Killer communication

Heather Maitland looks at using design to make your marketing communications more effective

Our potential customers need to understand our marketing communications and remember them positively when they make a decision about how to spend their leisure time. So how can we increase understanding and positive recall?

Both depend on how much attention our potential customer focuses on the communication, subconscious as well as conscious Everyone subconsciously scans their environment all the time. When they do focus conscious attention on something, the subconscious analysis can give it a feeling of familiarity. Their brains interpret this familiarity as approval which leads them to behave in a favourable way towards it. Marketers love this because subconsciously based preferences are easily formed, can’t be argued with and are relatively long lasting…

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Let’s walk before we run

Heather Maitland investigates how we are getting on with our e-mailing campaigns

Last autumn, my colleague, Beth Aplin, joined 13 venues’ email lists to see what happened. Although she was playing the role of a dance enthusiast, just five venues sent her relevant emails at an appropriate frequency. She got nothing at all from five venues and one venue sent her an average of two emails a week about everything from kids’ shows to musicals.
We hear a lot about the excellent results achieved by some of our colleagues but many of us aren’t getting the basics of email marketing right.

The research is clear and consistent. Email marketing works because it is low cost, easy to do and is customisable. Unfortunately, much of what we send out is ineffective because we ignore that third essential factor. Like any form of permission marketing, email must be ‘anticipated, personal and relevant’…

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Media coverage: why bother

Heather Maitland delves into some research about the effects of media coverage

You may not have to pay for media coverage but it still costs because getting it is so time consuming. So why invest all that time and energy?

Politicians are understandably interested in whether media coverage works. Pippa Norris explored how the media affects the way people vote in her analysis of the 2005 General Election. She looked at the direct effects of communications on the priority voters placed on particular campaign issues, the way they altered people’s attitudes regarding the performance of the government and the competence of party leaders, their influence on voting choice and on whether people turned out to vote at all.

Of course, there’s no point in asking people straight out what media most influenced their vote. People are unlikely to be aware of the complex range of influences shaping their political beliefs and perceptions. The project researched the political beliefs and attitudes of nearly 3,000 people both before and after the election. It then looked at whether changes were consistently associated with people who had used particular communication channels…

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Something for Everyone?

Niche marketing may be commonplace in the arts but most arts venues offer a range of events. Heather Maitland explores the marketing of choice.

One consequence of arts organisations’ work to broaden their audiences, visitors or participants is that many end up trying to offer ‘something for everyone’. There are very few venues in particular that single-mindedly pursue a single audience. Contact Theatre in Manchester is one that does, focusing on young adults aged 13 to 30. But even here director, John E McGrath, points out that ‘by breaking down barriers for young people, we also became a popular venue for a range of communities who felt unwelcome in stiff, traditional environments’.

Brands need a single, strong idea and most of these organisations focus on variety.

I’m not sure this works. What if the customer’s response is ‘I don’t want something for everyone, I want something for me!’? Marketing materials, such as season brochures, that present the broad sweep of the organisation’s work become a challenge. How do we guide potential customers through the packed menu to the event or activity aimed at them?

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More for Less

Heather Maitland reflects on what arts marketers can do to introduce new ideas and practice

How open are you to new ideas for developing your audiences, visitors or participants?

For many of the arts marketers I meet, this is a pointless question. They don’t have time even to think about doing anything new. Colleagues involved in training or consultancy tell me that they too often have their carefully thought-through recommendations for getting bigger and broader audiences greeted by something very like panic. This raises two questions. Why do these arts marketers feel under so much pressure? And what can they – and their managers – do about it?

The problem is that there are so many tasks that marketers could be doing to get people involved in an arts event or activity. And there are so many events. Marketers feel guilty that they aren’t doing every activity for every event…

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Open to Persuasion

The words we use to describe the events we put on are crucial. If you are marketing on a shoestring they are your most important marketing tool. Whether we are writing copy or talking face-to-face with potential attenders, we need to use words that persuade. If we don’t, then we waste precious resources on marketing communications that simply won’t work. Words don’t cost money. But they do cost time and that’s often just as precious. So how can we make deciding what to say less time-consuming (and less painful)?

Know what you are talking about

You can’t be persuasive if you don’t feel confident you know what you are talking about. The participants in the AMA’s recent Do the Write Thing copywriting seminars pinned down the problem nicely: they get copy from their curators/artistic directors/choreographers/visiting companies that even they don’t understand. How can they hope to turn it into something that communicates effectively with their audiences? Together we came up with some solutions…

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Open to Persuasion

How can we persuade people to try something different?

How can we persuade people to try something different? Andrew McIntyre argues that the difference between arts attenders and non-attenders is simply motivation. We talk about attenders, intenders, resistors and rejectors and tend to have a picture in our mind of lots of people who would come to our events if only we could remove the barriers that stop them. He suggests that this picture is wrong: these people are not ‘intenders’, because they have no intention of attending. Why? Because we don’t tell them what they will get out of it. If we thought of them as ‘open to persuasion’, then we would communicate much more effectively.

That’s what this column is about. How can we use marketing communications to persuade people that they want to come to our events?

I’ve been talking with Oxford Contemporary Music’s core audience, some of the most enthusiastic arts attenders I have ever met. They go to all sorts of arts events but are particularly committed to seeking out new musical experiences. One even resorts to going into Oxfam shops and buying second-hand cassette tapes at random to see if there is anything unfamiliar that he can follow up. But even these enthusiasts complain that it is difficult to find new music that they might enjoy…

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