As a marketeer you can no longer deny: influencer marketing is going to become a key part of your marketing strategy. Influencer marketing campaigns are released in all domains and branches of business, and marketeers are praised for the results they accomplish. One relevante branche, however, seems to fall behind: the cultural sector.
Museums and other cultural institutes in the Netherlands are not working with enough influencers, despite the fact that the branche is a good fit. How and why they should? Let’s look at some influencer content and find out.
Influencer marketing
Just to get it straight: influencer marketing is strategically working with bloggers and vloggers on social media. Actually, you could say it’s Word-of-Mouth, but digital. A lot of bloggers have a huge social following that they reach with their content daily. In the practice of influencer marketing, these pieces of content are sponsored by brands. If these brands match the influencer and his/her content, the results can be staggering. Firstly, the messages reach an enormous amount of people – which is far easier te measure on-, than offline. However, it’s important to understand that influencer marketing is more than reach. When you use influencers creatively and smart, you can really reach people and tell them the story of your brand.
Influencers in Museums
This shouldn’t be new to most of the marketeers who read this. For clothing-, retail-, e-commerce- and all kinds of different businesses influencer marketing is an everyday practice. In the cultural domain, however, we see that influencer marketing is barely applied. Why that is? Perhaps that museums and cultural institutes are more old-fashioned when it comes to marketing, or perhaps don’t think they have the budget. Let’s not focus on that: based om some content from influencers in the Join database we’ll discuss some ways to apply influencer marketing for museums.
Culture is a niche
The most important goal of influencer marketing is reaching a specific target audience that is located in your niche. Within each category or topic, we find niches: are you selling biological and sugar free breakfast cereals? We’re pretty sure you can find a foodblogger who specifically targets that topic. The same goes for art: whether it’s fans of a certain style of art, a certain museum or even a specific cultural day out, there’s most likely someone who makes content about just that. @the.avantguardian for example, reaching 42K people on Instagram, is very much into this style of art. The museum gets a tag and likeminded art-lovers know where to find this kind of paintings.
Museums are here for everybody
Attracting people that love a certain type of arts is a piece of cake. The difficulties of marketing efforts in museums, however, is reaching people that are not specifically interested in art in general. You can’t become a connaisseur out of nowhere. For this reason specifically it’s useful that influencer marketing is incredibly easy to apply in different markets. Also, for kids.
Admitted, there are not many children on social media who follow influencers that write about art or musea – even though they probably should. The focus that kids have for social media is mostly directed towards vloggers and gamers – and we don’t mind too much. These children’s parents, however, tend to focus on completely different channels. Ironically, parents tend to focus on influencers that make content about – you guessed it – children! If as a museum you’re looking to attract families, influencer marketing might be the way to do so. Whenever an influencer that blogs about his/her family and kids makes great content about your cultural day off, you can downright assume that a lot of other people will do so too!
Engagement in museums
Oddly, museums are mostly silent. We understand that enjoying art in the purest form takes a lot of concentration, but art is something that should spark discussion. Alright, maybe you shouldn’t argue about the intention of the artist with that old man that is studying a painting with an intense frown – that barely ever ends well. For cultural marketeers, it is exremely important that people talk about art. An exhibition they went to see, a painting or sculpture they have seen, people need to discuss these matters. Positive experiences go viral an reach a lot of different people. Just like influencer marketing. Especially micro-influencers with a smaller following can get a lot of people talking.
Influencer Elvera van Schaik (35K followers on Instagram) shares this beautiful hide-out – right in the centre of Amsterdam – with her followers. Apart from the positive aspects, a) this being a beautiful piece of content and b) it gets people to know about this place, the most relevant thing happens in the comments. People engage with the art and the location, and one follower even mentions that this is a destination for her must-visit list. The effects of influencer marketing have never been so tangible.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing isn’t the next best thing, it’s the current best thing. For businesses in all different markets it’s becoming more and more important to integrate influencers in their marketing strategy. The cultural domain falling behind to other businesses is absolutely not a reason to wait. Because of the AI-integration of influencer marketing platform Join you can find relevant influencers within certain categories – meaning you can find influencer that write about art or museums in all categories. This way it’s easy to get relevant influencers to work for marketing campaigns for museums and other cultural institutions. Cultural marketeers, what are you waiting for? Go!
