How to Market your Institution’s Reopening
As social distancing guidelines continue to loosen and businesses start opening their doors, more and more visitors across the nation are eagerly waiting for museums and cultural institutions to release their summer schedules and upcoming events.
After a few long months of stay-at-home orders, it’s not surprising that the public is as anxious as ever to connect with the history, art, and cultural achievements that have inspired and awed people for centuries.
While this is a great opportunity for cultural institutions to organize, rebrand, and promote their long-awaited reopenings, there are also some defining challenges they’re going to face in the midst of a Covid-19 and post Covid-19 timeline.
Below is everything you need to know on how to successfully market your institution’s reopening.
How to Build Confidence and Ensure Safety Through your Marketing Strategy
While you definitely want to take the opportunity of a grand reopening to work on branding and highlighting new events and upcoming exhibits, your number one priority should really be centered around communicating the safety of your guests.
Because there’s so much uncertainty surrounding Covid-19, a lot of your guests will be wondering if it’s safe to revisit their favorite cultural institutions. Ultimately, it’s your job to communicate the kind of safety precautions you are taking and technological solutions you are implementing that will help ensure a safe visiting environment for your guests.
Below is a comprehensive list of safety precautions and technological implementations that you should highlight in your marketing strategy.
- Completely Digitized Ticketing: The more your marketing strategy exemplifies the kind of precautions necessary to safely open your institutions, the more at ease your guests will be when scheduling a visit. This means highlighting things like completely digitized ticketing, including the actual tickets, payment procedures, and receipts.
- Cleanliness and Hygiene Precautions: Whether you’re creating a video or posting pictures on social media, you should be communicating the kind of hygienic precautions your institution is taking to ensure a safe experience. This includes hand sanitizer stations placed throughout your events, new staffing training/preparations, as well as how you aim to bolster your cleaning regiment.
- Timed Ticketing: ACME’s new timed ticketing features will help you manage your capacity and admissions procedures. Timed ticketing will replace general admissions, providing you with the ability to set your schedule, customize your maximum capacity for any given time slot, establish time limits on when guests can enter, and manually modify the maximum amount of tickets being sold at any time. Highlighting the transition from general admissions to timed ticketing will show your guests that you’re in control and taking the right steps to manage volume, practice social distancing while inside the institution and ensure a secure space.
- Capacity Calculator: Your capacity calculator will work alongside your timed ticketing platform. By inputting a number of variables, like your square-footage and Instantaneous Maximum Capacity, you can calculate an estimation on your maximum capacity. To ensure a spacious and safe environment, you can readjust that capacity number so it adds a six-foot grid around each guest, effectively ensuring your guests that, even at maximum capacity, they will be well in line with the recommended six-feet-apart guidelines. Highlighting these new features in your marketing strategy will help instill a sense of safety and confidence in your guests.
- POS Efficacy: Demonstrating your diverse and, more importantly, contact-free Point of Sale (POS) options help enable the kind of distancing guidelines that will set your guests’ anxieties at ease. advanced Online sales, portable kiosks, paperless entry, and contactless on-site payment options should all be things you highlight in your marketing strategy.
Where and How You Should Market your Reopening
How you market your reopening will depend, largely, on where you are. For states and cities most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, you will rely more on your online and social media marketing platforms.
This doesn’t mean, however, that institutions in these areas shouldn’t be reaching out to community members and local businesses. The guests most willing to return to restaurants, shopping malls, and other organizations that are beginning to reopen are likely more willing to make a trip to your cultural institution. So while you definitely want to bolster your online presence, you don’t want to disregard the kind of marketing opportunities in your surrounding area.
New Events, Exhibits, and Branding Opportunities
While the past three months have been difficult for much of the country and world, it’s also given curators, artists, creatives, and organizational teams a lot of time to think and plan.
This is a good chance for your team to present any new event ideas or possibilities for new rebranding campaigns. Your marketing and sales teams, additionally, have had a chance to review and assess what has worked best for your institutions and what hasn’t.
Bring your various departments and team members together, review the data and findings, and take the temporary closure as an opportunity to rebrand and design new marketing campaigns around the creative work you have lined up for your guests.
The key to any marketing strategy in a Covid-19 and post Covid-19 era is safety and security. While you want to include all the things that guests love about visiting cultural institutions, you need to demonstrate that you’re prepared for today’s challenges.
ACME ticketing has come up with a number of new features, like our timed ticketing applications and contactless ticketing capabilities, to help institutions become safer and more efficient. Have the technology to grow, build confidence, and provide the best visiting experience with ACME today.