Ideas

As we all struggle to get through what has been a year of multiple crises that have upended our lives, our families, our friends, and our organizations, we can take solace in knowing that we are not alone in all of this. It has been a challenging 2020 so far, and we still have many challenges ahead, but if we lean on each other and share our successes, we should be able to heal and become stronger collectively. We know that each of you is struggling in different ways, and while some of you can reconnect with your visitors, others don’t know what their schedule or future for in-person events looks like.

Your website is one of the first impressions your organization makes. It’s the place where most tickets are sold, it’s a goldmine for user behavior analytics, and it’s a place to share information and build your brand’s voice. Your website is a fundamental piece of a marketing funnel, whether or not a patron buys online.

The work of my team at Tessitura is based on one simple philosophy: revenue follows engagement. This means that deepening a customer’s engagement with your organization leads to more ticket sales, more donations, and more renewed memberships and subscriptions.

What does this mean for your website?

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.

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%?

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.