What good digital marketing looks like for arts & culture
18/03/2024 - Digital Marketing
How to build a good digital marketing strategy for your arts and culture organisation
The arts and culture sector brings in £10.6 billion to the UK economy. Culture alone contributes £850 million. Without a good digital marketing strategy, you risk your competitors reaching customers first.
When building your digital marketing strategy, your customers expect consistency across the board whichever channels you use from SEO, Paid Search, Paid Social, Email, affiliate marketing or others.
A good strategy allows you to attract and engage relevant audiences by communicating a clear and consistent message across every touchpoint. Every channel should be tailored to your online goals. Assigning key performance indicators to each goal will highlight the effectiveness of your strategy.
To identify the best channels to use, you first need to define your buyer personas, who are your ideal customers? What are their behaviours and traits? What are the best ways to reach them?
Next, establish your online goals. Do you want to boost brand awareness and visibility, generate leads or drive traffic and revenue to your website? Once you know your goals, you can invest in the right channels to help you meet them.
At Un.titled, we’re data-driven, as we always measure our actions to assess impact – that's what allows us to constantly innovate and deliver the best results for our clients.
Do your research
Before we jump into how to get the best out of your digital marketing channels, competitor research is an important starting point.
Start by selecting five direct competitors. As a guide, three may perform as well as you and two could be aspirational. Next conduct some research around their marketing activity. What content do they offer? Do they have a newsletter? Do they run paid ads on Google Ads or Meta Ads? From this research you can determine which channels work well in your space.
Our team can support you by providing a holistic view of your current position against your competitors. We combine our expertise with a vast suite of tools to provide practical recommendations to optimise your digital marketing strategy to take your arts & culture organisation to the next level.
Now you know your goals and where you stand against your competitors, let’s dive into our top tips for some key digital marketing channels.
SEO
Whether you’re selling tickets, artworks or merchandise, SEO is a valuable channel to grow your arts and culture organisation and promote what you do. SEO can increase brand visibility and boost organic website traffic, helping to convert website visitors into paying customers. Best of all, you can achieve these results for free.
With SEO you can grow your online visibility by improving your keyword rankings in relevant SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Instead of littering content with generic keywords to generate irrelevant traffic that will not convert and consequently lower your ranking, it’s better to pursue sustainable growth and focus on high-quality traffic. You can achieve this through keyword research and optimising your content and meta data with highly relevant, long-tail keywords.
Top tip – For the best results, place yourself in your customers’ shoes. Pay attention to the words and phrases they use in search results and factor this into your own content.
Working with a leading gallery, our team focussed on ranked keywords with the potential to generate revenue and proritised content. By conducting granular keyword research utilising innovative internal capabilities, we crafted valuable content for target audiences based on user intent. In the first six months of ongoing SEO work, we achieved the following:
- Increased the number of top performing key word rankings (keywords ranking between positions 1 to 5 in Google SERPs) by 76% and the overall volume of ranked keywords by 722%
- Boosted organic clicks by 42% and organic impressions by 358%
Paid Search
Paid Search is another digital marketing channel for driving traffic to your website and increasing sales for your organisations. It is also a powerful method of increasing brand awareness and filling your sales funnel with potential new customers.
As a Google and Microsoft Partner, our team of experts can create full funnel PPC strategies, manage your campaigns, optimise to improve performance and drive growth through your Paid Search marketing efforts.
Top tip - For arts and culture organisations looking to grow through Paid Search, we highly recommend Google Ads Grants. Non-profit organisations are eligible providing they meet Google quality standards on their website. If approved, you could receive a monthly grant of £10,000 per month.
For many arts and culture organisations, resource can be limited and so, this is an ideal way to achieve your goals. With any Google Ads activity, always check your tracking has been set up correctly to measure the effectiveness of your ads and manage budgets.
Google’s Performance Max (PMax) campaigns are also worth experimenting with if your goals are to increase online revenue and traffic. Rather than running multiple campaigns, PMax campaigns allow you to collate data in one campaign to increase the effectiveness of machine learning.
According to Google, advertisers achieve 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action with Pmax campaigns. If you give this a go, ensure you refine and target the right audience.
Paid Social
Research conducted by Statista found 74% of surveyed art buyers worldwide used Instagram for art-related purposes. Customers want to engage with you on social media. Paid Social is a great way to increase your brand visibility, ensure your campaigns are seen by the right people and bring your arts and culture organisation to life.
Top tip – If you’re looking to experiment with Paid Social, we would recommend Meta Ads. Due the breadth of Meta and all the various placements available within its network, you can reach a high volume of potential new customers on Meta and Instagram to showcase your brand, for example, within Stories, Reels and Messenger placements. Our team have found Meta Ads to be a cost-effective platform that performs just as well, if not better, than Google Ads.
Pinterest is another platform to consider. Due to its highly visual nature, organisations have used Pinterest to create virtual exhibitions. The option to preview museum and gallery pieces and pin particular gift shop items has also sparked conversation and engagement amongst potential customers.
Whilst less suitable for revenue generation, Tik Tok is also great for brand awareness and engagement. From influencer content showcasing how to get to your museum or gallery to favourite items from the gift shop or personal stories of the artists and their works in your galleries, the opportunities for video content are endless. 66% of users on Tik Tok are under the age of 30.
As loyal gallery and museum visitors age and reduce their visits throughout the year, now is the time to start engaging younger audiences. Younger audiences are willing to spend big. In the US, TikTok users spent $4.2 million dollars.
Future-proof your arts & culture organisation
We hope our insights have given you plenty of food for thought and tips to implement. Our dedicated digital marketing team can do the heavy lifting for you and build the foundations of your strategic roadmap.
As part of our ‘State of the Nation’ service, we can create a detailed report of your current position and performance. Every report is tailored to your organisation's goals, digital marketing channels and activities and can include:
- An executive summary with key trends and insights
- Competitor analysis
- Performance review and bespoke recommendations for specific digital marketing channels
- Additional sections to review - Retention vs Acquisition strategy and performance, Loyalty & Referral programme, Membership/Donations programme and more.
Our team have completed ‘State of the Nations’ for organisations across the arts & culture space from The British Museum Shop to Art UK, The Courtauld, Mall Galleries, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the Royal Institution and more.
As part of a larger project that involved updating Mall Galleries’ ecommerce capabilities and included conducting a ‘State of the Nation’ report to inform the changes needed for the website, we saw an increase in ecommerce sales of 5,780% and a project ROI of 1,125%.
If you would like our support with your digital marketing channels or with building your ‘State of the Nation’ report, our team would love to help.
The team showed real dedication in producing a State of the Nation report for our ecommerce activities. Their audit of our existing activity was combined with expertise in best-practice to produce a holistic roadmap we can rely on going forward. The attention to detail was exemplary. The handy tables outlining recommended activity are just brilliant. I find myself frequently returning to the document - it has become essential to the development and application of our marketing strategy. Our sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to it.
Gemma Briggs , Director of Marketing & Communications at Art UK
