Category Archives: A

What it means

Awareness is a key marketing success metric used as one way to evaluate a brand’s health. Awareness measures the target audience’s familiarity and associations with a particular brand, its features, products, and benefits. Awareness can be measured and categorized as “aided” or “unaided,” which describes how quickly knowledge of the museum or its offers comes to mind with and without help.

How it’s used

Awareness is often the first step in the sales funnel or purchase process (see also Audience Journey) and the first priority for a marketing effort because visitors must first be aware of an offering before taking any additional actions.

If your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room, then growing awareness and making sure audiences know who you are (and can talk about you at all) is an essential goal of any marketing strategy. Advertising, public relations, ambassador programs, exterior signage, partnerships, loyalty marketing, and social media are all ways that brands grow recognition and familiarity.

Awareness can be tracked via population surveys, website traffic, and social engagement.

Why it matters

People choose brands they know and trust. Audiences need to know who you are and what you stand for before they can choose to visit your museum. Growing awareness is essential to attracting new visitors, while staying visible and relevant is essential to remaining top-of-mind.

Notes

Awareness is sometimes tracked in an Awareness, Attitudes, and Usage (AAU) study for insights into brand health and to track trends in sentiment and behavior.

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What it means

Audience segmentation is the process of identifying subgroups within an audience in order to deliver more personalized and meaningful messaging to cultivate stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. Subgroups can also be based on behavior, such as types of past purchases or attendance of particular types of events, or psychographics, such as personality types, values, attitudes, and beliefs.

How it’s used

Audience segmentation allows a museum to focus the message when communicating with a particular audience on those things that are most relevant and important to that group. Segmentation helps exhibitions, interpretation, and programming teams to tailor offerings and the message about those offerings based on our understanding of the needs of the intended audience.

Why it matters

Segmentation ultimately improves the effectiveness of museum marketing, communications, and audience engagement, enhancing the museum’s capacity to shift perception, grow audiences, increase participation, and through these things, expand the museum’s opportunities to serve the public.

Notes

This definition was adapted from Mailchimp: https://mailchimp.com/marketing-glossary/audience-segmentation/.

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What it means

Audience research refers to any study conducted, reviewed, or considered on audiences with the goal of gaining insight into the audience’s behaviors, attitudes, values, motivations, and perceptions to better meet the needs of those the museum aims to serve.

Audience research has many methods, and is evolving, scalable, and dependent on the goals of the organization or project. Audience research can be qualitative and focused more on deeper insights or it can be quantitative and focused on statistically significant sample sizes. It can be conducted via online surveys/digital applications, online panels, focus groups, intercept surveys, observational studies, in-depth interviews, and more.

The U.S. Census, Convention Visitor Bureau, other cultural organizations, and commercial firms may be resources in this work.

How it’s used

Applications include informing strategy, optimizing revenue opportunities, crafting messaging, and enabling the museum to see itself as others see it.

Why it matters

Museums exist to serve the public, and therefore, understanding audiences is a foundational component of making that work meaningful. It’s a useful measure of the success of other initiatives such as branding, social impact, or mission effectiveness. It should inform such overriding questions as organizational purpose.

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What it means

An audience persona (in for-profit terms, a customer persona) is a semi-fictional character that is created to represent your target audience. It’s a concise snapshot of all of the relevant information you can obtain about them, all packaged together to form a “person” you can focus your marketing efforts toward. Personas usually take the form of stories based in research and capture a fuller picture of a target audience’s life and priorities. They can include things like where a “persona” lives, their daily routines, commute, hobbies, pets, social life, beliefs, family, and media consumption.

How it’s used

Museums will usually have several audience personas (e.g., “Busy Suburban Moms” and “Cool Downtown 20-Somethings”) and may even go so far as to name them (e.g., “Jacob”) and give them pictures and bios. They serve to deepen your understanding of individuals or groups with shared interests, psychographics, or demographics, especially to bring a visitor’s needs, goals, behaviors, and motivations into sharper focus. Thinking through possible decisions and evaluating programs, services, media plans, or materials from the perspective of different audience personas is a useful tool in understanding the impact on different audiences.

Why it matters

Audience personas help organizations understand audiences in a more tangible and nuanced way, especially when demographics seem abstract (e.g., “What would “Jacob” think of this?”). They offer museums the ability to package research into an easy-to-use tool to challenge preconceived ideas and facilitate audience-related discussions or strategies and make decision-making easier and the “why” clearer. They can also help teams avoid assumptions or the application of unconscious bias when considering a particular audience and their needs.

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What it means

Audience journey refers to the path individuals, groups, or audience segments take, or are encouraged to take, as they move through various touchpoints, interactions, and experiences with museums. It often takes the forms of a diagram—a map, a pyramid, or a funnel—that visualizes the different steps in the process, all from the audience’s perspective.

How it’s used

Mapping an audience journey helps staff understand interactions from the viewpoint of the visitor or web user, and see how all of the different pieces can fit together.

One common audience journey is the audience development pyramid. Within museums or arts organizations, this often takes the form of moving people along a journey from being unaware to aware (e.g., knowing who you are and what you offer), to attracted (e.g., visiting for the first time), to attached (e.g., visiting multiple times, recommending to friends, becoming a member), and to becoming advocates (e.g., being a donor or identifying with or championing the museum).

Another is the audience journey map, which maps out all the different moments a visitor interacts with your museum, from first hearing about it (e.g., listening to a news story) to actively seeking more information (e.g., searching online, visiting a website) to walking in the door to after the visit (e.g., posting pictures on social media).

The same technique can be used when developing new projects like websites or digital interactives (user experience/UX journey). It’s also a key organizing principle in fundraising and audience development, leading to the use of Customer Relationship Management software/CRMs like Salesforce.

Why it matters

How effectively museums engage audiences at these critical junctures along their journey can have a powerful impact on an institution’s economic sustainability and mission. Knowing and understanding audience journeys is a key decision-making and strategic tool. It also helps to lay out relationships between different touchpoints or the entire constellation of actions that are possible for visitors or an audience member to take.

Notes

See also Audience Persona and Audience Segmentation

What it means

Museums exist to serve the public. Every role in the institution is called upon to do the work. Audience engagement is critical as both a position and an area (e.g., team, department, and division) within the museum and the specific work needed to foster the relationship between the museum and its audiences.

As defined by the International Audience Engagement Network, “audience engagement champions the emotional and social relationship between audiences and the museum to sustain their future.”

Engagement can be either transactional or experiential.

• Transactional: People who buy a ticket to an exhibition or program, provide contact information, complete a survey, etc.
• Experiential: People who follow you on Instagram, share your social media posts (rather than look at them passively), listen to a podcast, attend a free exhibition, etc.

How it’s used

Audience engagement is an independent discipline within museums that touches the work of education, curatorial, marketing, and other teams to serve the audience. Start with getting to know your audiences so that you can develop the amenities and resources that will allow you to deepen your relationship with them.

Why it matters

The defining element of audience engagement is the need to holistically consider the overall audience experience across all the points of contact or interaction a person may have with a museum (e.g., collections, exhibitions, education, programs, interpretation, customer or visitor services, research, membership, development, digital interaction, and communications). When we prioritize audience engagement across the entire organization, we position the museum as a “third place” to better serve our communities with quality amenities and resources, enabling constructive interactions and dialogue, enhancing well-being, and fostering a greater understanding of the world we live in.

It should be noted that it’s a two-way street: the museum is not just a service provider but also a member and resource in the community.

Notes

See also Brand Equity

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What it means

Audience development is the strategy, tactics, and process of expanding and deepening the level of engagement with your desired audiences. Together, the activities of audience development move the general public from disengagement to passionate support.* (See also Audience Journey.)

How it’s used

The work is highly strategic and planned for over the course of several years. It’s collaborative in nature, requiring efforts of the entire organization and building relationships through community partnerships and outreach.

Amplifying audience development work employs tools such as customer relationships management systems (e.g., Salesforce) to identify the different touchpoints an audience has with a museum, as well as listening, surveys, and other audience research tools that help center audiences in the museum’s work.

Why it matters

The process of audience development is fundamental to the work, impact, and thriving of the entire museum, and almost all initiatives could or should be oriented around moving people along their audience development journey. It is rooted in building trust with audiences and cultivating a two-way relationship: listening to people at all levels of the journey, meeting their needs, and being responsive.

When developing an audience, it’s important to think about whether the goal is to make the audience bigger or to deepen the engagement.

Notes

See also Audience Journey, Awareness, and Audience Engagement

*Source: Psychological Continuum Model

What it means

A museum’s audience or audiences are those members of the public who are engaged with the museum in any formal or informal capacity at the museum, online with the museum, or in connection with museum-based activities.

The term audience differs from that of the general public, which refers to those who have yet to engage with the museum.

How it’s used

Audience is a term commonly used as shorthand to refer to members of the public. Here, we are distinguishing between those members of the public who are engaged and those who still need to be engaged.

Why it matters

As museums, our primary purpose is to serve our audiences. Understanding who we engage and who we should be engaging with is a critical and necessary ongoing conversation for museums.

Notes

See also Audience Development, Audience Engagement, Audience Journey, Audience Persona, Audience Research, Audience Segmentation

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What it means

Analytics is the critical practice of translating sets of data and information into actionable stories and insights to inform effective decision-making. The first step is to identify quantifiable goals and key performance indicators (KPIs), which are then used to measure success and serve as guideposts for managing and optimizing future actions. It is also helpful in challenging assumptions by providing empirical evidence to support a strategic direction instead of relying on anecdotal information.

Harvard Business School offers a helpful way to categorize the four basic types of analytics organizations typically use: descriptive (reports current performance), diagnostic (articulates the “why” behind data trends), predictive (forecasts trajectory), and prescriptive (plans actionable strategy).

How it’s used

Museum marketing, communications, and audience engagement teams use a combination of some or all of the types of analytics described above, depending on their institutional goals and technological infrastructure.

• Descriptive analytics entails measuring progress against KPIs, such as comparing current visitation numbers or email open rates relative to preset goals.
• Examples of diagnostic analytics include examining seasonality or market trends to explain attendance fluctuations or identifying patterns across compelling email subject lines that prompt high open rates.
• An example of predictive analytics is harnessing behavioral data of customers across digital marketing to identify a target audience or to re-engage those who responded to an advertisement or email.
• Prescriptive analytics might use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, such as Salesforce, and apply algorithms to assign a value or “score” to different museum audiences in their customer database, based on their touchpoints or interactions throughout their customer journey. (See also Audience Journey.)

Because museums are human-centered institutions, it is important to note that while critical, analytics do not tell the whole story. Qualitative methods of gathering and interpreting data, such as interviews, focus groups, and observational studies, can help provide a fuller picture than analytics alone.

Why it matters

Understanding audiences—both in person and online—at every point of their engagement before, during, and after their museum visit can be powerful in charting the long-term sustainability of a museum—in terms of both mission and revenue.

Data-informed storytelling and communications can be potent guides for decision-making, and the right mix of analytics can help the museum convert its data into actionable insight.

Notes

See also Metrics and Audience Journey

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What it means

Amenities, such as restrooms, coat check, food offerings, and seating, are services or conveniences made available to visitors to meet their visitation, participation, or general usage needs and support a prolonged stay in the museum. Amenities can and should include online services as well.

How it’s used

Amenities are a critical component of meeting the specific needs of our current and future audiences and a key ingredient of a museum’s audience development efforts. Planning for expanded or improved amenities is a necessary element of an effective audience development plan.

For example, a museum that wants to attract and grow a family audience but that does not adjust its amenities to meet the needs of the family audience through family restrooms, stroller parking, food offerings, designated spaces, and related programs will not be able to attract and maintain those audiences and suffers the risk of harming the museum’s reputation as a consequence.

Amenities can also be substantially improved through internal team training and actively collecting and listening to visitor feedback.

Why it matters

Amenities play a critical role in support of the museum experience because they make people more comfortable and thus able to engage more deeply with the museum’s content. Some amenities enhance the museum experience and help prolong a museum stay; if unavailable, they may limit or even prohibit visitation for some people.