Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

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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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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Sending your customers an email newsletter is possibly the cheapest and most effective way to market your services and build audiences. If you have a limited marketing budget, an email newsletter should be at the top of your to-do list. It can help you get eyeballs on your brand, send news and information to your customers and drive traffic to your website.

‘The seven deadly sins of email marketing management’ outlines the major pitfalls to avoid if you want to keep your newsletter subscribers happy. Some key things to remember are to keep your design simple and your messages relevant. Link through to your website for more information. Encourage subscribers to forward the newsletter and provide a link so that new people can subscribe.

Using a good email tool can make all the difference. It can help you identify bounces (email addresses that are no longer active), manage your list of contacts and monitor open rates for your newsletter. Data on the links in your newsletter that have been clicked on gives you opportunity to adapt newsletter content to meet your subsribers’ needs and interests.

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Papers and notes from the Museums and the Web 2007 conference (April 11-14) in San Francisco are now online.

The wiki notes on the Walker Art Centre’s presentation on blogging are worth a read. They list ‘gems’ from the museum blogosphere for 06/07 (including this very blog!), blogs that have ‘found their voice’, tips for the perfect post, dos and don’ts for creating income from your blog, link-building strategies and - most usefully - simple statistics for assessing whether your blog is working.

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TheNewDowse art gallery re-opened in February after major works that have improved and expanded their exhibition spaces in their Lower Hutt building.

I’ve really enjoyed their re-launch campaign, featuring a blistering pink on posters and balloons. The slogan ‘TheNewDowse is the *!’ invites you to make up your own mind. Nice one!

I took a photo of this poster on the edge of Wellington’s central business district. Is this the first ever campaign that’s compatible with graffiti? (The graffiti is the black squiggle in the bottom right hand corner.) Perhaps not what TheNewDowse intended - but it doesn’t look out of place.

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