Digital Strategy, SEO & Curatorial Direction

I've worked with Parkville Frame Gallery for two years, and the relationship has grown the way good strategic work often does — by following the business as its goals changed, rather than executing a fixed plan.

It began with a specific, modest goal: improving the Frame Gallery's SEO and building a healthier website and social media presence. That early work focused on visibility. As the online presence took hold, the scope expanded to include the new in-store art gallery.

What started as a goal to drive website traffic shifted more specifically toward purchases of both framing services and artwork. Framing services are promoted through social media that showcases expertise — completed projects, unique commissions, the relationships built with clients along the way. Artwork is promoted through social media, artist events, and the gallery's newly developed website, built specifically to give the art a presence that matches its caliber.

We meet monthly to review analytics and plan ahead, and every decision is rooted in the current business goals. The current focus has moved into something closer to full curatorial direction: acquiring, evaluating, and selecting art, and shaping how it's presented and told so that it draws people into the gallery and toward a purchase. This is where digital strategy and curatorial thinking meet — the online presence and the physical gallery experience now inform each other directly.

That curatorial direction is also where strategy and film have started to meet. Working closely with the gallery's artists, over time, gave rise to The Artist Series — a short-film documentary series featuring the artists exhibited at Fusion Fine Art. Each film gives a unique look into the artists’ work and passion. It is a natural extension of the curatorial thinking behind the rest of the relationship: the belief that art is better understood, and better sold, when its story is told well. It's also a clear example of how the strategic and film sides of my work aren't separate practices — one grows directly out of the other when the relationship is deep enough to support it.

The visibility work has paid off beyond the gallery's own channels. Parkville Frame Gallery and Fusion Fine Art have been featured in local magazines and on local news, which was picked up by CNN and aired nationally.

What's made this relationship durable is its willingness to change. Two years in, the work looks different than it did at the start, not because the original plan failed, but because good strategy stays responsive to where a business actually is, not where a plan once assumed it would be. Sometimes that responsiveness opens the door to work, like The Artist Series, that wasn't part of the original plan at all.