Automation Helps You Establish a Global Museum Brand

Developing a global brand will take the concentrated effort of everyone in your organization. It will require research on your current position, the current state of the world, and the opportunities available to you. This research requires data processing on a massive scale.

Establishing a Global Museum Brand

A proper global brand understands and embraces how different cultures and people are similar. They also understand where and how they differ. They understand how people respond to their culture identity and can react and update their message accordingly. This is both the challenge behind global branding and how it rewards you. Your entire organization must apply this cultural sensitivity to everything you do, including how you display your collection, how management conducts business, how you sell your tickets and gift shop items, and all your promotions. It requires more than just remaking your website in a number of languages. It is a complete paradigm shift.

A global museum brand requires the following five key business concepts.

Understand Your Audience

Audience preferences are not universal. Habits change constantly from one culture to the next. While these differences applies more to companies that want a physical location in their new markets, museums should take note of them as well. Different audiences will have different expectations about your collections, displays, website, and online offerings.

With an understanding of your audience, your museum will target and segment your campaigns much better, creating new digital opportunities to find and retain your audience. For example, with the right data, you can establish a loyalty program to create a community of frequent visitors and donors. These communities would, in turn, could help you attract more families, comply with governmental cultural policies, or bring more 18-26-year olds through your doors.

Position Yourself Properly

You must truly understand your place in the new market. Understanding your competition is the only way to stake your competitive advantage and establish a good brand position. This requires that how people in each of your primary markets discover and learn about their culture, history, and the world. This could be through local cultural outlets, government agencies, or for-profit organizations.

Understand How Your Brand Translates

This brand characteristic mostly deals with your museum’s name and colors.

Names can mean different things in different languages. Your institute's name might seem clever in some languages, but it could translate to something embarrassing in another. While you cannot change your name, understanding how it would be perceived can help you decide how to deal with certain markets and visitors.

Color is frequently another sore spot. Brands become synonymous with their primary color scheme. That is partly how people remember them. Therefore, you want to ensure your museum’s colors are either universal or you only present the appropriate colors to their appropriate markets. For instance, blues and greens work well in most of the world, but you want reds and yellows in Latin American countries.

Think Broadly

A global brand must think globally. You might have to expand your collections and displays to accommodate every regional market demand. While you are making your museum a destination and not establishing shop in the new locations, you still must provide the services and artifacts people in those areas expect to attract them to your door and website.

Find Good Partners

Finally, you should never enter a new market alone. You should work with your attorney and any local museum to help protect your brand and to promote your collections, programs, events, and exhibitions. This might be making sure that your appropriate government, trademark, patent protections, and licenses are in place. You also might want to let a reputable local museum host some of your collection for a while.

Marketing Automation Can Help

Museum brand development requires processing seemingly unconnected information and acting on them appropriately.

Your staff must go their reams of data on your current and future audiences and partners, especially during the early steps of your initiative. This can be a time consuming and expensive task if you do through the data by hand. Doing it that way also makes museum management difficult at best. You may miss an important opportunity or end up doing something inappropriate and offensive.

Fortunately, you have a much faster option. Market automation can streamline your entire operation, ensuring that your museum can take advantage of every opportunity. While marketing automation software will also help you communicate with your donor and partner leads, ultimately increasing your institute’s revenue.

Market automation tools can:

• Identify and use the tools that correctly deliver your message and content to your audience at the right time.
• Give your audience easy access to the most relevant content they need to quickly close deals and create repeat donors and visitors. This information could be anything from the right exhibits, services, locations, or persons.
• Make it easy for your audience to reach your sales team members once they discover the content that interests them. This includes directing them to the right person after they saw something on your website, an upcoming event, or promotion.
• Create opportunities or to cross-sell related merchandise such as books connected to an exhibition or collection
• Diversify your ticket packages such as upgrades to guided tours, audio guides at the point of purchase, or additional services such as food or parking
• Establish partnerships with other cultural institutions to offer comprehensive and attractive packages that benefit both, creating more satisfying and long-lasting experiences for your visitors

Benefits of Automating Museum Operations

While these tools exist primarily for B2B sales, cultural instructions can use them to effectively track and manage their collections, admissions, prospective donors, and partners from around the world.. With automation, your institution will:

• Have semi-personalized email templates to significantly reduce the time you need to email prospective donors, vendors, and partners
• Reach your leads faster. Automation tools with a good CRM can help you reach over forty percent more donors per day.
• Prioritize your leads so your sales and public relation teams know who they should address first and foremost.
• Take donor or lead-specific notes, letting you stay up-to-date on your previous communications with a particular lead
• Schedule appointments more conveniently for your donor relations team, reducing the chances for missed opportunities with new leads or your existing sponsors
• Establish different lists for prioritizing your leads and campaign efforts
• Quickly follow up on tasks to ensure that they are completed on time

The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco discovered these benefits immediately after replacing their legacy ticketing system. Their old system was sluggish, expensive to maintain, impossible to work with, and just completely insecure. Now, they can now manage their customer interactions from the large collection of personal data they can collect and process. Automation led the institution to new, more accurate, email marketing and audience forecasting, improving their overall value and their ROI throughout their complex.

Market automation lets you process audience data from a number of sources. This data can come from your future and current visitors, donors, social media posts, news stories, and everything in between. Processing this data will give you a 360-degree view of your customer purchasing patterns throughout your museum and website. You can use these insights to further segment your audience, provide them new, exciting, personalized experiences, and develop long-term customer engagements, while showing you the impacts of your campaigns on your ticket revenue.

With so much at stake, automating the process is the only way to ensure your museum remains up-to-date and sensitive to the needs of your audience, ultimately increasing your institute’s revenue.

The Foundation of Successful Marketing Automation

Acquiring the best and most comprehensive automation platforms will not guarantee a successful implementation and adoption on its own. This is especially true with cultural institutions which much weight the new technology against their traditions and the needs of their collections.

Before bringing new automation technology to your museum, you need:

• A well worked-out marketing strategy
• A marketing plan adapted to the new technology
• Internal procedures that clearly define the processes between marketing and sales
• A well-defined funnel
• High quality and relevant content
• Well trained and experienced personnel who align themselves with company goals

Once you put these elements in place, your marketing automation platform will serve as a powerful vehicle for delivering your message and campaigns to the people that need to hear it to increase your ticket sales and donation goals.