Invest in Arts Marketing: Its Your Future

Let’s say this clearly: it has never been harder to create, build, and maintain an arts audience. There has never been more attrition, lower retention, more ways needed to connect, more prospecting needed, to more numbers, to derive small incremental gains. Toss out yesterday’s level of investment. Take it up x 4. Or x 10.

There are more and more reasons not to attend, to walk through the doors, to sit and interact with the art on stage or with the art on the wall. The economy and lack of discretionary dollars, fragmentation in our lives and interests, inertia, lack of social connectedness with others in the audience or on stage, lack of time, lack of intellectual curiosity, lack of winningness to invest in the metal state of emotional and intellectual response and reflection that art demands of us. And, not to forget Shanon from Arizona’s comment in response to my last blog – the complete and utter self absorption that comes with endlessly customizing earphones/text/screen handheld/Twitter/Facebook to reinforce self rather than encounter with minds open to exploring the different and other that is art. She’s talking this problem v/v high schoolers, but it increasingly pervades all generations. It may be that new media’s foundational concept of 24/7 self-absoption is the greatest challenge that arts participation warriers have ever faced.

I think of the monster challenge, then, that is what arts marketing now faces every day, and the level of investment that HAS to be made to find, prospect, emotionally connect to and then retain audiences.

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded a year-long consultancy with a fine Canadian theatre company, during which we created marketing systems, tested them through fire, and evaluated what should last. They did significantly increase their audience count, but didn’t reach their revenue goals because it cost more than planned, and they needed more discounting tactics to get people in and back in the door than they planned. It left the board and staff collectively saying “it was so hard, so expensive, took so much time….was it worth it? Is this our future? Are you SURE there is no other way than a lifetime commitment to marketing at this level?”

Yes, yes, and yes. It will cost more, require more prospecting with lower returns, take more back office time, and be ever more strategic – requiring more and more organizational skill. It will be less fad, more investment. It will grow from detailed ROI projections, detailed Lifetime Value calculations. It will be more investment in the pipeline – constantly ensuring a stream of newcomers to enter the door, and then winning them back. It will be much more releationship marketing to build that return. It will take nothing for chance.

Today, we are marketing to the cultural market of one. It takes a lot of investment to find and connect to that “one,” to keep and nurture that “one,” so as to eventually realize the continued support of that “one.” Today there are hundreds of niche arts and cultural audiences and interests: no single “arts-interested potential audience.” Realizing this, and aligning your organization’s investment accordingly, will position you to gain the one-by-one audience growth that is the arts future.

Ignoring it is…denial.