Utilizing Technology as a Marketing Tool

Marketing tools have evolved over the years. From ads in newspapers, to direct mail, email marketing, digital adverting, and now social media platforms. The evolution of marketing has surely been driven by technology, especially in the last several decades.

Today, marketing success is quantifiable. We can tell how well a campaign performed by how many people visited a site, clicked on an ad, or purchased with a code. It’s built-in to most platforms. Technology makes a marketer’s life easy.

Different technologies, whether it's social media, Google Analytics, or optimizing systems, are helping organizations achieve their goals more easily. The best part of using technology as a marketing tool is that you can assume control of your marketing process. You can use your marketing budget to target only your desired demographics instead of wasting money on connecting with people who don't care about your cause. The highly targeted approach of today's technology is helping non-profit cultural organizations break all marketing boundaries and connect with vast audience to grow their organization. Technology can offer quality data that helps you create targeted marketing strategy and use your investment targeting your desired audience. This approach can help you sell tickets, increase attendance at events, and promote your theatre programs.

Why do Cultural Non-Profits need to Utilize High-Tech Marketing Tools?

Creating digital ads, social media posts, and emails are the marketing tools most organizations use today. Technology is the basis on which those campaigns are built upon, a far step from traditional print or broadcast advertisements.

Improved technology has updated the marketing and advertising world. Technology has made it possible to connect and market your organization to people across the globe. With breakthrough technology tools, funds that took years to collect can be accumulated in a few days. You can boost brand recognition and awareness by utilizing cutting-edge technologies to spread your message. Hence, the right use of technology can help you succeed in your cause.

Using technology is key to successful marketing, but what does that mean? If you’re sending well-written emails, running social media ads, and updating your website regularly – does that constitute utilizing technology for marketing. Well, yes but there is so much more to it.

Technology Tools for Promoting Non-Profit Cultural Organizations

Here are some technologies that can help you to create a game-changing measureable marketing strategy.

Marketing Analytics

In past years, a tremendous amount of marketing efforts have been focused on counting, questioning, researching every aspect of consumer behavior so that companies can adjust their offerings and present their customers with what they want and what they are willing to spend money on. This was an involved process. Market research teams were engaged to go out and ask the questions, quantify the answers and provide solutions. Today, marketing analytics offers this information in real time. A marketer can determine what people want by their online behavior. What they clicked on, where they prefer to shop, etc. There is no longer a need to ask the questions. They are provided by analytics if the marketing campaign is set up properly.

Analytics helps you understand the success of each campaign. It offers conversion rates, cost per click and ultimately cost per new customer. It can help you become a super-power of marketing as knowledge is power. But most importantly, it enables you to develop a marketing strategy that will provide better results next time.

All the numbers are great right? You have the power of knowledge. But how do you utilize it? What does it all mean? CultureOwl makes sure that you can analyze your marketing results. Analytics are built-in. We empower our members with quantifiable analytics so that they know what is working for them and what isn’t.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is an impressive tool that turns a simple website into a weapon to connect with a larger audience. But why do you even need SEO? Is a simple website not enough to engage with your audience? The search engine scans assess your entire website to decide whether it's relevant to what people are searching for. Web browsers check the titles, copy, pictures, and overall technology usage of a website to rank results. If the web browser determines your site is worthy and useful for users, they rank you higher on search engines.

So, having an optimized site is vital for non-profits to connect with a large audience. Knowing the importance of SEO for reaching large audiences, the CultureOwl platform converts all uploaded events to automatically optimize each entry. It adds the proper tags, adds the correct title and presents web crawlers with clean, up-to-date code to make it easy to find and present to web searchers.

Social Media

Social media platforms utilize the best of technology. Algorithms are written daily to quantify usage and learn about each user in depth. What they like to watch, who they associate with, what they are interested in, etc. Even who they are likely to vote for, but that’s for another day. The technology behind social media is a marketer’s dream. Since knowledge is power, what better way to gain power than utilizing social media for marketing purposes. The technology is built-in. You simply have to tap into it.

CultureOwl offers paid social media third-party services to its members. We understand the goals of cultural organizations and we know how to tap into social media to provide results. Social media marketing is offered as an extension to CultureOwl’s multi-channel marketing platform. It completes the circle, offering powerful tools for marketing arts, culture and entertainment – and all at rates geared for non-profit cultural organizations.

Conclusion

Cultural non-profits like theatres, museums, event planning organizations, festival planning companies, and others with limited marketing budgets don't need to compromise on their marketing. They can utilize technology as efficiently as any other organization. You just need to choose the right approach. Leveraging cost-effective tools can help you collect considerable donations or increase ticket sales. It can help you invite more people to your events, gain higher engagement, and boost brand awareness. Once you decide to utilize the right technology as a marketing tool, you'll be on the path to achieving your marketing goals. Just be wise in selecting the right platforms!