Most museums are struggling to attract new audiences and raise money. A part of the problem is that they don’t realize how much the web has changed in recent years and how quickly it’s evolving.
They’re using their websites according to old ideas about what works – even when those ideas aren’t working. Here’s a guide to making your museum website work harder – and smarter – for you.
1. Create a Buyer’s Persona
Contrary to popular belief, museums aren’t only for tourists or older people. They can be just as attractive to millennials and Generations Z and Alpha. Managers need to figure out how to align their online marketing campaigns to these target audiences. To do that, they can make buyer personas.
What is a buyer’s persona? A buyer persona is a stereotypical customer profile, typically including demographic data (e.g., age, gender), psychographic data (interests, motivations), and behavioral data (buying patterns). Marketers create buyer’s personas to help them understand what their target customers need.
The first rule of creating an effective buyer’s persona is that it should not include any real people. The point of the persona is for marketers to follow a single type of target audience member. This way, they can expect similar actions from them all.
Moreover, the buyer’s persona should be based primarily on statistical data that shows what type of people bought a product in the past and how they went about doing so. You can add anecdotal information to support the attributes. But it’s important not to let this become overwhelming or take precedence over the factual data.
You should aim to create multiple profiles when creating personas as there are often different types of buyers in a market: early adopters, innovators, laggards, etc. These vary in their actions and motivations and need to be considered separately. Only then will you know whether your marketing messages work across all customer types.
2. Take Advantage of Augmented Reality (AR)
The best way to understand augmented reality (AR) is to compare it with its sister technology, virtual reality (VR). VR is a self-contained digital environmentthat you enter and interact with using equipment such as a headset, gloves, or even haptic chairs.
This experience is wholly contained within the confines of a room, which has been completely converted into a digital space. All you see around you is the digital world, not your physical surroundings.
AR works by placing computer-generated information over top of real life. It mixes the real and the virtual in one seamless view. The key difference between AR and VR is whether our eyes see mostly real things (augmented) or mostly simulated things (virtual).
AR has a wide variety of business and personal uses. Companies such as Amazon use this technology to create virtual assistants to help customers navigate their stores using live video feeds displayed directly over the items they carry.
How do you use augmented reality in museums? Augmented reality (AR) for art could add an enhanced digital element to the real world. It can improve visitor experiences within museums, providing them with more information about their surroundings, helping them identify items of interest, and giving additional context for exhibitions.
AR offers visitors a richer experience when accessing museum information as they can view additional pieces of information and images. For example, AR makes it possible for them to use “My Quick Guide” to learn more about some items on display. They can scan an object, which can bring a piece of information about the object, along with an image.
In the process, the visitors can better understand an object and allow them to engage with objects more than they would normally be able to do so. Information about exhibits can also reach a wider audience than before. It is more accessible for people who are unable to visit the museum.
3. Go for Local Marketing
Over two trillion searches happen every year, but a significant percentage of these searches is local, like “museums near me.” Local businesses that don’t appear in the top three search engine results pages (SERPs) miss out on 83 percent of their business because people just aren’t seeing them when searching for local services or products.
Moreover, unlike what many museums might believe, consumers don’t like to travel far if they can help it. The farther they’d like to go is less than 20 minutes, according to Bright Local. HubSpot also shared that 80 percent of disposable income was spent in 20 miles of home.
While museums showcase anything of old, the marketing tactics don’t have to be trapped in time. They can elevate their strategies with these ideas.
