Americans for the Arts

Rachel Ciprotti

The ancient story of David, a young man who defeated the giant Goliath using only a small stone and a slingshot, is an apt metaphor for the situation most (perhaps all?) arts organizations find themselves in these days. The marketing world has become entirely fragmented, with hundreds of different channels competing for the attention of every consumer – that means every potential audience member. We are all inundated with emails, ever-multiplying social networks, television, radio, print, digital magazines, review sites, event sites, crowdfunding, discount ticket sites, etc, etc.

How can we cut through the clutter? How can we get our message across when the channels are overflowing with behemoth corporations spending the equivalent of our yearly operating expenses on a month’s worth of Facebook ads?

David Dombrosky

Mobile device adoption and usage is a global phenomenon with over 4.5 billion mobile users worldwide. In the United States, smartphone adoption has exceeded standard cell phone ownership by nearly 2-to-1. We no longer use our phones to simply make calls and send text messages.  We use them to explore our world. Anything we experience can be recorded, researched, and shared from the palms of our hands – anytime, anywhere.

As our adoption and usage of mobile technology has grown, so have our expectations for engaging with the world around us at a moment’s notice. Researchers at Forrester define this as the mobile mind shift “the expectation that [we] can get what we want in our immediate context and moments of need.”

Erik Gensler

If you still say "Facebook is not a direct sales tool" you're not using it correctly. And you don't understand how the marketing world has dramatically changed.

At a recent arts conference there were evidently some sessions where presenters said "Facebook doesn't sell tickets" or "we just use Facebook for branding and awareness."

We are in a new world where social storytelling and smart digital targeting are cornerstones of marketing. And those organizations that don't know how to do it are going to keep falling further and further behind. Spreading this misinformation is just going to keep our sector amongst the dinosaurs who think we can keep interrupting our way to ticket sales by buying traditional media.

Beth Malone

Audience is something we think about every moment. How are viewers engaging with our exhibitions? How are they responding to the organization’s methods of outreach? Are they even showing up in the first place?

From very early on, Dash has had a large outpouring of community support. My partner and I are both Atlanta natives and were lucky enough to leverage relationships we had with press, artists, and musicians in the city. As we continued to grow within our mission, we cultivated (and continue to cultivate) a solid, committed constituency. Efforts to engage an audience outside the traditional art-viewing public such as university students and faculty, small businesses, and city government, paid off. Quite literally, we were networking – meeting with leaders in these industries to explain our work and ask for their support via their own promotional tools like social media, web links, etc.

Ron Evans

As a starter conversation in advance of the customer loyalty preconference that I am teaching with Carol Jones at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference in Atlanta, a question for you. How does loyalty begin?

I had just moved to the area, and I was looking for a place to get my hair cut. I remember driving by a place near my house, and deciding to check it out. The available stylist was Lan. She called me back and talked with me about what I wanted in my cut, and we joked about various things. She did a great job with the haircut, too – I was happy.

Sean King

Would you send a Vine to your grandmother?

Would you tell your teenager to check out an ad in the newspaper?

OMG, did you really just send that on Snapchat? And what the heck is Snapchat anyway?

Arts marketers have the challenge of providing support for nearly every major facet of our organizations from development to branding, ticket sales to programming, volunteer recruitment to public relations.

But how do we use traditional and social media to reach the generations of our audience through multiple medias, with multiple messages, without being completely overwhelmed and completely alienating our audiences?