“When Art Basel, the grandfather of art fairs, opens […], the world’s most powerful dealers will share the event with midsize galleries and a crop of emerging hopefuls. But regardless of size, many of the more than 300 galleries at Art Basel will have felt the pressures of an art world in transition,” said the NY Times.
In “a time of turbulence” in the art world, where you are noted for what you don’t do as much as for what you do,
and multi-million dollar buying decisions are made based on personal preference and perceived status at least as often as they are made based on actual quality, small and medium galleries must distinguish themselves in order to survive. The Times notes that dealers generating sales of more than $13MM generally saw strongly increasing revenues through 2012, mid-size dealers had sales which were basically flat, and small galleries and dealers (< $500K) suffered heavily, with an average 17% drop in gallery revenues over the prior year.
What’s the small gallery owner to do to survive? It’s no longer enough to show up at art shows and hope. Not only do you need to be incredibly discerning in your choice of shows to attend, with marketing budgets declining along with revenues, but it’s imperative to make a strong impression instantly.
Art Basel Miami is not only the premier art show in Florida, but part of the largest art show in the world.
It’s an excellent opportunity to network with the biggest names in the art world, but it’s also a very large pond with many very large fish in it. Networking isn’t enough. Being the most knowledgeable in your niche isn’t enough. Even having the best art in your niche is not enough, anymore. You have to grab people by the figurative throat in order to be noticed and to survive in today’s art market.
Once you’ve made the decision to market your gallery at Art Basel Miami, and chosen pieces you will exhibit to represent your gallery,
how do you market your art gallery business at an expo?
The traditional method is through printed gallery catalogs. You choose a few pieces and send them to press along with some basic information about yourself. Print Farm is able to handle graphic design and layout of gallery catalogs for Art Basel, but there’s more to how to market art galleries through printing.
After showing off your gallery, how do you keep yourself in the minds of potential clients and keep them apprised of your current inventory?
Websites are great for marketing art galleries, but they’re not effective at making sure that your potential gallery clients remember you. A website doesn’t place itself in the hand of your clients or address them personally. No one reads mass email. Art gallery mailings have always been an effective way to market because they’re effective at getting into clients’ hands (everyone has to check the mail once in a while) and printed gallery mailers are also more capable of reproducing colors and shadows in art than a computer monitor ever can. Every monitor represents colors just a little bit differently, and sometimes that difference can mean that a piece just doesn’t speak to a potential client the way it would in person or in print.
Print Farm has experience in marketing materials for galleries at Art Basel Miami. Not only can we print them with perfect representation of the colors, and capture the piece in a living fashion, but the layout and design is all done in house. That enables you to know with whom you’re working for gallery marketing graphic design and also means that the layout and design team is intimately familiar with the capabilities of the equipment that will be used to produce the piece.
Another feature Print Farm makes available to help you market a gallery to clients met at Art Basel is something called Variable Data Printing.
Your art gallery postcard can be sent to press with names and addresses printed as part of a single run so they’re ready to mail – no hand-addressing or stamping. Even the mailing permit information can be printed directly in the same run. The entire process is automated, and your digital printing for art galleries can be taken from concept to finished product without any further intervention required from you.
Once your art gallery mailpieces are printed, many firms will ship them to you and that’s the end of their involvement. That’s not a good solution – as a gallery owner, you don’t have time to take them to the post office, separate them by zip code, stand in line, etc. You need a complete solution. Print Farm completes the process with the ability to not only print names and addresses on your piece, but also to directly mail them. You can even have the piece pre-designed before the Miami art show, and then send us a list of prospects you met there after the show. From there, we send your art gallery marketing mailer to press with the addresses printed at the same time based on your list, mail them, and take the entire process out of your hands.
You have an art gallery to run and keep profitable.
You need art marketing printing in Miami which handles the entire process from end to end and lets you get back to the business of owning your gallery and working with the clients we can help you generate. As the Times pointed out, small art gallery revenue is down drastically. Print Farm provides complete art marketing printing solutions which save time, save money, and can even help save your business. Contact Print Farm today for a no-obligation evaluation of your marketing printing for art gallery needs to find the best solution for marketing your gallery.
