Attract More Visitors With These Museum Marketing Ideas
Museums are pillars of culture and learning where people can explore different traditions, new ideas, and unique art forms. They’re also engaging and constantly changing. Curators know this, but potential visitors often don’t. That means many museums are missing out on repeat visitors and new visitors who don’t know about upcoming exhibits and events.
7 Creative Museum Marketing Trends That Attract Visitors
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 seven 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.
1. Embrace smartphone culture
For years, museums fought against smartphones, encouraging visitors to put away their technology and focus on the images and artifacts in front of them. However, the top institutions across the world have embraced modern technology in their museum marketing, and are reaping the benefits because of it.
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, the Met’s Chief Digital Officer, says the museum’s biggest competition isn’t the Guggenheim or the Museum of Modern Art, but rather Netflix, Candy Crush, and a desire to stay home rather than explore the city.
User-generated content is one of the most cost-effective ways you can boost your museum marketing.
2. Encourage visitors to get social
Another way museums like the Met increase attendance is by creating exhibits specifically for fans to promote on social media. Instead of denying visitors a chance to share what they saw with friends, museums can encourage people to snap selfies and share the museum content online. These photos promote museums as cool places to be and make online users wonder what the exhibits would look like in person. User-generated content is one of the most cost-effective ways you can boost your museum marketing.
The Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg recently 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 dollar tickets this time) sold out in ninety minutes.
Your fans are your biggest marketers and can bring more people to your museum.
3. Host unique events throughout the year
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. The team at TripSavvy curated a list of 10 unique museum events, 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.
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 an additional channel to your museum marketing. When people say they’re interested or going, that will show up on their friends’ timelines. Peer pressure!
4. Build partnerships
Find other local attractions or museums trying to solve the same problems and whose audience might share similar interests, then build co-marketing campaigns or sponsored events. For instance, our clients at The Space Foundation Discovery Center in Colorado Springs formed a partnership with the nearby Garden of the Gods Visitor Center to fund a bus shuttling visitors between their two attractions on busy weekends.
There are dozens of creative partnership opportunities with local restaurants or ice cream shops, other attractions, parks or events to create unique experiences that add value beyond what you’re able to offer.
5. Bring exhibits to the community
If you want people within your community to visit your museum, then you need to be part of the community. Look for ways to bring your exhibits to life and encourage people to visit your museum after they experience your traveling exhibits, local camps, or classroom presentations.
For example, the ArchaeoBus is a mobile archaeology classroom in Georgia that travels around to schools and communities to engage kids with the science behind human history. Meanwhile, the Nomad Art Bus visits schools around Tampa Bay and lets kids express their creativity through paint.
While you don’t need a bus to be active in the community, these are two strong examples of organizations laying a foundation for archaeology and art appreciation which can turn into future museum exhibits.
6. Leverage local influencers and publishers
Many museums have a strong public relations arm to their museum marketing where they send out press releases and reach out to local newspapers and TV stations. While these outlets are useful for mass broadcasting, museums may be ignoring groups who learn about events and activities in different ways.
Look at local blogs and websites (like I Love the Burg here 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.
7. Put some pennies into programmatic advertising
Programmatic advertising allows you to reach highly-targeted audiences on a shoe-string 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 offers platforms to gain awareness and even measures those who walk 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!
Get Creative!
You don’t need the marketing budget of the Kennedy Space Center or the name recognition of the Louvre in Paris 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? Inspire people to tell their friends about the amazing experience they had.
Are you looking to increase foot traffic and online engagement in your museum? Big Sea has helped promote exhibits at top museums and attractions. Learn more about Big Sea and contact us today.
