Ideas

CI to Eye is a podcast for arts leaders who want to reach their full potential. Each episode is created to help you become better at your job so you can help the arts move forward.

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.

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.

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.

Ask the Industry features advice from arts marketers in their own words. We hope you can learn from them and it will spark new ideas at your organization.

This month, we’re asking, “What advice would you give to a fellow arts marketer before embarking on a website redesign project?" 

Jonathan Carpenter and Jack Wright (Celebrity Series of Boston), Nora Brady (Los Angeles Philharmonic), and Rosemary Devine and Tori Harvey  (People's Light) highlight their most recent website redesigns, and answer everything from choosing a project manager, to their biggest successes and most valuable learnings. 

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is confusing to marketers. Of course it is! GDPR is a legal issue and we are not lawyers. At CI we want to be helpful so what we can provide is what our lawyer sent to us and other resources we have found useful in facing GDPR for our business. This is the first post we’re publicly releasing with another specifically about Google Analytics to follow. CI clients will be hearing more from us individually.

When we analyze Google Analytics (GA) client data at Capacity Interactive, two themes relating to the homepage commonly recur. Chances are, if you were to look at your own data, you’d see something very similar:

At Capacity Interactive, we work with nearly two hundred arts and cultural organizations and have the privilege of tackling challenges in the digital marketing realm with them every day.

Certain questions come up again and again across all organization shapes and sizes, and that inspired us to retool our benchmark. Some of the toughest questions for organizations involve where to put their money, how to staff their teams, and how to set priorities when there is always more to do.

The Challenge

When investing massive capital and human resources into a website redesign or update, how do you make the right design and content decisions to ensure a knockout site that meets stakeholders’ needs? We hope it comes as a huge relief to hear you can’t possibly make perfect and complete decisions at one preordained moment in time.

Thriving digitally today means your site (and your management of it) must be flexible and agile, evolving to meet the changing needs of users over time. So, how do you do this when your time and resources are finite?

It’s not easy to sell convertibles in the rain. This was the challenge for Audi Canada as they attempted to increase test drives for their A3 Cabriolet convertible. How could they reach their customers in the most relevant context to sell more cars? They turned to the insights gleaned from their potential customers’ mobile devices. Audi launched a mobile ad campaign where customers could book test drives directly from the ad experience. These ads were targeted to people in close proximity to a dealership, prioritized via CRM data and displayed only on sunny days when they knew test drives would be more likely. By understanding the context of their customers’ lives through the clues they leave behind though their mobile devices, Audi increased test drives by 51% and drove $13M in new A3 Cabriolet sales.