Archive for the ‘Building audiences’ Category

I’ve been reading about peer-to-peer marketing strategies. Although I’ve struggled to find a definition, I think that peer-to-peer marketing is about capitalising on your audience’s willingness (or rather, a segment of your audience) to market your product on your behalf. 

Methods for influencing people’s decisions have changed radically. If we can provide the tools (largely web-based) that help our audiences organise and socialise, they will influence the decisions of others, ultimately helping to build audiences at events. 

Strategies might include posting reviews or testimonials or pictures on your website from people attending your events, allowing visitors to email events information from your website to friends, through to creating quirky ‘viral advertising’ that gets posted on YouTube or other content-sharing sites or passed from one person to another via email. 

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Nicely done - the Christchurch Art Gallery has put its audio tours on the gallery’s website. You can listen to the guides on an iPod at the gallery for $5 or download and listen to them at home for free.

The narration is by actor Sam Neill and the audio tours feature some of the Gallery’s - and New Zealand’s - most significant works of art. The website includes an image of the painting under discussion, as well as a transcript if you can’t get the technology working. 

Worth having a listen even if you can’t get to the gallery. I heard somewhere the other day that the number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s virtual experience is greater by a third than the number of physical visitors. Virtual visits can be be relevant and measurable cultural experiences, as much as physical ones (and hopefully they sometimes initiate physical visits, too).

Following on from booked-out workshops earlier this year, Vicki Allpress (Marketing Manager at the NBR New Zealand Opera) has published an excellent article on effective e-marketing. It features examples and ideas taken from our very own cultural organisations.

Vicki says e-marketing involves using communications technologies, such as email newsletters (see an earlier post on this blog about these), social networking websites, RSS, blogs and podcasts, to reach audiences.

Which channels you use, what content you provide, how you segment your audience and when you contact them all depends on what you are trying to achieve with your marketing endeavours. Vicki encourages a strategic approach to e-marketing:

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The first day of the Maori Tourism Conference was devoted to the subject of creating quality tourism experiences. Craig Wilson from Quality Tourism Development presented, with breaks for groups to apply the ideas to their own businesses.

What do our visitors want?

Research shows that around 70% of a visitor’s overall satisfaction comes from what they do - not where they stay and how they get around (although a bad accommodation or transport experience can undermine their satisfaction).

So what is quality, and what is a quality experience? ‘Quality’ is in the eyes of the customer or - as Fiona Luhrs of TIANZ says - ‘quality is a race without a finish line’ as customers’ expectations continually increase.

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Creative New Zealand is bringing Alan Brown to Auckland and Wellington to present two sessions on how to articulate the value of arts activities and sell the benefits of attending and participating in the arts.

Session one: The architecture of value

• Cost: free
• Executive briefing for arts administrators, artistic directors, board members and artists.
• What value does your organisation create for its consitutents and stakeholders? Is value an unknowable by product of participation, or a guiding principle behind programming choices? Alan Brown will present a framework for understanding the value system surrounding arts activities, drawing on a variety of studies exploring the intrinsic and instrumental benefits of the arts.

Session two: Communicating value in today’s cultural marketplace

• Cost: $50 (GST excl) per person
• Workshop for marketing and fundraising practitioners.
• As arts marketers and fundraisers gain sophistication about ’selling the intangibles’ of arts experiences, we need better language and a new framework for talking about value. This session is particularly relevant to marketing and fundraising people and will conclude with a group discussion about values-based messaging and examples of different approaches to messaging to audience segments based on their attitudes, values and motivation for attending.

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