Social media marketing in performing art centers
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| 5.3.1 Major recommendation
Considering the literature review and survey results the following major recommendations were formularized. Social media should become an integral part of the marketing strategy for PACs. It is essential for PACs to realize that traditional advertising gradually becomes less effective over time. Today customers use
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Web 2.0 sites to attain valuable information. Moreover, customers are savvier, taking advantage of modern technologies, e.g. using social media for ticket purchase and accessing to downloading and streaming audio/video music files. These are just a few of the reasons for building increased involvement of concert visitors in social media activities. Delay in using modern technologies and understanding the shifting preferences of the market will potentially threaten the ability of PACs to retain their core group of customers. Those companies that become first adopters in social media marketing will be able to take the market share of the competitors who are not present there. The number of actively used social media tools should not be limited to the most popular sites.
There is no doubt that Facebook and Twitter are the current leaders in social media for almost all industries including performing arts. Performing arts companies could benefit more from social media by increasing the number of social media tools they actively use for marketing. For example, the survey results indicated low usage of Music 2.0 tools. Music-related websites with social networking features may significantly increase the coverage of the target audience of PACs. Maintaining a customer profile and connecting with the audience on Music 2.0 websites could be a great opportunity for PACs to promote events and ticket sales among other opportunities. Developing social media marketing should be strategic and well planned. Leveraging social media tools spontaneously without any concrete plan may not bring effective results in promoting business. PACs should think strategically to monetize social media tools and achieve the desired results. Concrete objectives should be defined when developing social media strategy. Moreover, it is necessary to plan and use a set of social media tools and tactics to achieve each objective. Selection of social media tools should be based on their relevancy to achievement of the marketing objectives. Social media embraces a plethora of tools that can be used to achieve objectives. For example, there are various social media tools that allow the passionate supporters of the non-profit organizations to set up individual online donation pages to fundraise from their friends or families, e.g. chipin.com, sixdegrees.org, change.org, changingthepresent.org, and firstgiving.org. Using volunteers and supporters of the organization on their behalf is the traditional method
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of fundraising for non-profits. The difference in using online tools for fundraising could make them more effective and efficient. These new tools are specifically designed for fundraising, allowing the users to upload pictures/video and provide information about their involvement in the cause. Moreover, these social media tools for fundraising offer widgets that can be connected with social networking websites or blogs to reach out to existing online communities. Some of these tools are equipped with functions that allow monitoring progress of the campaign. It is very important to develop tactics once a set of relevant tools for achieving each of the objectives is compiled. Success does not lie with a particular tool. It is necessary to know how to use them and to monitor the results to understand contribution to ROI. Facebook may be effective now without significant efforts. But it is only a short-term perspective. It is essential to learn the main principles/mechanism of social media marketing that can be applied via any other tools. For example, MySpace, once extremely popular, lost its clot after the advent of Facebook. In the near future something new may come up and the popularity of present social networking websites could steeply decline. Hence, continuous change and improvement are necessary. Simple presence in social media without well-planned strategy will not guarantee success nor positive outcomes. Marketing professionals of PACs should be aware of the following steps when developing a marketing strategy in social media. The first step is defining the target audience of an organization in social media. It is essential to develop insight about the target audience’s needs and interests, e.g. web resources they use, most common topics they are interested in, etc. Once the target audience is defined, the next step is developing marketing tactics that will appeal to the customers’ needs and interests. The content should be interesting to web users of a venue. The form of a marketing message may vary depending on a social media tool and objective the campaign. For example, the form of the marketing message on YouTube is video, while the content for blogs is a text message. But the form of the message is 65
not the most important. The content of the message is of crucial importance. The main goal of each tactic is total involvement of the audience. For example, PAC can use a ticket sale promoting a concert. However, a free ticket is not a tactic. An interesting contest/online event would be a tactic that could appeal to brand advocates. A ticket sale should be used as an incentive to stimulate your brand advocates to share information about the concert. For creating brand awareness and building a fan community, it is very important to involve fans with interesting conversations, posting blogs, or active discussions boards. The topics of marketing messages in social media should appeal to the customers. The main goal of the social media activity is involving the fans in conversations to help them interact with each other. Simple postings about concert venue news do not stimulate them to get involved. People are not interested in just a concert venue, but music and all related experiences they may garner. Conversations should be focused on the music trends, singers, songs the fans are interested in and more. Moreover, people would always be interested in something very intriguing, e.g. the life of the artists, favorite songs, etc. One of the methods to make people talk is asking questions and creating a dialogue with them. Posting questions initiates dialogue among people. When people sense a high level of involvement with the PAC and other customers, this may stimulate further participation. Creating a donor community as one of the main goals a marketer should keep in mind while creating the content for social media. Connecting potential donors in the community and engaging them in a cause could serve as the effective tactics to humanize the process. Instead of automatic procedures, such as a button “click here to donate”, telling a story can make a cause more personal and touch the feelings of people. In turn, authentic connections between people create movement. From the affect of a touching story, community members could communicate with each other and further spread the story to others outside the community. This process would increase the outreach of a fundraising campaign. Pull marketing should not be overlooked
Using the words in the content that can be used by the customers in the search system may enormously increase web traffic. Moreover, keywords for tagging
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should be selected based on words the potential reader would use in the search engine. There are many other tips the social media writer should be aware of to ensure effective generation of traffic to a website. In general, the content in social media should be valuable and relevant to customers and prospects. Web users may be more interested in discussing those topics they are interested, rather than commercial information. Moreover, it is of crucial importance to keep communication with the web users interactive and mutually beneficial. If a company asks a question from its fans and expects them to answer, it is necessary to maintain a dialogue to instill the feeling to the customers that their voices had been heard. Interaction would be more valuable when PACs involve its employees. Responses to fan comments encourage interaction. Providing valuable information to the web users and keeping interaction with the audience can insure a strong relationship with a fan community based on trust and loyalty is built. When creating a social media tactic, a company should always be innovative. Exploring the Web to find new innovative solutions is valuable. There are a lot of applications and instruments that can be integrated to ensure a higher diffusion. However, streaming media and music downloads are not the only options to engage customers into social media activities. For example, PACs can use iPhone applications to allow their patrons to keep track of concerts and book tickets. There are always new technologies that can be utilized by PACs. It is essential to make use of the advancing technology to facilitate experiences and meet expectations of the concert visitors. Thus, this study showed PACs use various social media tools to achieve their marketing objectives at various level of effectiveness. However, the tactics and tools of social media marketing used by PACs are still limited. The recommendations provided in this study can be used to achieve better results of social media marketing in PACs. While the content is of utmost importance, the ever developing and changing technologies should not be overlooked as channels of getting the content to the end user. Similarly, identifying the channel is only a small part of the job, while the effective means of using each of them is a determinant of success. |