Tips / Strategy for social media advertising for online gallery

[Tucky]

I have run an online gallery since 2006. Built it up in the early days and it was making good money and really flying. Then it got a Google penalty which I tried to fix, followed by the pharma hack which killed it. Cleaned the site and hoped it would come back but it never did. Over the last 10 years it's probably sold 10 prints a year but I've kept it going and just worked on other projects.

For the last few months I have been refreshing the site and now feel it has tons of potential, so instead of relying on the big G, the plan is to advertise on Facebook, IG and Pin. I'm always seeing similar companies doing this so let's give this a go.

Does anyone have tips or strategies for SM advertising that isn't in the online guides out there? What's worked for you? Any help would be appreciated. This was once my baby and now I have the time and enthusiasm to give it one more shot.

Target audience is UK homeowners who don't mind paying more for high quality wall art ie. good quality prints and framing, not cheap ebay shite.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Some helpful questions would be what's your:

• average order volume
• average order value
• customer lifetime value

I'm not saying to share those publicly, but it would give you the parameters for what you can spend on marketing. Then there's the question of hitting them direct with "buy now" PPC style ads, or trying to capture them into a funnel where you can continually re-market them for cheaper (email list with future sales, coupons, exclusive offers).

One thing I see people do with eCommerce stores, especially when they hire someone who just wants to show metrics (and not the right ones), is they'll start a blog and then try to rank those posts, they'll put up clickbaity style content and slap that on Facebook, etc. Even YouTube seems like it'd be a waste of time here. Teaching people to paint or make digital art, making funny comedy clips about art... waste of time. None of that leads to conversions, and that kind of broad mass awareness campaign for a product like this... I'd go very close to the bottom of the funnel with the marketing angles, whatever you do.

 

[Tucky]

Thanks Ryuzaki
In the past most people just buy one print at a time. Average order value would be £80 and most just buy once, but then in the past I haven't done much with email lists etc.
What do you mean by bottom of the funnel?
Personally I've always got swept in by FB ads that have the products you can scroll through in the ad itself. We have some very good images which will attract people's eye.

 

[Ryuzaki]

That’s what I mean. Advertise the product, rather than some post like “9 Pieces of Artwork Your Dog Will Stare At”. That’s the top of the funnel. Then I’d start in with negative keywords and demographic & creatives split-testing and all that. That’s the bottom of the funnel, where sales occur.

 

[Tucky]

What do we think about Google Merchant Centre these days? Apparently they have introduced AI into their Performance Max system