If the first month of 2025 has shown us anything, it’s that everything we thought we knew about marketing and advertising is changing and changing quickly. As arts organizations, you’ve always had to be creative with planning your workload and budgets, but now is the time to make “strategy” the key word for everything that you do. Below we have a few tips about the kind of strategies you should be thinking about in the year ahead.
Strategy for Your Digital Marketing
Digital marketing (especially social media) has always been a changing landscape, but with recent societal shifts, the various platforms are changing daily. Start gathering data on all the platforms you use, so that you can monitor engagement rates. This will help you make decisions about making changes to content or whether it’s time to divest in a particular platform.
Start investigating platforms you didn’t use or didn’t use very much. While the volatility of social media is scary, it is also a great time to start experimenting with other platforms. But be strategic about your experimenting; make sure to test, evaluate and refine, so that you can make well informed social media plans. And don’t forget about your emails! This is the piece of digital marketing that you can completely control. Invest time in good email campaign planning.
Strategy for Your Budget
If you aren’t doing it already, you need to start tracking every penny that gets spent on marketing. It’s time to look at how your dollars are spent and make strategic decisions about future spending. It appears that the majority of federal and state funding for arts organizations will be going away, and marketing budgets are the first to get cut when times get rough. Having a clear plan and explanation of your expenses will make it easier to keep your budget intact during those tough budget conversations. Like we saw with the pandemic, arts organizations that keep their marketing budgets during volatile times will bounce back quicker and for the better.
Strategy for Your Marketing Plan
While digital marketing has already been mentioned, it is important to evaluate your overall marketing strategy. Having a marketing plan in place for your entire season (if not for the entire organization) will make it easier to pivot and make changes when dealing with outside interruptions. Always being reactionary might work in the short term, but won’t lead to long-term growth.
The plan you make helps to balance the workload for you and your team so that you don’t feel rushed to complete a project or get burned out on the work. A well-thought-out marketing strategy can optimize your digital presence, improve communication and accessibility, and create a comprehensive process that effectively drives your organization’s revenue generation and advocacy efforts.
Confluence Arts Solutions is here to assist with any of your questions. Contact us today for a chat about your strategic plans!