Arts Intranet

When actor Kevin Spacey took to the stage at last year’s Content Marketing World conference, he reminded the audience of marketers that their customers want great content, no matter the platform. YouTube and Netflix are two bold examples of platform agnostic approaches to content consumption. Audiences no longer discern between watching “House of Cards” on an iPad or “Between Two Ferns” on a Smart TV. Audiences just want to consume their content. If your brand isn’t providing it, they’ll look elsewhere.

Remember the good old days of marketing? When a catchy phrase and a few colors were all you needed? When dancing popcorn and soda would convince you that you did, in fact, need a treat from the lobby? Those days are long gone. Modern marketing is a battlefield, a war for attention. Rest, even for a moment, and you’re lost in a sea of digital combatants. Sure, there is room for error because enough information is being pushed out all of the time that your mistakes will most likely be forgotten. Or will they?

It’s no surprise that my #NAMPC coaching sessions about creating surveys are always filled. When it comes to surveying, you, like most people, probably have the most trouble with simply getting started. These five tips should help you, if you do them in order.

1.Set your objectives.

What’s the real purpose of your survey? Your first step should always be getting clear on what your results will be used for and who will use them. Questions to ask yourself:

Will results be used internally or externally?

What decisions can be made based on your survey results?

A few weeks ago, I attended a show that wasn’t very good. It wasn’t bad, I guess, but it was an arty bit of esoterica that I only would have had the attention span for in my twenties. I couldn’t focus. While ostensibly watching the performance, I started thinking of ways to expedite my tax filings, pondered the purchase of an energy efficient refrigerator, and wondered how it was that NSYNC’s music videos haven’t aged very well relative to how timeless they once seemed. By the conclusion of the evening-length work, I was bored, depressed, and thankful that I wasn’t the poor schmuck arts marketer whose job it was to communicate a rationale for such meh art.

As the year 2016 approaches, as arts marketers we can look back and reflect on the variety of social media networks that we have seen succeed as effective platforms for engaging audiences: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, to name a few.

On the other hand, we’ve seen just as many flop. From Friendster to MySpace to Google+, these platforms fell short somewhere along the social media road to success. For example, Friendster lost the race to Facebook and MySpace when these two placed their emphasis on social sharing and connection. Then, MySpace -- even with its tag line “a place for friends” --- sunk when it gradually became an advertising platform for bands rather than a network for connecting with people.

Data. The word casts an attentive hush on any crowd gathered in a subdivided hotel ballroom. Data. The solution to every problem, the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe, the alpha and the omega, the Holy Grail. Data. It will make your marketing smarter, faster, better.

Well, yes and no. There are variables to whether or not your data-driven marketing strategies are good ones. One of those variables is the “heftiness” of your data, and the “heftiness” of your data depends on the source(s).