According to a recent study, the average consumer spends approximately seven hours per day consuming digital content. Compare this with the staggering statistic that the average American consumer only attends one arts and culture event annually, and it looks like the sector may be missing out on key engagement and mission delivery opportunities by not leveraging digital and social media content. While some organizations have experimented with continuing streaming services and digital galleries post-COVID, most organizations have returned to the typical, programmatic marketing-heavy digital strategies. Below we’ll talk about three viewpoints arts marketers can use to reactivate their digital marketing strategy for more engaging and higher-quality content by looking at marketing as mission delivery.

Education   
Since most arts organizations are working under the 501(c)(3) status, education is likely an important element of its mission. Whether they’re teaching music lessons, creating works of art, or tying a bolo-hitch, the people in your building display skills, expertise, and talent every day. It’s a good bet that someone somewhere wants to learn what your team has already figured out, which provides your organization an amazing opportunity to leverage that learning as mission delivery through social media. There are already individual social media content creators and influencers doing this across sectors like Amber Ardolino who showcases the fast-paced world of professional theatre or Felipa Efontes who shows the world what it’s like to be a ranger at a national park. Organizations doing this well already are the Met with videos about current exhibits and conservation and the American Shakespeare Center making connections with witty Instagram Reels that educate on the plot of Shakespeare plays. 

The key to this component lies in keeping content current and engaging. Just like theatre audiences, online audiences would rather be shown than told, so educational content must be visually engaging and instructional. If you rely heavily on text-based channels, presenting informal yet informed content in the style of letters, blog posts, and how-to articles opens the door for engagement with a wider audience based on mutual learning. Similarly, consider what it could look like for different staff positions within your organization to be active on Reddit by participating in forums posing questions. Don’t know where to start? Take a look at A Great Big List of Theatre Subreddits by user MacBeth_in_Yellow.

Entertainment
Think about the last time that your hall was filled with laughter or gasps of surprise - hopefully, it wasn’t long ago. Those same emotions are valuable to harness in digital content creation as well, but not for the reason you think.  Typically, in highlight reels and trailers for the visual and performing arts, we’re used to seeing the “best” or “most impressive” moments of a show or exhibit meant to draw people to come see it in real life, which only gets us so far.  Instead consider how the content can be the entertainment, not a means to selling tickets to the entertainment. Instead of appealing to emotionality to sell tickets, we can leverage humor on social media as institutional marketing to build trust between the organization and our current and would-be patrons.

If you are going to start using humor as a part of your larger brand strategy, a few things need to be considered. First, what kind of humor does your audience already expect from your company? If you’re known for being upbeat and family-friendly your audience may disengage if you suddenly start consistently employing dry-sarcastic humor (like the well-known Josh McCammon). Instead, consider the funny moments already inherent in your work that you feel like your audience would respond to (like this reel from the South Carolina Children’s Theatre). Second, what tone is already at play in the content we’re marketing and how can we present the opposite? Take the recent post from the Moss Arts Center where curator Brian Holcombe participated in the hilarious ‘gen-Z social media intern writes the script’ trend to promote “Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections” which saw nearly six times the engagement than any prior post. By subverting the viewer’s expectation of content from your organization, you can invite engagement from new audiences who identify with the tone or trend while providing clever “inside jokes” to your existing audience.

Inspiration 
Odds are you’re reading this because you care deeply about your organization and your field at large.  Whatever the reason why, you are committed because of the mission and the inspiration of a thousand little moments you can’t remember that told you the arts are a good and necessary part of our world. Amazingly, your marketing channels can be leveraged to say the same thing. This is about making the impact obvious through demonstrating your integration into the community. When was the last time you saw a theatre company perform the national anthem at a local sports game (like Celtic Thunder did here back in October), or a state or local park collaborate with a social service nonprofit to address housing insecurity? Whether you saw it or not, it was happening.

The burden of proof lies with arts marketers to capture and relay this information via established channels. Or does it? This is one area where user-generated content can be leveraged for nonprofit organizations. Most likely, there are already event facilitators in your community in the way of parent-and-me groups, homeschool networks, interest organizations, and community schools who are already promoting you outside of your channels (see this video for an example of how mom-influencer @kidsfun.uk promoted the Royal Shakespeare Company.)  To access this content, ensure your social media names and handles are easy to find and accessible across your program offerings. If there are not already existing channels, then consider partnering with known influencers, students, or local interest groups to create content in exchange for early or free access to exhibits, performances, or attractions. It might be difficult to give up creative control, but since this content is on their platforms it creates more opportunities to engage with a brand-new audience and leverage each individual’s following by displaying that people like them go to places like your organization. 

A successful digital marketing strategy will likely use each of these viewpoints in varying ways and frequencies based on your mission, community, and organizational goals. Some weeks will naturally be more promotion-heavy, but leveraging these lenses with your plan may shift the needle on attendance statistics and if they don’t offer another channel for the community to engage with you over time.

Written by Ashley Cooper, a graduate student in the M.F.A. in Theatre - Arts Leadership program at Virginia Tech.