10 Creative Museum Marketing Ideas to Attract More Visitors
Effective museum marketing combines digital presence, community engagement, and immersive experiences to attract new visitors and build lasting loyalty. The 10 strategies below cover the full range—from social media and SEO to programmatic advertising and membership communities—and treat every channel as an extension of the museum’s educational mission rather than a separate function.
1. Embrace Smartphone Culture
The top museums in the world have embraced smartphones as a core part of their visitor experience, and they’re seeing real results. For years, museums fought against them, encouraging visitors to put away their technology and focus on the images and artifacts in front of them. That’s changed.
New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has a mobile-focused website and app to guide visitors through its exhibits. People use their smartphones to learn more about the pieces they see and discover other works like them.
Sree Sreenivasan, former Chief Digital Officer for the New York Met, famously said the museum’s biggest competition isn’t MoMA or the Guggenheim, but rather Netflix, Candy Crush, and the impulse to stay home rather than explore the city.
2. Encourage Visitors to Post on Social Media
User-generated content is one of the most cost-effective ways you can boost your museum marketing. By encouraging visitors to share their experience on social media, your guests become your distribution channel, and their posts carry peer credibility that no ad can replicate.
Instead of denying visitors a chance to share what they saw with friends, museums can feature exhibits designed for social sharing and encourage people to snap selfies and share their one-of-a-kind experiences online. These photos promote museums as cool places to be and make online users wonder what the exhibits would look like in person.
For instance, the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg hosted “This is Not a Selfie,” an exhibition featuring photographic self-portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Guests were encouraged to engage with an interactive portion of the exhibit and share their selfies on social media with the hashtag #notaselfieMFA.
Obviously, we had to check it out.
The Museum of Ice Cream in New York gained Instagram “cult status,” as people flocked to the exhibits to take photos with the various displays. Everyone wanted a photo in the sprinkle pool or on the ice cream sandwich swing. The $18 tickets to the museum sold out within five days in New York, and then the entire six-month run in San Francisco (with $38 tickets this time) sold out in ninety minutes.
TikTok has become a significant channel for museum marketing and visitor discovery. TikTok’s engagement rate reached 3.73% in 2025, the highest of any major platform, compared to Instagram’s 0.48%, Facebook’s 0.15%, and X’s 0.12%. And 56 of the world’s 100 most-visited museums now have active TikTok accounts, up from just 21 in 2023. Short-form video on TikTok might belong in your social media strategy alongside Instagram.
Remember: Your fans are your biggest marketers and can bring more people to your museum.
3. Make Your Website as Inviting as Your Exhibits
These days, your website will likely be the first glimpse that a new visitor gets of your museum, so why not make sure it’s as stunning as your exhibits?
When we relaunched the Tampa Bay History Center’s website, we wanted to create an online experience that captured some of the awe and beauty that visitors to the museum might experience.
Our goal with museum websites, which we think should be yours as well, is to capture the story you want to tell to visitors about your institution. A great website and content strategy is built on the same kind of storytelling that draws people in via email, social media, and other campaigns. That’s why your website should:
- Put a face on your museum and the experiences people have there
- Tell a story about your exhibits
- Extend your museum’s educational mission
- Provide an opportunity to interact with exhibits online
Love the idea, but need some examples? Check out these 16 great museum websites for inspiration.
If you think it’s time for a new website, reach out to us! We specialize in several platforms, including WordPress and HubSpot, and we’d be happy to guide you to the right foundation, design, and user experience.
4. Turn Your Research Into Organic Website Visits
Museums that publish their research and educational expertise online are sitting on a significant organic search opportunity. A lot of museums don’t just educate through exhibits. They also perform research and write incredibly informative articles and blogs. This means that your website could be a hidden gold mine of organic search terms for an SEO-driven online marketing campaign.
The goal of Google’s helpful content system, one of its predominant algorithms for page ranking, is to identify expertly written content that provides useful information to visitors. Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines continue to emphasize E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Museums have all four in abundance. Museum professionals are uniquely positioned to provide exactly this kind of content to search engines.
But to transform your research or storytelling into organic traffic, you need search engine optimization (SEO). At a bare minimum, you’ll need:
- Keyword alignment and on-page optimization for your blog/research pieces
- Information architecture that makes your blog and research segments easy to find for both users and search engines
- SEO-optimized web design to improve indexing of your site as well as user experience
- A media strategy for sharing your content with other sites and news outlets to promote natural backlinking
At Big Sea, we’re experts in nonprofit and museum SEO. Drop us a line if you want help with your organic search strategy.
5. Host Immersive Events for More Engagement
If you want new visitors to become repeat visitors and repeat visitors to become members, then you have to give your visitors reasons to come back. Immersive visitor experiences provide exactly that incentive by helping guests become active participants in museum activities. The team at TripSavvy curated a list of 10 unique museum events that focus heavily on immersive experiences, from Night at the Museum sleepovers to public art exhibits. You can use these events as jumping-off points to bring visitors in multiple times per year, and even monthly.
If you’re not ready or don’t have the budget to create immersive exhibits or activities, you still have options for engaging visitors. In St. Petersburg, the Museum of Fine Arts has a monthly book club with picks related to various exhibits, while the Museum of History hosts Happy Hour with a Historian at regular intervals. These events aren’t expensive to host, but they cater to a base of regular visitors who appreciate the work these institutions do.
Leverage Facebook to create events and add the channel to your museum marketing. When people say they’re interested or going, that will show up on their friends’ timelines.
6. Use Your (Brand’s) Voice
Museums are cultural hubs with the power to shape community dialogue, and a strong brand voice is how you put that power to work. This voice should reflect your museum’s mission, be authentic to your collections, and align with the core values you prioritize.
For instance, when you visit the Mote Laboratory and Aquarium in Sarasota, FL, you learn that they’re more than just an aquarium: they’re a cutting-edge research institution on a mission to save the ocean. They articulate that mission clearly and consistently throughout their messaging.
Your brand voice can be an essential tool for advocacy. Whether it’s championing social justice initiatives, highlighting underrepresented perspectives, promoting environmental causes, or advocating for increased cultural access, your voice can be powerful. Be strategic: select topics with a clear link to your collections and values. Let your voice ring out through website content, social media posts, press statements, and even subtle additions to exhibit or gallery text.
Audiences today crave authenticity. Avoid token gestures or jumping on trending causes without genuine investment. Your advocacy should be rooted in the very soul of your museum. This is more than just marketing; it’s a core element of the cultural experience you offer. When you stand for something, visitors remember your exhibits and they’re more likely to become long-term supporters and advocates for your institution.
7. Bring Exhibits to the Community
To get members of the community to visit your museum, it helps to be recognized as an active part of that community. Look for ways to bring your exhibits to life and encourage people to visit after they experience your traveling exhibits, local camps, or classroom presentations.
For example, the ArchaeoBus in Georgia is a mobile archaeology classroom that travels around to schools and communities to engage kids with the science behind human history. Likewise, the Nomad Art Bus visits schools around Tampa Bay and lets kids express their creativity through paint. These traveling exhibits bring the museum experience to the community. They’re both a community service and an exercise in brand building that lays the groundwork for future engagement. For young people in particular, formative experiences like these can kindle interests that last a lifetime.
8. Leverage Local Influencers and Publishers
Local influencers and community publishers often reach audiences your museum’s owned channels don’t, and they carry the kind of peer credibility that actually drives attendance decisions. For many museums, marketing means a strong public relations arm that sends out press releases and reaches out to local newspapers and TV stations. Those outlets are useful for mass broadcasting, but they miss the audiences who discover local events through different channels entirely.
Look at local blogs and websites (like I Love the Burg in St. Petersburg, Florida) that promote community events. Consider testing ads through online radio like Spotify instead of traditional radio broadcasts. Invest in social media ads for your event promotion. If you want to reach new audiences or connect with old ones, find out where they get their information.
9. Put Some Money Into Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising allows you to reach highly-targeted audiences on a shoestring budget. From re-targeting visitors to your website, to hitting folks looking for something to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon, to sharing new exhibitions or events with your members, programmatic advertising offers platforms that will help you learn about your audience and even measure who walks through your doors as a result.
Start by creating some great campaigns that address the early and later stages of your potential visitors’ journeys—those who don’t know a thing about you and those who know and love you might be influenced by different messaging, so consider that.
Then, set up audiences and tools that share those campaign assets across their myriad devices, on relevant websites and platforms. Be sure to use a DSP (like the one we mostly employ) that measures lift to get a true count of the number of visitors who’ve interacted with your ads—you’ll be surprised how your foot traffic correlates with your ad reach!
Not sure where to start? Find out how we use programmatic advertising to optimize audiences in real-time to maximize campaign effectiveness.
10. Cultivate Community with a Facebook Group
Fostering community among members (and curious newbies) creates a sense of belonging that drives loyalty and fuels long-term retention. Engaged group members on Facebook or other social media platforms become powerful advocates, attracting new supporters while providing valuable feedback that enhances the member experience.
For example, The Hyde Collection created a private Facebook Group where members are invited to share their work and participate in creative challenges. It’s been very active, and a nice little community of frequent posters and commentators has formed. Here’s another mini case study: the National Quilt Museum’s “Block of the Month” Group has nearly 27,000 members (and growing)! These are both great examples of how you can leverage your niche content to build a niche community.
To get started, invite all of your members via email, and be sure to include the invitation in any new member communications, too. Have a dedicated staff member moderate discussions, answer questions, and foster a positive atmosphere.
Seed your group with content about upcoming events, behind-the-scenes peeks, member-only pools or contests, and spotlight interests related to your collections.
Most exciting is that you can use your Facebook group as a place to feature user-generated content, like photos or insights. But be patient: getting a real community in place can take a while. Luckily, though, the effort is low for a very high reward.
We’re Museum Marketing Experts
You don’t need the marketing budget of the Kennedy Space Center or the name recognition of the Louvre to successfully market your museum. With a little creativity, you can develop a museum marketing strategy that leverages digital channels and brings people to your exhibits. The ultimate goal? To get people in the door and inspire them to tell their friends about the amazing experience they had.
Looking to boost your fundraising, increase foot traffic, and drive online engagement at your museum? Big Sea has helped promote exhibits at top museums and attractions. Learn more about Big Sea and contact us today.
Museum Marketing FAQs
Why Do Museums Need Marketing?
Museums need visitors, donors, and an engaged public to carry out their missions. Museum marketing promotes growth in all of those areas so that your directors, curators, and experts can focus on your goals of education and conservation. Building a website that works 24/7, automating engagement and outreach through email campaigns, giving your organization a chance to grow through word of mouth via social campaigns, and running programmatic and other advertising all work together to draw more people into your community.
Another way to think about it is that education, outreach, beauty, and storytelling are all crucial components of an outstanding marketing strategy. When you have so much fantastic material to work with, why not take advantage of it to draw more interest in your mission?
What Metrics Should Track for Museum Marketing Success?
Track both digital and on-site indicators: website traffic and bounce rate (especially blog pages), event registrations, hashtag engagement, email open/click rates, membership conversions, and—where possible—door scans tied to ads or campaigns.
What Makes Museum Marketing Different?
Effective museum marketing isn’t just advertising. It’s an extension of your mission both online and in the real world. Engaging your visitors through fun, creative, and informative content is central to what you do. And in the process, you not only draw more supporters and raise more funds, you further your mission to educate the public.
It’s time for museums to reconnect with their communities and bring people back through their doors. Not just once, but multiple times per year. Use these ten museum marketing ideas and tips to promote your museum and fill your halls with curious and eager visitors. Feel free to explore our digital marketing services.
How Do You Develop a Museum Marketing Strategy Without Losing Sight of Your Mission and Vision?
Whichever direction you take with your marketing, the first step is to know your audience. You probably already have a rough idea who the ideal guest is at your museum: do more research to put together a complete visitor persona profile with information about who she is, what she cares about, where she spends time online, and what brings her in the door.
With that in mind, you can start to formulate a marketing plan for how to reach your ideal visitors. Create a series of specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your marketing plan. You know who you’re trying to reach; now you can take discrete steps toward reaching them.
Depending on where you’re starting from, the first step might just be awareness. People have to know you exist before they can consider whether to visit. Just a small investment in targeted programmatic advertising will get your name out there. Your marketing efforts don’t have to be monumental right away to start making a difference.
How Do We Attract Local People to Our Museum?
Start by building a genuine relationship between the museum and your surrounding community: one that goes beyond traditional outreach and taps into local shared interests and neighborhood pride. When locals see themselves reflected in the exhibits, events, and voices within your museum, it stops being just a place to visit and becomes a place to belong.
To that end, try hosting events that celebrate local artists, makers, and traditions, and spotlight local history and contemporary issues in your programming. These position your museum as a dynamic community hub rather than a static institution.
Build partnerships with nearby businesses and cultural institutions for cross-promotions, like ticket discounts with coffee shops or themed evenings tied to your local farmers markets or First Friday art walks. Feature local voices in your storytelling—invite guest curators, educators, or performers from the community to lead tours or workshops, making your museum feel personal and participatory. Create accessible, welcoming experiences: offer free or pay-what-you-can days, bilingual signage, family-friendly guides, or sensory-friendly hours.
On the digital side, use consistent and targeted local digital outreach, especially through neighborhood Facebook groups, local newsletters, or geotargeted ads, to ensure locals hear about your offerings. Most importantly, involve the community in shaping the experience—ask for feedback, listen deeply, and iterate often.
How Do You Market an Art Gallery?
Art gallery marketing is similar to museum marketing, but there are some crucial differences. Press releases and a strong PR strategy are important tools for art galleries seeking to attract more customers. You can also start with many of the tips here, such as developing a robust website, launching email campaigns, and crafting a social media strategy. And don’t forget to craft strong personas so you can understand and target the right demographics for your niche.
