Ep. 09 — Creating Brand Love For Your Museum
What is brand love and why is it so important for your museum? Brand Love is Amy’s three-part strategy to help your visitors fall in love with your museum so much that they come back and bring a friend. In this episode, Amy gives an overview of each one and talks about the reason why you need all three for your visitors to become lifelong fans.
Show Links
Join the new “Love my Museum” Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lovemymuseum
Check out Heritage Museums and Gardens: https://heritagemuseumsandgardens.org/
More FREE resources:
Download the People First Framework Guide for Museums: https://bit.ly/4PSguide_lovemymuseum
Download the Planning Calendar for Museums: https://bit.ly/2024museumcal
You can also join Amy’s email list here: https://bit.ly/LMMpodcast_signup
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00]
What is brand love and why is it so important for your museum? Brand love is when your visitors loved their experience so much that they come back and bring a friend. How you achieve brand love for your museum is what we're talking about today. Let's get started.
Hello. Welcome to the "Love my Museum" podcast. I'm your host, Amy Kehs, and I love museums. I also happen to be a brand strategist and communications expert. I've worked for some of the most renowned and well-loved museums on the planet and my goal is to ensure that museums thrive into the next century.
I use the general term "museum" loosely to mean museums, historic homes, art galleries, zoos, aquariums, nature centers, anything that falls into that educational, cultural institution realm.
[00:01:00]
I am really passionate about helping you get visitors through your museum's doors.
Now, you might be thinking, if you've been listening to the podcast up until this point, "Amy, I don't get it. You've just spent all of the last eight episodes not talking about how to get visitors through our museum's doors. You've just been yammering on and on about how we work together and internal communications. What on earth does this have to do with getting visitors through my museum's doors?" Okay. Well, hear me out. How your employees feel at work, how productive they are, how burnt out they are, how supported they feel, has a direct correlation to how your visitors feel when they visit your museum and if they decide they want to come back.
[00:02:00]
Even if you are a staff person who isn't in a communications office, how you interact with visitors, whether it's in-person or behind the scenes, your job satisfaction is going to affect those interactions and that visitor's experience. So getting your internal communications running smoothly is the first step to a successful external communication strategy. And yes, today we are finally going to talk about external communications and how to get visitors through your museum's doors
You'll have two kinds of visitors, the people that are visiting your town or city for what I like to call a "once-in-a-lifetime" visit.
[00:03:00]
And the people in your community that you hope will want to come back often and bring a friend. For the "once-in-a-lifetime" group, you want to be in touch with your local visitor's bureau or town hall so that you can maximize your chances of being part of that "once-in-a-lifetime" visit. Those "once-in-a-lifetime" visitors are going to go home and tell their family and friends about their awesome trip. You want to be included in those highlights. The "once-in-a-lifetime" visitors are very important. Maybe their visit is so great that they turn into a repeat visitor, even though they may live far away. You really need the repeat visitors to sustain your museum and make sure it thrives. Now we hope the out-of-towners become regulars. But that could take some time and here's the important thing.
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If there is only one thing you hear me say in this episode, please hear this and sear it into your brain and how you think about your museum. Every museum is a community museum. Let me say it again. Every museum is a community museum. No matter how big or how small you are, no matter if you are a five-year-old museum or a 100-year-old museum, making your museum into a place that your community loves is what is going to ensure your success. And establishing yourself in the community means that your museum will thrive.
Okay. So how do you do this? How do you get visitors through the door and how do you get them to come back and bring a friend? Well, I call this brand love. You want people to love your museum so much that they not only come back and bring a friend,
[00:05:00]
but maybe they buy something in the gift shop or they buy a membership or they make a donation. They are invested in you and you are invested in them. Brand love is when your audience loves your museum so much that they tell others about you when you're not even in the room. They know what you're about. They know what you do. They know who you are. Your museum, it takes on a persona, a brand. A lot of times my clients say, "Amy, why do you care so much about this brand stuff? Brands are for big corporations like Nike or McDonald's." No, no, no, this isn't true. In today's world, people are bombarded with noise. Words, words, words.
Think about it. Think about how much you hear throughout the day.
[00:06:00]
You need to create a solid brand for your museum so that you stand out in this noise. Visitors who feel like they not only know, like, and trust your brand or your museum, but they love your brand... brand love is something that is earned and it is slow-growing, but the benefits are much, much more effective than any other public relations strategy.
There are three things that you need to work on to create what I call brand love for your museum. : authentic brand messaging, visitor experience, and media relations. Okay. Let's talk about each one, just a bit. First—authentic brand messaging.
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Recognizing and getting to know your museum probably begins for most visitors before they even leave their house. They will probably find you on social media, or look up your website, or maybe they get a recommendation from a friend. And the words that you use are part of your brand. Your brand is not just your logo. It is also the words that you use. This is your brand messaging. While your logo or font colors, the visual aspects of your brand, capture your audience's attention, it's the words that you use that will let them know if they're in the right place and if they want to invest more of their most precious commodity, their time, at your museum. Your brand messaging should be three things. I call them the three C's: clear, consistent and confident.
[00:08:00]
If your audience understands the clear and simple message, then they're going to remember it and hopefully they will even be able to repeat it to others.
In addition to being clear and simple, r epeat it consistently. That's going to help them remember it. It takes people seven times to see a message before they act on it. If you deliver that message with confidence, that means that they will trust what you're saying as well.
The second part is visitor experience. Knowing what the visitor experience is like from beginning to end is really important. I have my clients put themselves in the shoes of a person who has never been to their museum before. Is it easy to find directions on their website? Can they plan their visit before they arrive?
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What about when the person gets to the museum? Are they greeted by a friendly staff member or volunteer? Is the museum accessible to everyone? How does the museum support its community? And also, how do they keep in touch with you after they've left?
This past weekend, my daughter and I were visiting Cape Cod. We were in Sandwich, Massachusetts, and we visited the Heritage Museums and Gardens. This place, oh my gosh, their visitor experience from beginning to end was amazing. I'm sure I'll talk about it on another episode, but let me just kind of give you the highlights. So tickets are required.
[00:10:00]
We went online and purchased tickets in advance. The website is great. It is one of the best museum websites I have ever seen. I'll leave it in the show notes so you can go and check it out. So we get to the museum. They have construction going on right now, but there were a lot of signs and directions and cones and staff there to help you navigate getting into the parking lot and then getting to the entrance. It was really easy for the visitors because they had taken the time to think through the visitor experience. It just made it a really welcoming and well-thought-out experience for us.
We get to the ticket booth and show our tickets, also a very easy process with very friendly staff.
[00:11:00]
Heritage Museums and Gardens is three indoor gallery spaces and then 100 acres of outdoor gardens. It is also quite hilly. My daughter and I were really excited to get our steps in, but I can see where the amount of walking and the type of walking might be tough for some visitors. They have even thought of that too. There was, at the entrance, a man with a golf cart. And he was introducing himself to everyone that came through and letting us know that he would be driving around in his golf cart.
If we needed a ride or if we needed anything, to just flag him down. And sure enough throughout the day, we saw him driving around on the golf cart and checking in on the visitors. It was so nice. It was just such a nice touch.
[00:12:00]
All of the staff, the docent at the car museum, the staff that were out working in the gardens, the staff that were in the art gallery, everyone was not only friendly, but so informative. They had so much information. The visitor experience was top notch. When I got home a few days later, we received a follow-up email because to buy the tickets, you had to give your email address. So they have captured my email address. And I got a really nice email that really said, "Thank you for your visit. We hope you enjoyed your time here. We enjoyed hosting you, we're so delighted that you came to see us."
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Then the next part of the email was about turning your ticket into a membership.
It was just really, really well done. They checked all of my boxes for a good visitor experience. And I know that it's going to be something that I recommend to friends. I know that it definitely will be a part of my next visit to Cape Cod. We just had a really good time.
So that's the second part of brand love is creating a really good visitor experience that is consistent.
You want every visitor experience to be as consistent as possible. The third part of brand love is media relations.
If your audience feels like through the brand messaging that they know you really well , their visitor experience has been really good, if they see positive media coverage, it validates how they feel about you.
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I could talk about media relations all day. I've been doing media relations for museums for over 30 years now. And the important thing to remember about media relations is it really is about relationships. How you cultivate the relationships with the hardworking journalists on your media list takes time. It takes effort. And it's important to remember that it is definitely a two-way street. So how can you help the journalists on your media list? Have you positioned your curators as experts? Do you have spokespeople who know your messaging and feel comfortable speaking to journalists?
[00:15:00]
Because seeing your museum in the media, seeing media coverage, is going to validate how they already feel about you. So there you have it, the three things that you need to create brand love for your museum. You need to attract your ideal visitors with your brand messaging. You need to create for them an amazing visitor experience. And you need to have really good third-party endorsements, like media relations, to validate how they feel about you.
Working on these three things, brand messaging, visitor experience and media relations is my tried and true external communications strategy.
We'll be talking about these things a lot more on the podcast.
[00:16:00]
This podcast is part of my "Love my Museum" suite of services, which are professional development, resources and support for museum employees. I really hope that these services help you transform your museum into a lovely place to work while also making your museum a place that your community loves.
And I have just added something new to the "Love my Museum" suite of services, a new Facebook group just for museum professionals. And I would love to see you there. If you search "Love my Museum" under Facebook groups, it should pop up and you can go ahead and join. It's brand new and my plan for it is to share more resources like the metrics template that I shared in the last episode.
[00:17:00]
And maybe we'll have some workshops in the future and just start some conversations. It'll be a private group. So everyone that is in there will be museum professionals.
I'll put the link to the new Facebook group in the show notes. You can also find in the show notes, some more free resources. And I'll also go ahead and add Heritage Museums and Gardens' website if you'd like to take a look at that too.
That is all for today. I hope this was helpful. Please let me know if you have any questions. Send me an email or better yet, send me a message in the new Facebook group.
I'll see you next time.
