smART talk 02 | Wrap Up

Thanks for your contributions, questions, wisdom and willingness to share your ideas on the smART talk 02 | Crack Web Marketing forum with specialist guest Vicki Allpress-Hill.

“It's been a privilege to spend three weeks discussing the use of online marketing with my arts colleagues,” says Vicki.  “I hope everyone has gained as many valuable insights as I have. I encourage you to keep learning and use every channel available to you to discuss and debate this important subject.”

Here is a wrap up of some of the practical advice from Vicki Allpress-Hill and other forum members about how to grow audiences using web marketing.  Follow the links to see more information on each topic.

Topic One | Getting Started: New To Web Marketing

“Put yourself in the shoes of your potential audience member and decide which online tools might best reach them effectively. Do a lot of observation of what other companies are doing in the meantime.”

Leapfrog: The web moves fast, there are no obligatory steps, leapfrog to ‘the next best thing’ when ready.  Don’t rush but don’t miss the boat entirely. Focus first on your objectives and target audience.

Target market segments: Know your target markets - their characteristics, lifestyle and media habits – through surveys, observation and talking to your audience.  Communicate benefits and connect in a relevant way.  Connect your online presence with their purpose for being online.

Challenges: The time and brain space to learn and apply a new way of working. Barriers include mindset, age, location, accessibility issues or financial reasons.

International comparisons: Examples of international organisations who have embraced Web 2.0.

Web marketing resources: Resources for online and arts marketing - including eMarketer Daily, iMedia Connection, Admit 2.0 and Eugene Carr's blog.

Topic Two | Web Analytics

“Sharing benchmarks as an industry will help us all to set goals that are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound). And the more experience you gain in using each of the online tools, the more you will understand what success might mean.”

Measure success: Define what success is for you in people or audience terms, and set some benchmarks (of where you are now) to compare to. Decide which tool provides the data to measure that success.

Start now: Start using web and email analytics as soon as possible, to track trends over time.

How arts organisations are using web analytics: To time marketing campaigns, create an international online campaign, change social media focus, navigation, price breaks, simplify online purchases, support grant applications, record historical data, popular content and seasonal trends.

Tagged links: You can add tracking code to any external link coming into your site and then run specific reports on those 'micro-segments'.

Benchmarking statistics: To compare like with like and understand if statistics are promising or concerning, there are some general and international benchmarking tools but Vicki says “At this point in New Zealand there are no clear benchmarks within our industry. It’s something we need to work on as colleagues.”

Topic Three | Email Marketing

“Is it just a repeat of your print brochure or ads, or are you offering the people on your email list something of real value?”

Email marketing strategy: Elements include data acquisition, deployment methods, style/type of communication, email ‘publications’, integration, monitoring and tracking. Consider timing, the subject line (and spam words), content and a call to action.

Make the most of e-newsletters: Email is a personal medium, not a fax machine. E-newsletters should be treated as publications, editorial not advertorial.  Give it a publication name, a personality and regular features. Include information of value, promote a sense of community, provide short overviews and link to stories on your website. The tone can be more light-hearted and cheeky than the corporate face of your website.

Statistics: According to a book ‘Wired for Culture’ by Eugene Carr (in New York) - "51% of arts patrons claim that they read opt-in arts email as carefully as they read email from their friends".

When to send: There is no one-size-fits-all answer, experiment by signing up to newsletters in your niche. Mondays and weekends are not good days.  Tuesdays and Thursdays were recommended, recent practice suggested Friday mid-afternoon. After lunch is the best time to send them.

Email service providers: Models range from deploying email on your behalf to custom-built software developed in-house. Consider the number of emails you send, size of your list, likely growth and in-house expertise. Features to consider include an autoresponder service, SMS / text messaging, RSS blog integration, pricing, split testing, survey creation and prebuilt templates.

Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (UEMA): The UEMA principles are basic common sense. Be clear about what people will receive, identify yourself, do not use the email address for other promotional purposes, keep it secure and never pass it to a third party, provide a clear and easy opt-out.

Topic Four | Social Media

"Social media is about listening to your audience and enabling them to connect with each other, and with you, in a way that adds value to their lives. Be careful to provide information that assists or intrigues them, and to enable the conversation to happen naturally without too much interference from you."

Social media isn’t a fad: The Social Media Revolution video points out that 'Social media isn't a fad. It's a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.' The years of mass-produced messages are over.

Statistics: After Google, Facebook is the second most visited website in the world. In New Zealand, YouTube is the 5th most popular site, Wikipedia is 8th, Blogger.com is 10th, Bebo is 12th and Twitter is 13th.

Persuading your organisation to join: Document how it will work, who and how many people it is likely to reach, your targets, fit with marketing objectives, how to manage it efficiently. Common objections and fears include negative feedback, preferring face to face communication, lack of resources.

Persuading your audience: If the message is inappropriate to the target audience then it doesn’t matter how often you tweet, you still won’t engage new people. If applied to the marketing ‘4 P's or the 7 P's, then ‘promotion’ is only one small part of the mix.

Find out if your audience is using social media: If direct research is not possible then intuitive assumptions are needed, including matching known audience demographic with known demographics of the most popular social media tools, using publicly available statistics.

Controlling social media: Any attempt to control a conversation or community online will stifle it. Social media makes it easier to find out what people are thinking and saying about us, and to start interacting in a genuine and honest way with our audiences. Create an internal policy to avoid unfortunate situations. Cover acceptable subject matter, who is responsible, frequency of updates, tone of voice, response times to comments.

Selling tickets: You can use sites like Facebook to promote your event and ticket sales. The Social Media Revolution video shows that 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 14% trust advertisements.

Tweeting at a conference: Can create a taster and extend the reach of the event and network.  Set up a #hashtag early, have someone on the ground responding, call in a social media expert if needed. “You are going to be talked about anyway – it’s up to you whether you become part of the conversation."

Topic Five | SEO & SEM

“If you are a typical arts marketer in a typical arts organisation, or you are a one-person business, then I have to say you are being quite optimistic by expecting to be able to manage SEO on your own.”

SEO is important: Search engine optimisation (SEO) can have a big impact on your visibility and website visitor numbers.

Deliver value: To your online target audience for the optimised search terms, then Google will see your site is relevant to those searching on that term. Posting videos on YouTube, submitting articles, commenting on forums and getting links from 'authority' sites will all help progressively.

High quality links: Create links from sites where you add value.  Links from authority sites with a high page rank, those that Google deems to be independent and are often less commercial – like .govt and .edu.

SEO Google Keywords: Add your website's URL for keywords suggestions based on your content.

DIY: Educate yourself on how SEO works, so your practises elsewhere support your SEO efforts and help manage an external provider.

Get a professional: To be truly effective, SEO needs constant maintenance and adjustment.  

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Use SEM, such as Google Adwords, to target precise search terms your target audience will be searching on, and deliver relevant ads in the “sponsored links” at the top and right of the search results pages to drive people to your site.

Topic Six | Online Advertising

“The great thing about online advertising and a niche product is that you can get very cost-effective with your ad spend.”

Adsense & Adwords: Google Adwords allows you to advertise on search engine results and others websites. Google Adsense is where as a site owner you get paid to display Google Ads.

Identify websites: Use your audience/user information to locate websites that are likely to be attracting them. This might be an intuitive guess, a survey or audience research. Use Hitwise statistics or have a conversation with the site managers.

Partnerships and links: Get creative with partnerships and reciprocal linking arrangements.

Make sense of statistics: A "hit" is commonly misrepresented by ad sales people as a "person".  “The number of hits a website receives is not a valid popularity gauge, but rather is an indication of server use and loading."

smART talk 02 | Crack Web Marketing with Vicki Allpress-Hill

smART talk 02 | Crack Web Marketing is the second in a series of three online forums run by Creative New Zealand and The Big Idea.  smART talk is hosted by The Big Idea | Te Aria Nui and aimed at arts & creative sector professionals in any creative field.

Vicki Allpress-Hill has been a regular contributor at Creative New Zealand’s 21st Century Arts Conferences. Currently Manager – Online & CRM for The Edge in Auckland, Vicki has also worked and consulted with some of the most successful arts organisations in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and US and has authored books, papers and blogs on the subjects of audience development and online marketing.