Ideas

Picture this: It’s a beautiful June morning. Your mind is clear of polar vortexes or snowfall up to your waist. You’re beginning a Facebook ad campaign for an upcoming artist coming to your organization. You’ve been provided a gorgeous video, paired it with quippy copy, and tied it together with a clever call-to-action. You click ‘Publish,’ and your campaign should be live soon. How satisfying! Check that off of your to-do list. But, soon you (or your digital marketing team) get this email:

From: Facebook Ads Team
Subject: Some of Your Ads are Disapproved

#%!$*!. All of your hard work, down the drain. What do you do now? Rebuild the post? Sue Facebook for censorship?

Take a deep breath. Facebook’s ad review process has become stricter within the last year. You’re not alone. We have all been frustrated by how often gorgeous ads are not going live.

Ask the Industry features advice from arts marketers in their own words. We hope you that it will spark new ideas for your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “What’s your advice for an organization looking to start and maintain a blog?”

Calvin Dotsey (Houston Symphony), Jeff Fickes (Seattle Shakespeare Company), and Krystina Tran (Stanford Live) discuss everything from how to feasibly create blog content on a regular basis, to the different types of audiences they write for, and the tools they use to keep everything in line.

Instagram Stories can have a lasting impact, far past their 24-hour time limit. If your organization has been sleeping on them, consider this: of the 400 million accounts using Instagram Stories, one-third of the most viewed stories come from businesses, and one in five Stories gets a direct message from its viewers. Additionally, one in three people from a survey of 10,000 Instagram users said they’ve become more interested in a brand or product after seeing it in Instagram Stories.

If you’re a marketer, you’re probably familiar with Google Analytics, one of the most powerful free tools out there for monitoring your website. Google Analytics (GA) allows us to measure the activity of our site visitors in real time, at a super granular level and can inform everything from landing page design to site structure. It’s one of the essential tools to have in our marketing tool belts. We love it and have talked about it at length here, here, and here.

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?