Ideas

Now that all of the ballots from the 2018 midterms are finally (mostly) counted, the election season has come to an end (though the politicking never seems to stop).

Many arts marketers feel the aftermath of an election season, and spend time trying to recover from a downturn in ticket sales. At University Musical Society (UMS), we call this the “election year phenomenon,” and it’s something we’ve been tracking for well over 20 years.

The difference is that we’re using our data to do something about it.

The Arts Industry Digital Marketing Benchmark Study is available for download and this sixth edition holds a ton of new data to help you market smarter. We rethought our approach to make sure we’re giving you the metrics and key performance indicators that can fuel conversation about growth and help you make informed decisions. It’s double the length of previous versions, since the data’s cut in a couple new ways. Here’s a guide to help you get the most out of it.

Let’s hop into our digital marketing time machines. The year is 2012, and the 92nd Street Y, in partnership with the United Nations Foundation, established #GivingTuesday. The power of social media was used to launch a movement of philanthropy in communities worldwide.

There is a new marketing model I can't stop thinking about. It's called the Flywheel. It's a new paradigm to model modern marketing that I learned about at the 2018 Inbound Conference from HubSpot’s CEO, Brian Halligan. His presentation outlining the Flywheel is long, but it’s worth watching.

For years the arts and cultural industry has been on edge. We keep waiting, and perhaps hoping, for packages that yield our largest quantity of repeat attendance to die. Why?

It’s quite a trick. How did email, the original digital marketing channel born in 1970, become not just reliable, but effective, trusted and dare I say, cool?  No doubt you’ve seen the data on email’s conversion rates. It’s still your best marketing spend by a mile. But there’s a bigger story to email than just conversion stats. Why has email been so resilient, why is it so effective and more importantly, is there still a tangible opportunity for the modern marketers with email?

Digital marketers of the world, if we all had the budget, time, and staffing resources that we wished we had, then we’d be unstoppable. But, working in a non-profit often means having to market on a shoestring. That’s why it’s important to be strategic and prioritize high-impact, low-effort campaigns.

The road to social content bliss is often met with some challenges along the way. Whether you’re creating content from scratch or only have a small pool of artist-approved assets, you don’t have to put the brakes on creativity. That’s right. There are solutions ahead.

Arts marketers from two different organizations and genres discuss their social content challenges and how they found solutions to keep their content fresh and engaging. 

Let’s say you have twelve delicious donuts in a box. You bring them into a classroom of first-grade kids, frothing with glee after recess. You put the donuts on a table. Cake donuts. Glazed donuts. Different flavors. They smell good. They’re even still a bit warm.

You say, “Who wants a donut?”

What happens? All thirty kids come rushing to the table and start grabbing donuts in a fierce dustup of flying sugar, elbow jabs and colorful uses of the word booger. 

Navigation, whether you’re talking ships or the web, refers to a method of determining one’s current position, distance traveled, and plotting the course to a destination. When it comes to your organization’s website, you want your users to be able to quickly and easily find what they’re looking for. This is accomplished by putting an interface into place that clearly plots out the information and actions available and encourages them to move through your site with confidence.