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The generation game
How museums market themselves to millennials
Social media is the key channel for marketing to millennials, although it’s important to identify which platform best suits. Social media not only allows for direct, targeted promotion but is also vital for building word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer marketing.
In print media, free magazines and newspapers are still an important outlet, as are alternative and community radio stations.
Employing millennials in a marketing role can also be effective. This group, which has grown up with social media often has an instinctive understanding of what is shareable on various digital platforms.
The key point, as with any marketing, is to go where the audience is.
Whitworth
The Whitworth in Manchester targets visitors in their 20s for a number of events, such as its free Tuesday Talks programme organised in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University. It is publicised through social media channels, mostly Twitter and Facebook, and via the Whitworth website.
“I schedule a number of tweets, so, for example, in the week leading up to a new talk I will [put out] one tweet per day with a link to more information about the talks and a link to our Facebook event page,” says Matthew Retallick, a marketing assistant at the Whitworth.
“We have a mailing list specifically for our talks programme – the vast majority of people on that list are students, but there are also industry professionals and members of the public – and we send a reminder email out to all of them a few days before each talk,” he adds.
Turner Contemporary
At the Turner Contemporary in Margate, creative use of social media has helped boost attendance of younger visitors to major exhibitions such as last summer’s Grayson Perry: Provincial Punk, which saw a 5% increase in visitors aged 16-30 on the previous year’s show, Mondrian and Colour.
For the Perry exhibition, the gallery filmed a 20-second trailer of the artist talking about his work, supervising the hanging of a tapestry on the gallery wall and tweeting about its progress, which was shared on Twitter and Facebook.
In another project, the gallery successfully collaborated with the Curzon cinema in Canterbury to promote its recent Risk exhibition, which featured work by artists including Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Ai Weiwei alongside works by JMW Turner.
The resulting joint campaign, targeted at cinema goers, included a 20-second film that flashed up the names of artists involved in the exhibition along with dramatic representations of risk, such as a plane in flames and a tidal wave.
The cinema’s programming team identified a number of big movie releases – the Bond film Spectre and period drama Suffragette were among them – that tackled risk as a theme, and the promotional film was shown ahead of each screening.
A specially commissioned poster depicting a man poised on either side of a bow, pulled taut with an arrow, was also displayed outside the gallery.
“The poster was for people to photograph and tweet about,” says Poppy Andrews, the communications assistant at Turner Contemporary. “Taking pictures of work in the galleries was obviously limited, so the poster provided visitors with something they could take shots of outside.”
Nottingham Contemporary
The advantage of social media is its flexibility, says Vicky Godfrey, marketing manager at Nottingham Contemporary. “You can track the response to posts and change what you’re putting up if you need to. You can be proactive.”
The gallery also uses local community media, such as Kemet FM, which is aimed at the city’s African and Caribbean communities, as well as student media and free magazines, including Nottingham’s Left Lion.
“Free magazines and newspapers are really effective for young people,” says Godfrey, adding that email newsletters are less effective.
Involving young people in an event can be a good marketing tool in itself, she adds. For example, the gallery puts young staff on its front desk to welcome visitors to events.
“We have seen over the last year that more and more people of the 15-25 age group are attending and it’s partly down to word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer marketing.
The word is going out that these events are for people of that age group, so it helps when they can see themselves reflected in the make-up of the place when they come.”
Tate
Mark Miller, the convenor of young people’s programmes for Tate and a leader on Circuit, the national visual arts network for young people aged 15-25 funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, says it’s given that social media is important for reaching this younger audience.
Tate often buy banner ads on Facebook pages of organisations such as Bigga Fish that it knows are used by young people that are a possible captive audience for the gallery. The ads encourage site visitors to click throughs to the Tate's website or Facebook page.
It’s important, says Miller, to identify and collaborate with the artists, organisations and networks who influence the generation that Tate is trying to reach.
But it must be an authentic that’s forged, he says, and museums should choose partners that have similar aims or share a genuine mutual creative interest, rather than use them simply to exploit their audience.
“We might work with Reprezent Radio or a musician on the rise like Kojey Radical, and perhaps contract with them to use their social media. They put three or four tweets out about what we’re doing, which starts to generate an audience through their connections, and word of mouth starts to build.”
But you can’t form these relationships for purely pragmatic reasons or as one-off services, says Miller. The link needs to be forged with organisations and artists that share your broad aims for young people as well as your creative focus.
“This kind of connection needs to be made completely authentically,” he stresses.
“It’s about building a partnership with someone and working with them so that they understand what your programme is trying to do, rather than you thinking ‘I’m going to pay someone to influence on our behalf’. We think of the outlets we use as collaborators and contributors to our programme. It’s two-way.”
In print media, free magazines and newspapers are still an important outlet, as are alternative and community radio stations.
Employing millennials in a marketing role can also be effective. This group, which has grown up with social media often has an instinctive understanding of what is shareable on various digital platforms.
The key point, as with any marketing, is to go where the audience is.
Whitworth
The Whitworth in Manchester targets visitors in their 20s for a number of events, such as its free Tuesday Talks programme organised in collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University. It is publicised through social media channels, mostly Twitter and Facebook, and via the Whitworth website.
“I schedule a number of tweets, so, for example, in the week leading up to a new talk I will [put out] one tweet per day with a link to more information about the talks and a link to our Facebook event page,” says Matthew Retallick, a marketing assistant at the Whitworth.
“We have a mailing list specifically for our talks programme – the vast majority of people on that list are students, but there are also industry professionals and members of the public – and we send a reminder email out to all of them a few days before each talk,” he adds.
Turner Contemporary
At the Turner Contemporary in Margate, creative use of social media has helped boost attendance of younger visitors to major exhibitions such as last summer’s Grayson Perry: Provincial Punk, which saw a 5% increase in visitors aged 16-30 on the previous year’s show, Mondrian and Colour.
For the Perry exhibition, the gallery filmed a 20-second trailer of the artist talking about his work, supervising the hanging of a tapestry on the gallery wall and tweeting about its progress, which was shared on Twitter and Facebook.
In another project, the gallery successfully collaborated with the Curzon cinema in Canterbury to promote its recent Risk exhibition, which featured work by artists including Marina Abramović, Yoko Ono, Ai Weiwei alongside works by JMW Turner.
The resulting joint campaign, targeted at cinema goers, included a 20-second film that flashed up the names of artists involved in the exhibition along with dramatic representations of risk, such as a plane in flames and a tidal wave.
The cinema’s programming team identified a number of big movie releases – the Bond film Spectre and period drama Suffragette were among them – that tackled risk as a theme, and the promotional film was shown ahead of each screening.
A specially commissioned poster depicting a man poised on either side of a bow, pulled taut with an arrow, was also displayed outside the gallery.
“The poster was for people to photograph and tweet about,” says Poppy Andrews, the communications assistant at Turner Contemporary. “Taking pictures of work in the galleries was obviously limited, so the poster provided visitors with something they could take shots of outside.”
Nottingham Contemporary
The advantage of social media is its flexibility, says Vicky Godfrey, marketing manager at Nottingham Contemporary. “You can track the response to posts and change what you’re putting up if you need to. You can be proactive.”
The gallery also uses local community media, such as Kemet FM, which is aimed at the city’s African and Caribbean communities, as well as student media and free magazines, including Nottingham’s Left Lion.
“Free magazines and newspapers are really effective for young people,” says Godfrey, adding that email newsletters are less effective.
Involving young people in an event can be a good marketing tool in itself, she adds. For example, the gallery puts young staff on its front desk to welcome visitors to events.
“We have seen over the last year that more and more people of the 15-25 age group are attending and it’s partly down to word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer marketing.
The word is going out that these events are for people of that age group, so it helps when they can see themselves reflected in the make-up of the place when they come.”
Tate
Mark Miller, the convenor of young people’s programmes for Tate and a leader on Circuit, the national visual arts network for young people aged 15-25 funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, says it’s given that social media is important for reaching this younger audience.
Tate often buy banner ads on Facebook pages of organisations such as Bigga Fish that it knows are used by young people that are a possible captive audience for the gallery. The ads encourage site visitors to click throughs to the Tate's website or Facebook page.
It’s important, says Miller, to identify and collaborate with the artists, organisations and networks who influence the generation that Tate is trying to reach.
But it must be an authentic that’s forged, he says, and museums should choose partners that have similar aims or share a genuine mutual creative interest, rather than use them simply to exploit their audience.
“We might work with Reprezent Radio or a musician on the rise like Kojey Radical, and perhaps contract with them to use their social media. They put three or four tweets out about what we’re doing, which starts to generate an audience through their connections, and word of mouth starts to build.”
But you can’t form these relationships for purely pragmatic reasons or as one-off services, says Miller. The link needs to be forged with organisations and artists that share your broad aims for young people as well as your creative focus.
“This kind of connection needs to be made completely authentically,” he stresses.
“It’s about building a partnership with someone and working with them so that they understand what your programme is trying to do, rather than you thinking ‘I’m going to pay someone to influence on our behalf’. We think of the outlets we use as collaborators and contributors to our programme. It’s two-way.”