Top 6 Digital Marketing Tips for Museums in 2023

Social media has become the top platform for driving museum ticket sales. When run correctly, social media campaigns can be cost effective and produce incredible results. New platforms are popping up often. While it can be daunting to take on a new media type, we recommend that our clients embrace newer social media platforms like TikTok and BeReal to expand your reach. Start to build your presence on these new platforms to grow your organic followership, then begin to use these platforms to run ads. Create content, engage with your audience, and run ads as much as your marketing team can handle, and reach out to a museum marketing agency that can further develop and manage more complex paid and organic social media content and campaigns. 

When running an advertising campaign for a specific museum department, make sure you use the data and audience generated by the rest of the institutional campaigns. For example, consumers who have interacted with ads in a ticket sales campaign for an exhibition should be targeted again when you employ campaigns across departments such as membership, donations, education and merchandise sales. Be careful not to silo your departments’ campaigns, as there are a lot more efficiencies to be gained by communicating with customers who have already been qualified by another museum department’s budget.

Invite local influencers for an exclusive event to share content. Many influencers will attend and create content for free in exchange for museum admission and light bites. Others may charge a fee for their time and content creation. A museum marketing agency can help you with a digital public relations initiative like this by creating large lists of local influencers and managing the outreach and relationships. There are a number of strategies within the industry to reduce the costs of these types of partnerships and ensure that they remain cost efficient and effective.

Whether for organic social posting, in-museum media, social ads or other, video content is still king, especially when it comes to digital platforms. Digital video ads are a key way to engage potential visitors and bring them into your brand and content. Producing video content can be as simple as having a staff member go around and film throughout any given period and creating an Instagram Reel, or setting up a proper video production shoot for video spots. Both have their benefits and times for employment. With their extensive experience, museum marketing agencies can be very helpful in producing museums’ video content for driving engagement and exposure.

Alongside new social media platforms popping up regularly, new ad technologies are changing the way brands across all industries reach their customers. Museums can benefit from newer targeting methods such as: 

• IP address matching your website traffic to mailing addresses and drop shipping postcards to prospective high-ticket customers
• Cross device, cross-platform targeting that allows you to serve, say, a Spotify ad to someone who has watched one of your ads on their Roku TV. 
• Using mobile device data to “geoframe” a competitor to build an audience of qualified customers. For example, if your museum wanted to target people interested in other cultural institutions, you can geoframe another museum or institution of choice to create an audience of people who have been to that place in the last 6-months.

This is just the tip of the iceberg! A museum marketing agency will have experience working with platforms that run these types of campaigns, so it’s great to reach out to an expert when exploring new ad technologies for your museum.

Spending time and money on digital advertising campaigns is only as good as your ability to effectively track the visitors you are sending to your site. Ensure you have your advertising pixels placed properly on your website, ticketing system, and other. Most museums have Google Analytics installed, but is it set up and reporting in a way that provides meaningful data? A museum marketing agency’s digital manager can help support this initiative.