In the Loupe
In the Loupe
What I Learned About Business Marketing from Hosting a Solo Art Exhibition
Drawing from his recent experience hosting a solo watercolor exhibition, Michael Burpoe shares marketing strategies that business owners can apply to their own store events. He explains how effective event planning, branding, goal-setting, and multi-channel promotion can enhance attendance and sales for any luxury buying experience.
Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe
Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com
Inquire about sponsoring In the Loupe and showcase your business on our next episode: podcast@punchmark.com
Welcome to In the Loop, a buying event, and what I mean by that is I did promotion and marketing and inviting specifically for this event and I wanted to see if I could try to relate some of the things I learned along the way to what jewelers and listeners can do if they are throwing events for themselves. I think I was a little bit more digital heavy than a lot of places, but I also had some print and mailing components and branding components and I think it might be interesting just to kind of show some of my work along the way, just like the process, and see if there's anything that you can learn for when you do your next event. Just a quicker episode because I was out a fair amount this week and I think it's kind of an interesting one and maybe you'll enjoy. Thanks.
Speaker 2:This episode is brought to you by Punchmark, the jewelry industry's favorite website platform and digital growth agency. Our mission reaches way beyond technology. With decades of experience and long-lasting industry relationships, punchmark enables jewelry businesses to flourish in any marketplace. We consider our clients our friends, as many of them have been friends way before becoming clients. Punchmark's own success comes from the fact that we have a much deeper need and obligation to help our friends succeed. Whether you're looking for better e-commerce performance, business growth or campaigns that drive traffic and sales, punchmark's website and marketing services were made just for you. It's never too late to transform your business and stitch together your digital and physical worlds in a way that achieves tremendous growth and results. Schedule a guided demo today at punchmarkcom. Slash go.
Speaker 1:And now back to the show. All right, everybody. So, like I mentioned along the way, talking about this solo exhibition I put together to kind of rewind it a little bit. I've talked about my you know, semi-professional art career along the way. I work as a design manager for Punchmark and I host this podcast as part of my job with them. But at the same time I also am slightly pursuing a career as a watercolor artist and one of the parts of being an artist is you hold these gallery exhibitions and it's kind of one of those ways that you level up and kind of push your craft to the next level is getting people to attend your shows and then eventually having them, you know, invite you to do more things, more prestigious shows, and you kind of walk yourself up to the top like that.
Speaker 1:I had a show this is my first one in a year and a half and I treated it kind of like a business event. So Unfortunately, because I have so much history with Punchmark and working in branding and design, I can't just turn that part of me off. So I carry those traits and skills into everything I do, whether it's throwing my own birthday party or having a Friendsgiving at my house. I have to brand everything. I have to do marketing for it. Whether it's you know what that looks like is always typically different, but again, I treat things. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing is the way I've kind of always seen these events. So when you're doing an event like an art exhibition, one of the things that I found is very helpful is talking about planning and branding, and one thing I did for mine is I sat down and I really thought about what the branding for my event was going to be. To give you an idea, it was this show was held in the next town over so not in the town that I live in, but in the next town. So not in the town that I live in, but in the next town.
Speaker 1:And what I saw this as is kind of a opportunity as well as kind of a setback, if you will, but an opportunity for me to brand myself in a unique way to people who might not have ever seen my work before. So, for example, I saw this as a branding event for me to talk about how my work speaks specifically to the area, and I think that this is something you can do with your store and position yourself. For example, if you are a community-minded business, do you give money back to the area, do you have these charity foundation events, things like that? How are you going to talk about it? Because one thing I do find is that when people do charity work or they have community-minded events, they sometimes are not putting that in the front, when I think that's a really great differentiating factor and it's something that you can do more of. So for me, what I did is I picked a name for my show and I picked some branding, some typefaces and colors and like how was my design aesthetic for this? And I really wanted to do that because I noticed that other people weren't doing that. So another thing that stores can do to differentiate themselves when they have these events, whether it's a national rarities event or a trunk show or something like that I think a little touch of branding goes a long way. So here's what I did I named my show and I named it terroir.
Speaker 1:Terroir it's a word for wine you know typically using to describe wine and how you can sort of sometimes taste the region can be imparted upon a wine depending on where it's grown. So the terroir and flavor profile of a wine from Spain is probably going to taste very differently compared to a wine from California. They might be wonderful and magnificent, and maybe even the same grape variety, but the soil and the pH balance of the nutrients that go into the grapes is going to impart a flavor. So I named mine terroir because I wanted to kind of convey in a word that my paintings are dictated and influenced by the area that I live in and grew up. But one thing I found with mine is I didn't love how the word terroir looked like the word terror. So I actually used the phonetic spelling of terroir. So that is a slash, lowercase t-E-R dash, w-a-h-r slash, so that is a phonetic spelling and I thought of it as like a cool branding.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I did is I picked a color that I really liked that I could use as my spot color. So a spot color is like a branding term that you can use in a bunch of print material that is uniform across all of them and it kind of becomes like the de facto branding. And I think, for example, with national rarities, events, for example, if you do one in the spring and you do one in the fall, like a lot of stores do. Maybe you brand it differently. You know, the spring could be a light green, using your logo in like a more fun way or talking, using it for your colored printouts and stuff like that, and then for the fall, maybe using an orange or a darker color or something like that. For me, I used a wine color, so it's close to white, but it's kind of like a burgundy, kind of brownie reddish hue, and I really liked it. I spent a lot of time trying to pick it and I also picked a series of typefaces. I try to keep mine really clean, so I used like a Helvetica and Helvetica New and also some Acumen, and what I did that for is just because I really wanted to contrast my art.
Speaker 1:I think that putting on events at your store, I think a little bit of design consultation, is something that kind of goes a long way, and maybe you only have to do it the first time, or maybe even the second time as well, and then from there a good design system can be built upon iteratively. So I know Punchmark has a design team on staff that could help you, but you could also just speak with whoever does your design work regularly and I'm sure that they could help you as well. So that's planning and branding, and I also outlined a couple of goals and I think I am really into this. I think every store should be doing goals as well, and what I see it as is like pass, no pass. So pass meaning like what is the success, kind of markers.
Speaker 1:So for me, I just wanted to sell one painting, one print, and I wanted to have 50 people show up. That was kind of like what I thought was like a nice sort of line, and what it means is that I hit all of the points that I wanted. I wanted people to show up, I wanted people to show up and buy low price point items, and then I wanted people to show up and buy high price point items. So if I was able to hit all three of those like whether that's a lot of people or not, a lot of people as well, as you know, I think it is determining whether that's, hey, we want to have a thousand people to come through the doors during this time, but also setting up a variable that's like, oh, we want them to show, you know, and we want 50 people to buy something. I think setting up those lines ahead of time so that you know if things were successful or not successful, because I think it's a real human trade of us to move the goalposts Okay.
Speaker 1:So that's planning, branding and goals, but the next, I think, is also the advertising and marketing of it all. So this is where I think that you have the most room to do more, and I think if you're not careful, you can really spend a ton of money on this. I had to really reel it in, but it's what I ended up spending the most money on is the save the dates and the posters. So I think that every store can do a lot more direct mail. I think direct mail is money, especially if you just do some tasteful, tasteful stuff instead of just doing like those cheesy, crappy flyers that go in and people take them and they throw them right in the trash. I think having some nice branding on them and having some nice photography from your previous events, I think it goes a long way.
Speaker 1:So for mine, I did some save the dates to my VIPs. So this is everybody who's bought something from me in the last two years. So I consider them, you know, former clients and everybody who's ever done a commission for me and I also did a lot of marketing to people in the area. I had like kind of a list of people who I thought could go and ended up being a lot really helpful to have like those addresses. That's kind of what took me the longest. And then I bought and designed some save the dates. I bought mine from Zillion, I think it was, and no, sorry, from Zazzle, and I think it turned out really well. I stuffed all the envelopes and I printed everything on labels and sent them out. It was by far my biggest expense. I spent nearly, I think, like $300 on save the dates and marketing materials and I also bought some posters.
Speaker 1:I think it's just sometimes stores just aren't really bragging enough, and what I mean by that is having your banners and telling your salespeople to mention the events. And I noticed that in the days leading up to the events I would just casually just drop oh yeah, I'm doing a show, it's going to be at this time at this place. Yeah, if you're free, you should swing by. And of those casual mentions, a lot of people showed up from those. So I would be recommending that you train your staff everybody on staff to mention it as much as possible. It'll just help with getting people through the door, because I think that that is one of the most marketable things that you can hang your hat on is the ability to congregate people, and I think that's a very slept on ability, especially for smaller areas, smaller markets, for bigger cities. You know, I feel like you could probably just have an event and people will show up. A certain number of people will show up just passively, but I think in a small area, you do need to be a little bit more active. Okay, so that's the save the dates in marketing.
Speaker 1:The next I did is that is very different and I would recommend every store do this is I wanted to find a way to market with my Instagram and leverage my Instagram. So one thing I did is, one week before the show started, I started posting content about it. So anything related to the show I was trying my hardest to do at least one a day, but usually it was two a day. I tried to do something in the morning, so all I would do is I just had some photographs of some of the marketing. Like to save the date, I'd take a photo, put it on my Instagram story and put the date, time and location. That's all I did. And then I made a post, talked about it a little bit more date, time and location. That's all I did. And then I made a post, talked about it a little bit more date, time, location and then I would try to up it. So in the three days leading up to the show I tried to post three or four times and then on the day of the show kicked off at five o'clock and I had a virtual walkthrough at 4.30, I posted probably every two hours.
Speaker 1:So I really tried to get in front of people's Instagram stories and really just get on top of it. And I was talking to my mom about this and she was kind of like, man, you're really doing a lot of marketing for this. And I was like, yeah, it's because you need to cash in on your goodwill. And I think this is another point I'd like to make for stores. And again, this is I know I'm comparing, you know, apples to potatoes but I think that the cashing in it's like why do we spend all this time and pay an employee and, like you know, spend all this effort and time building up our Instagram if we're not going to cash in on it.
Speaker 1:And what I mean by that is you only have, you know, probably five or six opportunities a year to leverage your marketing tools to their fullest potential in a way that can really pay off. And I think it builds up like a crescendo and it's just like a really loud noise and you're marketing and marketing and you're loud. And then I think the second most important thing is you got to go quiet afterwards, and I think otherwise people get tired and they turn you off. And that's what I try to do with mine is, you know, you build it up, build it up until it comes to this moment where it's loud, and then for the next couple of weeks I'm just going to be quiet and the marketing opportunity is sort of over and I think it's time to let things sort of resolve and kind of come back down. To let things sort of resolve and kind of come back down.
Speaker 1:And one thing I was trying to market on, because I believe digital to digital is one of the most effective routes, because digital to physical is hard but physical to physical is easier and digital to digital is easier. So physical to physical, when I was sending save the dates and mailing and banners and stuff like that that works the best, because I was trying to get people to show up. Virtual to virtual is. I was marketing on my Instagram about this virtual walkthrough because I knew that the people who follow my Instagram don't have to necessarily be limited to a geographic region, whereas I'm only mailing stuff to people who might be able to make the drive. So, for this virtual walkthrough, what this was is I went in and I did an Instagram live for 15 minutes and I'll get into why I did it for so short. But I went through at 4.30 and my show started at five and I walked through and I talked about each painting for just a minute, you know, or just a couple seconds, and kind of went through and I showed everything and I directed everybody. If they wanted to shop, they could buy from the gallery. But what was cool was it lives on as this legacy and it lives on my Instagram feed and it lives on as a more kind of polished tool that I can use in future things.
Speaker 1:And I will say that virtual walkthroughs and just live streams they're so easy to do and all you need is someone that's okay to be in front of camera. Fortunately, it's something that I feel like I'm a little bit more naturally okay at because of this job. But the thing that I found very useful is all you have to do is just market for this event and then when you go, it doesn't matter if you have one person on there or 20 people on there. If you understand that the real reason why you're doing it is so that you can have the recording afterwards, suddenly it frees you up a little bit more. But what's cool is the gallery had told me that no one had ever done a virtual walkthrough at their place, and I think maybe if you had a national rarities event, or again, if you had some trunk show or a guy's night or something like that, I think having a little bit of a live stream of it all as people come through and all you got to do is just keep an eye out for when people write in and just have someone kind of hosting it and talking through it, all it's I think it'd be really effective and I wish that more stores would do live stuff, whether on Facebook, on Instagram, maybe on YouTube. I think that there's a lot of benefit to doing something live and then taking the recording or the VOD, which is a video on demand and then remarketing with that. And what's cool is I'm going to be using that virtual walkthrough as a piece in my portfolio. It's like, hey, this is what the show looked like. So we've already gone through planning, branding and, as well as the marketing that's leading up to it, a virtual component.
Speaker 1:And then the final was I did a little bit of marketing to try to remarket in clientele, and one of the things I'm trying my hardest to do is I really wanted to make sure that purchasers and buyers would consider maybe coming back in the future. So what I mean by that is, I think, having a I put a thank you note in every purchase and those thank you notes just have like a little piece of art and on the back just said thank you, and it also had my social media and contact information. So I'm hoping that people might buy more stuff from me. I'm hoping that if I can turn one in 10 buyers into a repeat buyer, that's 10%. That is a 10% growth more than if I was to not, and it actually the marketing and the dollars pays off absolutely, and I think that jewelry stores in general are actually really good at this. You all know how to, you know, turn a one-time purchase into a real kind of client. So they come in and they get their anniversary gifts and they get their Mother's Day gifts and they get their whatever gifts. I think that you've all kind of figured that part out, but it's definitely worth kind of mentioning.
Speaker 1:So I think, if you can kind of understand the connection I'm trying to make, to me, an art show is a again, it's a luxury buying event and I would like to say that the similarities between a trunk show and this might be substantial. Maybe it's tenuous, maybe you're all kind of sitting there like, nah, this is silly. But I want to kind of convey how I unfortunately can't turn the business side of my brain off and whenever I do anything casual I have to do it to the max. And when I did this art show it was kind of like a lot of work that led up to something. But what's really nice is now is the quiet part. Now you kind of just let the show be up for a month and you can get a chance to let the sales, the passive sales, happen. But I found that having people show up was the biggest currency I could get. I guess this is kind of a side point, but I just want to. Maybe I'll mention it a little bit further.
Speaker 1:What I was saying about the ability to congregate people is such an overlooked skill that I think that there are certain people that can use that almost as like a as a lever. You know, the ability to have people show up to something is not as common as you think. I think that having the ability to tell people, hey, I'm having a birthday party and people actually come, that's impressive. Not everyone can do that. How many people have awesome, great ideas and then they fall down on one of those legs, whether it's the planning or the communication or like the polishing of the actual event or the thank you at the end. I think the you can't overlook any of those components and I tried my hardest not to. I will also say that I learned a lot. There's a bunch of things I'm going to try to do differently next time and I think I spent way too much money on Save the Dates. I think a fair number of people didn't show up and I might tailor it down, might send it to 75 people, because there's about 25 people who it was kind of a waste and I could cut down on my expenses, but I think it was a lot of fun and maybe in a couple of months or a year, when I do my next one, it'll be even better. I guess maybe I'll leave it at the end, if you made it to the end.
Speaker 1:If you want to see what the show looked like, it's on my Instagram. My Instagram is burpski15. That's B-U-R-P-S-K-I 15 on Instagram. I don't market it very much on anything Punchmark related. I try to keep my business and art life separately, but since this episode was all about that, I guess I will talk about it a little bit more.
Speaker 1:Yep, just a quick episode. I was out a couple of days this week dealing with my show and I didn't want to have us skip an episode. We've got some exciting stuff coming down the pike that I can't wait to explain and share more about. We have the client workshop in a couple of just a couple of days, and for that one I'm really excited as well. So, everybody, thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers, bye, all right, everybody. That's the end of the show. Thanks so much for listening. This episode was brought to you by Punchmark and produced and hosted by me, michael Burpo. This episode was edited by Paul Suarez with music by Ross Cocker. Don't forget to rate the podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and leave us feedback on punchmarkcom slash Luke. That's L-O-U-P-E, thanks. I'll be back next week, tuesday, with another episode. Cheers, bye, thank you.
