Webinars to Watch: Marketing Strategies for Local Audiences

Museum and historic sites are popular attractions for a destination’s overnight visitors interested in learning more about the history and culture of a place, but a post-COVID-19 reality means fewer people will be traveling long distances on vacation or holiday. These circumstances mean that museum professionals are now tasked with finding new, or reengaging familiar, audiences, particularly among locals and day trippers. Taking a look at your social media strategy is an important way to gain exposure to this target audience, while still expanding your reach to future markets. Below are some webinars that can help guide your planning process.

The American Alliance of Museums presents Attracting the Tourist Audience: Local, Regional, Global. This webinar highlights current trends of various tourist segments, tips on how to partner with local and regional organizations—e.g. tourism bureaus, destination management companies, etc.—in attracting tourists, plus resources and strategies for creating meaningful experiences that not only meet tourists’ needs, but also support your organization’s audience engagement goals. There is a $25 fee to watch the webinar.

For a more local focus, watch Cuseum’s Membership Marketing, Audience Shifts & Community Engagement after Coronavirus. After almost two months of coronavirus closures, many museums and cultural organizations are preparing to welcome visitors and members back. However, while organizations may be reopening, many are doing so in a graduated way and facing new challenges. In particular, many are realizing that tourism will be down for quite some time, which has the potential to profoundly affect admissions and membership revenue. At the same time, cultural organizations may have renewed appeal to local audiences as the world embraces a “stay local” or “staycation” mentality for the foreseeable future. This webinar will address how organizations can reorient the value propositions of membership and double down on local audience development to survive and thrive in the coronavirus era.

For some marketing advice, Cusuem also offers Small But Mighty: Navigating the New Normal as a Small or Mid-sized Museum. Now, more than three months after lockdown began, museums are gradually beginning to reopen their doors to visitors. While cultural organizations face many common hurdles, small and mid-sized institutions, with fewer staff and resources, may be facing unique challenges around this “new normal”. Many may be concerned that they lack the budgets and bandwidth needed to implement necessary changes, like contactless experience design and new digital initiatives. Speakers will discuss shifts in audiences and membership marketing strategy in light of coronavirus. Cuseum’s webinars are free to watch.

American Alliance for State and Local History (AASLH) provides even more focused advice in their recorded webinar Planning for Marketing at Museums and Historic Sites. This webinar is about how to create a marketing plan tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Marketing is crucial for small museums and historic sites, but where do you begin? In this webinar, AASLH’s Hannah Hethmon will teach you, step by step, how to create a marketing plan tailored to your organization’s unique needs. A good marketing plan can help you more effectively allocated time and money, get approval for a marketing budget, keep you focused on high-priority goals, and ensure that your marketing objectives and methods are supporting your institutional mission. Working through a series of prompts and questions, you will get a chance to see other organizations’ answers and get real-time pointers. If you are not a member of AASLH, there is a fee to watch the webinar.

And if you need further advice or assistance, don’t forget to engage with Visit Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, our local experts in destination marketing; Christine McNichols is Director of Partnership.