People are the lifeblood of your museum.
If you don’t get a constant flow of people through your doors it doesn’t matter if your exhibition comes to life Night at the Museum style, you’ll only entertain crickets. And crickets don’t have money.
But how can you ensure more people visit your museum to be awed by your latest display of genius?
Are you missing out on visitors?
How active are you on social media?
You’re probably a savvy museum curator, who takes time to create meaningful—hopefully not jargon-filled—mini articles to post to Facebook.
Perhaps you take lovely pics of your installations and share it to Instagram.
The likes and shares might be pouring in.
But are you reaching enough of the right people?
Perhaps you have a website for your museum.
However, the website itself is old enough to be put on display in your museum!
It hearkens back to days of glittery neon; built with serif text that’s hardly distinguishable from a shouting patterned background.
And you don’t use the website. It just sits there like Rembrandt’s weird Stone Operation, drawing looks of disgust, but not much more.
Have you ever considered investing in a website that actually works and helps you make headway in your online marketing efforts?
What can you do with a website?
Your contact details should obviously be visible on the website, along with your location, for those who’ve not been to your place of wonder.
But you could be using it to market exhibits too.
Whenever you’ve activated a new display, why not take some beautiful pics and upload them along with a meaningful story about the display?
What is it about? Why do you have it in your museum? When can people come by to see it? How much does it cost to get in?
You might say, “I can do that on Facebook.”
But you’re missing out on other quality traffic if you’re only focused on social media.
Read on to see why.
Email marketing
Email is a wonderful way to connect with your fans.
If you have something new coming in or if you’d like to get new visitors to an older exhibit, email is a great tool to reach people.
But you wouldn’t want to create an email manually for each campaign you run. It’s tedious work. And unnecessary.
No, with our automated email marketing package, you focus on creating articles on your website.
Those articles are sent out to email newsletter subscribers automatically, without you even opening email creation software.
That leaves you to write passionate pieces about the art or science artifacts you have on display.
That way, you only need to create content on a single platform. BUT… it reaches people through three channels.
To get you going with email marketing, we set up a newsletter system for you, and add a signup form to your website where people can add their names and email addresses, which adds them to your newsletter automatically.
Search engine marketing
Many people completely forget about search engines in their quest for the mighty like and share.
That’s a pity because Google is a fantastic source of traffic and social media likes and shares don’t equal guaranteed museum visits.
Some searches performed in the museum niche include:
- art exhibitions in austin
- art exhibitions dallas
- art galleries in san antonio
- art gallery
- art times
- gallery events
- museum near me
- museums near me
- museums exhibits near me
- things to do near me
Now, before you think, “but our museum’s not even in San Antonio,” think of the traffic you could generate by speaking of those things.
For instance, you could write an article or ten about the wonderful museums in Dallas, and use that same article to invite foreign visitors to your museum as well, even if your museum is out in the middle of nowhere.
The possibilities for quality traffic are nearly endless.
And if creating content is something that doesn’t come naturally to you, hire us to do it. We’ll create professionally written articles geared towards making your museum look like the wonder it is.
Emails
A museum with a Gmail or Yahoo address doesn’t look all that professional.
If you get our web design package, you can set up as many email addresses as you wish, your hosting space being the only limit.
Set up your emails using POP and you won’t even have to worry about using hosting space.
Analytics
Your museum website comes with Google Analytics installed.
You also get a weekly report revealing some metrics at a glance: things like which pages people visited, which keywords got them to your site and where they’re from.
Your website also comes with a search box that records searches.
If someone visits your website, and they use the search box, it shows you what they searched for.
It’s a great way to see what people expect of your museum.
Mobile friendly
Your museum website will look great on any size screen.
You want to avoid sending out an article in an email inviting people to come view your latest finds and when they try to read the article on your website they have to pinch and zoom to see what’s going on.
Cost
We’re selling a Van Gogh marketing package here. It’s loaded with everything you need for online success.
You can expect to pay more for such a package.
Conclusion
You could post your museum’s exhibits to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms.
You’ll get your likes and shares.
But if you ignore other platforms in favor of social media, you’re missing out on good traffic.
Why not book a consultation, get our marketing package and market to three different channels from a single place?