Five Types of Arts Marketing featuring Heather Kelly

[AI ] TRANSCRIPT:

I just thought I would pop in with a quick High Five about the different kinds of marketing in the arts. I'm preparing for a workshop that I'm giving and really had to think about how I'm going to focus the marketing workshop for the audience. And I thought, you know what? There's so many different kinds of arts marketing that I would share five of them, because this is High Five.

The first is destination marketing. I mean, this is really about attracting attendance. And it's also really based in trust. Trust that whatever is happening at your site or your organization is going to be interesting and and worthwhile for people attending. And so it's really establishing your organization or your location as a destination no matter what the programing is.

So then that leads to a different kind of marketing, which is really marketing programs and events. And you know, for us with arts organizations, this is our exhibitions, our performances. It's really about attracting attendance. It's about engaging people and having people participate in the programing that we're presenting. And oftentimes it's related to driving revenue, whether that's admission revenue or ticket sales revenue.

Then there's a different kind of marketing for creative entrepreneurs because marketing's purpose in other cases as well, but especially with creative entrepreneurs, is really to lead to a sale or a booking. It's really to attract and cultivate clients and to generate revenue.

And then artists. Now when we're talking about arts marketing for artists, there's so many different directions that goes in, right? An artist may be selling work directly to the public. They may be working with organizations and wanting to be programed or presented or booked. They may be presenting themselves or their own events and things like this.

Each one of these has a different approach to the marketing and then there's also professional profile development, which is also another form of marketing and communications. It needs to be strategic and it needs to be authentic. And I mean, we could consider it kind of an updated modern day approach to personal branding, but it's really also related to sharing and teaching and positively influencing the people that the leader or the professional wants to be speaking to. And there's multiple ways of doing that.

So even though each of these is really has a different intent and different tactics and tools, all of them are required clarity of why we're doing the marketing, all of them require clarity of what the goals are and what we're trying to accomplish, and also the specific strategy, the tools and tactics that are going to reach the right audience in any of those situations and attract them and engage them with what we're doing.

So I'm going to be working on a workshop of this, in the next little bit. And I thought it would be interesting to share with you, because oftentimes we're doing more than one of these at once. So which ones of them do you think that you might be doing? Destination marketing, programmatic marketing, marketing as a creative entrepreneur, various forms of marketing as an artist and or personal professional profile development?

I'm Heather Kelly, this has been a High Five and I'll see you again next week.