The Art of Fine-Tuning Your Marketing featuring Heather Kelly

[AI ] TRANSCRIPT:

Hi. This is High Five, and I'm Heather Kelly, and I thought I would just pop in with a quick episode about arts marketing and a few things to look for that will help improve the quality of your arts marketing. A lot of organizations or people I work with have a good idea of what they want to do, but they ask, how do we do it really well? Or they just want a few tips. So I thought I would prepare five things that you can look for.

One is start with your audience. So messaging isn't just what we say, but it's how we say it as well. We can shift from thinking and talking about ourselves to what it offers for the audience, person, or how it benefits them.

So shifting from we offer this to your experience, this or from we're presenting to, you'll discover it's a small tweak that really instantly makes the message feel more relevant and more personal to the audience person because you're leading from their point of view.

Number two is let your visuals do some of the heavy lifting. Yes, image quality matters, but more importantly, you can ask, does this visual appeal to the people that I want to reach?

Not everything really needs to look absolutely perfect, but it does need to connect with the audience that you want to engage. So the other thing to really think about with arts marketing in particular, is that our audiences really do have a very sophisticated eye often. So we want to honor that. We want to make sure that we're addressing their, interests and what appeals to them.

Number three, trust when it feels off. Sometimes the content is technically fine, but it just doesn't feel right. It's just not resonating as you're creating it, let alone putting it out into the world. So that misalignment can be real. And it might just mean we just need to look at like, are we just not speaking to the real heart of this program or really identifying what is the key element that's going to attract people, that's really going to connect with people?

I always say, you want to get to both the heart and the hook, and you know, when they're not quite there, it feels off. So it might just mean digging a little deeper or just thinking about it from another angle. Number four, align with your audience's timeline. Not necessarily our own cycles and cadences as the flow for your campaign to roll out, or your just your communications to roll out.

Marketing isn't just, you know, promotion. It's relationship building over time. So you want to think about when your audience is making their decisions and when they probably need information before the decision making process, when the decision making is happening, and then how much lead time is it between that and, say, an event or, something that you want them to engage with early awareness and then first commitments and then their decision windows and then last minute reminders can be really helpful.

Your campaign really needs to mirror the audience's decision making process and needs and flow and lifestyle, not just when we can, you know, roll stuff out.

So the fifth thing to look for is just make the next step ridiculously easy for your audience. Good marketing should always lead to a clear action. So is it easy to RSVP? Is it easy to sign up or buy a ticket, or engage in some way in the way that you want your audiences to engage with you? Is that path really clear? Really easy? And, not necessarily feeling pushy? It doesn't always have to be. Buy tickets now, although I love a good clear call to action, whatever the call is, it can be an invitation. So that's really caring about our audience and caring for our audience and making things easy for them.

So these are not really, you know, just five ways to do marketing, but they're just things that we can think about that might help us tweak things and do it really well. Thoughtful, effective and human centered is what we really are going for.

Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of High Five. I'm Heather Kelly, and join us again next week.