Augmented reality is a technology that layers digital content, such as sound, video or 3D animation, onto real-world surroundings. It can be a powerful tool for engaging potential audiences as it creates interactive experiences and helps organisations stand out from the crowd. Trevor explained that:

“The arts and cultural sectors must digitalise and invest in new technologies as this will enable the organisations and creative individuals to stay relevant and to continue to reach their audiences in the future. Technology such as augmented reality can be an inexpensive but extremely powerful tool to engage and increase your audience.”

Trevor and David came prepared with some great examples of AR in action as they highlighted how arts organisations can use the technology to connect with their clients. For example, Museum of London’s Streetmuseum app is a simple and effective use of augmented reality that takes the museum experience beyond the museum walls, helping to boost engagement levels. The app recognises a user’s location and then overlays a historic image onto the camera view. Users can also tap on the image for historical facts and additional information on the picture. What’s more, AR provides valuable audience insights as it allows you to track where, when and how users are engaging with your content.

Here are Trevor and David’s five top tips for creating an effective AR campaign:

1. Walk users through the process of activating your digital content. Make sure your instructions are simple and clear. Explain what users need to do and highlight the benefits of doing so. Making the process as easy as possible will enhance customer experience, and encourage users to return to your digital content.
2. Include a strong call to action. Augmented reality works best when you encourage users to do something. This might be booking tickets to a show, sending a tweet or entering a competition. Not only will this drive better results, it will also help you measure the success of your campaign.
3. Invest in content. Using AR for the sake of it will appear gimmicky. It’s important that you create value for your users. Think beyond the ‘wow’ factor and develop relevant content that will resonate with your audiences.
4. Refresh content regularly. No one wants to see the same thing over and over. Updating your content often will create fresh, of-the-moment AR experiences for your users.
5. Promote campaign on multiple channels. If you’ve invested time and money in an AR campaign you want to let people know about it! Share it on Facebook and Twitter, post about it on your website and talk about it in your newsletter.

The First Wednesday series continues in June – keep an eye on our events page for details. Follow us on Twitter @Culture_Public and join in the conversation with the hashtag #1stWed. You can also find our speakers on Twitter @Creativtek.

It might sound like it’s all about computers and machinery but ultimately MA is about building better relationships with people. The software can improve your data collection, giving you greater insight into who your customers are and how they interact with you. It also makes it easier for you to put this audience data to good use, as it makes it possible to tailor the user experience automatically. This personalisation is vital to nurturing prospects and converting them into regular customers.

The technology also helps you to analyse whether what you’re doing works and identify room for improvement. Crucially, it allows marketers to illustrate their value. By bringing all your marketing tactics together in one place MA enables you to quantify activity, measure impact and calculate ROI more efficiently and accurately.

Marketing automation, however, is not a ‘press and go’ software. It takes time to understand, to prepare for and to find the right platform. In this blog we share Stuart and Sarah’s advice on taking your first steps into marketing automation:

Plan

Time spent planning is crucial as MA will magnify, not solve, any inefficient processes you might have. To make it work you’ll need a comprehensive strategy that integrates the right processes, people, content and data. So, before launching a MA campaign you should answer some key questions:

• What are your goals?
• What strategy will help you reach these goals?
• Who should lead on the project?
• How will you measure success?

Research

There are a range of MA platforms available to you.  Marketo, Pardot and Hubspot are often referred to as the leaders in marketing automation software. These are big platforms with powerful functionality and they come with a big price tag to match. Mailchimp, Instapage and Leadius are three cheaper options. They lack some of the capabilities of the bigger platforms but can be a nice introduction to the world of MA. Before making your decision use free trials to find out the pros and cons of each platform and determine suitability for your needs.

Start small

Don’t be overzealous in your ambitions. Whilst MA offers a lot of tempting features it is also a large investment in terms of money and time. Rather than paying out for software you don’t need, begin by experimenting with one or two MA features. For example, you could test out the automatic email function in Mail Chimp, see what results you get from that and go from there.

And remember, if you need help identifying your audiences or planning a marketing approach we’re here to help. Give us a call or send us an email – we’d love to hear from you.

The First Wednesday discussion continues next month when we’ll explore augmented reality with Trevor Jones and David Oaxly of CreativTek. First Wednesdays are exclusively available to Culture Republic Partners. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about these events or our partnership offer.

First Wednesdays are monthly training and networking sessions for Culture Republic’s Partner network. This month we explored how to improve website efficiency. Brian highlighted the importance of tracking your own data. This is the best way to measure your website’s performance.  Your own data will provide meaningful insight into potential issues and highlight opportunities for change and growth, as well as help establish a benchmark from which improvements should occur.

In this event summary we’ve focused on three challenges that organisations regularly come up against, how you can address these issues and some cost-effective tools to help:

1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

One of the most common reasons for organisations wanting to redesign their website is that their current version doesn’t rank high enough in Google.

There’s often a significant difference between what you think people are searching for, and what they’re actually searching for. You need to understand the difference before you can judge if your site is working.

Webmaster Tools (for either Google or Bing) are useful for identifying what users are  really searching for. Free and easy to set-up, these tools help you monitor and maintain your site’s presence on search engines. They provide Click, Impression and Ranking information on keywords.

2. Mobile

At Culture Republic we have seen a growth in mobile traffic over the past three years and it is on the rise. Our recent research into digital use in the arts sector, however, found that 47% of websites were not optimised for mobile browsing.

When it comes to mobile optimisation Brian suggested that the best place to start is simply to better understand how your website currently performs on mobile devices. Google Analytics will give you a good overview of this. Use the data available to you to provide objective input and to help prioritise any changes.

Brian recommended a range of tools that you can then use to make your site faster and more responsive. For example, you can check if your website is fast enough for mobile using GTmetrix or Google Developers. Both these free tools summarise how your site is performing and give guidance on how to make improvements. Simple changes, such as resizing an image or altering landing pages, can make a big difference.

3. Users

It can be frustrating if users don’t engage with the site as you want them to. How do you make users read the right content, click the correct links or purchase tickets? Brian advocated considering exactly what you want users to do, and then eliminating any obstacles. This will be easier than developing a perfect solution.

There are lots of affordable tools to help you better understand your users’ behaviour. Crazy Egg, for example, generates a heat map based on the click behaviour of website visitors. This gives you a much better understanding of how people engage with your website and will help you to identify what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t forget that if you’re looking to revamp your website we can help. Get in touch for more information.

Follow us on Twitter @Culture_Public and join in  the conversation with the hashtag #1stWed. You can also reach out to Brian @taitbw

Keep your data clean:

It’s important to filter out your own IP address and any Spam Traffic. This ensures that your analytics are an accurate reflection of your website’s reach and impact. If you don’t you’ll be measuring irrelevant visits to your site and important stats, such as Bounce Rates and Conversions, will become skewed.

Make it easier for yourself:

Google Analytics has lots of features that make it easier for you to find, and make sense of, data that’s relevant to you.  Dashboards, for example, provide a single page overview of your key reports so you can quickly visualise the data. They’re straight-forward to create and customisable so you can set them up for what matters most to you.

Annotations are another simple way of ensuring your data is easily understandable. This function allows you to mark notes on your analytics showing when important events took place, such as an email campaign or a website outage. This means that when you look back over time you’ll be able to attribute any spikes or dips in your traffic to those specific events.

Dig into your data:

Within Google Analytics you can also drill-down further to get more detailed analysis. Secondary Dimensions, for instance, are a simple to use filter that instantly puts more context on your data. You can also segment your data to isolate and compare different users, or set up custom reports from scratch to get a greater breakdown of data. There’s a wealth of detailed audience information available once you know how to find it.

Do more with your data:

There’s not much point collecting and analysing all these figures if you don’t then use them to inform your marketing strategy. There are lots of functions within Google Analytics that can help you with this. You can set-up and track specific events, goals or transactions, allowing you to measure website engagement in relation to your business objectives.  You can even assign monetary value to your goals giving you a more tangible way of measuring changes and improvements on your site. By tracking interactions in this way you will identify the high value content on your website, meaning you can make informed decisions about how you spend your time.

Brian emphasised that whilst the amount of information available on Google Analytics might seem overwhelming at first, it’s worth pursuing as the possibilities are endless!

If you would like support with your website tracking, or are looking to develop your website and don’t know where to start, get in touch.

Museums, galleries and visual arts exhibition spaces all over the country are invited to participate. Together, we will create a new resource for everyone who shares an interest in growing visual arts audiences in Scotland.

Combining postcode data, social media information and intelligence gathered through in-venue surveys, we will build a real-time, multi-dimensional picture of where, how and why people engage with the visual arts.

Take part

There are three ways to get involved: opt for one or all of them to start benchmarking your audience against your peers and colleagues in Scotland and beyond:

1. Profile your postcode data: if you collect postcode data from your audience, you can be part of a new national audience data set for the visual arts. Share 12 months of your visitor data, and it will be aggregated with data from venues across the country to establish patterns of audience crossover and repeat attendance across the country, building up a Scotland-wide picture of audience demographics and characteristics. Don’t worry, your postcodes are safe and secure– we’ll never use them for ourselves or share them in non-aggregated form.
2. Profile your online audience: if your venue is active on Facebook, twitter and/or Instagram, you can be part of our online profiling programme, mapping digital audiences and their engagement locally, nationally and internationally. You only need to give us access to your active social media accounts – we will do the rest.
3. Be part of our in-venue audience survey pilot: in partnership with the Audience Agency, we are piloting a short, in-venue audience survey that will explore visitor profiles and motivations, allowing participating organisations to compare their audiences with peers across the UK at the touch of a button. Up to 25 visual arts venues can participate in this pilot phase, and anonymised, aggregated survey findings will be reported back to all participating venues in a series of sharing events and briefings throughout 2016.

By getting involved, you’ll become part of a Scotland-wide network of visual arts venues and organisations, working together to grow our collective understanding of audience behaviours, profiles and motivations around the country. You’ll get:

• Early access to research findings;
• Regular project reporting and support with your data gathering;
• Invitations to sharing events and networking opportunities with fellow participants;
• Online dashboard access to your own in-venue survey data when 380 or more responses are collected from your venue;
• Opportunities to further profile your own audience data for bespoke insights and intelligence.

This is a not-for-profit project, and there is a small project fee that covers set-up, data analysis, project reporting and sharing events.

Contact Dianne at Culture Republic to take part or find out more.

@culture_public @DianneGreig I've done my Jan turnover & my business has increased by 1000% since your digital coms workshop #unprecedented

— splashyartystory (@splashyartytart) February 1, 2015

Using targeted social media Pauline exceeded her sales targets and built a loyal social media fan base that has put her freelance artist’s enterprise on firm financial footing. Here’s how she did it.

This time last year Splashyartystory – a small business selling reproductions of Pauline’s original watercolours – was making most of its sales through Etsy and Ebay. Tired of losing income to pay the fees from these services, Pauline decided to invest in a new website which would host an online shop allowing her to sell direct to customers. When the site went live in August 2014, she wanted to make sure that she could recoup the investment in the website.

Pauline runs a classic creative microbusiness – she is the artist, marketer, shipping supervisor and business manager. To improve her marketing and drive sales, Pauline attended a Culture Republic digital communications workshop in Dumfries in December. The event, offered in partnership with Dumfries and Galloway Council, was delivered by our own Dianne Greig and Deborah Hair.

Pauline’s situation was this:

• Splashyartystory’s products had high appeal but low visibility
• There was a great online content, it just wasn’t reaching people
• Her brand values were clear, she has a friendly personality and an open conversational tone, it just needed a wider audience

She left the workshop with a plan of how to use social media to drive sales. And did it ever!

What happened next

Pauline headed back to her studio with the bones of a communications strategy from her day at the workshop. She decided to start with a little bit of targeted Facebook advertising and boosted a post for a contest to give away one of her most popular paintings – a purple thistle.

@culture_public I took my facebook fan page from 400 likes to over 1,000 in one day so well chuffed and thanks for the advice #happybunny

— splashyartystory (@splashyartytart) January 14, 2015

The first ad ran for 3 weeks and according to Pauline “it just went nuts”. Her Facebook page went from 500 likes to 5500 likes in 5 days. Her sales increased by 1000%. She could only just keep up with the orders by working 16-hour days. It was so successful that Pauline had to think seriously about where she wanted the business to go. For her, painting is a lifestyle business and she didn’t want to scale it up and have it take over her life.

One note – there are strict guidelines around competition terms and conditions on Facebook. Pauline has become an expert at staying within them, but her first attempt inadvertently breached these and the post was taken down (that’s why you can’t see it in this article). This has been a key learning for her. If you are thinking of trying a competition yourself make sure to visit Facebook’s Ts&Cs to keep yourself right.

Sustainable growth

Because of the sales boost in January, Pauline has been able to consolidate her business. She had the capital to invest in a canvas printer of her own – previously she was outsourcing the printing to a company in England. Because of this change Pauline’s profits have increased by an additional 30% per picture sold; she’s able to supply all of her orders in a much shorter time period and she’s able to supply her canvases off the stretcher which suits her international buyers much better. Pauline has also moved into larger premises and taken on a part-time employee to help with fulfilment.

Pauline’s found a way to keep growing her online community and generating constant sales but which is sustainable for a one-woman shop. Because the competition worked so well she has been running regular giveaways – she plans to do one a month or so leading up to the festive period. Here’s the most recent example:

This effort added more than 100 new likes to the page, over 1000 likes to the post, 740 shares & over 1500 comments. The method that works for her is to boost a competition post for only for 3 days and only run the competition for 5 days. This helps keep the response manageable (she learned that three weeks was far too long). For Pauline, contests generate sales immediately. She says she adds 100 – 200 people on average doing this and she earns the cost of the advertisement back within an hour.

Build a strategy that works

One key thing Pauline took away from her Culture Republic workshop was to set SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time bound) objectives. After the training session she returned to her studio and posted her SMART objectives on the wall as a daily reminder. Pauline reports that the discipline of being timely and relevant in particular inspired her to look for current events and affairs as useful triggers to be able to talk about her work and share examples. Here’s an example from around Burns night:

The other learning was to identify who her key audiences were and make sure the content that she was posting was particularly relevant them. Pauline says when Dianne suggested that she look at her audience profile she “felt like going ‘Oh, Duh!’” because it wasn’t something she had done yet and it made perfect sense to her. The very next day Pauline sat down and went through all the sales for the year. What she found was that her customer base was 20% male and 80% female. A typical customer is a woman, aged 20 to 60, who is interested in home interiors. If the customer is a man she found he was often buying for his wife. Pauline responded by subscribing to decorating magazines and looking at trends for home decorating. She responded with new work that was on trend in terms of colour – a painting in shades of grey with just a splash of colour.

Pauline also noticed that a significant section of her audience are expatriate Scots who like the Scottish subjects and provenance of her paintings. She started a series of thistle paintings, which began with a thistle and rose (signifying England) to include a thistle and other national plants like a shamrock, a daffodil or a maple leaf.

That post in particular generated an emotional response from her audience who shared personal stories of the significance of yellow roses for them.

One key to her success is that Pauline is very responsive to her customers – she tries to get back individually to each person who makes a comment on her page. It takes about an hour every day. And, if there is enough of an appetite for a particular subject she will make a piece that gives the people what they want.

Pauline reflects that after her Likes jumped up to over 5000 her business really took off, but it still takes constant work. Now she is adding fans regularly and sales have become steady, but people still need constant reminders and redirection back to the shop. Even though sales information is listed clearly at the top of her page, she regularly responds to enquiries asking, “where can I buy this”. Pauline’s posts are designed to keep her work at the front of people’s mind, she doesn’t want the page to become static. If her posts are not engaging then Facebook could see her as less relevant and take her out of people’s news feeds.

What’s next?

Pauline’s newest effort sees her branching out into YouTube tutorials

She is cross posting these onto her Facebook page and using them to drive awareness and engagement with her work. So far the feedback has been enthusiastic!

Prior to this, other social networks had been taking a back seat and Pauline has been concentrating on Facebook because she’s found it to be the best route to her core audience. Other businesses may find that other networks like Instagram or Twitter or Tumblr (or a mix of these) will work best depending on your audience profile. Similarly you may find that other types of Facebook ads will be more or less effective. The key is to plan activities based on a strategy and then implement it.

Alastair Jeffrey of J Thompson Colour Printers led the session and came prepared with an array of samples and ideas of how we can all make the most of our printed materials. The session highlighted the value in working with both designers and printers to come up with imaginative solutions. Some of the most striking examples, for instance, were printed purely in black and white achieving maximum impact for minimal costs. His message was loud and clear: we regularly talk about innovation for digital marketing but we shouldn’t stop applying creative thinking to printed literature.

Alastair explained that print doesn’t have to be old fashioned. Augmented Reality is a great way of combining modern techniques with the more traditional. Using tools like Layar you can enhance flyers and posters with interactive content such as web and social media links, video messages or music clips. This technology also enables you to track and analyse who is interacting with your printed materials.

Digital printing means you can now use your audience data to customise the content of your printed materials so that is tailored towards specific customers. For example, you might use your purchase history data to target previous attendees about a similar show. Alastair reminded that personalised printing is most effective when you include a call to action.

Exclusively available for Culture Republic Partners, First Wednesday events are monthly lunchtime sessions where attendees can learn and network around key issues affecting our sector. Next time we’ll be in Edinburgh with Stephen Bullock from Education Scotland who will talk about how arts and culture organisations can  connect, communicate and collaborate with schools and educators nationally. Contact us for more information about this event or to find out about Culture Republic partnerships.

Edinburgh | 29 October | #CRConf15 | #One Audience

View the conference website and find out more

Scotland’s population is becoming more diverse and growing daily. Technologies are advancing. Society is shifting, and Scotland’s national identity is evolving in response to migration, recent political events and a sense of social justice.

Access All Areas will be a full day of discussions, lab sessions and practical workshops, exploring how enlightened cultural leadership has audience insights, intelligent partnership working and agile technology at its core.

We’ve summarised our key learnings from the afternoon:

Start with needs. Marrying the needs of customers with the desires of businesses lies at the heart of UX design. To do this effectively you first need to gather insights on users’ behaviour. The Storm ID team begin with organisations’ needs and then move to thinking about personas. Personas are archetypes of key consumers that provide a foundation for any design and are a good way of visualising who your audiences are as individuals. In this way, UX design focuses not just on products or services but on the people using them.

Test, and then test again. Prototyping is crucial. When developing any product or service you should re-evaluate and improve your work continuously. What’s more, responsible design should never discriminate against users with different needs and the session highlighted the importance of building for inclusion. With this in mind, testing should be done with as many different users with as many different needs as possible.

Focus on the whole customer journey. Organisations should aim to create experiences, not just websites. Thinking about customer journeys from beginning to end is important because if any one part of a transaction is difficult for your users it will impact negatively on how they perceive your brand. Wojtek and Jason advocated embedding digital at the core of everything you do as the best way of solving service design problems. Integrating technology into the customer experience from the start can streamline the process, making life easier for users. It’s about developing a model that embraces the digital, not one that treats it as an add-on to existing business structures.

Asked to contribute to our blog post, Wojtek said:

“True design should be open, sustainable and, above all, influenced by both decision makers and users of the end product. Whatever your organisation does, keep exploring user experience. Remember that the convenience of technology comes with a price: bad products can impact the happiness of your users, whereas good products can make your organisation work better! If in doubt about any design decision – always refer to your end-users. They will quickly tell you if your ideas make sense. Hopefully you’ll hear that they do, but if not, fasten your seatbelt and… enjoy the ride! Make mistakes and improve, be transparent about the process and evolve as a product maker.”

Exclusively available for Culture Republic Partners, First Wednesdays are a great opportunity to learn and network around key issues affecting our sector. Next month we’ll be exploring the question: is print dead? Alastair Jeffrey of J. Thomson Colour Printers will lead the session looking at how to use print in the digital age. Contact us to find out more about this event, or about Culture Republic partnerships.

MuseumNext is an international conference series which challenges the sector to think about the future of museums. This year our Senior Executive Deborah Hair was in Geneva to find out what the speakers and delegates from around the world had to say.

Throughout the three day conference, key themes and challenges emerged through a range of talks, events, workshops and open stage discussions.

One key question that ran throughout the whole conference was: how can museums be social and sociable within their own environment? Discussion focused not just on visitor interaction with the objects on display but also on promoting dialogue between audiences. Case studies demonstrated how institutions can harness digital tools that foster conversation. Cooper Hewitt’s Pen was a particularly innovative piece of technology. Given at admission, the Pen enables visitors to add a digital record of objects to their personal museum collection and create their own designs on interactive tables. At the end of a visit the Pen is returned but all the objects collected or designed by the visitor are accessible online. Seb Chan (Director of Digital & Emerging Media at Cooper Hewitt) noted how the museum: “isn’t there to show off the best stuff, it’s to inspire and excite people to create their own things”. The Pen achieves this by encouraging visitors to become active participants in the museum.

Harnessing the power of storytelling was another recurring topic. The conference highlighted how important it is for museums to create and tell stories in order to develop meaningful experiences for their visitors. Many of the talks illustrated how digital technologies can be used to tell museums’ stories in an engaging way. Royal Museums Greenwich, for example, has created The Great Map as a way of involving visitors in their story. This interactive world map located at the centre of the museum allows visitors to delve deeper into collections and engage more fully with events. By using storytelling in this way museums can deliver an emotive experience.

If museums are to remain relevant for their 21st century audiences they need to be able to adapt. Much of the conversation at MuseumNext focused on best practice around this constant change, and technology was frequently at the heart of the discussion. Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum spoke about their visitor experience initiative. The team are developing ASK, a mobile app which enables visitors to ask questions about exhibitions and get personal answers from museum employees in real time. The initiative means that staff deliver relevant and informative experiences to their audiences in a welcoming way. Not only does this app meet the needs of the Brooklyn Museum’s modern audiences but the conversational data collected can then also be used to inform future change.

Deborah’s top three takeaways from MuseumNext:
1. Storytelling can take many formats but remember it’s all about ensuring you tell the right story, at the right time, to the right audience.
2. Always keep the user at the centre of any project in order to create an effective and engaging user experience.
3. Focus on the future, in terms of sourcing funding and creating and improving the social impact in museums.