Web cultural marketing is an underutilized channel for attracting audiences to cultural events and selling culture in general.
Using cultural marketing as a means to promote cultural goods or events is becoming increasingly essential. Let’s see what it is, how cultural marketing works, and how it applies to the digital world.
What is cultural marketing?
We know the definition of marketing and understand that it’s not just about generating revenue, but mainly about understanding and creating the needs and desires of the target market we address.
In marketing, we set objectives to be achieved through strategies.
Cultural marketing is the same concept in a specific reference market, targeting a specific audience.
The market’s product becomes a service, and the strategies turn into events.
How to do cultural marketing for an event?
When we talk about cultural products, we refer to both movable cultural assets and immovable ones, such as exhibitions, concerts, film festivals, book presentations, and everything related to artistic expression in the broadest sense.
The question arises: how do you sell culture?
Cultural marketing for an event involves primarily two strategies:
- Led marketing: in short, sponsoring the cultural event through guerrilla marketing, advertisements on buses, online banners, and discount codes.
- Audience-focused: establishing a relationship with the event’s audience, understanding their needs, and satisfying them. For example, offering free museum entry on the first Sunday of the month.
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The use of digital in cultural marketing
Applying digital to cultural marketing means implementing inbound marketing with an audience-focused strategy. Developing digital culture is essential (discover what digital culture is).
Using online channels, from social media to various web platforms, allows us to attract more customers, impress them, and provide a unique experience that fosters loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.
It’s a win-win situation and a path, the web, accessible and enjoyable for all those who want to grow, whether as a company or an individual.
When booking a guided tour online or purchasing a concert ticket, we are responding to a need created through cultural marketing. Another growing and complementary concept to cultural marketing is undoubtedly the new sector of museum marketing. Especially in recent times (in a post-pandemic era), this has become the frontier for cultural and touristic-economic revival.
It fulfills the need for cultural consumption, essentially selling culture.
Culture and digital: it can, indeed it must.
Applying digital in cultural marketing is essential, I would say. Let’s see the first steps to take and the most suitable strategies to apply.
Five starting points
- Creating a mobile-optimized and multilingual website;
- Presence on social networks, a platform with great visibility;
- Digital storytelling, telling, and being told;
- Blog, creating interaction with the audience;
- Local search marketing, to capture the audience’s needs.
What does it mean to create an optimized website?
These ideas may seem obvious, especially to you, who understands the importance of the web, but I assure you that many (I would even say too many) cultural organizations do not have personal websites or social media profiles, let alone professional figures to manage them.
When talking about website optimization, it means creating a landing page that is clear, easy to understand, and interesting in terms of content.
For those who follow us, we will talk about events in cultural marketing.
Of course, the optimization to achieve is the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) that will make us stand out and be among the top results in Google searches.
To make the optimization even better, it is crucial to have a website that is navigable on mobile and tablet devices and supports multiple languages.
Social networks are communication tools that should not only be used to increase sales but also to enhance visibility and lead generation.
Today, social networks are essential for marketing strategies and visibility because they allow the creation of networks among users scattered all over the world.
This is made even easier by the use of smartphones and tablets, which have made social media more accessible to everyone.
The biggest advantage is that social media is free, but at the same time, it can be seen as a disadvantage, why?
Firstly, because the profiles, despite bearing our name, are not our property; they have guidelines to follow and require constant updating in terms of content and publications, which should not exceed two days of inactivity.
This becomes a disadvantage when there are no professional figures tasked with managing social media platforms, like social media editors.
- Linkedin: It’s the most used social network by professionals to create important networks and collaborations. It’s a good platform to gain professional recognition and target audiences relevant to your business;
- Instagram: Thanks to influencers who increasingly choose this social platform for communication and brand promotion, it can be an excellent tool to close sales and acquire customers;
- Facebook: It’s the most widely used social network as it provides various communication and event promotion tools.
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Telling Your Story: The Best Way to Be Known
Through storytelling, which can take place on social media as well as on your website’s blog, you have the opportunity to make yourself known in the pre and post-event phases.
How wonderful would it be to know what’s behind a cultural event? Discovering, through stories that almost all social media platforms offer today, how a particular event came to be. After all, this is also marketing.
The blog is the right means to talk about yourself because it also represents an opportunity for interaction with users who can ask questions, review us, and create a network of relationships that leads to greater visibility.
The Importance of Local Marketing
The points mentioned so far are based on market research and field research, where the needs of the audience manifest themselves. In the case of cultural marketing, it’s about cultural services.
Local cultural marketing has a wide range of actions and extends to a broad target but can be focused and put into practice in artistic-cultural events.
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