Look for creative and strategic low cost/no cost marketing
opportunities. Some strategies that have worked at our institution:
We approached our local public radio station about one of our monthly
archaeology lectures, and this has evolved into a regular monthly
interview with the featured speaker the morning of the evening
program. New people have attended as a result and more people know
about the issue and our programs even if they don't attend.
We developed a relationship with a locally owned bank which evolved into
their sponsoring regular ads in the newspaper for a monthly kids
program. They get good PR and we get large, highly effective ads
for free. The bank actually prepares and submits the ads to the paper and
pays for them directly after getting content information from us.
We have asked visitors who have had great experiences at our museum to
write a letter to the editor. A couple of the letters on two different
occasions were so good that we used the opportunity to get a reporter to
do a feature story on the exhibit and in another case worked with the
editorial page editor and received a very positive editorial. In
both instances the reporters were receptive to doing a story since they
had seen the letters to the editor from visitors.
Karen Witter
Illinois State Museum
At 01:28 PM 11/6/2008 -0500, you wrote:
We are having an ongoing discussion about
marketing resource allocation at our small museum.
One side: Put more $$ into higher quality exhibitions that will
draw greater audiences.
Other side: Keep exhibition budgets small and modest and of less
quality and put money into advertising to draw attendance.
Thoughts Please. Thanks.
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