Personalising the Museum Experience via social media

Personalising the Museum Experience via social media

By complimenting traditional marketing with personalised social media experiences, museums and art institutions can reach a broader, younger, international demographic.

Let’s talk…

Underlying themes

Personalisation

Underlying themes

You can market relatively obscure and specialist art fields to a much broader international audience by focusing on the underlying themes in the works and personalizing them for the audience.

Not so much this…

More like this…

Reshaping your social media to be more

inclusive

accessible

personal

Everyone is ‘using’ social media

Everyone is ‘using’ social media

Virtually every art institutions and museums has a social media presence. But simply having a Facebook account or Instagram doesn’t cut it these days.

You’re competing against every other art institution, paid advertisement, and friend’s status updates for people’s attention.

To make matters worse, changes to Facebook’s policy mean only a small percentage of your followers will ever see what you upload.

As low as 2-3% organic audience reach without payment.

Let’s talk about emotions

Let’s talk about emotions

To cut through all the social media noise you need to create campaigns that both personalise the experience and elicit some sort of emotional response.

A recent article in the New York times about viral videos said, “People share things they have strong emotional reactions to.”

Promoting underlying themes, and personalising them for an audience help campaigns to trigger emotional responses in audiences. In other words – it makes them care.

Can haz feels?

Social media

Personalisation

‘feels’

What is Orientalist Art?

What is Orientalist Art?

Don’t know anything about Orientalist art?

That’s okay, because when it comes to marketing museums and art (or anything else for that matter), ignorance can be an asset.

Curators and art professionals don’t see exhibitions from the same perspective as the public and can assume that just because they care, so should everyone else.

Marketing’s job is to make the work relevant to a broad, general audience.

Curators are not people, people

Because it’s art?

Because it’s art?

“Because it’s art” is not going to get a disinterested public tearing down the doors to attend your exhibition.

You need to make the artwork or exhibition somehow relevant to your audience.

This is the challenge we faced with our exhibition – ‘The Art of Travel: Bartholomäus Schachman (1559-1614)’.

The Art of Travel

The Art of Travel

The exhibition focused on a Polish mayor from the 16th century who travelled down through North Africa and the Middle East on a diplomatic mission to the Ottoman Empire. Along the way he commissioned artists to paint pictures of the people and places he encountered. These illustrations formed the centerpiece of our exhibition, with over 100 on display.

The problem we faced was selling this exhibition to the public in Doha.

The Art of Travel

The Art of Travel

But what about Qatar?

But what about Qatar?

While Qatar is investing heavily in the arts, for the majority of the population visiting a museum simply isn’t something they would consider. This is especially true when the exhibit focuses on topics that aren’t obviously relevant to local culture.

That’s when we decided to look at ways to make the exhibition relevant to not only a local audience, but a much broader international audience.

And so the first thing we did was look at the underlying themes of the exhibition.

What are we actually selling here

Travel is a Universal Theme

Travel is a Universal Theme

Travel is a universal theme

And if you get to the exhibitions core, the ‘Art of Travel’ is a story about capturing your travel experiences.

Question is - how do people document their travel photos these days?

The Instagram campaign

The Instagram campaign

1. We partnered with Qatar Airways and asked people to tag their best travel photos on Instagram #ArtofTravel

2. We shared the best images to our Instagram account and asked people to vote for them

3. The person with the most popular photo would be awarded two return flights to anywhere in the world

The Instagram finalists

The Instagram finalists

The Instagram finalists

How did we go?

Over 6000 entries were submitted

Approximately 2000 people participated

65 photos were shortlisted for the competition (which people could vote on)

15,397 ‘likes’ were generated on our Instagram page from entries

265 comments were posted about the 65 featured photos

Total views = 400,000 + people

The viral element

What’s really interesting about these numbers is the overall reach.

According to online figures, the typical Instagram account has 200 followers.

So if we had 2000 people enter and post their entries online, that means 400,000 people saw the competition on their friends Instagram accounts (2000 x 200 = 400,000).

That’s a huge audience for a comparatively niche exhibit which we reached without using a single advertising dollar.

The Pinterest contest

The Pinterst idea

1. We’re going to upload approximately 100 paintings from our collection to Pinterest and ask people to create their own board featuring their 10 favourites.

2. The public will then vote on these Pinterest boards

3. The most popular entry will become a fully fledged temporary installation at a Doha art space.

A successful media campaign

A successful media campaign

1. Immediacy – can you explain the concept in a sentence

2. Personalisation – can the audience add to the overall experience

3. Ease of entry – limit the barriers to participation

4. Viral element – encourage people to share the contest around

5. Reward – make participation worthwhile for people

A successful media campaign

A successful media campaign

Even the most obscure and niche of museum exhibitions can be marketed to a broader audience by personalising and simplifying the marketing campaign.

You can do this by finding the underlying universal theme at its core.

By honing in on this theme and linking it with an appropriate social media campaign you can greatly broaden the reach of your exhibit.

An underlying theme - food

An underlying theme - family

An underlying theme - nature

An underlying theme - travel

It’s all about you, and you, and you

It’s all about you, and you, and you

More than ever, content needs to be personalised to make an impact.

Sure, museums still need to run traditional campaigns to reach their core audiences and the general public, but creative use of social media and the personalization it affords can reap huge dividends.

A new audience

Free Publicity

Increased attendance

It’s all about you, and you, and you

And you can do all this while spending a fraction of a traditional marketing budget

Money ain’t a thing

Thank you

Twitter: @ArtsDigital101 / @mikolai

Email: mikolai.napieralski@gmail.com