Seminar: Artfully "E": Internet Marketing for Nonprofit Music Organizations

Monday, December 6, 2004

Vicki Allpress, Marketing Manager of The NBR New Zealand Opera, joined members of the Philadelphia music community to conduct a seminar on her specialty – internet marketing. The seminar, named Artfully ‘E’ after the term she coined during her work streamlining online arts marketing strategies, drew about thirty representatives of music organizations from the Philadelphia area.

Her presentation began with an explanation of what it means to be “Artfully ‘E’.” According to Allpress, a successful internet marketing strategy must achieve a wide array of goals: integrating a website with print materials and organizational identity, ensuring that the right people – current and potential audiences – can find the site, actively driving new audiences to the site, allowing for two-way communication between site visitors and the website’s owner, and, finally, being both respectful and pro-active in engaging visitors. To achieve each of these ends simultaneously, Allpress suggested, is an art.

Allpress outlined what she calls a “Website Effectiveness Matrix,” a set of four categories with which an organization can interrogate its website’s success: purpose, content and design, usability, and optimization. The first task, Allpress noted, is determining the primary purpose of one’s website. Since arts organizations’ websites might engage in a range of purposes, including selling tickets, providing a calendar of upcoming events, or offering details on the history and activities of an organization, the structure of a website can and should reflect the specific needs of the organization.
           
The second category of Allpress’ matrix, content and design, includes everything that “populates” the website, and, to keep visitors coming back, it must be current, relevant, accurate, and easy to scan. “People must believe that your website is alive and kicking,” she explained, “They must believe that someone is behind it.” The more dynamic one’s website is – the more frequently its content is updated and the more friendly its use – the more likely visitors are to come to your site, to stick around, and become actual audience members.

As for usability, Allpress defined a usable website as one in which “visitors are able to undertake the task they expect to achieve on the site and leave satisfied that their needs have been met.” Usability is so important, she said, that visitors will leave websites and never come back if the site is particularly unsatisfactory. Studies have found that web users enjoy sites that are continually updated, easy to navigate, in-depth on its subject, and load quickly on their computers.

The final category in the Website Effectiveness Matrix, optimization, refers to bringing as many visitors to a site as possible. Optimization is mainly achieved by getting your website noticed by major search engines, particularly Google, through featured keywords in the supporting HTML code.

In addition to streamlining website design, Allpress encouraged music organizations to trade links with other sites in order to bring in additional internet traffic. Increasing link popularity will also raise your site’s status on search engines. She also addressed strategies for e-mail marketing, including sending messages on appropriate days. For instance, Allpress mentioned that her company sent out an electronic newsletter every Wednesday, when professionals were neither too busy nor too tired to read a message. E-mail, she emphasized, is a cheap and efficient way to gather information about audiences and to initiate various kinds of feedback.

Allpress concluded with further tips to keep visitors coming back to a site: in addition to fresh and current information, she listed regular competitions and surveys, any kind of interactivity, assuming a distinct voice or personality in the text of a site, a good resource links page, as well as others. She outlined ways to record online traffic such as tracking links and feedback forms, and she clarified terms of usage measurement. One of the most misused terms, she pointed out, is a “hit.” Rather than referring to a visitor to the site, a hit is an “action” on the site, like the automatic download of an image. In other words, any time one person arrives at a website, there might be more than a dozen hits.
           
Allpress offered an online bibliography of helpful texts, including her own recently-published A Practical Guide to Developing and Managing Websites. The publication is available free for download at
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/.