Marketing your art gallery online: Everything you need to know

Art gallery marketing can be a lot trickier to perfect than other industries. Selling art is a very personal process. Sophisticated investors are parting with a lot of their money, at times for works by artists who have yet to make the big time but have serious potential to be the next Warhol or Lichtenstein. 

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Nevertheless, working in the art industry is incredibly rewarding, both in a financial and a creative sense. When it comes to marketing your art gallery, many spaces also hold the very futures of the young contemporary artists they represent in their hands. The better they promote their artists, the more likely they are to increase the future worth of their pieces and attract high net-worth investors looking for assets that will accrue in value.

London especially is an area that has a high concentration of art specialists, with an estimated 1,500 gallery spaces in the capital. Some of those will be putting out messages and waiting for the right investor to simply walk in. Other galleries may have more complicated sales pipelines and processes;

As major creative venues experience declining footfall, however, how can smaller independent galleries find high-quality leads, encourage them to visit and promote the virtues of the artists they represent?

Inbound marketing paints a picture that attracts high net-worth leads

Adding an inbound attitude to your art gallery marketing strategy does more than promote your gallery, its pieces and the artists they represent. Inbound marketing gives galleries the ability to create visually-stunning creative campaigns across a number of online channels to attract people with a passion to invest.

The inbound marketing process also goes beyond attracting leads. It's also an essential way to boost brand authority in a crowded industry, and allows the gallery to better communicate with their audience, better champion their artists, offer thought leadership, and act as a PR service to attract bloggers, journalists and other influential figures to events and exhibitions.

Marketing your art gallery using an inbound strategy can also be the key to solving one of the biggest problems currently facing the gallery scene; the lack of footfall we've already highlighted.

By utilising channels such as biddable search and social media, and combining creative content with the right technology, galleries can encourage investors and art lovers alike to visit and create a huge buzz around your brand and the artists you represent.

The right art gallery marketing strategy builds strong relationships

Creating a buzz is one thing, but how do you capture that initial excitement and those visitors and turn them into long-term brand advocates? How do you get them to invest in your artists, promote their works naturally and target high-quality leads that won't waste your sales experts' time?

An essential part of the inbound marketing process revolves around creating personas and profiling the people who are most likely to match with your brand, its artists and your creative ideals. It's also a crucial way of visualising, targeting and nurturing the investors who you are most likely to be able to build strong, future relationships with and who have a serious interest in art on a personal level.

Putting some budget aside and investing in paid social media to target these experienced investors is a vital part of the art gallery marketing process. Not only is it a visual way to promote the works your gallery currently sells, but also gives your market a glimpse into the lives and creative processes of the artists you represent as the organic side of your inbound campaign takes hold.

Investing into an Instagram campaign, for instance, gives you access to the incredible targeting tools available on the Facebook-owned social network, allowing you to immediately get your artists, their pieces and your gallery in front of the high net-worth leads you've researched and are looking to nurture.

Inbound art gallery marketing can ackle long-term market challenges

Dwindling footfall isn't the only problem facing art galleries. Our forthcoming Brexit is also a huge challenge that galleries are set to face thanks to factors including fluctuating exchange rates, potential changes to import and export taxes and more.

The very nature of the internet itself is also challenging the overall art gallery marketing scene with new trends, technologies, hardware and software being adopted and used in creative ways to make a real impact on the art investment scene and attract attention.

When it comes to marketing your art gallery, trends set to arrive during the course of 2017 include the explosion of live video, the emergence of interactive content, the marketing potential of social media influencers, mobile video and even virtual reality.

We're not saying that galleries have to adopt all of these measures to be successful, but if the leads and investors your gallery is trying to attract interact with any of those channels then adding them to a bespoke inbound marketing campaign could go a long way to attracting them.

A bespoke art gallery marketing campaign can help you to successfully navigate a lot of those troubles while creatively attracting new leads that could grow your business almost instantly, especially if you consider introducing biddable media to your campaigns.

Possibly the most beneficial part of a bespoke inbound marketing campaign that art galleries can enjoy is the way it helps enhance sales floors by collecting heavily researched and targeted data in ethical, transparent ways to improve the quality of their leads and pair art lovers with incredible works that have the potential to make enormous profits.

We know because we've done it ourselves. We've helped a leading art gallery in an extraordinarily competitive London scene to improve the quality of their leads, build strong relationships with investors, the media and art lovers, increase footfall and promote their artists in new sectors to raise their profiles.

In a few short months we improved their Facebook engagement by 600%, their Twitter presence by 530% and Instagram by 60%. Find out more about how we did it and their story by reading our case study.