Ideas

What does it mean to “market” the brand? Some industries are all about brand marketing. The game we play, working in the performing arts, is most often one of conversions - get butts in those seats! I’ve been thinking a lot about brand marketing since I arrived at Carnegie Hall just over two years ago.

The Goodman Theatre has a long history of innovation on-stage. It’s the recipient of the Special Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and is known at home and abroad as a theater as much for artists as it is for the community. The team at The Goodman puts their patrons at the heart of everything they do, including their digital initiatives, proving that they are innovators off-stage as well. 

This was most evident in The Goodman’s recent website redesign, where, with funding from the Wallace Foundation, they were able to turn to user data at key moments in the process to inform the direction and prioritization of new templates on their site.

An arts organization can have the best digital strategies in the world, but so much of an organization's success comes down to people, culture, and leadership.

Without valuing people, we won’t meet the critical challenges of connecting with our audiences in the 21st century. 

I recently presented a webinar called "Creating a People-First Culture," or if you're a glass half empty person, "The People Crisis in the Arts." I am passionate about this topic and want to share this webinar with you. 

Our clients often ask how they compare to other cultural organizations. While we’re happy to point them towards the most recent Arts Industry Digital Marketing Benchmark Study, the best path is to benchmark against themselves. This is particularly true for email because email type and the size of the list both impact metrics and results.

The word “segmentation” can bring to mind images of infinitesimal details and complex analysis. In other words, plans that digital marketers of the artistic world might be salivating to try but blocked to implement by time, resources and reality. Luckily, new research suggests that relatively straightforward strategies are still valuable for arts organizations trying to boost their return on investment (ROI) on email.

Exploring trends in organizational health at the intersection of arts administration and technology, the 2019 Spektrix Insights Report analyzed a cohort of about 350 performing arts organizations from the software provider’s client base. The report shows segmented emails outperform open rates on unsegmented emails by 56%. In this case, “segmented” means sent to 10% or less of an organization’s opted-in audience base.

In a battle for inbox relevance, only anticipated, personal, and relevant emails will survive.

As arts marketers, we’re always looking for new and exciting ways to grow our audiences. We want to invite them into our inner circle, and make them feel like they’re part of a growing cultural community.

One of the most valuable assets we can gain from a new patron is their email address. They’ve given us permission to talk to them on a regular basis, and we shouldn’t take that for granted.

Hi, CI! is our monthly series featuring the best team we know - the Capacity Interactive team! You will learn more about the people who help arts organizations market smarter. This month, we’re featuring one of our Digital Marketing Analysts who is a dynamic dancer, a talented choreographer and empowers arts marketers to find important stories within data.

As arts marketers, we are fortunate to promote products and experiences that, by their very nature, are designed to be engaging and delightful. It’s not like toothpaste or frozen peas — we are telling people about plays, concerts, artwork, and performances that offer shared human experiences.

A few weeks ago, I was digging through the Google Analytics (GA) account of one of our projects. While this may not sound exciting, I love gleaning information that I can use to improve our projects and empower us to do a better job. What I actually encountered was something that will change our approach to web development at its core. I discovered a bit of data that will have a direct impact on the way our team does its job.

Over the past few years, the GA data on all websites we’ve built has justified investing in responsively designed sites. With non-desktop traffic hovering in the 50% range, we could clearly make the argument that desktop and mobile need to have equal investments in time and effort. But what happens when mobile traffic reaches 70%?