What Art Marketing Consultants can do for YOU!

If you’re early in your career, don’t sell much art, or don’t have dealer or gallery representation, you may want an agent or marketer to help sell your art, but at this stage, you’re not sure what art marketing consultants can do for you. Maybe you’re not generating enough income and sales to pay someone serious money to help you.

Less successful artists have to do whatever they can on their own to get their art out into the public, get active on social media, cultivate followings, and generate whatever sales they can. Once you start selling regularly, you’ll attract dealers, galleries, or other professionals to help you advance in your career, but until you’ve shown that you can produce income not only for yourself, but also for others, you’re going to have to go it alone.

Reality of being an Artist

The large majority of artists have more modest careers, do not generate large amounts of income, and have only periodic gallery shows, assuming they have any at all. For them, a single dealer or gallery is often adequate to handle this type of artist’s business affairs. In fact, most dealers and galleries act as informal agents for the artists they show or represent by giving them advice, helping them organize future shows, and performing functions like publicizing their art, and getting their art shown at new venues.

Many artists who develop successful long-term relationships with galleries or dealers (the lucky ones), eventually draw up agreements that allow those establishments to act as sole agents or representatives on either a permanent or a semi-permanent basis.

Unfortunately, artists spend too little time learning basic art business skills and often end up making costly mistakes. Many art school graduate artists who know plenty about how to create art,  have little or no idea what to do with that art once it’s finished and ready to leave their studios.

The art studio and art world are two very different places. Hopefully more and more artists will have opportunities to learn business skills, whether at art school, by reading articles, or hiring art consults or professionals, especially when they have difficult or complex decisions to make about the futures of their art careers.

Web Presence

With an online presence being so important now, adding to all that has to be done to be seen!

Fortunately, there is help in that area of marketing. When an artist realizes that they don’t have to (or can’t) do everything, that’s when there world can open up. Unfortunately, all an artist sees is more dollars going out and none coming in.

The reality is that if you are deciding to become a real business, there is always an investment to make. If you were opening a shop, there would be a commitment to a lease, fixtures to buy, marketing and advertising costs, maybe people to hire, etc, etc, etc.

With online marketing there is also an investment….but only in marketing.

If you think, if you build it, they will come, you’re in lalaland.  You need to scream from the mountain tops – I’m HERE!

Can you do the marketing yourself?….sure! Check out my ebook, SEO for ARTISTS. It is an inexpensive way to learn all the steps it takes to optimize and market your website. Then you can decide for yourself what you can and can’t do.

After reading through the book, you find you don’t have those 10-20 hours a week to dedicate to marketing, or you’re not great at writing, or finding keywords, or meta, then you can hire an artist marketing consultant to guide you though the process or even do it for you.

There are some great people to use and not so great people to use. Packages range from $150 – $5000 a month (or more for large corporations) with a six month to 1 year contract. By the way, it takes 30-90 days to see any progress, because it takes time to get the work done, then more time for google to crawl your site and show it in the search.

Another option is to go ala carte. This is a process that you set up with the consultant to plan and prioritize what your optimization and marketing needs and budget are. I have a plan that works with many artists where they do some of the work and I do some of the work, to come together as a full action plan.

Find out more about it on my marketing consultation page. I love working with artists and know lots of avenues to get on…..

Allow me to show you how to get your art in front of buyers!!!

Email me with any questions you have. I look forward to hearing from you!

What are your toughest things to get through as an artist?

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