as Mailchimp, to give you tracking capabilities. Bombbomb and Bonjoro
- Even using LinkedIn’s voice messaging adds a simple, yet unexpected personal feel.
To the Point
Art galleries today should focus on providing an online sales and marketing experience that excels at the basic capabilities. Strive to tell a meaningful brand story consistently throughout the year.
There are so many excellent tools to help enhance the level of personalization you provide while communicating with prospective art buyers online. Experiment with a few this year. Art sales is all about relationships, right? These tools are made for that.
Always put the voice of your ideal collector for your artists’ work into everything you do online.
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