How to help not hinder your arts marketing

Introduction & context

Hello and thank you for joining me for this keynote presentation on the state of arts marketing in Australia. Welcome. I am Elliott Bledsoe, an arts marketing consultant and Certified Practicing Marketer based in Meanjin/Brisbane and working nationally. I have held marketing and digital content roles in arts nonprofits, government and public broadcasting. As a consultant I have worked with a number of organisations across artforms, most recently working ‘embedded’ at BlakDance to help them establish an arts marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  → and to mentor and support an early career First Nations arts marketer. (That role is currently open so I encourage you to please share it with your networks.)

Since February I’ve been leading an online six-part Strategic Arts Marketing training program for Circuit West for Western Australian performing arts venues. The cohort has been working with me to explore marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  → and how it can enhance their arts marketing work.

Today I want to walk you through the challenges and opportunities for marketing in the performing arts and more broadly across the arts and cultural sector. Insights I’m sharing come from the exchanges in the Circuit West program, my own experiences and observations and conversations with my peers.

Before we get into it, I would like to acknowledge the Whadjuk Noongar Peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the Country where we gather today. I pay respect to their Elders – past and present – and to their emerging leaders. I extend my respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, their communities and their cultures throughout Australia. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sovereignty was never ceded.

An acknowledgment of country is an important mark of respect. As an arts marketing communicator I also do it because marketing is fundamentally about communicating ideas and exchanging value between people. In making my acknowledgement, I recognise that Indigenous peoples the world over have been sharing knowledge through networks for tens of thousands of years, and that Australia has a long and rich history of intergenerational knowledge making and storytelling, starting with our First Peoples.

I wanted to start this talk by saying arts marketing in Australia is a house of cards. A little dramatic, maybe? (Even for a performing arts conference.) Please pardon the pun, but perhaps the metaphor stands up though? But the more I thought about it, the more I felt a game of Jenga was a more fitting image. While the notions of instability and precariousness apply to both, there is more deliberateness in Jenga, which I think better reflects the realities for arts organisations. Players are asked to remove blocks from the tower and add them to the top. As more blocks are moved, the tower ends up on a shaky foundation. The game goes on, blocks shift, and the stack gets even shakier. It is a little grim to think that there is no winner in Jenga. Blocks just keep moving until the game ends. That is when the tower falls. The loser is the person who made it topple.

We all know that arts organisations operate on tight budgets. These have been made tighter over the years. There’s a complex web of reasons why, starting with the ebbs and flows of government support for the arts, patchy arts and cultural policy and decades of underfunding. These spectres have been joined by newer phenomenon: slow post-pandemic financial recovery in and out of the arts, changing consumer behaviour and the makeup of arts audiences, intense new competition for attention in the shifting entertainment and leisure market that arts organisations compete in, and the emergence of dual cost of living and housing affordability crises throttling consumer spending.

All of this sits against a bigger backdrop of complex and interconnected global challenges. War, political instability and conflict are taking place right now in multiple places around the world. There are ongoing struggles against inequalities playing out within countries and between the Global North and the Global South. This is about power and wealth redistribution, but also it’s about access to water, nutritious food, education, healthcare and the rule of law. Amidst resources accumulation and depletion we are witnessing escalated environmental degradation, loss of biodiversity and the extreme and unpredictable impacts of climate change. It’s a lot.

More recently the rapid advancement of artificial intelligenceAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → and related technologies have burst out of the speculative space of science fiction and into practically every industry and use case you can think of: banking and finance, manufacturing, supply chain management and logistics, health and medicine, research and analysis, software development, social media, content streaming, creativity and content creation, online dating, washing machines and dryers and more. While AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → itself isn’t actually new, generative AIWhen text, images and other content are generated by AI (hence why it is called generative AI). Learn more  → and its capability to create content is a significant ‘step change’. As these technologies proliferate, public awareness of AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → increases, bringing with it a range of expectations and anxieties.

AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → hype is carried forward on evangelical promises of immeasurable economic, social and creative potential, but these tools are not without legitimate concerns and criticisms. And there are plenty of them, starting with the data they are trained on. Riddled with bias, we must remain vigilant to how that manifests in AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → outputs. They can and already are having an inequitable impact on some groups in society. Biases that find their way unseen into automated decision-making (ADM) is an illustrative case. Such decisions can lead to unfair outcomes, economic inequality and the potential to further exacerbate existing social injustices. Simply ensuring there’s a ‘human in the loop’ may not be enough if the harm has already been inflicted.

Where the data came from is equally problematic. We are still trying to work out how to respond to the extractivist mass scale copyright infringement that fed the machine learningA term for how an AI system ‘learns’. Learn more  → (MLA term for how an AI system ‘learns’. Learn more  →) models of the early AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → machines. When artists’ incomes are already so precarious, there is no wonder why the sector is concerned with how AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → is undermining beliefs our industry holds dear: the notions of authorship and ownership, the power of human creativity and the value of ‘the artist’ and the arts in society.

Equally wicked problems are pumped out the other end of AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → as well. Job market displacement through automation and a widening digital divide is changing the nature of work while increasingly convincing AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → content has the potential for political and social manipulation through deepfakes, fake news and scams. Together these are further feeding the erosion of trust. Beyond that, who knows what other catastrophic misuse awaits. Opportunities abound, but so does the potential for harm. Killer robots aside, there is a lot to unpack in relation to AIAI is tech and marketing speak for a range of technology that imitates human intellect. Learn more  → – including when, where and how it should (or shouldn’t) be used in arts marketing. That’s complicated – just ask the Queensland Symphony Orchestra.

Amongst all this, arts organisations are negotiating and navigating what to do with less. Arts leaders are grappling with which parts of their limited budget to reallocate and how. Each time they ‘move a block’ they risk further destablising their shaky Jenga towers. Perhaps it is remiss of me to say, but it seems to me that for many arts leaders they are hoping desperately for it to not be their turn when the blocks finally fall.

When this is the budget bidding environment in which arts marketers are asking for money to do their work, is it any wonder that marketing budgets in the arts are measly at best?

I know that is a lot to situate yourself and your organisations in, but this is the reality we all find ourselves in as we go into the mid-2020s. I probably should have started with a trigger warning.

Bringing it back to the central theme of arts marketing, what I want to draw out today is that there is more going on for arts marketing than just crappy budgets. In fact, low budget allocations for marketing communications are a symptom of larger problems that stem from how the arts sector values marketing – or more realistically undervalues it. While lots of people in the sector recognise the importance of marketing to what they do, this isn’t translating into a healthy workplace environment for arts marketers. Despite the doom and gloom, there are ways to make things better. But before we get to treatment, we must first diagnose the problem.

I have already suggested that marketing is undervalued in the arts leading to significant issues for the sector. To really understand this though, we need to look carefully at how this undervaluing happens, both directly and indirectly.

Direct undervaluing

There are many ways that marketing communication roles are directly undervalued in our sector. Let’s start with the most obvious: low incomes.

Poor remuneration

Salaries in the arts are typically less competitive than in other industries, but this is particularly apparent for marketing communications roles. When you look at the salary packages tied to marketing roles advertised on ArtsHub, Seek or through organisations’ owned channels, they are often less than equivalent level roles in other areas of the organisation, such as programming, production and operations. We literally pay arts marketers less.

Marketing roles are also more likely than those other areas to be part-time. It is not uncommon for an arts marketing role to be three days a week – four if you’re lucky. So the advertised salary must be understood in terms of the pro rata take-home pay, not the advertised income. $70,000 a year pro rata for a three day part-time role is about $42,000 – $56,000 for four days a week. But of course we know this from wages calculations in our budget spreadsheets.

Salaries are not the only element that contribute to job satisfaction of course, but they definitely play a part. If the salary isn’t the reason you work in the arts then, at least in many cases, it is a choice arts professionals including arts marketers make. Doing so, they sacrifice greater income and all that comes with it; financial security, increased attractiveness to lenders and upped borrowing power and the ability to more readily diversify personal income streams. All of us in the arts give up a lot to follow our passion. But low salaries also mean that another organisation looking to entice an arts marketer to defect doesn’t have to add much to make a better offer – another $2,000 or $3,000 a year can be enough incentive when your current wage is not great.

Consistent messaging, visual treatment and tone of voice across different channels and campaigns help to create a strong brand identity. Overall, consistency in marketing is not just about maintaining a uniform look and feel; it’s about creating a cohesive brand identity that resonates with your audience and drives operational results. If you want your brand to be easily recognisable and memorable to your target audiences this is important. But this can be difficult to achieve when your marketing role changes hands every 18 months to two years.

Positioning of arts marketing roles

For arts marketers, wages are not the only thing that is low. When you look at the organisational charts of arts organisations, it is not uncommon to see the marketing role somewhere towards the bottom. Most of the Australian arts marketing job market is made up of Marketing Coordinators and Marketing Officers. This is especially the case in the small-to-medium part of the arts sector.

Because of the low salaries and the part-time nature of the roles, these jobs tend to be occupied by early-career arts professionals. And many arts marketers have ended up in marketing more by circumstances than by design. They may have been dancers or visual artists or arts administrators who found themselves doing the marketing, and are still doing it now. As a result, it is not unusual for them to not have formal qualifications in marketing. I am in no way downplaying the importance of instinct, learning on the job and experience when marketing arts products. And I am not suggesting all arts marketers should hold a Bachelors or Masters level degree in marketing, either. (Why would you want to anyway when the cost of a degree is so high and HECS debts are indexed?) However this trend does mean that many arts marketers have not been taught the fundamentals of marketing. What a formal qualification teaches you is key marketing tools and frameworks used to develop marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  →. Without strategy, the most likely outcome is a marketing program that leans heavily on promotional tactics only and one that is propped up by free communications channels – many of which are algorithmically stacked against you to funnel you into their business model of paying to push out content.

On top of this, it is rare for small and medium arts organisations to have more than one marketing-focused role. Some of the larger organisations are lucky enough to have a marketing team taking in a range of roles and specialisations, but this is certainly not the norm across the arts sector. If there is only one person in marketing they have to do everything – regardless of the seniority of their role.

Limited marketing budgets

Marketing budgets for arts organisations also tend to be low. This happens in part because arts organisations often have smaller budgets than commercial businesses. For many organisations in our industry government funding is a major source of revenue. It is not common for large marketing budget lines to feature in grant applications. In fact, we all know how hard it is to get grant money for core marketing costs. This is made harder by the fact that some grants exclude asking for marketing money at all. What marketing we can squeeze into grants is often tied to project funding, meaning central marketing activities such as building brand awareness and ongoing brand development either don’t happen or funds to do them must be tactfully tacked on to project grants where possible or cobbled together from multiple other sources.

And other revenue sources such as ticket sales, memberships and donations can be highly variable. (I might add here that, ironically, the success of such endeavours is very dependent on compelling and consistent marketing communications). Fluctuating incomes and uncertain revenue projections can make organisations hesitant to up their marketing spend.

The prioritisation of core artistic activities reduces the potential investment in marketing as well. Many organisations are driven by their artistic mission or purpose, which is about the creation and presentation of artistic experiences. Fixed overheads and necessary prioritisation of costs like artist fees, production expenses, travel and accommodation, venue rentals and other costs of making art all reduce what can be allocated to other activities including marketing. I am not saying that a commitment to creating quality art is a bad thing; on the contrary, without it there is no product to market. But when you have a limited budget and dollars have already been earmarked for the production of the art, there’s less money for marketing and everything else. And costs are going up, leaving even less in the kitty.

Arts marketers are left holding the begging bowl. Worse, they are holding it out to people who may not fully understand what they do. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle because arts marketers operating with limited budgets, resources and strategic marketingThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  → skills invariably find it difficult to demonstrate the full potential of their work. Without being able to see results a legacy perception of marketing as a non-essential function is likely reinforced.

I don’t want to be too pessimistic, but it seems to me that some arts organisations may not fully understand the potential return on investment (ROI) of marketing efforts – or at least not have the financial means to fully realise that potential. Too often marketing in the arts is viewed as an expense rather than a proactive investment in raising awareness of the organisation, creating value that is meaningful to their buyers and building the strong relationships with customers and audiences that are needed to sustain organisations in the long-term.

Overloading marketing staff

Two things that are not low for arts marketers are their workload and the responsibilities they take on. Despite the low incomes, marketing roles take on a disproportionate share of responsibility for crucial organisational KPIs – certainly all KPIs aligned with audiences fall into their position descriptions and reporting requirements. These could be tied to attendance numbers and ticket sales, audience retention, audience development and attracting new audiences, increasing brand awareness and reach and myriad other metrics. And often the marketing role has had little or no input into what those KPIs are – they are handed on to them, drawn down from strategic or operational plans and contractual obligations in funding agreements. What is quietly overlooked is that the level of responsibility the marketing role takes on is usually not appropriate to the level of seniority of their role and is not commensurate with the salary offered.

Worse still, marketing KPIs are often shallow and one-dimensional. They tend to be bogged down in simplistic measures such as ‘bums on seats’, content reach, ‘likes’, click-through rates (CTR) and ticket conversions. These types of metrics alone can result in tunnel vision and blind spots for overworked arts marketers. They can also unintentionally incentivise short-term success over long-term performance. Even where they extend beyond basic indices, they rarely align to metrics that matter. Imagine how much more job satisfaction your arts marketer would have if they were reporting on audiences experiencing joy, being challenged, thinking differently, increasing their cross-cultural awareness, feeling more connected to where they live or their communities or any other of the numerous indicators we can use to demonstrate the public value of the arts. Actually, imagine how much better our collective sense of accomplishment would be if they were the yardsticks.

Coming back to workload, arts marketers are often the only person working directly on marketing so the high volume of marketing activities needed are largely shouldered by just them. And, without a team, there is little room for ‘fresh eyes’, constructive feedback and bouncing marketing ideas around. A never-ending flow of requests for Facebook posts and vertical videos and email sends also leaves little room for experimentation and innovation in marketing practice. This can lead to an overreliance on ‘doing what we did last time’, templates and what is easily measurable. A ‘copy/paste’ mentality is hardly unexpected when you aren’t fully across the product you are selling and are constantly under the pump to get messages out. All of this results in formulaic marketing outputs that struggle to cut through the marketing noise that surrounds our audiences.

Plus, marketing never stops. The ‘always on’ nature of marketing means arts marketers are (explicitly or implicitly) expected to work outside of their usual business hours. Life/work balance is difficult to balance when the optimal times to push out communications messages are often after 9–5. Even if your content is released on a schedule, if something is going to blow up (in a good way or a bad way) it is at least as likely to happen outside of hours as it is in them.

The already high pressure requirement to ‘sell shows’ has increased as organisations weather what I’m calling ‘long COVID recovery’. After an initial flurry of audiences returning to theatres, our new ‘new normal’ began to reveal itself. The Australian Bureau of Statistics are saying staying in and spending less are here to stay. Entertainment options such as Netflix, Stan and other streaming media are easy and convenient providers of escapism and storytelling. Creative Australia reports that when people are engaging with arts experiences many are doing less of it, they are being more selective about what they do and when, and they are buying their tickets at the last minute. Arguably these phenomena were already emerging before COVID, but were exacerbated during and after the pandemic and have continued to accelerate as many people struggle under increasing costs of living and housing. To say it is a challenging environment for arts marketing is an understatement.

Instead of reassessing what are realistic expectations for ticket sales in this environment of changed consumer behaviour, it seems to me the push is on to fill those seats to pre-pandemic numbers regardless.

Arts marketers are last in line

The workflow within arts organisations also contributes to arts marketers’ busy work loads. Because arts marketing is often relegated to a promotional function only, marketers are usually last on the list – they are ‘handed a thing and told to sell it’, usually at the 11th hour. They are unlikely to have been involved in the conceptualisation and development of the work, so they must rely heavily on what they have been given to promote the show. They have only second-hand (or even third-hand) information to inform their understanding of the product. They likely had little say in what promotional images were captured (but the money for the promo shots probably came out of their budget anyway). And they must work with copy about the show that was rarely written by someone with a marketing focus. In my experience most artists suck at talking about their art, yet that’s where draft one trends to come from.

Back to the workflow, any tardiness earlier in the product life cycle reduces the marketing timeline. Each missed deadline before the product gets to marketing concertinas down the marketing period like a bellowing accordion. What may have started as an optimistic 6- or 4-week promotional run for a show can quickly reduce down to a fortnight or less if marketing materials are delayed.

Another thing I have noticed that impacts on arts marketers’ capacity is the trend towards putting more responsibility for marketing assets on artists and producers. While programming is involved in the relationship, what goes unsaid is that the logistical responsibility for managing these marketing assets falls largely on the already swamped marketing role. Plus, by shifting some marketing responsibility to artists and producers, arts organisations are adding more people to the process; the more people you add, the more likely that deadlines will be missed and more marketing time lost. But the expectations on arts marketers do not change to accommodate reduced marketing timeframes. They just have less time to achieve the goals that are expected of them.

Given all of this, overloading and burnout is very common.

Indirect undervaluing

Beyond direct undervaluing of arts marketing, there is also a culture of indirect undervaluing in the sector that warrants interrogation.

Marketing is not seen as strategic

In many arts organisations the marketing function is not seen as a major contributor to organisational strategy. Arts marketers are rarely given a seat at the strategy table. Sometimes this stems from a perceptual legacy that marketing is a tactical function focused on promotion and advertising, rather than a strategic one. Other times the fact the role is not managerial or more senior can be a reason for marketing to be passed over when strategic input is asked for. Either way, marketers tend to be excluded from strategic discussions.

Inversely, in many other industries marketing is recognised as a strategic player and is an integrated part of many strategic decision-making processes. To illustrate, the conceptualisation, prototyping, creation, testing, gathering of feedback and launch of new products and services in industries such as consumer electronics, fast moving consumer goods (i.e. groceries) and professional services are led by cross-disciplinary teams that include marketing communicators. Marketing input is integral to new product development (NPD) and R&D (research and development) in those industries and others. Equivalent processes in the arts, such as creative development and creative experimentation, rarely if ever involve an arts marketer.

Because arts marketers are excluded from artistic development processes, they have little ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to these new products. As mentioned earlier, this means that the person responsible for communicating the product to target audience segments doesn’t have first-hand experience of the product. How compelling or convincing can marketing communications messages be when they aren’t authentic? Worse, if messages establish a customer expectation that can’t be met this can be seriously harmful to customer satisfaction, and by extension the arts brand.

While arts marketers aren’t contributors to organisational strategy or the development or arts products, conversely everyone else seems to get a say in how arts marketing is done. People with little or no experience suddenly have an expert opinion and can voice it readily. Vetoing is also common; coming down from programming, artistic directors or artists alike. And this is never questioned. Imagine if someone with no legal training was adding to legal advice or someone without a background in accounting could suggest changes to financial reporting. We accepted the professional expertise of these disciplines, but not of marketing.

Their managers don’t (really) know what they do

Because arts marketers are often the odd one out, it is also very common for arts marketers to be reporting to someone internally who does not have marketing knowledge and experience. Beyond the arts marketer’s direct report, their boss (and potentially their boss’ boss) are also not likely to know much about good marketing. This means the expectations placed on arts marketers and the budget allocations they are given (if any) are not informed by what it actually takes to deliver effective marketing. How can their managers ‘go into bat’ for marketing if arts marketers’ needs and frustrations are not fully understood or are under-appreciated? I am going to say it: arts leaders and managers of marketers in arts organisations must have more awareness of how the marketing function works. If marketing terminology is met with bewilderment, it is hard for a manager to play a supportive role for their arts marketer.

Arts marketers are not supported and empowered to speak up about their needs, and if they do, they risk their concerns being shrugged off as ‘griping’ and falling on deaf ears. Confidence, competence, seniority, the organisational structure and the workload of a service-orientated role all impact effective communication between marketers and their managers, as well as communication with other parts of the organisation.

Limited professional opportunities

Not to doomscroll further, but for arts marketers it is not as easy to climb the corporate ladder. There are limited professional development and career progression opportunities for arts marketers – certainly less than in many other areas of the arts. There are notably less programs to support and train arts marketing professionals. There are even less marketing-focused arts funding programs. To my knowledge there are no awards for arts marketing. This lack of industry-level development of the skills and competencies of arts marketers plays out in negative ways at different levels of the profession.

Early career arts marketers are often employed in the small-to-medium part of the sector where a lack of managerial guidance and support coupled with a (seemingly) infinitely scrolling ‘to do’ list limits their ability and availability to undertake professional development – even if it were available to them. Separate to PD, career progression for these arts marketers is often shifting to another small-to-medium organisation as this is where the bulk of arts marketing jobs are.

For mid-career arts marketers there are even fewer pathways because of little movement in marketing jobs in the bigger organisations. They must be content to move sideways, ’sit tight’ where they are or shift to riskier consulting work. Although, what the work from home silver lining of COVID lockdowns showed them was that their skills are readily transferable to other fields and their uncommon experience in the arts is a differentiator when going for jobs elsewhere. During the pandemic we saw many experienced arts marketers move into other industries, and the trend continues even now. Many have not come back.

Unless an established arts marketer is seeking the career equivalent of a sea change, they are not likely to vacate their position in a major arts organisation. Only the musical chairs of moving into a similar role at one of the other major arts organisations might be enough to unseat them. As my friend and colleague arts strategy consultant Penny Miles has flagged elsewhere, early indicators suggest recruitment and retention at the senior marketing level in major arts organisations is less of an issue, but if burnout of early career arts marketers and the attrition at mid-career marketing professionals continues unabated, where is the pipeline of talent for these positions in the majors in the future? Intentional intervention and cultivation of the arts marketing talent pool is needed.

Across the strata of marketers in the arts, there also aren’t many places for arts marketers to go for professional networking, to exchange ideas and get inspiration. For example, what ever happened to the Marketing Summit? The Australia Council for the Arts stopped running it after the 2018 event, and there are no signs it will be reinvigorated under Creative Australia. (I wonder if the crappy state of arts marketing is even on the radar of Creative Workplaces?) Plus, competitive mindsets that construe funding, audiences and advocacy outcomes as things to ‘win’ tend to frown on the idea of arts marketers gathering to meet, learn together, share ideas, discuss trends and collaborate. Even simpler, sometimes we just need a chance to vent to each other!

So, drawing a line under all of that, suffice it to say that arts marketing is a thankless job. Ask any arts marketer about where success is attributed in their organisations and you will hear something like this: “If a show is a success it is because of good programming or expert leadership. If it is a failure, it is because of bad marketing.”

When sector colleagues in other areas say to me they are finding it difficult to recruit and retain marketing staff I am at a loss as to where to even start with a response. (It turns out you need at least an hour-long keynote just to get started unpacking the issues!)

How do we respond?

But I’m a solutions-oriented person though, so just laying out the problems isn’t good enough for me. Now I’ve aired the laundry I also want to also present my thoughts on how the arts can strive to make things better for arts marketers.

Before I do that though, I want to share three key marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  → tools with you to inform and maybe inspire your own arts marketing journey. 

About the marketing mixThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  →

First I want to describe to you the marketing mixThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  →, or what is called the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  →. As a framework, it articulates marketing as a mix of Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence. Product relates to the product and services you create. Price is the amount you charge for those products or services. Place is where your customers buy those products or services. Promotion is how you communicate your product or service to potential customers and other stakeholders. People are everyone a customer engages with on their customer journey. Process is everything that goes into getting the products or services to customers. And Physical evidence is the tangible cues of the quality of your products or services that customers experience in a sensory way such as through sight, sound and touch.

Each P plays an important role in the success of a marketing campaign, and brands need to carefully consider each one in order to create an effective marketing plan. While each contributes to a marketing program, their value is cumulative.

About customer segmentation

Next I want to talk about segmentation, which involves grouping members of a customer base or audiences into subgroups (called segments). Members of each segment should share common characteristics such as similar wants and needs, preferences or consumer behaviour. On screen I have a hypothetical customer base for dishwashing liquid. It could be segmented based on age, location or customers’ attitudes to climate change.

Segments can be distinguished using: geographic areas – such as suburbs or postcodes, demographic factors – such as age, gender, income, education level and occupation, psychographic traits – such as personality traits, values and lifestyle or behaviours – such as purchase history, usage level or product preferences, including features they expect and attributes they value. More often, a combination of elements from across segmentation methods are used. Segmentation allows arts marketing communicators to select targets to focus on and learn more about each target segment so they are better able to align the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → to meet their needs and preferences, target the messages they create to ‘speak’ to a segment and select tactics and marketing channels that are most effective at getting messages to them.

About competitive positioning

Brand positioning in the arts is about creating a unique and distinct identity for an artist, artwork, arts organisation or arts product in the minds of their target audience or audiences. Identify their unique qualities; what makes them special, valuable and different from other brands in the crowded arts sector. Positioning is typically anchored to something like a positioning statement or a unique value proposition (UVP). These tools aim to clearly and concisely communicate what makes a brand different from and superior to other offers in the market it is in.

On screen you can see how some of the more than 40 water brands in Australia position themselves against each other, despite being virtually identical products. I won’t look at them all, but Coca-Cola’s Mt Franklin products claim they are the nation’s hydration, which speaks to their ubiquitousness and how easy it is to get it whereas evian is OG premium water brand: high-end and high-quality drinking water. Voss came for evian’s affluent and aspirational consumers with a sleek and unique bottle and associations with luxury people, places and other brands. Woolworths’ Select-branded water has no tagline because it is intentionally no frills. It focuses on being simple and practical.

Armed with this new knowledge here is my rallying cry, including actions marketers themselves can take, what their managers can do, where arts leaders can step up and where advocacy is needed for sector-level change.

For arts marketers

For any arts marketer in the room – I feel you! You matter and so does the work that you do. Here’s some strategies you can take forward:

• Commit to yourself and your practice – While arts marketing-specific training is scarce, lots of training is readily transferable into arts and cultural contexts. Enrol in short courses, attend webinars, read marketing blogs, follow marketers on social media, share your own thoughts and proactively look for ways to stay abreast of emerging trends and technologies. Where you can, dip into your organisation’s professional development budget – it is there for all staff including you and you should take advantage of it.
• Make your strategic value known – Proactively identify ways to demonstrate your worth. Make seen and heard where marketing contributes to the organisation’s strategy and goals. Communicate successes effectively. Embrace data to strengthen evidence-based reporting on marketing’s impact, but also share customers’ stories too. Use quantitative and qualitative data to strongly emphasise that you are a source of strategic insights that can inform all parts of the organisation.
• Forge strong internal relationships – Actively connect with colleagues in other departments. Learn more about what they do and share marketing knowledge informally with them. As you build rapport you will increase the likelihood marketing will be invited into key discussions and decision-making processes, through formal and informal processes.
• Connect with your arts marketing peers – Don’t limit your disciplinary contacts to just co-production and cross-promotional arrangements. Reach out to others working in arts marketing and form your own communities of practice. Once you have them, connect with them regularly for support, inspiration and to share war stories.

For managers of arts marketers

If you have an arts marketer under you and marketing is not your area of expertise, here’s some ideas for you:

• Get informed – Familiarise yourself further with the marketing concepts I touched on. Even foundational knowledge such as the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → marketing mixThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  →, audience segmentation and competitive positioning will help you better understand the strategies and tactics used by your marketer. I will share some further reading on each after this talk but a Google search will reveal a huge number of free resources on these topics and more. You could also add something marketing related to your own professional development plan. The Australian Marketing Institute offers an on-demand Marketing Fundamentals online course and many of the universities have online short courses in marketing. Not to humble brag, but the Arts Marketing Mix and Strategic Marketing in the Arts micro-credentials offered by CQUniversity were co-developed by me, so they are okay (if I do say so myself!)
• Be led by your arts marketer – Actively listen to your marketers’ perspectives and learn from their insights. This will help you understand their work, make better informed decisions and be their champion in strategic spaces they are not part of. Trust their expertise and experience and give them autonomy to make decisions, discretion on what strategies and tactics to deploy and space to experiment and innovate.
• Encourage your peers to learn more – Talk to your colleagues about why they should learn more about arts marketing. Bring it up in industry gatherings and conferences such as this one. They are important platforms for upskilling the sector on marketing and including discussions of marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  → in these fora would increase knowledge and help shift mindsets across the sector sooner. When these events call for ideas for sessions, suggest something on marketing for non-marketers.

For arts leaders

To get to a point where the sector values the craft of marketing, increased marketing literacy across the sector is an important step. Everyone in organisations – from Boards and executive leadership teams to entry-level roles – need a working knowledge of marketing and how it contributes to organisational purpose and objectives. This will not happen without leadership from the top. Arts leaders, I have some ideas on how you can elevate marketing in your organisations:

• Embrace a ‘marketing as whole-of-organisation’ mindset – Use the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → to help your whole team understand how they contribute to the organisation’s brand. (Self-plug: I am running a workshop on the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → on Thursday which could be a great initiation into the marketing mixThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → if you are looking for one.) Start with obvious business units such as front of house (FOH) and work outwards. When your staff realise that more than promotions contribute to marketing it is easier to see how and why marketing needs to engage with other parts of an arts organisation. After all, everyone who interacts with anyone outside of the organisation is part of the marketing program (whether they know it or not).
• Embed that mindset everywhere – Start small; you could add an overview of marketing strategies, key messages and your brand guidelines to staff induction. What about adding marketing briefings for shows so all staff know the key messages and talking points? Add the all staff email to the press release list. Maybe ask your marketer to share some of what goes into a marketing campaign at a staff meeting? Or seek out a marketer to fill the next casual vacancy on your Board.
• See your arts marketer as a strategic asset – Hopefully I have convinced you that your arts marketer is a strategic input. Lean into that new appreciation of arts marketing as a strategic lever for your organisation. Consider if there are ways you can reduce the day-to-day workload on your arts marketer so they can skill up on marketing strategyThe unique ways a company or brand communicates marketing messages to potential customers. Learn more  →. Then actively help them bring that new knowledge to the organisation in practical terms. Invite them to bring customer-centric insights and perspectives to programming discussions, creative developments and Board meetings.
• Find ways to invest more in your arts marketing – I know it is tricky given the constraints of grant funding, but get creative with how to grow your marketing budget. For example, what if organisations factored in a core marketing contribution into marketing budget lines in project grants, not just project-specific marketing expenditure? Many of us are already doing something similar with management fees. Or what if you committed a minimum of five percent of profits earned to next year’s core marketing activities? Freeing up discretionary marketing money lets you invest in brand-based marketing and gives you resources to let your marketer experiment and innovate outside of project marketing and the day-to-day marketing churn.
• Advocate up and advocate out – Talk to your fellow arts leaders about the importance of audience development as a shared, ongoing, cross-organisational objective rather than a point of competition. After all, none of you have the resources to match Netflix’s marketing spend. Like it or not, you are all competing with that content behemoth and its ilk. Plus, we are also in the recreation, entertainment and leisure product category so our competitive frame includes anything and everything audiences can expend their entertainment money or time on. Hopefully that realisation alarms you enough to immediately want to advocate to funding bodies, ministers and philanthropists about the importance of properly resourcing marketing, because that’s my final recommendation for arts leaders. This could start with simple questions such as, ‘Why aren’t marketing activities an eligible expense for many grants?’

Concluding comments

More and more savvy arts organisations are realising that marketing is essential to their success and are looking for ways to support a ‘whole of organisation’ approach to it. If arts leadership and professionals in other parts of your organisation do not fully understand the marketing function undervaluing, overloading and transactional relationships run rife. Marketing success hinges on dynamic cooperation across your arts organisation and exciting new ideas and insights come to the fore when arts marketers are given a seat at the strategy table. Harnessing all the 7 PsThe unique combination of marketing elements – Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical Evidence – a company or brand uses to support their marketing efforts. Learn more  → of marketing (not just Promotion) leads to a holistic, comprehensive, customer-centric marketing program that all staff can see themselves in. Encouraging cross-organisational collaboration and cooperation on integrated marketing communications (IMC) campaigns results in marketing that supports your products, your arts brand and your arts marketer‘s job satisfaction (not to mention mention their sanity!). Shared vigor in our marketing of arts products and brands is something we can all celebrate. After all, CEOs of arts organisations, artistic directors, programmers, artists and marketers are all driven by the same thing: to get more Australians experiencing unforgettable performing arts experiences.