Your audiences
The most effective marketing campaigns concentrate on personalising their message and ways of marketing rather than ‘mass marketing’. The audience doesn’t want to know just anything – they have to be spoken to in the right way about the right things.
No business has just one type of audience (or visitor). You can group your visitors by their age, where they live etc. This is called visitor segmentation. How you segment your visitors will dictate how you speak and what you offer them.
There are a number of ways you can find out about your current visitors. The getting to know your visitors advice sheet on the right hand side of the page gives suggestions. You can also visit the Understanding your visitors page for some templates, further advice, case studies and what to do with this information.
But just knowing your existing visitors sometimes isn’t enough. Often we want to attract those who don’t usually visit our museums. Don’t worry – you don’t have to do all the research into these audiences yourself. Many other organisations produce and publish reports which could give you valuable information about the people you would like to attract. To see just a few of these, visit the Research by other organisations and Official statistics pages on this site.
Once you have gathered information about your audiences, it’s important to do something with it. The best thing to do would be to start (and keep) a database, spreadsheet or record. See the information sheet in the right hand menu for more information.
Now you have your audience information, you are ready to start planning your marketing activity. To get going, visit the Where to start page.