Presentation Notes
AYour organization's website should be the core of your organization's marketing strategy.
All other marketing efforts, social media, print, radio etc, should drive traffic back to your website.
Conversely, your website can also drive traffic to those resources.
Email is a more effective sales and communications channel than social networking sites.
Content Marketing / Cross Platform (Channel) Marketing / Integrated Marketing
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, and relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive customer action.
Instead of pitching a product or service, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your customers. For museums this form of marketing is one of the strongest you can do.
Museums are warehouses of useful content that should be at the core of your marketing strategy
Cross Platform (Channel) Marketing (multi-channel marketing)
Cross Platform Marketing is the practice of using multiple channels (Social media, email, radio, print, etc) to reach customers. The key is to avoid the silo mentality – your channel campaigns should be integrated together.
hence...
Integrated Marketing
Integrated Marketing harnesses the benefits of each channel, which when combined together builds a clearer and vaster impact than if used individually.
The Increasing Uselessness of Facebook (and many other social media outlets)
At one point in time, Facebook was a great strategy for small museums. Increasing your "likes" on Facebook would result in increased exposure, engagement, traffic, and eventually increased traffic to your museum. Facebook changed all of this with a number of consistent tweaks to their algorithm and organic reach (as opposed to paying for placement) for Facebook Pages started to plummet around the end of 2013.
Facebook organic reach is continuing to go down. The reason behind this is an ever-increasing number of Facebook users create more and more content that competes for your newsfeed. And there’s the need for Facebook to sell ads.
This does not mean that all social channels are tanking. But it should make you cautious about where to invest your marketing time (and dollars). The first step would be to start moving social media followers to your e-newsletter. Rethinking your email marketing strategy will give you better control over your marketing assets.
Email is more effective in reaching your audience than Facebook
Email is a more effective sales and communications channel than social networking sites. Even if you are very active in managing your Facebook page or Twitter the potential return is much lower than using opt-in email lists. Social media channels are great for outreach. Next step would be to bring the people you reach there to your email list.
With email you can:
You get more attention
Control who sees what
Personalize for better results
You can segment messages
Test what works
In today’s world, the reality is that you need both social media and email channels in your marketing strategy. When in sync, social media and email marketing can form a mighty combination.
Just having a Website isn’t the key to success
Building a website and just leaving it to sit there, hoping people will magically flock to it isn't going to work.
You need to bring people to it.
Takeaways from this website
This will be a growing list as a have the time to add to it.
Make sure to have your contact information and address on EVERY page. A footer is a good place for it. However, you should still have a separate "Contact Us" page in your navigation.
Your Event pages and Exhibit pages can function as press releases. Most organizations do not have the luxury to write both press releases AND copy for their v Events and exhibits for the public. If you write it as a press release, your news outlets will thank you but the public, knowing you are a small underfunded organization, won't be put off by it.
You should create a News/Media Room page on your web site.