eBusiness Weekly
National Arts Gallery
Marketing consists the designing of exhibitions and other products so as to attract the audience. It also requires designing a promotion strategy to make potential business practitioners aware of the artworks and exhibitions through advertising.
In a non-profit gallery, the purpose is to try and gain sponsorship from different organisation so as to achieve operational support. Marketing artworks and exhibitions requires exhibiting with no intentions of gaining profit but to be able to gain funds and support activities at a maximum level.
One can note with the recent International Conference on African Cultures (ICAC 2017) which had a lot of sponsors and partners giving a hand to make sure that the event was a success. With such a big event, financial funding from different organisations ensured that ICAC 2017 would progress with no hiccups. There are so many ways in which an organisation can promote its art work or its exhibition so as to promote funding from other organisations.
Press conferences, social media, posters and invitations can be of great use in marketing artworks and exhibitions. It is important to note that the digital age has brought with it great advantages that have created good marketing strategies.
New technologies have been providing businesses with more relevant experiences to customers. The two valuable ways a gallery can use technology to market exhibitions are establishing a customer database and improving the ways in which artworks are presented online. This makes it easy to market as the organisation has knowledge on the kind of artwork that interests the public.
Social media has become a powerful tool in trying to market exhibitions and artworks as it reaches a wide audience and helps stay in touch with established ones. Creating pages concerning exhibitions or artworks on sites as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest has proved to be a great way of maintaining a close relationship with the audience. These social media platforms are of zero cost to any business organisation that creates an account.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram provide live streaming, and if this tool is used effectively as a marketing tool, exhibitions are able to reach a wider range. The use of popular art hashtags on twitter will boost the accessibility of any content concerning the exhibition. One can also use these hashtags to easily find people to follow and relevant information to share. Sharing videos of an opening exhibition, or opening night to potential sponsors will create interaction between the gallery and its followers.
One can also market an exhibition with the use of posters. Posters can be circulated via different social media platforms and shared with other organisation that are likely to be interested in the exhibition. Tagging interested or potential business practitioners will increase the chance of good business relations. It is also important to tag the sponsors of the exhibition in any post related to the exhibition that is being exhibited.
Posters can be printed out into small pamphlets such as the ones made by the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in promoting ICAC 2017. These can be handed over to anyone who visits the gallery, at the reception.
With marketing exhibition, one has to take note of the target audience. Targeting the rightful audience will help in contacting relevant organisations about an upcoming exhibition.
Organisations that are interested in the specific artworks being exhibited are likely to sponsor the event as it falls in context with the organisation’s objective. Carrol (2015) states that for any exhibition people have different interests and priorities these have to be reached, thus it is important to think about how best to target each of these audiences since they not everyone will respond to the same marketing channels and approaches.
Marketing artworks and exhibitions can be done by informing journalists and media practitioners. This helps promote more publicity thus creating good media relations. Non-profit galleries should also work towards coming up with connections to business individuals who are likely to be interested in the exhibition or can be potential buyers.
When marketing exhibitions and artworks one has to consider the content provided for the audience. Content concerning an upcoming exhibition, artist, or collection strategies should be written keeping the readers’ interests in mind.
A gallery can use a famous blogger to write a blog post about an upcoming exhibition as famous reader is likely to have many followers and will gain more if the information provided is of interest to a certain group of 0 people. Invitations can be a great tool for marketing exhibitions in a non-profit organisation. Invitations can be done a few months before the exhibition so as to give enough time for the invited guests to prepare themselves.
Last minute invitations are a risk as not everyone will be available at that particular time. It is of great advantage to invite business practitioners which an organisation has worked with before or that may have funded an event in the past. Thanking them and acknowledging that they were helpful during the past exhibition will promote the chance of them funding again.
