Marketing

It’s different from publicity

There is more to marketing than spending money on a leaflet. It is unlikely that leaping in to create great publicity at a high level of expense will reap a good rate of return.

Marketing is an overall approach to how your museum is presented to the world, how your management will carry out this function and how you will get other people interested in your museum – it is therefore more than publicity leaflets.

You are planning how to increase the interaction between your museum and the outside world and by planning there should be less of a hit-and-miss approach and therefore more reward.

You are aiming to build a long term customer relationship that grows and matures.  Start by finding out who your customers are, where they come from:

• Having a visitors book
• Talking to your visitors and keeping a record of conversations held
• Analysing who visits your website
• By asking people as you sell them an admission ticket to record their name, house number and postcode
• Conduct a market survey of your visitors

Look at what your museum offers – break down the elements of your offer and work out who is the customer for each part.

Directing your spend

A scatter gun approach of sending out publicity in as many directions as possible in the hope of getting a return is an old way of promoting your business. Marketing is more sophisticated and can be used to make more specific approaches that will hopefully bring a better return.

Using a map and a list of postcodes of visitors you can see where your visitors have come from in the past. This may highlight a ‘hole’ geographically that your visitors do not come from. Where there is a gap geographically you may wish to address the following points:

• You may need a leaflet distribution point in that area (a library, a tourist information point, a partner organisation etc)
• You may not have any press or other printed information reaching that area 
• Do you know the profile of people in the area? Are there factors that might affect a wish to come to the museum?
• Can you make a specific offer to potential visitors from this area?
• Can you build up links with any organisations in that area, schools etc?
• You may also want to address whether or not you want to work on getting visitors from this area – it is a business decision that you must make on how energies are expended.

Using the comments that you have collected from your visitors and from your staff/volunteers you may find out about publicity effectiveness.

Suggested free and low-cost ways of publicising your museum

• Write press releases – make life easier for the journalist you are going to give the information to by giving them information about your event, people involved etc. Add a digital photo that might be used with the press release – be clear about the permission to use the photo and be clear about the
• Contact your local paper and other local press about the possibility of writing a column or doing the paper review (radio)
• Attend other events and talk about your museum, e.g. forum meetings, networks
• Be part of your community and keep officials, dignitaries informed of what you are doing at regular intervals.
• Keep in contact with your MDO and keep them informed of what you are planning to do in the future. Contact them regularly rather than waiting for a funding application or event to be in the near future.
• Create an email newsletter and send it to local dignitaries, press, politicians etc to keep them up-to-date with what is happening at your museum and why they should be involved
• Update your website regularly so that web visitors have a reason to return to your site again and again.
• Create a Friends or Supporters scheme for your museum. Send information about the museum, hold specific events, have ‘hidden collection’ evenings with a speaker exploring specific artefacts in your collection that are not necessarily on display at present.
• Invite specific people (local dignitaries, politicians, local press) to any events you are having. Address invitations by name rather than to job titles.
• Invite specific people for a private tour of your museum and provide a pack of information about the local area, the collection and indications of why they should be interested
• Sponsor an award. Local business support organisations often have awards events and you could add in an award for creativity or promotion of the local area or something else relevant to your museum.