THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: There’s a great story how the band LED Zeppelin, the guitarist Jimmy Page and the singer Robert Plant were really tired of performing their biggest hits, stairway to Heaven. They wanted to focus on newer material that reflected where they were artistically at the time, and they wanted to experiment. So when they wouldn’t play it, the fans would be so disappointed or they’d come to hear it. But Jimmy Page and Robert Plant would openly be very disdainful of having to play that damn song again. So they weren’t playing it with the same energy or passion, and it affected the whole concert experience. Bob Dylan had the same problem. I’m not saying don’t experiment with your art, so don’t hear me wrong. But even in art, people are expecting you to continue to do what they like.
Speaker2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast, an art World Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Well hey there, it’s Miriam Schulman. Welcome to the Inspiration Place podcast. I’m your host and curator of inspiration, and you’re listening to episode number 329. So how has it been, my friend? I’m always bragging about living in New York City, but I don’t always share some of the downsides of living here. And one of the downsides happened this morning, so I thought I would tell you about it. I definitely told my team about it. I like had to interrupt our team meeting to tell them I was getting ready and I was in the bathroom, and all of a sudden a big brown bug jumps up from behind my whatever it’s called, soap dish. And my husband says, no, no, no, no, it’s not a cockroach, Miriam. It’s a water bug. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think that water bug is just something that husbands or boyfriends or whatever or partners tell us that that’s what their roaches are like. They think if they caught a water bug, that somehow it’s less gross or less scary or something. But to me, a big brown bug is a cockroach. Anyway, it ran away and we couldn’t find it. And I’m like screaming around, running around the apartment. And I said, where is the cat? So I find the cat and I stick her in the bathroom, and that damn smart cat found the cockroach or water bug, as my husband likes to call it.
Miriam Schulman: So now she’s like hanging out in the bathroom hoping another one comes along. I’m hoping it doesn’t. But she did find the road. She did kill the roach. And that’s why in New York City you have to have a cat. Those things and other things that could be popping out of your drains, apparently. So. Anyway, like I said, I interrupted my meeting to discuss this with my team and I says, you know what? We really need to ask how? That’s what I call ChatGPT. What’s the difference between a water bug and a cockroach? So there is a difference between a water bug and a cockroach. But they said it’s not likely to be in New York City because they really live in water. Now, sometimes Hal makes things up. You can’t always believe what you are generating on AI. It’s trained, by the way, from the entire internet, but it doesn’t always remember or understand the information that it’s fed. The way generative AI works, it’s kind of almost like a magic eight ball. Most of what it says, it seems real, but it’s really just trying to predict the next word, like what you do on your smartphone when you’re typing and it predicts the next word. That’s really all it does. It predicts a string of words that most likely is going to make sense.
Miriam Schulman: It just does it on a larger scale. So it’s designed to make things up based on what’s probable or predictive. I wrote back to my husband today, and I said, I don’t think it was a water bug because they don’t live in New York City. I’m like acting like what I read on, I was real, it was a cockroach. And he said, no, Miriam, water bugs live in New York City. All right. So then I texted him, it’s a big, brown, scary bug. No matter how you slice the salami. Now, that expression slice the salami is actually the theme of today’s episode. Yes, I know it’s called Play Your Greatest Hits. I will explain what the expression slice the salami means. It’s actually a fairly new metaphor to me too, but I did come across it recently inside two different places. The first place I came across it was inside Eugene Schwartz Breakthrough Advertising. So that’s mostly the way we’re going to talk about it this time, how it relates to your marketing. And then the other way I saw it was inside of Hernan Diaz’s book trust, which if you’re a literary person, if you’d like to read, I definitely recommend that book. So the idiom slicing the salami can be used in many different ways, but it often refers to gradual division or dissecting of something. So in the book I read trust, what the author did was so creative.
Miriam Schulman: He basically started by putting a book within the book, and then the next book within the book was an autobiography of apparently the same character that was in the first book, but told from a different point of view. And then we have a third version of the same story, and then we have a fourth version of the story, but but told from the wife’s point of view. So you have four competing narratives in the story, four different ways of telling the same story. And it was very interesting because in the book, he actually has one of the characters talk about slicing salami, but not as it relates to the idiom, but it definitely was meant to invoke this idea nonetheless. So in the Diaz book, it’s most likely about looking at the same story from different possibilities from these competing narratives or maybe fake narratives. You know, sometimes people are lying or exaggerating, aka fake news. But the metaphor in general originates from the idea of cutting a large salami into very thin slices. So if you’ve been to a deli, you know what that’s about. Like each slice is so small it doesn’t make a big difference. And how this relates to marketing is you’re going to be repeating your same message over and over and over again, but in different ways.
Miriam Schulman: Or you can also think about it in terms of your own artwork. So for example, like the way Monet would paint the same thing in many different ways, he had the haystacks series or the water Lily series, or the London Thames series. So it’s continuing, redoing the same thing, but in a different way over and over again. I have a client, Grace Marquez, who gets her inspiration underwater from her dives, and she had been using acrylics. But now that she’s taking care of her aging parents who aren’t doing so well, she’s finding her spending a lot of time by their bedside. So instead of working in acrylics, she’s been working in gouache, but she’s still exploring the same themes. So this is another way that she’s still playing her greatest hits, but in a different way. So playing the greatest hits is like, okay, Joni Mitchell can play her song on a guitar or she can play it on the piano, but when you go to see her in concert, you still want her to play the greatest hits. I get this common question, and I’m just going to read out the way one of my incubator members put it. Here is what he said. I’m a little conflicted. You say to put in your email what you would put on social media. Is it okay to post the same pictures that you email, or should you try to reserve things for different things? So people who get the emails, who also happen to see your post, don’t think, what’s the point of the email since I’m seeing the same things on his posts? Or is it okay that they are repeated? I feel like perhaps even if they are the same pictures, I say different things and elaborate more in my emails.
Miriam Schulman: My mind is spinning about the subject. Please give your insights. So spoiler alert you know this podcast episode is called Play Your Greatest hits. So I think you might have a pretty good idea of what I told him. So when we come back, we’re going to talk about what the current stats are on social media. It’s worse. But first these words. One of the benefits of joining the Artist Incubator program is our accountability pods. And I had the opportunity to do a mastermind session inside one of those pods. And so I’m going to share their win with you so that you can hear from them how much results they are getting out of this program. You’re going to hear from Tammy, Tatum, Grace, Paula, Jackie, and Stephanie. And we’re going to make sure that we tag all the artists that have contributed to this in the show notes, so that you can check out their amazing art. All right. Listen in.
Tammy Tatum: I have a show coming up in December that I’m working on a solo show. This is big for me because I applied and I didn’t think I was going to get in until 2025, and I actually have the month of December with a kick off. I’m super, super excited about that opportunity.
Grace Marquez: I was interviewed by Shark Trust in the UK, and I have gotten so much publicity because it’s a traveling exhibition and it traveled. The publicity has been phenomenal because I’ve been watching my. Every time it moves to a new location, I announce it and then another win.
Paula Manning-Lewis: This week I just got to 600 people on my email list, and my last email I sent out got 65% opens on it. And then I have a art fair coming up next weekend.
Jackie Flanagan Pangelinan: I did start a welcome sequence and because of that I sold two pieces from the welcome sequence. I sent out a few emails and no one’s yelled at me for sending them out, so that’s good. I can’t believe it’s been like this gold platinum experience in this program. I’ve learned so much from my partners in this, and I’m growing in my mailing list a lot, so that feels good.
Stefanie Rapoza: I got into a gallery and it’s on a high street where there’s like tons of foot traffic. I feel really good about the emails I’m sending, and I was not sending emails at all before I started with your program. My contact list is small, but I feel like I’ve doubled it, almost doubled it since I started a few months ago.
Miriam Schulman: Okay, and now back to the show. All right, let’s talk about social media. When I first started writing my book, Artpreneur, the average engagement rate on Instagram was 1%. And then by the time I went to edit the chapter on social media, the engagement rate on Instagram had dropped to less than 1% to 0.6%. And now that I’m writing a new book, I had to look up what was the statistic of engagement on Instagram? And it’s probably no surprise to you that it’s dropped and it’s now 0.4%. That means out of 1000 people, only four people are going to be engaging with your posts. So my friend who posted this question on our message board, I explained to him, hey, you know what? Very few people are going to see it. But here’s the thing that you need to know. And only 24% are going to probably open the email. By the way, email open rates have stayed relatively the same, but they are kind of suspect because with some of the privacy laws, we’re not always getting an accurate open rate anymore. Just so you know, it’s a little bit inflated. The real metric you’re going to want to pay attention to in terms of your email marketing is the click rate, because that is somebody who’s actually truly engaging with your email is not just opening it according to the email reporting, because sometimes they’re going to mark something as open, even if it wasn’t, it’s if they actually click on it.
Miriam Schulman: Now, I actually recently had done a list cleaning of my list, like going through anybody who hadn’t been clicking. Seeing if they wanted to unsubscribe. And some of my subscribers have let me know that when they see the notification in their inbox for my podcast, it reminds them to go listen to it, but they don’t necessarily always open my emails, and they don’t necessarily click on the email to listen to the podcast. They may go to their podcast app. But anyway, I digress. The main thing you need to know is that very few people, as you suspected, see your posts and social media and I can even like go to my own Instagram. Let’s see if I can pull it up. If you go to Instagram and you go to any of your posts, you’re going to be able to see not just the likes, but something called insight. And it tells you how many views or how many accounts that it reaches. So, for example, I have over 33,000 followers on Instagram, but one of my most recent posts that has been out for 24 hours was only shown to about 800 people. Wow. Okay, so it was only shown to 800 people. Okay. It says accounts reached 800 and it says views 974.
Miriam Schulman: I don’t know what the difference is between views and reach. Actually, I should probably look it up. And then interactions it has. It’s only 32 interactions. So yeah it’s not great. It’s not great. So interactions is a like or you say and then it says counts engaged is 32. So let’s calculate that the engagement on that is so pathetic that I could cry. I’m not even going to tell you it’s way lower than the He averages. And then I just looked at one of my reels. And because, you know, they’re always saying, oh, well, you do reels that has more engagement and that is actually worse. So something from two days ago only has five interactions on it. And let’s see, there’s something here where this one looks a little bit better. Let’s see. Yeah. No it only says 23 engaged on on this reel. So that’s no good either I don’t know I’m gonna go to somebody else to learn how to do social media apparently. But my point is that you can spend a lot of time creating reels, creating content. And you, my team, spent a lot of time creating this stuff, creating the graphics, deciding what captions to use, deciding which clips to pull out of the podcast and turn into a real for very little return. Then you see just how many few people are actually engaging with any one of these posts.
Miriam Schulman: And it’s really sad. Actually, it’s really, really sad. So the average right now is 0.4% four people out of a thousand. Okay. And how many people see it I don’t know. It’s not a lot. It’s not a lot. And I’m somebody who has a lot of followers, 33,000 followers. And it’s just not what it used to be. So let’s talk about playing your greatest hits and why it matters. It’s really important that you repeat yourself over and over again. You know, as a creative person who develops their skills, whether that’s writing or Painting or sculpting or anything else. Repetition is the mother of mastery. But doing repetitive things, doing repetitive, boring things is what’s going to make you money. I see so many artists who will switch genres prematurely, switch mediums prematurely, and I also see this problem with entrepreneurs who change focus of what they’re doing. And it’s because they get bored with their own shit. Don’t get bored with your own shit when something is making you money. One of the things I like to say to my clients is where there’s gold. Keep digging. Keep doing it. You’ll find a lot of your customers are going to be taking longer to make decisions. And let me tell you my friend, that is not because of the economy. People are taking longer because they’re doing more research.
Miriam Schulman: And the more you can repeat your same things over and over again. First of all, like I said from the beginning with social media, there is probably a good chance they never saw what you posted on social media. And let’s just say so for me, like I said, only 800 people saw one of these posts. So let’s say we don’t even care about how many people actually interact by clicking on it or forwarding it or whatever. And we just say, okay, 800 people saw these posts, this post. Of course I should put it into an email, because even if those 800 people say it again, it’s okay. We always flatter ourselves that we think everyone is going to remember everything that we ever say, and it’s just not true. Nobody’s ever said, oh, Miriam, I saw you posted that on Instagram. Yeah, and if they do, it’s usually. Oh, I saw that you posted it on Instagram and that was so awesome. Like, if they remember it, that’s a good thing. That’s a good thing. So think about the advertising that you see. Could you imagine if McDonald’s came up with a brand new ad every single time they had to air a commercial on television, and every single time they posted something on social media? No, they don’t do that. They’ll have their really good commercial, maybe, that they come up with at the Super Bowl, and they pay a lot of money to put it on the Super Bowl or the World Series or whatever the the game is, or the World Cup.
Miriam Schulman: And then they play that same ad multiple times, even during a single show. You’ll see the same exact ad because they know during the commercials. People are getting up. They are going to get a snack. They may not see it, they see it. They may not remember it. They need to see it many times before it gets stuck in their head. Like a song getting stuck in your head. Now, a lot of times this is something that can make or break. A brand is being bored with their stuff. So when you go to a concert, you want to hear the greatest hits, not just their latest music. So there’s a great story how the band LED Zeppelin, the guitarist Jimmy Page and the singer Robert Plant were really tired of performing their biggest hits, stairway to Heaven, because even though successful, they wanted to focus on newer material that reflected where they were artistically at the time, and they wanted to experiment. And hey, as an artist, I get that. And I’m not saying don’t experiment with your art, so don’t hear me wrong. Of course you should experiment with your art, but even in art, you can’t get bored with your own stuff because people are expecting you to continue to do what they like.
Miriam Schulman: So when they wouldn’t play it, the fans would be so disappointed or they’d come to hear it. But Jimmy Page and Robert Plant would openly be very disdainful of having to play that damn song again. So they weren’t playing it with the same energy or passion, and it affected the whole concert experience. Bob Dylan had the same problem. His fans came and they wanted to hear him play blowing in the wind, but he would, like, improvise during his concerts and try to get new material out. And so fans were very Hood. Marketers have to be like musicians. You may feel tempted to abandon your greatest hits in your marketing to do something new, but you really are overdoing it. So if you post something on Instagram and it resonates, you want to post it to your email list. Not only that, but you want to post it again. Sometimes I will repost some of my successful Instagram posts and I’ll do it a month later, or a few months later. The same exact thing. And you don’t get penalized for doing this. It really helps. So for example, I have a post and this was the second time I posted this same graphic. It’s a quote that says artists who flounder don’t believe in themselves or the process.
Miriam Schulman: And it was not the first time I posted this, and this was a few weeks ago. So let’s compare how this post that was a repost did compare to some of my other womp womp wah social media posts that I was talking about earlier. So this particular one Instagram showed it has it has 2881 views. Okay. It reached 2592 accounts. It has 50 interactions. So basically double what the other ones did and the reach 2500. I’m assuming that it reached more accounts because it was being interacted with or people were pausing on it, that kind of thing. So when that happens, Instagram will show it to more accounts. So this one did basically was shown to three times as many people as some of my brand new content was shown to. So this is something that I should do again. I mean, 22 people visited my profile from that. That’s what actually ends up leading to sales. So that is the power of reposting. So not only should you duplicate what you’ve already done on social media in your emails, but you should keep repeating it over and over again. You should continue to play your greatest hits. Now let’s go back to the salami thing. Repetition doesn’t always mean redundancy. So I’m saying two things. I’m saying. One is you can’t repeat the same exact thing, but you can also repeat the message and not be repetitive.
Miriam Schulman: So the slicing the salami concept involves presenting the same core idea through different lenses and formats. So for example, one time you can tell a story, maybe one time it’s a statistic, maybe it’s a testimonial. So you do it in different ways. So maybe it’s a graphic post, maybe it’s a reel, maybe you’re telling a story. And just to be keep it with the email. Maybe it’s a picture of a work in progress, maybe it’s a picture of your finished art, whatever that is. Maybe it’s a story about the inspiration. Maybe you’re showing how a customer bought it and why they bought it. So it’s still the same kind of art, but different slices of salami. If you’re promoting a new art collection, you might first share the story behind it. Follow up with an email showcasing reviews from collectors, and then later, maybe you have a video on YouTube discussing your creative process along with a time lapse video. Or maybe it’s a podcast. Whatever it is that you do. Okay, so when we come back, we’re going to talk about building trust through repetition. But first these words. Okay. So I also want to share another part of that session I did with this accountability pod. I did this session with them because they were winners of one of our challenges, and Paula had shared with us this recently.
Paula Manning-Lewis: I applied for a show that’s a big art fair in Tubac, Arizona. It’s like number eight on the top ten Sunshine Artists list of shows or whatever. Um, I got that application in. I was kind of afraid to do it as my pod members know it was. You know, it’s one of those that, you know, it’s like says 350 people apply and only 200 get in. And so I was just like, I’m never going to get in. But it’s like, screw it. I’m just going to do it.
Miriam Schulman: Okay. So as I was preparing this podcast, we actually got an email from Paula and I’m going to read to you her email because wow, I’m just so excited for her. So Paula manning Lewis wrote in, I had a huge win today and I had to share. I am so excited. I applied to a big art fair in Arizona last month. It is on the list of the top ten art fairs in the US. I was accepted this win is not only that, but I finally faced my fear of rejection and did it anyway. I had no thoughts of actually making it into the show, but I did it. I have to thank my accountability pod pot for their encouragement. I don’t know that I would have gone for it without their encouragement. So congratulations Paula! I am so thrilled for you. And also big shout outs and thanks to the rest of her pod. So this is the same pod that you heard earlier from that commercial break. And yay! We’re going to link all those artists who are inside her accountability pod in the show notes so that you can check out their art or follow them on Instagram. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the Inspiration Place. So I promised that we would talk about building trust through repetition. Trust does not happen overnight. Much like building a relationship, marketing messages need time and multiple interactions to foster trust with the audience.
Miriam Schulman: Like I said earlier, people are taking longer before they make a purchasing decision, not because of the economy, but because they’re doing more research. I see that with my own clients. I asked people inside the Artist Incubator, hey, how many of you did multiple boot camps before you joined? Lots of people raised their hand. Some people need to read the book and watch a masterclass. Yes, of course there are some people who only need to do one of those things and join right away. But some people need more time. Right now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, we are sinking into an era of low trust. Trust and authenticity are at a premium, and people have an aversion to what we perceive as fakes because authenticity is what resonates so deeply within the human spirit. If we think something is fake, we don’t like it. And a lot of times we’ll see things on social media and we worry that it’s fake. And that’s why people are taking longer to make these decisions, to make sure that what they’re seeing is real, to make sure that they can trust it. I tell my clients that life is what’s going to make your business thrive, and some of my clients thought that I meant like going live on social media, and that’s not what I meant, although that helps. What I was talking about is in real life. So IRL is better than IRL because online will only work if you can be as good or even better of what you do in person, and people are going to trust in person much more than they’re going to trust something that they see online.
Miriam Schulman: So now we’re going to talk about how you can repeat through different formats. So we already talked about emails and social media. We talked about creating YouTube videos. You can create podcasts if you feel that’s the right medium for you. You just want to create in many different formats as possible without burning yourself out so that people feel more comfortable and familiar with you. Now, if you only feel comfortable with email and Instagram, let’s just say two. That’s also fine, but you need to get creative about how are you going to talk about the same thing in multiple different ways, how you’re going to slice the salami in multiple different ways. Now, during my audience building workshop, which you can still get on demand, it’s not live anymore, but we are selling it on demand. Schulmanart.com forward slash audience. We talked about how you can channel existing desire. One thing that artists need to know is you can’t really create a desire for something in the marketplace. You’re channeling desire that’s already out there that your customers desires. They already exist. And your role as an artist, and also as someone marketing your art, is to direct them toward what it is that you have.
Miriam Schulman: And that’s where the repetition comes in. You slice the salami by presenting your same things in different ways to appeal to different facets of your audience’s existing desires. So let’s take the example of a painting. They may have a desire to hang it up in their home for decoration. That’s probably a low level desire. They might have another desire of him wanting to impress their friends. They might have another desire to express their individuality. They might have another desire of having sovereignty over their own style, of expressing Dressing themself as an independent person who can make their own decisions in their home. So you have to understand your customers on that level. What is the why behind their why? That’s behind their why. And it’s not your why. That’s why I really don’t like Simon Sinek’s book Find Your Why? Because it’s not about your why, it’s about your customer’s why? Finally, we want to talk about attention spans. Attention spans are shrinking. Now, I know a lot of my audience is ADHD, so I don’t have to tell you that. And you know, I’m jumping from topic to topic. But here’s the thing, where it matters to you as somebody who’s trying to market your art. Scarcity makes it more important than ever to repeat your core message. People are busy. They’re bombarded with information. So the likelihood that they’ll absorb a single message from you the first time is slim. That’s why, as someone who’s marketing your art, you have to constantly find new ways to reframe the same message. Okay, so we did talk a little bit about it could be that you’re exploring the same art in different ways, but for the most part, this podcast is about marketing that art. Look at how I do it. I have a book, I have a webinar, I have a podcast, and I have a bootcamp, and they all pretty much lay out the same messages over and over again. Don’t rely on social media. Do email and email is the cockroach of marketing, which we’re going to guess is going to end right here where we started off. It’s not the water bug of marketing, it is the cockroach of marketing. So let’s end here with the power of consistency. Consistency is key. Marketing is not about bombarding people, but showing up regularly and giving them nuanced ways to understand and engage with you. So just like your favorite songs, messages, and marketing, they need to be played over and over in different ways for them to truly stick. All right, my friend. I hope you got a lot out of today’s show. It was so much fun talking with you today. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at Facebook.com/SchulmanArt on Instagram @SchulmanArt, and of course, on SchulmanArt.com.
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