MARKETING PAIN

One of my main headaches as a self-employed artist is the nebulous and esoteric subject of marketing. Basically, I don't understand it, and every part of my very being rails against the thought of gaining any further knowledge on the subject. However, I know it is an essential element of running a small business, so every so often I take a deep breath and plunge into its murky depths, normally emerging as clueless as when I went in.

Art is even more difficult to market than most goods and services, for all kinds of reasons. Even the gurus have very little to say on the subject and, whenever I have approached any of them for advice, they become uncharacteristically unforthcoming with ideas and "useful products" to help me in my endeavours. Most of these able and intelligent entrepreneurs are into things like joint ventures, affiliate schemes, private label and resale rights and Clickbank campaigns, which are no doubt wonderful money-making tools for the marketing professional or hobbyist, but are of no value whatsoever to an artist seeking outlets for his paintings and prints. And there are tens of thousands of other artists trying to do exactly the same thing. Every week I receive several emails from Chinese studios offering me their "beautiful" products to display and sell. I now have a stock reply, saved on my hard drive, thanking them for their offer and wishing them well in their search for markets for their artwork, but explaining that the Tait Gallery is for the marketing and sale of my own artwork only. Maybe I'm missing out on something here - but no, I don't have the time to take on other people's problems.

Not that there aren't self-appointed art-marketing gurus out there. These people, fluent in Blindingly Obvious, advertise their services in tempting terms such as "revolutionary", "exciting" or "new". I once accepted the offer of a video course (with a money-back guarantee), from an American artist, who claimed to have found the secret of eternal successful art sales. I paid my $99, downloaded the course on to my computer, and set aside an evening to ingest the course. I managed to get through the first four of twenty-seven modules, before I got fed-up listening to the fellow's dreary east-coast voice telling me nothing I didn't know already. My eyes glazed over, my cigarette dropped out of my mouth and started to burn my genitals. In a fit of blind foul temper, I deleted the whole course from my hard drive. I didn't even bother to ask for my money back - it certainly was an astute piece of marketing from the point of view of the maker of the video!

The marketing whizz for Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Ian Muir, was sceptical about online marketing, when I attended a pre-arranged interview with him, about five years ago, at the beginning of my self-employment. He was convinced that the best way to market art was through exhibitions and art fairs - to have a physical presence in front of potential buyers. In this he wasn't wrong. Certainly my best event was the Catterline exhibition last year, and I hope to have another there soon. But I have found that the website has helped a bit too, along with strategic newspaper and magazine advertising campaigns. I applied a few tricks to bring the site to the attention of the public. I submitted www.tait-gallery.co.uk to directories, joined online galleries and did a lot of work on getting backlinks (although my Links page, it turns out, is of limited value for this). So what the marketing gurus have to say about SEO, traffic building and keywords should be of interest to me. But, in the end, if I rank no. 1 in the search engines and receive thousands of visitors a day, this will all count for nothing if no-one wants to buy my artwork.

It appears that we are in a recession (some would say a depression) at the moment, and there is a shortage of filthy lucre about. That being the case, people are buying tea-bags, toilet roll and other essentials, and the people who manufacture and market those are presumably doing fine. Anything left after paying the mortgage and buying food , lighting and heating will go on clothing and white goods. Only after this is taken care of can a householder think of getting something nice to hang on his or her wall, so we struggling artists are always at the bottom of the food chain. And there are an awful lot of us chasing a very limited number of buyers. Times are tough for artists.