Art gallery marketing is very important to getting more visitors, and successful marketing can have a huge impact on your gallery. Marketing your art gallery online? Here are a few mistakes to avoid to help you make the most of your art gallery marketing and attract more new and repeat patrons.
Not Using Social Media Effectively
Social media is a highly effective way to spread your art gallery messages and news. Many art galleries have social media pages but don't update them very often. In order to draw in new patrons, you need to keep your social media pages active. This is simple when you use automated social media management. Create a series of posts and schedule them to go out over time so you don't have to manually update your social media content every day.
Don't just post ads for your upcoming shows. Post reviews of your gallery and your shows from real patrons. Post contests where patrons can enter to win a piece of art by a local artist or a year's free art gallery pass. Post photo and video teasers of your new exhibits. Post news about community events that your gallery is involved in. Anything that gets people involved entices people to visit your pages more often and share your content with a wider audience.
Not Staying in Touch with Your Patrons
Social media helps you reach new art fans but how do you really keep people coming back? Encourage art gallery patrons to sign up for your regular email newsletter. Automate your newsletter to make it simple and efficient. Automated solutions also enable you to review detailed analytic data. This enables you to see which newsletter techniques and subject lines are most effective. Which gets the most opens and clicks? Use this data to improve future newsletters.
Regular email newsletters keep patrons interested and connected with your gallery. Some things to include in your newsletter: details about your upcoming exhibits and gallery events, coupons and discounts for your gallery admission and your gift shop (it really does make people more likely to visit when they get an exclusive discount!), artist biographies and more.
Not Paying Attention to SEO
SEO is search engine optimization. This is basically what helps search engines like Google and Bing find your art gallery website and content. In turn, this means that SEO is what helps new fans and current patrons find your art gallery. SEO is complicated and we could write hundreds of posts on the topic, but there are a few basics that you need to know.
You need to have quality, relevant content and you need to update it often as part of your gallery marketing efforts. Consider creating a blog. The blog doesn't have to be anything profound. Simply provide informative content about your gallery, your upcoming shows, community events or charities your gallery is involved in, featured profiles of artists, highlights of special artworks and so on. Create content and be consistent about when you post. The more often you post quality content, the more often search engines will check your site and the more great content you will have to offer.
Use relevant terms in your content. Include terms that relate to your artists, your gallery and your artwork. Strong, relevant keywords should also be included in your post titles and your meta descriptions - short descriptions of your content that search engines will "read" to help determine if the content is relevant.
Quality links help. If you can get your gallery's website content legitimately linked to other websites with high SEO ranking, your own ranking will go up. When your SEO ranking goes up, it makes your site easier to find. You could, for example, ask a popular art blogger to create a guest blog post for your site then link it to their site. Be careful with links, though. Broken links hurt your SEO score, as do links that link to poor quality or spammy sites.
Try Automated Art Gallery Marketing for Free
Automated marketing helps save your staff time and money. You can easily automate your email newsletters, social media management and more. Sign up for a 14 day free trial of automated art gallery marketing. Our friendly team will give you a demo to show you the potential of automation and how it will work for your specific gallery.
