Our museum clients have often asked us how to advertise a museum. One way to attract more visitors to your museum is to harness the growth of social media marketing for museums. Museums create an experience for their visitors. And visitors often take a lot of pictures while visiting museums. This makes Social Media marketing for museums a perfect match between those who want to show a larger audience all the wonderful ways to learn and grow from experiencing their museum and those enjoying the experience of it. The explosion of social media has created wide ranging opportunities for museum marketing ideas that will spread your message far and wide. And it provides lots of benefits.
Showing Off Your Museum Experience
People love to post pictures and videos of their experiences at fun, educational and exciting places. By carefully promoting and helping your visitors promote your museum you can gain a lot of publicity and credibility on social media. (Beware, this can also become a two-edged sword that will require an emergency plan for dealing with bad publicity.) But for the vast majority of visitors museums are safe, fun, educational and wholesome experiences for individuals, gorups and families alike.
Create contests where people can post their favorite videos or photos of their family or friends at your museum. Offer recognition or even an incentive for winning “Video of the Month”, or “Photo of the Week”. These photos and videos will be seen by hundreds and perhaps thousands of other people who may have never visited your museum. Besides, if you do the contest right you can post them all on your website and even open the contest to the democratic process to create more traffic on your website. Taking advantage of these experiences as museum marketing ideas will build energy and excitement for your museum.
Brand Exposure
In order to grow familiarity with your potential customers as well as awareness of your brand and mission as a museum you will need to get a very specific message out to people. People need to be familiar with the name, the purpose, the location and some of the content of your museum in order for them to decide to visit. If they have encountered these elements of your brand before you will have a much easier time attracting their first time attendance. Social media has the potential to reach a global audience with your website and with connections to hundreds or even thousands of supporters.
Branding your museum, if you have not done so already, is a vital early step in your overall marketing strategy on how to advertise a museum. Capturing, knowing and communicating your brand will serve you incredibly well with all aspects of your marketing. It can be particularly effective within the social media sphere as an overall guide to preserve your image, refine your message and keep your message on track.
Fish where they Bite
Can you believe that the average person spends 2.5 hours on social media daily. A majority of people are interacting with others, getting information and receiving advertisements through their online communities. And this is even more true after the Covid-19 pandemic kept us socially distanced from everyone for more than a year. Staying relevant means endeavoring to go where people are engaged and active. When your museum builds a positive presence on social media, answering questions and building relationships you are fishing where people are biting.
Become the Go-To Expert
When your website and your Facebook page provide people with excellent content, common sense advice, clear answers to relevant questions, connections to other quality sources and friendly customer service you will be well on your way to creating a following on social media in which you are the go-to expert in your field. When visitors or just curious information seekers go to or return to your website for quality content, and when they pass good information on to their “friends” good things happen. For one thing your list of visitors will grow and secondly their trust in your business will increase. A growing number of trusting contacts will inevitably lead to higher visitation rates.
People are so excited to get out of their homes and visit places they’ve never been or haven’t visited in a while. So there is no better time than now to get your information out to people and set yourself up as the go-to expert in what your museum exhibits.
Essential Social Media Platforms
Facebook has become the king of social media by reaching 60.6% of internet users. Did you know that more than 1.84 billion people log in to their FB accounts daily and 2.8 billion monthly? In addition, 80 million small businesses around the world use Facebook pages and 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical to their business. That translates to a lot of reasons to have a business page for your museum and to join at least one relevant group on FB.
As a social media platform, FB is built to encourage interaction with your visitor base and back and forth sharing of information. Your museum fb page should share daily a post with inspirational stories, museum news, photo contests, blog posts, links to newsletters, and a list of upcoming/special events.
Twitter has 187 million daily active users, and 353 million users, it’s largest age demographic is 25-34 years old (29% of users), it is the #1 social network in Japan, it was used by 82% of B2B content marketers in the last year, it had a 62% increase in video views from 2019-2020, and it’s user base is projected to grow 2.4% in 2021. That is a huge marketing platform opportunity!
YouTube
With a rapid rise in the popularity of videos paired with the relative ease of creating video content and linking these videos to your website through social media, YouTube is a great marketing tool. It would be a great place to host your video of the month contest and make sure quality content is being shared broadly to your audience and supporters.
Don’t Give Up on Email
Email plays an important role in social media marketing for museums because of its ability to get quality content, announcements and event calendars to your subscribers. These are people who have already shown an interest and who through their social media contacts can and will pass on your information. This is a great way of cultivating leads from existing museum supporters. For many companies email remains their most effective channel based on ROI. In fact in a McKinsey & Company study, email fared 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter when used to acquire new customers, and conversions were 17% higher than on social media. Perhaps museums would see a similar trend.
That Includes Email Newsletters
There are several excellent companies who will happily get you started with a low monthly cost newsletter campaign for a go to: MailChimp (http://mailchimp.com), Aweber (http://aweber.com) or Campaign Monitor (http://www.campaignmonitor.com) to name a few. They utilize a lot of tools and analytics that will help you create newsletters, optimize your subject lines and track all the responses to your newsletter.
Unique, interesting, relevant, fact-filled and helpful information is most effective at drawing interested readers. An added benefit is that high-quality content will also be shared on social media, doubling the benefits. You might include special offers, event announcements, summaries of your blog posts or links to third party articles all of which help build momentum for your museum with search engines as well.
Regularly posting your e-newsletters is most effective; monthly postings are a good place to begin. A vital aspect of this process is creating and maintaining your email list and making it super easy to sign up for your newsletter with an email address on your website. This is best done with simple newsletter sign up forms throughout your website and blog. Your email newsletter provider is also capable of tracking click ins, sign ups as well as which supporters click into which articles. All of these analytics tools are useful for refining the content and layout of your newsletters to most effectively engage your audience.
Final Thoughts
If you want to make speedy headway with your museum marketing ideas generally and with social media marketing for museums specifically, we suggest getting in touch with a full service marketing agency. A great agency will listen to your goals, will work with you and your goals to build your brand, and will design an overall marketing plan that is tailored to your museum. Letting your marketing agency teach and show you how to advertise a museum will give you much more time and freedom to run your museum and make it great for visitors.
Here at zo agency we work to build long term relationships with our clients. We call it Tribe!
We will work diligently to discover your vision, your passion, your needs, your hopes and dreams for your museum and then will create an overall marketing plan that meets your needs and fits your budget. Visit us today at www.zo.agency!
