The Internet offers opportunities to sell to new markets and widens the horizons of any business; there are significant opportunities to reduce costs, increase personalisation and get your message across to customers in ways that find new visitors, and drive previous visitors back for repeat visits.
Key to an effective website is to know exactly what you want it to achieve. Are you going to enable customers to buy tickets online; in which case, it needs to be set up with a payment system such as PayPal or GooglePay. You can add this yourself by visiting the relevant sites, or brief your designer on how you want it to appear. On the other hand, if it is primarily designed as a showcase for the museum and designed to help new customers find out what you have to offer, it will need to be designed differently. Knowing exactly what it’s for will lead to a strong site; make sure any designer is properly briefed.
It’s important to remember that you’re not just competing with other museums or other visitor attractions; you’re competing with any other entertainment that people could choose to spend their time and money on. A good design can make the difference between a customer choosing your museum instead of a trip to a park, lunch in a restaurant or a matinee at the theatre or cinema. Because all this competition for attention is only a click of a button away, you have to attract people immediately, and hold on to them once they’ve arrived.
An essential element of this is to follow the rule of thumb that the customer should never have to click through more than three pages before they find what they’re looking for. Similarly, it needs to be immediately apparent on each page where the customer needs to click, in order to go to the next page down. Seth Godin describes this issue as ‘where’s the banana?’: when a monkey has lots of trees to choose from, he will only jump into the one where he can see the banana on the branch. Not that museums see their customers as monkeys (apart from natural history museums, perhaps), but the point is worth bearing in mind.
How do you drive potential visitors to your web site in the first place? The internet is a big place, and you want to find ways of directing people to your site without them necessarily needing to type the museum’s name in. There are two main ways to do this: search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC). SEO is finding ways of pushing your website near the top of search engines like Google and Yahoo!; research shows that if your site isn’t in the top half of page results, customers are unlikely ever to visit you. SEO is achieved by ensuring that the words most relevant to your business are included in the text of the pages themselves; so that they are most likely to be found by the web crawlers that push one site above another. Think about the kind of words your potential visitors are likely to type into a web search, and ensure they feature enough on your web pages. For example, if you happened to be the only museum in the country to have genuine exhibits from James Bond, Star Wars and Star Trek, highlight this in the text.
Pay per click ads are the sponsored links you see appearing at the top and at the right of search engines. You pay the provider a certain percentage of each click-through, as a fee for being featured in this way. Build in measurement of this (i.e., you can see exactly how many click-throughs you get from customers, and you can also monitor how many of these click-throughs convert into actual ticket sales. That way, you can start to know whether or not the investment in PPC is paying out for you.
Keep the home page ‘live’ if you can, adding news or special offers on a regular basis; this will stimulate return visits, if customers know they’re likely to see something different when they look you up. If you run regular events to encourage repeat visits, ensure these are kept live on the homepage too; and similarly, if you are selling merchandise from the museum shop, ensure that’s on the landing site as well. Make sure you provide full contact details in a section that is easy to find on the web site. (It’s now a legal requirement that any website contains the kind of company information that you are required to have on your correspondence.)
Think about incentives; do you have a restaurant and café on site; do you have free parking; does entry to the museum give free or discounted entry to other attractions nearby? If so, make sure these are publicised on the website as they can make the difference for an interested, but not committed, potential visitor. If you don’t have any of these things, consider introducing them! Discount arrangements with other local attractions can be mutually beneficial, customers feel they’re getting an offer that is genuinely special, and you will find that it is unlikely to cut into your profits because there will be a number of new customers who do not take up the discounted offer elsewhere, or who would not have come to you at all if the offer had not been made.
Creating and maintaining a presence on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace is a cheap and effective way of building your visibility, attracting new visitors, and encouraging previous visitors to return. This is particularly useful if you’re attracting teenagers or children; but contradictory to popular belief, social networking sites are not just used by the young, and penetration amongst older customers is increasing all the time. You may find that Facebook et al are more effective places to use than your own website, because it’s easier to ‘pull’ customers to the digital spaces that they already inhabit, than getting them to come to a separate site. Look at other attractions’ ‘Become a Fan’ pages on Facebook for example, and see if you can do something similar.
Finally, speak to some of your customers and ask them what they want from your web site. Find out which other museums, attractions or zoos’ sites they use, and why. Have a look at those sites to see how the competitors do it. ‘Borrow’ the ideas that work and note where your competitors’ web sites are less effective – improve on them for yours. As in all of your marketing activities, try to see the business from the point of view of the customer, and create the website in ways that are going to be what your customers want to see.
Mark Stuart
Head of Research
The Chartered Institute of Marketing
