Selling artwork is hard work. There are more creators than buyers and the artwork typically is considered a luxury item and not an immediate necessity. Artwork is purchased after the basics of food, shelter, electricity bill, cell phone bill, cable tv bill etc. But having said that, artwork is sold all the time, 24/7. Maybe just not your artwork.
Selling online in particular is tough because you are competing with a global market of sellers. On the plus side, every day more and more artwork is sold online. On the negative side, every day more and more artists are trying to sell their artwork on the Internet. Plus since there are few gatekeepers or curators or reviewers reviewing what is offered for sale online, the market is crowded with substandard work that gets in the way of good work. Also buyers have more choices than ever to choose from – instead of flipping through a few dozen artworks at Pier One, they can shift through thousands upon thousands of artworks online.
Top Five Reasons Your Artwork Isn’t Selling
- Buyers don’t like it or understand it
- The quality isn’t up to industry standard
- Its priced too high or too low
- Its not being seen
- Its not being seen by the right people
Is Your Artwork The Problem?
The first problem you might want to assess is if your artwork is the problem. Check out the competition and see if you are offering work at the quality level that people are buying and if your artwork has wide appeal. If you are making work that is hard to sell, that is, it has limited appeal to most buyers, then it will take more work to sell it.
Or you might find out that you have work people will buy when they see it often enough, but you are not efficient in getting it seen by the right prospects often enough.
Two Solutions
If the problem is the artwork, you have two choices – choose to make art with more appeal.
or
accept you have created a pleasant pastime where you occasionally get rewarded with sales.
How to get artwork sales
- Well-designed website
- Strong traffic
- Excellent conversions with powerful calls to action.
- Drive traffic to an e-commerce site such as FineArtAmerica.com or Pixels
- Create interest around yourself as an artist and around the work
- Partner with quality sites who provide quality products for repeat sales
The Four Ps of Marketing
The marketing mix is a crucial tool to help understand what the product or service can offer and how to plan for a successful product offering. The marketing mix is most commonly executed through the 4 P’s of marketing:
- Price
- Product
- Promotion
- Place
You have to have a well priced product – not to high or too low (too low can signal “cheap” to the buyer), the right product for the market, a well thought out promotional plan and offer it in the right place – trying to sell ice to Eskimos in Alaska for example is a good product but the wrong place.