Grow Your Business | Attract New Collectors
There are fundamentally three ways to grow your business.
- 1. Increase your margins
Your ability to increase margins may be limited depending on your circumstances and position within the market, and includes the cost and the market value of the artwork. Factors that lead to the price you paid for an artwork include when you paid for it, how you paid for it, and whether you paid market or trade price.
The ability to hold an artwork over a period of time and not sell immediately may increase your margins significantly, depending on the artist and actual artists. How many dealers regret not holding onto prints by Warhol, Picasso and Banksy, amongst very many other artists, when they were first released?! Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
The value of an artwork is largely dedicated by the market though galleries are in a stronger position if they represent an artist or are the publisher. Prints priced significantly above the market price will take longer to sell or not at all depending on the market and simple supply and demand. Generally, increasing your margins will not help you grow your business significantly.
2. Sell more to your existing clients
Selling more artworks to your existing is made easier if you treat collectors as long-term clients and not one-off purchase customers. The ability to sell more to your clients will depend on your position in the market (primary or secondary dealer) and the artists and artworks you deal in. ‘Looking after’ your clients is of course key and the ability to sell more works to your clients will be again dictated by how well you are able to source artworks for which will affect the price you can offer. You will typically have a handful of clients who regularly buy from you, the majority of your sales will be to one-time buyers.
3. Increase your client-base
This is the most obvious way to grow your business but also the most time consuming and expensive. You can spend a fortune on marketing and how very little to show for all of your time and money. This is where galleries need to be more efficient with their resources by partnering with strategic portals such as Printed Editions, in effect outsourcing a lot of their marketing activities.
Printed Editions can reach a lot more collectors than many galleries as this is its speciality and key purpose – to promote its member galleries, their prints and artworks to collectors. Galleries can also promote their online (and physical, hopefully very soon!) events and shows.
Galleries may have great websites and fabulous artworks but if no-one can see them then so much hard work and investment has gone to waste. Listing on Printed Editions will increase the online presence of a gallery immediately to both collectors and other dealers (who may well become clients too!). The value and benefits of listing far exceeds the costs of not listing.
2020 was a horrible year and 2021 will be better, though not straight away. Galleries need to fully embrace online and take action – they just need to try something new if they really want to grow their business.
Printed Editions is here to help!
If you want to collaborate this us, click here.