Murmur Sweeps Categories Taking Top Honours at NSW Business Chamber Awards
“Being recognised builds your credibility. It says you’re on the right track and doing exceptional work.”
Last week, I was humbled and honoured to be joined by a variety of clients, suppliers, partners, and close guests, at our annual Xmas in July event – where we featured 2 x industry heavyweights who gave us their 2 cents worth on the state of marketing for 2019.Read More
A content strategy is a vital cog in today’s social media and digitally driven marketing machine.
Attending this workshop shows you what a content strategy is – BUT – also gives you the practical tools, tips and tricks, for you to build one, and walk away with everything you need to start building out your social media channels.
At our interactive “Content Strategy on a Page” Masterclass, you’ll build, design and refine your strategy, and walk away with your very own Content Strategy on a Page :
The workshop is designed to take you on a step-by-step journey through every step in developing a Content Strategy.
If you’re in Marketing or Social Media and need to build, deliver and execute a Content Strategy for 2019
By the end of our 2-hour workshop, you will walk away with an A3 ‘Content Strategy on a Page’ – designed and built bespoke for your business or brand
The workshop will take place over a 2 hour period at Murmur, 223 Liverpool St, Sydney.
Every attendee has a choice of 2 x sessions to ensure that you can best find the time that suits you:
Early Bird prices are available until December 24th, for $99 plus GST.
After December 24th, prices will increase to $129 plus GST.
Each ticket includes access to our 2-hour workshop, complimentary coffee plus breakfast or lunch (pending your session), and networking forum.
My favourite place to stop and unwind is Goolwa S.A, it’s a ghost town, but it’s beautiful. Our family’s beach house looks over a ‘Dawson’s Creek’ type lake.
Something that inspires me? People and their life stories.
My favourite fiction book would have to be The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty. I’m making my way though all of her books now. Big Little Lies (the TV show) written by Moriarty is amazing – highly recommend.
I am super creative, I tend to come up with a novel, movie, TV or brand idea nearly every month, it becomes exhausting… for everyone else, but I love it!Read More
I’d like to try and live somewhere in Asia, perhaps Shanghai or even Seoul to reconnect with my Korean heritage.
To unwind from work I usually spend time with friends or doing some sort of physical activity like running or bouldering.
My favourite fiction book would be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson it’s such a hectic and fun book to read! The best non-fiction I’ve read has been Hillbilly Elegy by J.D Vance it opened my eyes to the lives of those who are often ignored in “middle America”.
At work I enjoy the creative challenges I come across on a daily basis. I find them challenging and rewarding. I love that moment where I figure out a way to solve a creative problem.
Here at MURMUR I’m responsible for the creative aspect, designing different assets our clients might need to use in their campaigns. I also assist with the creative direction, helping create appealing designs that are in line with the different brands we work with.
The marketing industry has taught me that nowadays the relationship between companies and customers is no longer a simple transaction of goods for money, it’s much deeper than that.
My all time favourite quotes is, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” – Albert Einstein
To me, creativity means, coming up with unexpected and innovative solutions to problems. Making connections others don’t see.
THE REVEAL: I can’t speak 5 languages unfortunately, but, I have lived in 4 countries and can fly a plane!
Last week, my team and I were fortunate enough to attend the 2018 Google Partners Summit and hear about the forthcoming changes to the Google Marketing Platform, the rebranding of Google Ads, and what’s in store over the next few years.
Here are my key take outs from the day, and things that brands should be looking into:
1997 is arguably one the greatest years of Rock n Roll history. Radiohead released OK Computer predicting a future techno-centric world we arguably now find ourselves in; while there were blindingly fantastic songs such as The Verve ’s ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, Foo Fighters ‘My Hero’, and Blur’s ‘Song 2’ amongst Aqua’s ‘Barbie Girl’.
Along with this alumni, Everclear released their hit single, ‘Everything to Everyone’ – which in 2018 and our era of Cambridge Analytica, and Micro or Mass Marketing, holds a pertinent message we can use for marketing, and in particular those brands that do as they sang – and ‘try to be everything to everyone’.
Last week I had a moment of serendipity. After studying the theories and practices of audience segmentation, most notably around the schools of thought on ways to slice and dice markets, I met with the Chief Marketing Officer of a large sporting brand, and were chatting about their upcoming event. There’s a lot of challenges that said brand faces in a crowded market, especially when Sydney-siders can be so fickle around sport, always jumping on bandwagons when they appear, and then just as quickly jumping off when things go sour.
With this in mind, I pressed the CMO on who their audience is, and what segments of the market they were looking to attract – to be met with ‘we’re targeting everyone’.
Now, brands clearly can’t target everyone – and brands don’t exist for everyone. Unless of course you’re someone like Amazon – and even then an argument can be made against that notion.
There are 3 alarming issues for a brand that wants to ‘target everyone’ and doesn’t have a clear idea of market segmentation or who their target audience is.
If you’re trying to please everyone, you won’t have anything constructive, unique or relevant to convince people as to why your product or service is better than your competitors, and they should part with their hard earned cash for your product or service.
People are different. We’re not the same, we have unique attitudes, behaviours and motivators.
If you aren’t talking to any of these particular characteristics or motivators, you’re going to find yourself down the list of people’s priorities when they think of your brand.
By trying to be everything to everyone, your message will end up being so weak and vanilla that customers at best won’t notice notice you, or at worst will seek out more specific and relevant brands for their needs.
Due to your messages being so vague and weak, your Brand Promise and ultimately the sense of your Brand itself is inevitably watered down in order to make it as appealing and broad as possible.
In turn, this affects what customers take away from your brand – which is confusion because you’re using fluffy terms, and buzz language that doesn’t meet an actual need that consumers have.
More often than not, as a business, you’re trying to maximise your profit, by ensuring that the cost it takes to acquire a customer, is less than the cost it takes to reach a customer.
There is not a media channel in the world that will allow you to give a relevant message to a general audience.
You need to choose the right media, to get in front of the right person – at hopefully the right time.
Don’t waste your budget by going general – go specific, and look for the audiences that you can target with efficient media and use your budget efficiently.
If you’re currently trying to target everyone, here’s 2 x things that you need to do immediately:
Get out there and understand your customers. Whether you want to do focus groups, or online survey’s – the benefits of this are immeasurable and set you up for success.
I once had a client, who thought their existing customer didn’t purchase their clothing inventory more often was because their range wasn’t extensive enough. After doing some research, we found out that the main reason they would purchase more often, was because they didn’t offer Free Shipping.
Turns out the client did offer Free Shipping, they just weren’t communicating it to their customers!
Once you’ve done your research you can segment the market to find out which audiences are worth chasing.
You’ll be in a position to understand the market as a whole, and it will be as if you’ve gained sight after being blind for your lifetime.
By trying to be everything to everyone, your brand and your marketing will be less for it. Find your target markets, understand your segments, and you’ll avoid the spinning around, falling down, stumbling and falling that Everclear foreshadowed.
BTW – Check out the class of ’97 – it’s a collection of the finest rock songs you’ll ever hear: https://www.spin.com/featured/best-alternative-rock-songs-1997
One of the most common remarks we hear from clients is “I’m on the 1st page of Google – I don’t need to bid on my own brand. Right?”
Wrong.
I mean sure, you don’t have to – and from the outset it might seem to make logical sense. People have searched for your Brand. They’re going to click through.
Why would you pay for a click when you have someone looking for you in the first place? Some say it’s just a vanity metric, and has no impact on your results.
Google and Bing – only 2 of the highest placed purveyors on the subject – have previously weighed in on this matter in separate reports where they detail that:
There’s a few solid reasons as to why these stats matter, and why you should be bidding on your brand terms. In fact – there’s 7 and a half.
So many options – catering to every need.
As we mentioned earlier, Google conducted a study on what would happen if your Branded Search Ads were paused – and they resoundingly found that “over 89% of the ads clicks are incremental, in the sense that the visits to the advertiser’s site would not have occurred without the [Brand] Ad Campaigns.
You can read all about it here.
Users that search for your brand, are low in your customer sales funnel.
They’re already aware of your brand, they’re likely to be educated on it, and they are now either at consideration, or even better, at the action phase of their purchasing decision.
Make this decision easy for them.
In fact, you can make this purchase cycle even faster by generating instant customers with a “Click to Call” phone extension.
So now that you know that these prospects are low in the funnel, you can assume that they’re weighing your product or service up against your competitors.
What’s going to tip them over the line?
How about advertising that Exclusive Offer or your seasonal promotion?
Again, it’s all about speeding up the purchase journey.
Send prospective customers straight to a specific Landing Page, it’s a great opportunity to highlight any offers you have.
Why don’t you take advantage of Foxtel’s “Special Online Offer”?
In all likelihood, your SERP (Search Engine Results Page) results are the result of your Meta tagging and detail coded in the back end of your website.
This means that when someone searches for your Brand, Google is going to pull that data (which you’ve updated for SEO) and present that to them.
That’s good and well, but it may not be the right message you want to provide the market at that specific moment in time.
With Paid Ads, you control the messaging, and you can communicate exactly what you want to say, without it affecting your SEO.
There’s also that added benefit that – in the rather unfortunate case of that bad PR disaster that happened – you can hide any negative perceptions or news on the brand is hidden below the fold, so it’s only that dastardly scrollers that see it.
Did you know that Coca Cola No Sugar is here? You do now…
Let’s not even go here…Push it down the page already @Pepsi!
Probably one of the biggest advantages of Branded Search terms, are Ad Extensions.
You know right – those little highlighted links under your Ad.
They’re:
Point me in the right direction, I may just go straight there
If you live in Sydney, you know that every 3rd conversation generally comes around to real estate.
Where are you looking? How big a place do you need? When will the market ever come crashing down?
Well, by bidding on your Branded Search terms, you get more real estate on your SERP page.
Your page generally has a lot of information, it could have your business’ location, a Shopping feed, site links, reviews, the list goes on.
At the top of all of these – are Paid Ads.
Think of it as just putting on an extension to the house. you’ve now gone double storey.
If you’re in a competitive market, chances are that your competitors are bidding on your Brand.
If they’re smart, or have read this Blog Post, they’ve likely got a special deal going on to entice would be customers of yours to go and visit their site for a better deal.
One of the ways to combat this behaviour, is to get on the front foot, and dominate your Branded Search results.
Woah… That’s quite a competitive space.
As we all know, Google rewards you as an advertiser for having a good Quality Score.
Well, Branded Search terms will generally have the highest Quality Score of all your campaigns.
This is because people are down the funnel, the Ads have a high CTR, your Ad Relevance should be on point, and your Landing page experience will generally meet expectations.
By having a high QS for your Brand terms, your Account QS will improve, therefore your other campaigns can benefit and come down in cost simply by being associated with a quality campaign.
So, this should never be a reason to do anything, but there can be no denying that your branded terms are a super cheap and cost effective driver of traffic.
Of all your AdWords campaigns, the Brand Campaign with it’s high CTR and high Quality Score will be one of the cheapest Campaigns you run.
It’s also going to be one of the highest converting campaigns you run. That’s just a measure of where it is in the funnel.
So there you have it, 7½ comprehensive reasons that you should be bidding on your Brand terms.
If you currently aren’t bidding on your Brand Terms, I can understand the hesitation in suddenly putting budget where you think the return won’t be generated, but – at least test it – see what effect it has on overall traffic to site, and weigh up the pro’s and con’s for yourself.
Do you currently bid on Brand Terms? How have you found it?
Cover Image by by Jordan Whitfield on Unsplash
As 2016 draws to a close and we look forward to what 2017 can bring, the pace of change amongst one of the worlds largest media publishers continues to amaze us.
The challenge for marketers, is to know which new innovations and features that Facebook release are worth investing time and energy into.
To help you stay ahead and keep an eye on what to look out for, we’ve put together our Top 5 Trends to watch our for with Facebook Advertising in 2017.
Meerkat was one of the first platforms to really bring live streaming video to the masses, and with Facebook Live, marketers have a readily accessible vehicle to give behind the scenes, educational, or even event updates to their audience.
We’ve already seen higher organic reach and results through Facebook Live, and with Facebook placing more and more emphasis on ‘video’ as a preferred content medium, expect this space to amplify next year.
Image Source: Facebook Live
The introduction of Instant Articles, has allowed Facebook to become another distribution channel for many news-based organisations, as they can reap the benefits of reduced load time, completely optimised delivery, and an almost completely native home.
As Facebook’s News Feed, becomes increasingly more and more ‘news’ focused rather than ‘friends status’ based – many publishers are tapping into this by providing rich and insightful articles that are shared up to 30% more than their web based news pages.
As a marketer, if your brand isn’t using Canvas ads, you are losing out on engagement, clicks, and conversions. We’ve seen a large increase in overall engagement from Canvas Ads, as audiences become familiar with brands’ ability to tell their narrative, and control the messages and images or video they see.
Image Source: facebook.com
So, Facebook has noticed the amount of Groups dedicated to buying, selling and trading goods, and earlier this year delivered ‘Marketplace’ to their apps, which allow users to buy and sell goods.
They’re taking on eBay.
Facebook has seen more than 450 million people visit buy and sell groups each month and with the release of Marketplace, you too, can now trade with people in your local community.
Image Source: facebook.com
Having just one Facebook conversion pixel has made making Custom Audiences easier, and with targeting audiences and customers even more a priority for Facebook Advertisers – it comes as no surprise, that the ability to create niche Custom Audiences are becoming more a focus for brands and marketers.
No longer are you simply relying on website visitors, or fans of your Page.
Now, you can create Custom Audiences, based on Video Engagement, who’s opened your Lead Form, who’s opened your Lead Form but didn’t complete it!
The opportunities this presents marketers keen to target specific audiences is huge, it means that the messaging and Ads you create become more tailored and bespoke, not only for your audiences, but for your audiences engagement history.
Finally, Facebook 360 has really brought the immersive world to your screen.
This point needs it’s own point, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of this next year – much more than Instant Articles and Canvas, as Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality hit the mainstream.
One only needed to be a bystander to Pokemon Go earlier this year, to see the huge impact that Augmented Reality is going to have – and how it’s going to be a mobile first experience – exactly what Facebook has been moving towards the last few years.
Did we mention that Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2 billion?
You don’t make that kind of investment without some serious thoughts around how to bring VR to the masses.
Image Source: https://facebook360.fb.com/
That’s where we think Facebook is headed in 2017 – what are your thoughts?
Do you sense something big on the horizon that we’ve missed?
Let us know below.
A common area of confusion many Facebook marketers come across is understanding how much of their marketing is targeting the same people in different AdSets.
Audience overlap refers to the commonalities that exist between two different audiences.
It is the estimated percentage of people that lie between Audience A, and Audience B.
Well, when Facebook serves Ads to your audience, it does so based on the type of AdSet that you choose when planning your campaign.
Audience Overlap can become a problem if your audiences have similarities, and in many cases, this will be the case.
For example, if you’re marketing a beauty product, you may have the following AdSets:
Audience A: Lookalike Audience of your website visitors from 10% of Facebook users
Audience B: Saved Audience of Females 18-28yo.
Now, there is a fair chance that when Facebook generates your Lookalike Audience, some of your website visitors fit the bill of an 18-28 year old female.
So you would be marketing to the same audience but serving them different AdSets.
This can result in wasted spend because your Ads are essentially playing off and competing against one another.
Currently, you can only check these 3 x audience types:
Lucky for you, Facebook have made it super easy to check your audiences.
You can access the Audience Overlap tool in Ads Manager or Power Editor.
When looking at your audiences, check which audiences you want to see the overlap between.
NOTE: You can choose up to 5 x audiences, but an audience must have at least 1,000 people to be viewed.
Then, under Actions, choose the option that says Show Audience Overlap.
You will see a screen like the below that shows you the different overlaps between audiences.
Under Selected Audience, you will see your main audience you want to compare other audiences against.
You can change this in the drop down box in the Selected Audience box.
Underneath, in the Comparison Audiences, you can see different audiences, and how many people, and what percentage of overlap there is in the audiences.
In my example, I’ve compared a Lookalike Audience of my Prospects & Customers, with a lookalike audience of my Website Visitors. There’s a very small overlap which means that there will be minimal wastage of any spend if I marketed to both AdSets.
Similarly, I’ve compared my Prospects & Customers Lookalike Audience with a Lookalike Audience that completed a Lead Form, and there is no overlap, so again, good news when marketing to the AdSets.
You can remove Audiences, by either clicking on the ‘X’ to the right of each audience, or you can add more audiences by clicking the ‘+’ sign at the bottom of the Audience Overlap screen.
If you have two audiences with a high percentage of overlap you need to refine your AdSet targeting and make it more specific so that you can further seperate your audiences and ensure that your AdSets aren’t marketing to the same audience.
If you have specific audiences that overlap, another thing you could do is to compile and amalgamate your audiences into fewer AdSets.
There’s a number of ways you can use Audience Overlap to fine tune your Facebook marketing, and not just through identifying overlapping audiences.
For example, you could try to understand the value of your Facebook Fans by comparing these against your website visitors (to see whether your Fans visit your page), or if they have the same interests & behaviours that you want to target.
So there you go, why not login to your Ads Manager or Power Editor and give Audience Overlap a spin.
Let me know your thoughts, and what you found in the comments below.
We met with a startup yesterday and one of their very first questions was what their Facebook Campaigns should be.
They launched a new product to market a week ago, and they’d been dabbling with a number of different campaigns, had tried a few things but nothing had really worked.
They had numerous campaigns they were trying to run, with a few different objectives, but really broad audiences, and even though they were driving a hell of a lot of traffic to their site, they weren’t seeing the results or conversions come through at the end.
Starting out on Facebook is hard, it takes time to grow your audience base, and to understand which customers you should be targeting.
The first thing we spoke about, was choosing the right campaign topic.
We started to outline and workshop a few questions such as what their objectives were, what were they trying to achieve.
Once you’ve figured out your primary & secondary objectives, you’ll be in the best position to start thinking about budget.
Facebook gives you up to 15 objectives for you to choose from, there’s a healthy array of choice, and allows you to focus on a specific objective.
Determining where you want to focus your campaign and where your customers are in your purchase funnel, will help determine which objectives are right for you.
A large percentage of our clients choose to ‘Increase conversion on your website’ which is completely understandable – it’s at the bottom of the funnel, and means that there’s going to be revenue associated with it.
However, in order for the ‘Conversion’ campaign type to work best – you need to ensure that not only is your Facebook Pixel loaded and installed correctly (read Blog Post here), but that you have standard or custom events set up on the pages you want your customers to convert.
You also need to remember, that once you grab all the ‘low hanging fruit’, and easy to reach customers, i.e. your Fans, website visitors, then you need to find more of those people to fill the top of your funnel.
The customer purchase funnel is the journey that every consumer goes on prior to purchasing a product or service.
The customer purchase funnel is made up of 5 x key steps:
You’ve no doubt gone through this yourself when you’re making any purchase, big or small, but the example we often use is choosing a car.
Let’s take the example if you’re looking at upgrading your car because you have a growing family.
If I asked you how many car brands you could name, how many could you? Our rough guess, off the top of your head, is that you could name anywhere between 20-30, depending on how big a car enthusiast you are.
Through your life, you’ve been exposed to numerous brands, whether you will ever purchase them or not, and you’re aware that they exist.
During our lifetime though, we’ve come to associate car brands with certain things that they do well.
We’ve been educated by these brands on their products, so we know that we associate ‘Ferrari’ with high end sports cars, Jeep, as a car for the outdoors, or four wheel driving, and Peugeot as smaller European style cars.
Each brand will have cars that cross over into different categories, but as a general rule, you will have been educated on their products and offerings by these brands.
Of these 20-30 car brands, you’re educated enough to know that there’s probably half of them you can immediately rule out, and you’re left with 10-15 cars that you believe would ever suit your needs.
There comes a stage though, when your current car breaks down one time too many, or you need to upgrade your car, and you’re now considering what kind of car you need to purchase.
You will only ever consider brands, that you’re aware of, and of those brands that you’re aware of, you will consider an even smaller number based on what you know about those brands, and what you’ve been educated on.
For your growing family you’ll automatically discount cars like a Lamborghini or Mini, and instead may focus on cars like a Toyota or Mazda.
Out of the 20-30 cars that you were initially aware of, now you’re in consideration stage, you’ve whittled that number down to 5 cars or so.
The final stage, is taking action.
What is it going to take, to make you purchase.
Of these 5 cars that you’re now considering, the brands will be offering different incentives or offers for you to buy their car, it could be an extended warranty, free air conditioning, or even road side assistance.
Eventually though, after you’ve gone through the brands you’re aware of, and you’ve educated yourself on their merits and benefits, you’ve shortlisted a few that you’re considering, there will be one left that you will purchase.
The 5th and final stage though – is one that you should not forget.
How can you turn your customers into advocates?
Advocates are powerful, because they’ll fill the top of your funnel again, or they may even influence their friends and push them down the funnel very quickly and you’ll end up with prospects in the consideration phase, bypassing and skipping awareness and education due to your advocates favourability and recommendation.
So, based on what you’re trying to achieve, and which pool of customers you’re trying to grow – you may have a number of different campaigns that you should be running.
It’s important to note with Facebook advertising – that you NEVER try and run a campaign to do multiple things.
You will only dilute your audience, Facebook will optimise your Ad serving incorrectly, and you’ll be left with very mediocre results and zero learnings.
Have you been running Facebook Advertising? Have you had any experience good or bad running multiple campaigns at the same time? How have your campaigns performed?
Be sure to let us know in the comments below.
If you’re anything like most of our clients, you’ve dabbled with Facebook advertising, or are at least exploring how you can use Facebook advertising for your business.
Like some of our clients, you may be daunted by the complexity of it, you may be experiencing dissatisfaction with your efforts or you aren’t seeing any of the results come in.
Well, the GOOD NEWS is that we’ve developed a FREE 5-Step Guide that shows you how to create a Facebook Ad that works and delivers you amazing results.
To download your free copy of the 5-Step Guide to Facebook click here.
Of all the tools that Facebook has provided marketers in their arsenal of weaponry, the Facebook Pixel is by far the one that marketers should familiarise themselves with and learn how to use.
The Facebook Pixel allows you to retarget people who visit your website, create customised audiences, and understand how many conversions your ads are delivering so you can see which adverts are working best.
The conversion pixel will soon become your new best friend as you will be able to determine which ads are delivering results to meet your campaign and business objectives. Conversions could be as simple as a click to your website or web page, a completed lead form or sign up, to a product purchase.
Your first step is to create the Facebook Pixel. You can read about how easy it is to create the pixel in our previous post. If you haven’t had a chance to create the pixel and need to understand how to do it, head on over to the post here. It will take 2 minutes…
Now that you’ve created your pixel, it’s important to understand what it exactly is. The Facebook Pixel is essentially a piece of code that can be inserted into your website and on every page.
The Facebook pixel code contains two key elements:
Here is an example of what your Facebook Pixel Code will look like with a standard event included.
These are the 9 x types of Standard Events (and their corresponding code) that you can add:
| Website action | Standard event code |
| View content | fbq(‘track’, ‘ViewContent’); |
| Search | fbq(‘track’, ‘Search’); |
| Add to cart | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToCart’); |
| Add to wishlist | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddToWishlist’); |
| Initiate checkout | fbq(‘track’, ‘InitiateCheckout’); |
| Add payment info | fbq(‘track’, ‘AddPaymentInfo’); |
| Make purchase | fbq(‘track’, ‘Purchase’, {value: ‘0.00’, currency: ‘USD’}); |
| Lead | fbq(‘track’, ‘Lead’); |
| Complete registration | fbq(‘track’, ‘CompleteRegistration’); |
For example, if you are after registration forms completion, you would put the Lead code on the page where the user will land to fill out the form, and your Complete Registration code on the ‘thank you’ page after the Lead has been completed.
You’ve now created and installed the Facebook Pixel on your website – which means not only are you avoiding the 1 critical mistake many Facebook marketers make, but you’re now able to get a greater degree of insight into which adverts are doing well, which campaigns and ads are converting, and how best you can manage your budget.
If you have any questions on the Facebook Pixel, or want some help with your Facebook marketing, be sure to let us know and we’ll help you straight away!
Run twice a week.
Travel more.
Lose weight.
See more theatre.
The start of a new year brings many things. Returning unwanted Christmas gifts. The annual visit to the dentist. A hangover. However by now, after you’ve cleaned up from New Years Day, your thinking is clearer, you’ve recovered and you’re trying to remember what those promises were that you slurred those few minutes before midnight to improve your life in the next 12 months.
Theatre companies are no different.
Coming back from the Xmas/NY break, you feel refreshed, full of energy to tackle the year ahead and plough head long into the campaigns and productions in the works.
Before you do that though, here we’ve put together 4 x New Years resolutions that every theatre should make if they haven’t already.
“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
If you’re starting the New Year without a marketing plan on how to achieve your goals, it goes to stand that 12 months from now you’ll be in a similar spot to where you are now.
The skeleton of your plan should consist of 4 key areas:
Vision
Have a clear understanding of the reasoning behind your existence. Yourartistic vision gives purpose to your company and outlines where you want to go in the future.
Goals
The long term purpose to which you’re striving. Your goals should feed from your vision and ultimately help you achieve your artistic vision.
Strategies
Your strategies detail the numerous ways, resources and initiatives that you’ll employ in order to achieve your goals.
Objectives
Objectives should have a short to mid term focus with quantifiable and measurable specific actions that will help reach associated strategies.
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits them and sells itself.” ~ Peter Drucker
If you can’t specify who your audience is, you need to start!
A segmented audience means that your marketing will be delivered via a rifle rather than a shotgun.
The more targeted your marketing can become, the more efficient it will be and the greater the results will be.
We’ve spoken previously before about how to identify your target audience, you can read more about that here.
“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” ~ Daniel Keys Moran
Building on top of any audience segmentation you have, it’s important to understand what additional data you’re capturing, and what insight you want delivered.
Capturing data should be the building blocks to each key initiative in your marketing plan.
Whether you want to understand when ticket sales occur, the effectiveness of your marketing, or even the amount of snacks sold at the interval, if you have questions that pertain to the performance of your theatre, you need to be capturing the right data.
“Content is anything that adds value to the reader’s life.” ~ Avinash Kaushik.
In the past few years, ‘content’ has become the buzz word for any social mediacampaign, but it’s important that the content you’re producing is relevant to your audience.
As a theatre, you have an abundance of content to promote and a variety of media to distribute through.
By utilising a social media content calendar you can begin to make your content proactive rather than reactive.
I’ve written previously about crafting your artistic vision as the first step in building a marketing strategy, and how important this is in detailing your statement of purpose, your reason for being, your dreams of where you want to be.
However, once you’ve identified your artistic vision, your next step in building a marketing strategy is to detail the objectives that you’re going to take to help you get there.
You can set long term objectives, for the next 2, 5, or even 10 years, but to ensure long term success, you should focus and be explicitly clear on your marketing objectives for the next 12 months.
Setting objectives should be one of the most enjoyable aspects of your strategy planning, and as you begin to sharpen your focus, you will begin to visualise how extensive and exhaustive your campaigns will need to be in order to support your company over the next 12 months.
As a marketing team, your objectives should fall into one of these four categories:
In this first of a four part series, I’m going to talk about key objectives for your audience.
How you set objectives for your audience depends on what type of audience they are.
Where your theatre is at in its ‘life stage’ as a company should determine exactly what you focus your energies and objectives on to reach your artistic vision.
There are two common types of marketing you should be producing for your theatre audience, ‘Brand Marketing’ and ‘Direct Marketing’.
– To engage people emotionally with the brand
Brand marketing is designed to create awareness of your brand or your company. For new theatres, some of the most important marketing you do will be around your brand, how you build the perception of your company, or even landing messages that tell the community or your audience what it is that your company stands for.
Often marketers refer to Brand Marketing as the ‘heart’ of marketing, as it builds and creates an emotional connection between your brand/company, and your audience.
The first step in starting any kind of brand marketing is to look at whatdifferentiates your theatre. Why is it that people will come to your theatre, instead of doing something else?
Is it the type of production you create? Perhaps your audience is a stark difference from other theatres? Do you specialise in one form of theatre?
Brand marketing objectives could be as simple as ‘increasing community awareness’, ‘change perceptions of our theatre company’, or it could be to ‘promote the critically acclaimed awards we have won’.
Measuring the effectiveness of brand marketing is often quite difficult, as it is more qualitative in nature dependent upon changes in audience and community perceptions.
One way of measuring the effectiveness of your brand marketing is throughsurveys. Surveys will give you qualitative insight into your brand, if your logo and colours are recognisable, if people know what the quality of your productions are like and even how customers are visibly recognising your brand?
There are a number of online and offline survey tools you can use to measure your brand campaigns are through Survey Monkey or Polldaddy.
If you’re after more quantifiable metrics, measuring the trends of new visitors to your website will give an indication of whether your prospective audience is becoming more attuned to your marketing and taking interest in your offering.
– To take action and contact you
If brand marketing is the heart of your marketing, direct marketing is the ‘hand’. Direct marketing entices prospects to take action from your marketing communications.
Direct marketing is most successful once you’ve established your brand andcreated awareness and perception about your theatre. Without any awareness or branding, people will be less likely to take action from your direct marketing as they will still be unclear about the overarching premise of why they should go and what they are seeing.
We have previously written about 5 things your direct marketing should feature, setting objectives for your direct marketing should focus on the channels that prospects will take action through.
For theatres, your most common objectives will revolve around increasing ticket sales, calls to the Box Office, increasing memberships to your theatre, or a variety of digital objectives such as ‘click through rate’, ‘purchase conversion rate’ or ‘unique visits to website’.
One of the binding principles of direct marketing is to have a clear ‘call to action’, that is – a clear and defined journey for any prospects to take once they finish reading your communications.
For theatre marketer’s, your main objective will be to sell tickets, and you need to be giving thought around the ways that customers can purchase tickets for your productions. The most common call to actions will be to guide prospective audience members to a phone number or to an online website where they can buy tickets.
Setting marketing objectives for your theatre will largely depend on the type of audience you are speaking to and whether the communications you’re producing are either brand or direct centric.
Each type of marketing is measurable in either a qualitative or quantitative way, and it’s important to ensure that these objectives are clear and defined in your strategy so that when you reflect on your marketing you can deem whether it’s successful or not.
In my next blog post, I’m going to talk about setting financial objectives, and how these are important for a theatre marketer. Not all marketing is creative pictures, funky messaging, and twitter banter. It’s important to understand how your marketing impacts on the success of your productions and theatre, and what financial metrics you should be measuring.
1. Brand marketing creates awareness
2. Measure brand marketing through a mix of qualitative and quantitativeanalysis
3. Direct marketing promotes action
4. Ensure your call to action channels are communicated clearly on your direct communications
1. List three marketing objectives of your theatre for this year.
2. Identify against each, whether they are ‘brand’ centric or ‘direct’ response.
Remember: If you’re changing awareness or perception it is ‘brand marketing’, if you’re enticing prospects to take action, it’s ‘direct marketing’.
3. Against each objective list ways that you can measure success. Are you going to measure online ticket purchases? Are you taking customer surveys?
4. Against each success measurement, write down a metric that you want to achieve. Do you want to increase ticket sales by 20%? Do you want to increase awareness of your theatre by 5%?
5. Finally, against each objective, list all the relevant ‘call to actions’ that you are asking a customer to take. Where will the customer go next? What are you asking them to do?
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