Ideas

Your organization’s website is your first-impression for many of your potential ticket buyers, patrons or clients. It shows off your visual identity and houses all of the essentials about you and your mission. Your sales, fundraising, online engagement, lead generation, and more depend on your place online.

As the analytics lead at Capacity Interactive, my job revolves around on-site behavioral data - collecting it, analyzing it, making informed decisions and strategic recommendations based on it. Data can be analyzed in many ways, and I don't believe in a cookie-cutter approach. Every client is unique - in who they are, what their objectives are, what kind of content they have, how their website looks, what tech platforms they use, etc.

Marketing, when effective, reaches the right audience at the right place at the right time. It connects ideas and benefits with the people who want them. Arts marketing is no exception. In fact, it is one of the most challenging sectors since we, as art marketers, rarely have any control over the “product” for which we are raising awareness and creating demand.

This year we are presenting our sixth annual Digital Marketing Boot Camp for the Arts. To commemorate, we did what any sensible digital marketer would do...we created an infographic! Enjoy.

I want to tell you about The Perfect Website Redesign Project. It happened about a year ago with the Palo Alto Dance Theater Company (or PADT for short), an arts organization started by a group of software engineers in Silicon Valley with a mission to balance the lives of desk-bound coders with inspiring dance programs. My firm had been selected to overhaul the existing website and build a new experience that would:

• Better represent the breadth of the organization's offerings.
• Increase online donations.
• Increase ticket sales to performances.

As arts marketers, we’re always looking to optimize our digital campaigns and be more efficient with our budgets. We have to or we'll see a direct impact on ticket sales. 

I hear these requests far too often from arts marketers. I don’t blame them for wanting something fast and inexpensive, but these timelines and budgets are incredibly unrealistic and create a domino effect that causes more work, lots of headaches, and ultimately leads to poor websites that keep our industry in the dark ages.

In the beginning there was a new website or a redesign… and people were impressed. Compliments were passed. Beer was shared. The website was built according to plan—populated with snappy content and interesting images—and it finally launched with a sigh of relief. Months passed and people were (still) impressed. But analytic data started to tell a different story. 

Gone are the days of wondering if your organization needs either a mobile optimized website or a mobile app.

We have all cast our vote through our smartphone usage and the data shows that we interact with mobile web and mobile applications in different ways. Depending on your business, you may need one or both.