In this day and age, leveraging online marketing avenues is a must for a business to gain any exposure.
The art community is no different, and at the end of the day, an art gallery is essentially a commercial enterprise.
Besides, marketing your art gallery has become increasingly important for several factors. Studies suggest that attendance figures are dropping by millions in certain art galleries.
The collectors have changed their ways of viewing and buying art, and owners and curators are using new tools to get attention.
In such a scenario, you need to be on your toes when it comes to maintaining the footfall of the interested art lovers and potential collectors in your art gallery.
With that in mind, we have brought you six online marketing tips that will help you reach out effectively to your interested audience.
Let’s get started!
1. Start by setting your marketing objectives
Before using online marketing techniques for boosting your art gallery, make sure you have a clear idea of the objectives you want to achieve.
Taking the right steps will be much easier after this. Ask yourself the following questions before you start:
- Do you want to attract more visitors to the website of your art gallery?
- Do you aim to motivate existing clients more or increase the number of new collectors?
- Do you want to sell more art or raise the artists’ profile?
Determining the target audience for your marketing efforts will be easier once you have the answers to these questions, and you have set your objectives.
2. Determine your target audience and reach out to them
If you have set your objectives, you now have a clear picture of your target audience.
Your next goal should be to find out as much as possible about the target audience.
There are loads of details that you need to be aware of your audience.
For instance, the social media channels that your audience uses, the average age of your audience, to the location of your audience.
The art galleries selling art by local artists to the local collectors will find the audience in their area.
Investing in local SEO will be a good idea in that case, whereas trying to earn international contracts from a different country will need you to analyze global traffic trends.
The more detailed your analysis of your target audience is, the better you are at addressing them.
3. Optimize your website to get a higher rank on search engines
Your website has to be optimized to attain a higher rank in the result pages of the search engine. For most art lovers, the website will serve as the first point of contact with the work of your artists.
The first step you should take is to make your website optimized for viewing on all screen sizes. 60 percent of users claim to never go back to a website that is not optimized for mobile viewing.
With that being done, pay attention to the images you have on your website.
An art gallery needs to have high-resolution images on the site. It is best to keep image sizes between 1000 and 3000 pixels and let the visitors zoom in to the pictures for better understanding.
Newsletters are one of the most efficient channels for online marketing that let you reach many clients at once.
However, making sure that your newsletter is read will need some effort on your part.
It is important to select an interesting and relevant topic for the readers that can hold their attention.
You can focus on the exhibition openings that are coming up or the stories of your featured artists. Keep in mind that you will have to capture the attention of the readers from the subject line itself.
Specify what the reader gains from reading the newsletter, such as “(artist) featured in the upcoming exhibition” or “Are you heading to Art Basel?”
Any online marketing strategy these days remains incomplete without relying on the powers of social media, and it is no different for an art gallery.
There are multiple ways to put social media platforms to good use, but the first step is to create your profile for sharing the news about your art gallery.
You can share posts about interviews, artists’ awards, art fair participations, and more to keep up the interests of the followers of your page.
Use the right Hashtags to make your posts easy to search and reach out to a wider audience.
You can also use Facebook Ads to promote new artworks, special offers, art exhibitions, and more. Create Facebook events to get people interested in visiting your art gallery.
6. Consider using virtual reality for your art gallery
Virtual reality (VR) might have seemed like a sci-fi dream a few years back, but not anymore.
Many art galleries have started using VR in recent times, and it is time for you to jump on the bandwagon.
It is highly satisfying for the online customers to get to see your gallery using augmented reality.
VR is certainly one of the most useful marketing strategies that you can invest in.
Use VR on your website to give your audience a glimpse of what they can expect from your gallery.
Online marketing is all about innovations and doing things differently than your competitors, and VR is a step in that direction.
The best part is that the use of augmented reality and virtual reality is also going to help you with SEO.
Endnote: Practical online marketing tips for a modern art gallery
There you have it: our digital pointers to help your art gallery get more attention from the interested art lovers.
There is no denying the fact that marketing an art gallery is a complex process, but these ideas will surely help you navigate through it more effectively.
Go ahead and use these tips for promoting your art gallery, and the results will show for sure. After all, the world needs more art!
Emma Gill is a passionate writer and guest blogger. Writing helps her to improve her knowledge, skills, and understanding of the specific industry. She loves writing and sharing her knowledge mostly in the health industry. She believes health is the real wealth & wants to spread her belief across the world. Apart from writing, she loves traveling and cooking.
