More bang for your online buck

We're in recession and the signs show that it's going to be deeper and longer than we imagined. Arts organisations’ incomes were already under attack: operational costs had been adversely affected by the rising cost of utilities, levels of disposable income had been reduced, and the 'success of Beijing' added pressure for Lottery Funding to be diverted from the Arts to the London 2012 Olympics. As the recession bites, other problem areas are likely to emerge: corporate sponsorship from business will fall (especially for smaller organisations on shorter-term agreements), the rise in unemployment will further affect disposable income and translate into falling audience levels, and local authority funding could be under threat due to overstretched finances. Budgetary belt tightening is a given, ruin is a distinct possibility. In such a challenging environment, budgets are likely to come under attack, spending will need to show a return and your online strategy will need to be re-written in the context of the new reality. Your external adviser is well placed to help plot a course through these testing times. Their experience, core strengths and sector knowledge are there to be leaned on and made the most of.

The main advantage of an online presence is that it is an 'open channel', an already-paid-for means of communicating with your audience. It is there to be used to its full extent, maximising prior investment. As an arts professional – irrespective of your department – you are always looking to improve your audience relationship and, where possible and realistic, to add value to their experience. This is as true for the online as it is of the offline, real world experience. As budgets are reduced you will have to make less go further. Even if your budget stays the same, the increased competition for audiences and their hard-earned cash means the same question: how to get more bang for your increasingly under-attack buck?

There are several options open to you: reach further with your existing marketing material; improve your online positioning; invest in content and in-house control; and sell more online.

• Reaching further: Before contemplating new initiatives, ask whether what you
already have is working to its full potential. Many organisations do not know the full range of online options available. Consult an expert to review what you are getting and make sure you firstly understand what's on offer, and secondly make the most of what you're already doing. A good example relates to managing newsletter campaigns. Newsletters are in many ways the lifeblood of many organisations' audience relationship and yet there's a wide range of factors that make up 'best practice'. It's not enough to assume that, just because you are using a robust mass mailing tool, have a clean and up-to-date database of contacts, and have good data management and privacy systems, you have an effective newsletter campaign strategy. Find out what your deliverability rate is – how well does your email newsletter design and layout perform across the full range of the most popular email clients such as Outlook; Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. Track the success of your email newsletter: how often it is opened, how often links are clicked, how often the newsletter has been forwarded. Resolving any (or all) of these issues will deliver a one-off improvement for ongoing and long-term gain. It will result in a better understanding of your audience and it will enable you to deliver better to more of your audience, and increase conversion rates and loyalty.

• Improve online positioning: Easy wins offer a quick, anti-recessionary antidote to
stalled progress and can maintain momentum. Improvements that are easy to implement and which deliver either long-term gain (ideally with minimal management) or instant returns (probably with some level of required management) are ideal. Previously these may have been good ideas that nobody every got around to implementing. A few good examples are RSS feeds, GoogleAnalytics, and search engine optimisation (SEO). RSS will not revolutionise your online activity overnight, yet once set-up (and running with minimum management and with appropriate tracking) it will offer a different method for distributing your information and match a discerning public’s expectations of how they want to digest your info. GoogleAnalytics is free, and offers a very good level of traffic analysis and, more importantly, a wide range of options for further data mining and analysis (e.g. funnelling). SEO, influenced by a myriad of relevant factors from URL management to on-page content optimisation and browser titling, is supported by well-documented online best practice guides and tips and tricks, as well as relevant training. Combined, these three will have measurable impact, gaining a better understanding of your audiences’ onsite behaviour, and raising your search engine ranking.

• Invest in content, in-house control and user engagement
When times were good it may have helped to outsource some of your online publication processes. If internal capacity was at its limit, the effort to get the required capacity approved and sourced internally may have been arduous to say the least. However, the cost-benefit balance of this approach may have shifted. Whilst previously it may have paid to outsource activities such as SEO and reporting, now it may be the case that an internal solution is far more (cost) effective.
Another potential area is online digitisation – whereas previously it may have been sensible to get external suppliers to create and/or convert, there is now a wide range of free, opensource or low cost applications or training courses that will enable you to take more control over the process and outputs, and also the associated costs. Another area that is more important than ever is user engagement. If your audiences’ behaviour and expectations are changing, then you need to be as forewarned as possible. User engagement provides the best early-warning system available. It can come in many guises, and potentially with significant costs, but both low-cost surveying and the value of well structured but relatively basic website usability sessions can bring significant returns.

• Sell more online Whilst offline ‘High Street’ sales are falling, online sales (whilst still
proportionally smaller) are continuing to rise. This provides a good argument for investing more in order to sell more online, relatively secure in the knowledge that this is still a growth area. Improvements could come in many guises – look to improve your existing online sales offering and be cleverer with it. Review the purchase path – could it be made even simpler, shorter and more consistent? Look to improve customer care with better purchase path messaging, and when you're helping the potential purchaser (for example, offering products related to the viewed product), ask how automated these relationships can be. Additionally, look at what you are already producing but not necessarily selling online. Look at other offline commercial activities and ask whether they could be offered online – costume hire, space hire, venue tours – and look to see if this growing online product list can be combined into meaningful packages or value added visitor experiences – a ticket, a programme, a venue tour, a meal.

The economy will eventually rebound, but in the meantime organisations can find online opportunities that can help deliver better value to audiences, the organisation and eventually the bottom line. It may mean seeking external advice to help you gain a better understanding of relevant developing trends and the options open to you, and you may require help to implement them. But it doesn’t mean having to develop new services or products, nor does it necessarily mean significant increases to ongoing costs. The majority of the above are about better use of what you already have, and in the main would need one-off development or set-up costs. The result will be an improved understanding of your audience, an improved use of existing marketing solutions, a greater level of internal empowerment and possibly a broader online offering. Achieve all of this and the coming dark clouds are likely to carry far less by way of destructive force and instead carry more in the way of potential growth.