Scalable Marketing Tips for Museums and Nonprofits
MuseumTastic had a chance to be a presenter at the most recent Massachusetts History Conference. As always, this is an engaging event full of people getting the work done in a variety of historical fields. From professors to collections pros to tour guides to trusty volunteers, it’s always great to see what’s really happening in the field.
MuseumTastic’s founder, Julie Arrison-Bishop, offered a workshop featuring scalable marketing ideas for history organizations. The inspiration for this came from the success of the Small Museum Toolkit that was presented at the 2022 New England Museum Association Conference. Thinking about who attends the Massachusetts History Conference, we knew this would be a good fit for all abilities and budgets to be able to learn about current best practices and apply those to their organizations.
Defining marketing for museums and nonprofits
Marketing is the strategic process of promotion. For museums, this may mean promoting your organization to attract visitors and donors, engaging the public, and sharing knowledge and resources. For nonprofits, this may mean sharing your mission, attracting volunteers, and growing support.
Marketing is NOT advertising alone. Even with zero budget, marketing does not need to be a scary word. Marketing is public relations, partnerships, events, and storytelling. The people who do the marketing are the ones who know it all in the organization because they are involved and informed from start to finish on a project.
SMART Marketing Goals for Museums and Nonprofits
SMART goals are crucial if you are setting out to create your first-ever marketing plan or even to update one from last year. While 10,000 likes on a social media post or a $1,000,000 donation from out of the blue are great, these are not realistic, especially in a small organization. We recommend starting small with specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-based goals.
Mini-Marketing Glossary for Museums and Nonprofits
Objectives, personas, targets? EEK!
Here’s a short list of marketing terminology to bring you up to speed:
Channels: where is your audience engaging? Consider a balance of channels/mediums to reach your target audiences. Side note: Digital is great and extremely important, but print is NOT dead for museums and history organizations.
Competition: this isn’t just a who, but also a what! Think about the who/what is competing for attention for your product. For example, maybe your museum is located near a ski area and winter is your slowest season because visitors to the area only come for that activity. What can you do?
Objective: the step to move towards a goal. For example, you want 50 people to come to an event (goal). To get 50 people to come to an event you will send out email invitation, post a Facebook event, and have your board reach out to 5 of their friends. Check out this link for some great ideas for objectives.
Metrics: Using data to measure the success of marketing efforts is so important. Even if you’re short on time, Meta Business Suite can be a great tool to use. Beware the vanity metric and use data and metrics that matter to your organization.
Personas/TargetAudience: you likely have a few audiences that are your “bread and butter,” but who are your goal audiences? A target audience is who you WANT to engage. A persona is a data-based person or group you want to engage. Think of an organization in Salem, MA. They want to attract people to come for a historical tour. People who visit in the summer may have a different motivation and set of needs than someone visiting for Haunted Happenings in October.
Mini-Marketing Toolkit for Museums and Nonprofits
AI Technology: ChatGPT is cool. If you haven’t tried it out yet, check with your IT team about policies, but it’s a game changer. Human intervention is absolutely a must, but if you need quick inspiration for posts, blogs, and more it’s worth some time experimenting.
Budget: Advocate for a starter budget to help you to invest in tools and advertising.
Email Marketing Software: There are many choices out there–look into one that fits your budget and gives you the metrics that support your work.
Google Analytics: UA is sunsetting and GA4 takes over on July 1, 2023. We strongly recommend finding ways to spend time with GA4 to better understand engagement from your website and social media.
Graphic Design Software: Adobe is the gold standard, but if you don’t know it, it can feel overwhelming. Canva is FREE for nonprofits! Visual branding is so important to marketing as a whole and there are tools to help to support that visual identification of your brand.
Marketing Plan: Captures where you are NOW and where you want to go. Your plan needs to have realistic objectives and metrics to measure success. Think of this as your road map!
Moral support and community: Gone are the days when social media was an intern-only, entry-level job. Gone are also the days of people only posting puppies and babies. Social media management is hard work. Build a community of advocates, staff, board, etc. to support your efforts. We love this group on Facebook.
Social Media Calendar: Use a social media calendar to get inspired, save time, stay on brand, and avoid the dreaded social media vortex.
Social Media Management Tool: This is the biggest time saver out there! A third-party posting tool allows you to post to multiple channels with adjusted messaging, and create engaging content with videos, reels, and more. Many of these tools can provide easy-to-access analytics about engagement.
Wish List: When it comes time for annual planning, you’ll never remember the opportunities you passed up. Keep a running list of ideas with an associated budget and contact information so that when the time comes, you’ll be able to talk to your leadership about opportunities.