“Everyone needs a cat video on the internet”

Last week I attended my first Arts Marketing Association Digital Marketing Day hosted in the shiny surroundings of Sadler’s Wells. The day was crammed with content for start to finish – with the necessary pauses for tea, biscuits and sandwiches, and most excellent they were too! The speakers on the day, that provided the food for thought, included:

With so much to take in on the day it has been difficult to condense that down into a snappy blog post however here goes with my top 5 take aways from the day:

1) Marketers need to move away from creating slogans to telling stories – Audiences want experiences they can connect with not just messages pushed to them.

2) People aren’t going to come and watch adverts – Video content has huge potential for art organisations if they are willing to invest in ‘programmes’ rather than trailers and vox-pops – the opportunity of mass media brings with it the opportunity of mass appeal.

3) You need people to create good content – It’s the ‘social’ in social media that makes it work. Not everyone will take to Facebook or Twitter or making videos, play to people’s strengths.

4) Users at the centre – Whether it is producing videos, building a mobile application, establishing a presence on a new social network it is essential to keep your audience at the core of any developments.

5) You’re always in beta – As the tech changes at ever increasing speed we’re all on a steep learning curve and perhaps we’ll never have all the answers. There is no shame in failing forwards… after all is that not often how we get to the best ideas?

Oh and don’t forget your cat video… *meow!*