Author: Christina Lister, Marketing and audience development consultant
This guide aims to demystify marketing for small and medium-sized museums, providing an overview of what marketing is and a framework for developing a strategy and a template for an action plan.
AIM’s Success Guide ‘Understanding your audiences’ is a good starting point to read ahead of this guide.
What is marketing?
Marketing is much more than simply selling or publicity.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing’s definition of marketing is:
“The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”
It involves:
- understanding who your competitors are, the context and environment you operate in and relevant trends and developments
- identifying and understanding your current and potential audiences
- understanding these audiences’ needs and preferences
- providing a service or product that your audiences want and value – at the right price, place and time
- reaching and communicating with your audiences
- engaging them and retaining their custom.
In museums, marketing involves identifying and satisfying audiences’ needs, thereby ensuring there is demand for the museum’s products and services. Marketing is an exchange process, meaning a museum aims to offer its audiences something that they value (e.g. a day out, a learning experience, information, entertainment) in exchange for their money, time and attention.
Marketing is closely linked to audience development, and for some organisations the terms “arts marketing” and “audience development” are even used interchangeably. Others see marketing as being about increasing income and visitor numbers, whilst viewing audience development as being about deepening engagement and engaging under-represented audiences, with less of a focus on driving income or big visitor numbers. Either way there is certainly a lot of overlap between the two terms.
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