Marketing a small museum
The whole plan for a museum with a collection, a calendar and a staff of a few: the films, the event campaign, the event page that has to rank, the weekly rhythm, and what to count.
A small museum has the hardest marketing brief there is and the best raw material. The brief is hard because the staff is a handful of people who also run the desk, the shop and the school visits, and the budget is whatever is left after the roof. The material is the best because every case holds a thing nobody else has. This is the plan we run for the Gettysburg Museum of History, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, written so a museum anywhere can run it with or without us.
Who is a small museum actually marketing to?
Three people, and they want different things. The first lives within driving distance and has never been in; they need a reason, which is usually an event or a single object they did not know was there. The second visited once, years ago, and needs to be reminded the place has changed. The third is far away and will probably never come, but follows the subject, watches every film and tells the first two. Most museum marketing talks to a fourth person who does not exist: a general public that wants to hear about heritage in the abstract.
Write for the three. The object film serves all of them. The event campaign is for the first and the second. The weekly feed keeps the third, who is where a museum's reach comes from. The Gettysburg Museum of History keeps uniforms, equipment and letters from the people who carried them, and the person who follows that subject from another state is not a lost cause. They are the one who shares the film.
Why do the films come from the collection?
Because the collection is the one thing a museum has that nobody can copy. A film about the building looks like every other museum's film about its building. A film about a single overcoat, with the name of the man who wore it and the winter he wore it through, looks like nothing else on the feed.
The method is short. Pick an object with a person attached. Write one line about it before anyone picks up a camera; if the line needs a second sentence, pick another object. Film it close, in its case, in its own light. Cut it upright for a phone, with the object in the first second and the line over it. Close on the museum's name. We have written the method in full elsewhere in this journal. The point here is where it sits in the plan: the films are the anchor, every other post points back at one of them, and the archive of them is what a visitor scrolls through at the desk before deciding to come in.
For the museum we started on the floor with the curator, picked the pieces with a name, a date or a place on them, and filmed in series. A series matters more than any single film. It gives people a reason to come back, and it gives the staff a format they can keep producing after we have gone.
What does an event campaign look like?
A small museum has one or two moments a year when a room has to fill. For the Gettysburg Museum of History it is the anniversary weekend in October. The campaign we ran for it is the shape we would hand to any museum with a date on the calendar and a quiet feed behind it.
- A countdown, one story a day, each over an archive photograph, so the date is in front of the audience every morning without a flyer in sight.
- An object series through the feed, one piece at a time, drawn from the people the weekend is about.
- An invitation film cut from the collection, saying what will happen, where and when, in the voice of the place rather than the voice of a poster.
- A small paid plan, in the museum's own ad account, putting the invitation in front of people within driving distance who have never heard of the museum.
- One practical post, and only one, that does the job of the flyer: the day, the venues, where to park, where to go first.
- Every one of the above pointing at one page the museum owns.
Nothing in it was a poster with a date on. Every post showed something from the collection or the archive, and the practical information rode on the back of it. We publish no figures from the campaign, because none has been measured and cleared, and a museum's weekend is counted at the door in any case.
Why host the event page yourself?
Because the people searching for the weekend should land on the museum, not on a listings site, a ticketing platform or somebody else's write-up of last year. A third-party page that ranks for your event holds the one asset that compounds, and it will be wrong about the time.
We built the event page on the museum's own site, wrote it around the words people actually type for the weekend, and sent every story, post and film to it. It does three jobs. Before the event it carries the programme, the date, the venues and the answer to every question the inbox would otherwise get. During the weekend it is the link in the bio. Afterwards it becomes the record, with the photographs, the thanks and the first mention of next year, and it keeps ranking long after the posts have scrolled away. Next year's campaign starts from a page that already ranks.
The same discipline applies to the museum's listing on Google and on Maps. Opening hours, the address, the pin and the photographs have to be exact and current, because the listing is the first thing a visitor sees and a wrong closing time undoes a month of good posts. Enter the event on the listing in the same words as the page, and both do better.
What should a small museum post each week?
A museum does not need a campaign to have a feed. It needs a rhythm it can keep with the staff it has. The question is never what could be posted; it is what two people can make on a Tuesday afternoon between a school group and the shop. The week below is built around that.
| Day | The post | Who makes it, and how long it takes |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | One object, one line, filmed upright on a phone | The curator and whoever is on the desk, under an hour |
| Wednesday | A face from the archive with a name and a sentence | Anyone who can scan a photograph, a few minutes |
| Friday | Behind the glass: a drawer opened, a label written, a repair in progress | Whoever is doing the work that day, filmed by the person next to them |
| Weekend | A question the curator cannot answer, put to the audience | The curator, one sentence |
| When it happens | A visitor at a case, with permission, or the next event carried on an object | The desk |
On a quiet week, three of those is enough. The order matters less than the habit. What matters is that none of them requires anything the museum does not already own, and that the object post is never skipped, because it is the one the others point back to.
What should a museum count?
Not likes. A small museum has three numbers that mean something and all three are counted in the building. The door: how many came in, against the same week last year. The desk: the answer to the question of how they heard about the place, asked of everyone and written down. The event page: whether it comes up when someone searches the event's name and the town, which the museum can check on its own phone in a minute.
We report what the feed did alongside those, but we would never ask a museum to judge the work on reach alone. Reach that does not turn into a person at a case is a pleasant chart. The desk question is the only attribution a small museum needs, and it costs nothing.
When should a museum not hire an agency?
When the collection has not been photographed. The first job is a camera and a list, and that is staff work, not agency work. When there is nobody to answer the inbox, because a campaign that brings questions to an empty inbox does harm. When the event is weeks away and nothing exists yet, because the page needs time to rank and the countdown needs an archive to draw on. And when the budget would come out of conservation, because the object has to exist before it can be filmed.
If the collection is photographed, someone answers the messages and the next date is a season away, the plan above works, with us or without us. We would rather a museum run it alone than not run it at all. The collection was always the content. The plan is only the order in which to let it out.