Inbound marketing can sometimes come across as being useful only to knowledge-based, industrial, B2B businesses but that is not the case. There are tons of Inbound Marketing tactics that will help your arts & entertainment business gain new viewers, readers, customers and more.
Inbound marketing is all about helping your potential customers by answering the questions they may have about your industry. This is why it's often mistaken for being solely for businesses that supply a service or product that fixes something physical like a car or piece of plumbing. And while it's true that more often than not people will end up on Google searching for how to get the wine out of their carpet, thousands of people also use Google to search for much more personal issues, such as what performance to see or who is a good local author?
There are many great Inbound Marketing tactics for your business to take advantage of, each of which will bring in fresh prospects. Some of the most popular Inbound strategies include:
When a business runs a blog they are able to quickly and easily create content that answers question, produce new pages for their site and provide themselves with a great way to get conversions.
Forms allow a business to gather useful information about their prospects in exchange for free content. When placed on a landing pages or their website, they convert visitors into leads and allow people to travel along the buyer's journey.
Knowing your potential clients is a crucial part of any business. With a buyer persona, you can plan content with targeting the right people in mind.
Using social media to raise brand awareness is an important goal for many businesses. Having a social media content plan will help you push your marketing and business in the right direction and achieve your business goals.
A CTA will guide your visitors to the pages you want them to see and make them go from a stranger searching for answers, to a customer that you have a relationship with.
There are many more Inbound Marketing strategies but these are a few that an arts & entertainment business can really make use of to boost their business.
When applying these Inbound strategies to your business marketing plan you both need to understand what they help you achieve but also what you specifically want to achieve. To get you started I'll explain a few ways that the above strategies could help a business in the arts & entertainment industry.
When it comes to art & entertainment, people are always looking for the next big thing. When someone finished a show they'll be wanting to quickly move onto the next one and while sometimes they'll have something in mind, often people will head to Google and start researching shows they might enjoy. That's where your blog can come in! Having an article of the 'Top 10 Online Shows For Fantasy Lovers' will draw in a ton of readers and if you give your show a high ranking you may end up with more than just a few new viewers. A similar format will work for artists, authors and online entertainers.
As an artistic business you likely get a lot of your customers in the form of commissions. Many of these will likely come through messaging on social media and other types of personal communication. This is great as it adds a personal touch to your business process but it makes organising leads and prospects difficult and tedious and is often not worth the effort. However, by letting your past customers disappear you lose the opportunity to remarket to them. By sending those that want to enquire about a commission to your website, or more-so a form, you will be able to gather their information in a way that is much easier for you and allows you to carefully select the jobs you want to take. And thanks to the customisable fields you can ensure you get the name, address, request and type of work all straight from the get-go!
Having a strong knowledge of your target audience is crucial for any business no matter of the industry. If you are creating something with the intention of someone else enjoying it, you NEED to know what they like, dislike, where they want to view it and when they like to consume their content. The absolute best way to understand your target audience is with the research and transparency that a buyer persona provides. One of the biggest causes of a failed content creator is when they set out to make content that THEY want to create without first considering if that content is what their target audience wants.
Social media is a huge part of an arts & entertainment business as it's where you will find new customers more than anywhere else. Creative content goes viral much easier than commercial content does so you'll have a major advantage here. Post you’re content, previous commissions, pricing guides, videos, vlogs and more to gain a large following of admirers.
You can use CTAs to guide readers and views to specific pages of your website. If you have a web page about your commission prices, create a CTA to take people to that landing page when they show interest in your commissions. If you have a web page about upcoming performances you'll be doing, use a CTA to guide people to where they can find that information. A CTA allows you to track where your leads are coming from and also which of your products and services are gathering most attention.
Hopefully, these suggestions help fill you with ideas on how you can effectively use Inbound Marketing to grow your arts & entertainment business.
Now that you've seen how Inbound Marketing can be used to give your business a good push in the right direction, you should begin to consider how you can implement this hugely successful marketing strategy. If you feel overwhelmed or unprepared to take on a new marketing strategy, the JDR Group can help guide you through the process and show you how easy Inbound Marketing can be. Contact us on our website or call us on 01332 343281.