Marketing & the OCAF

The Ontario Cultural Attractions Fund’s (OCAF) mission is about expanding cultural tourism. It is about helping you attract new people from new places for new events or programs.

We do our part through funding.

Using our resources your risk is reduced, thus enabling you to help your organization grow in ways that would be impossible otherwise.

You do your part through marketing.

However, funding alone does not guarantee marketing success.

This Marketing Kit will provide a simple set of tools to help you produce a stronger marketing plan and execute it more effectively. It is meant to encourage and guide you in realizing the goals of your organization.

Marketing Success

Sound Planning + Capable Execution = Marketing Success

This equation may sound simple. At OCAF, we know that it is not.

Marketing is a discipline. The marketer must maintain optimism and objectivity in perfect balance. Optimism is needed in order to begin and to venture forward. Objectivity is required to find the best way to success.

The OCAF Marketing Kit already assumes that you are optimistic about the event or program you are planning to present. What it does is impose a degree of objectivity by asking the questions that need to be answered to guarantee the greatest likelihood of marketing success.

Some of the questions in this kit may seem obvious. Other questions may make you uncomfortable because you have not considered them before or because the answer obliges you to rethink your plans. However, you will be able to proceed more confidently and engage the support of others more easily when you have ready answers to these questions.

Planning Made Simple

No one should be daunted by the task of producing a detailed marketing plan. All sound plans result from looking at things in three different ways, always in the same order:

• Research gaining relevant knowledge about the environment and circumstances within which your enterprise must succeed or fail, followed by;
• Analysis identifying and understanding the critical factors governing success or failure that will directly and indirectly affect your prospects for success, followed by;
• Synthesis reassembling what has been learned through research and analysis into a plan of action that turns the critical factors for success in your favour or at least minimizes the inherent risks.
• Summary: gather knowledge, study it and use what you have learned to your advantage.

How to use this kit

All you have to do is answer the questions posed in each section, in order, as if you were explaining your intentions to a total stranger.

You will be able to answer most questions without any difficulty. If you need specific information, pause to look it up or flag the question for future reference.

Some sections of the plan will contain references to resources that might be of assistance to you. These will be attached in the appendices or a website will be given so that you can look up extra information. The experience of successful OCAF clients will also be cited from time to time.

For those organizations that have never taken a systematic approach to planning, we hope that this will start a habit that will last beyond the event or program being proposed to OCAF.

Feel free to browse through the material at your own pace. Conversely, you may sign in and create your own marketing plan for future use.

Analysis of your current position

Market Analysis I

It is critical that you attempt to quantify the potential audience for your program. Sooner or later, all of this effort will manifest itself in numbers: actual attendance, actual revenue, actual surplus or deficit. It is imperative that you are able to substantiate the projections upon which you will be risking your organization's resources.

How do you define your market?

It is important that you can define your market in words -- words that dictate what numbers will find their way into your marketing plans. Too often the words are vague or detached from the numbers, leading to an unrealistic set of expectations and unwelcome surprises when the actual numbers are registered. Only when you can put it into words can you give meaning to your numerical estimates. Compare the two hypothetical statements below for example:

1. Our re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham will draw from the regional secondary school population (75,000 individuals).

vs.

2. Our re-enactment of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham will draw from the local secondary school population that is enrolled in elective Canadian history classes in grades 11 and 12 (approximately 25,000 individuals), and who will respond to encouragement from teachers to attend the extracurricular weekend event (estimated at 20% or 5,000 individuals).

As these hypothetical numbers suggest, one definition of the market would lead to high, perhaps unattainable attendance goals, whereas the other definition might lead to either a scaled down event or a reduced reliance on earned revenue. The second definition will be the one that truly captures the target market groups or categories that you believe you have a realistic chance of attracting.

The market which you say you are after is the one you should pursue. Saying it clearly, so that you can attach reasonable numbers to it, will make sure that your plan is hinged on reality.

Competitive Analysis

Competition for people's attention, time, and money is a fact of life for cultural organizations. This is probably even more true for one-time or first-time events or programs than for regular activities that already enjoy a high level of awareness and perhaps a loyal following.

The Marketing Mix

Planning I

Here are some of the planning issues to keep in mind during implementation:

• Who are you trying to attract?
• What is the most effective way to do it?

There is no standard format for publicity and every situation needs individual attention. You need to:

• Plan well in advance.
• Decide on your budget.
• Based upon your analysis, decide which kinds of people you want to attract: business people, schools, private collectors, tourists, etc., and direct your publicity at those "target groups".
• Make use of free publicity --from sending media releases and good photographs to local, regional, and national press and media or to the specialist visual arts, crafts and media magazines (see media).

Planning II

A simple table can serve in this regard. However, you may have some prepackaged software such as MS Project that will make the job easier. The bare essentials will look something like this:

Pricing

You may have considered some of these factors before, but you may find it helpful to consider their combined effects on the prices you were thinking of charging. Start by jotting down your intended admission prices and revising them upwards or downwards as you work through the checklist below. If your organization will be capturing revenue through ancillary sales, such as food or merchandise, you may wish to repeat this exercise. The prices you come up with, and any rationale that occurs to you in the process, could be included in your marketing plan.

Impact of Pricing

If you revise your pricing scheme, make sure that the effects are reflected in your estimates of attendance and revenue. You may discover that the pricing that yields the highest income might not be desirable if it works against other objectives for the event.

Social Media Tips

Facebook

1. Facebook gives priority to images- post your info with a corresponding image to get more views!
2. If you’ve created an event: Put important, long-lasting information on your PAGE as it ‘lives’ there after your event has past & more people (not just those who clicked ‘attending’) will be notified.
3. Ask people to ‘like’ your page, they wont’ know to do it otherwise!

Twitter

1. 4-1-1 for every single tweet about your company, create four ‘shout outs’ or mentions to other companies (e.g. ‘Follow Friday’ #FF and then list friends of your company’s)
2. Asking your followers to ‘Retweet or RT’ get a higher response rate (the full word yields higher results)
3. Hashtags (# + keywords) heighten your search-ability (2 hashtags are optimal- more than that is too many)
4. Twitter users are most active between 10am-4pm, with the most activity around 3pm.
5. 140 characters may seem small, but it’s your chance to tell a quick and direct story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn. #Hemingway)

Both: Schedule your posts and tweets in advance: This saves you time and helps you plan ahead. You can do this directly in Facebook, and you can use Hootsuite or Tweetdeck to schedule your tweets. (Be careful to monitor these to make sure they are still relevant!)

Connect your Facebook account to your twitter and not vice versa. Facebook is for longer more important posts and images. Twitter is in-the-moment and smaller updates in addition to Facebook alerts.

Tagging: Check to make sure the people you are mentioning in your posts are available to ‘tag’ on both Facebook (as a page- not individuals) and on Twitter. Tag them accordingly. If you’ve connected Facebook to Twitter you will have to send a second tweet as Facebook usernames and Twitter usernames are different. Reword, tag the twitter profile and send!

Be active! Reach out to your followers using your individual voice- no generic responses. Respond quickly- social media happens in real time. If you can’t dedicate more than a few minutes to social media split it up through out the day. And be consistent about how you reply and when you post- your followers like routine (not monotony) and will appreciate your efforts!

Most importantly: think about what you can do for your audience. How can you best serve them? Pass on important, entertaining and share-able information to create active followers!

Media

When Choosing a Media Mode ask:

Evaluation

The measures of success for your plan are fairly simple. Did you achieve or exceed your attendance and revenue targets? Were you able to achieve them within the marketing budget you set for yourself?

• If so, your marketing plan has been a complete success!
• If not, you have likely only partially achieved your targets.

Go over your plan that documents the process by which you arrived at your targets and strategy and identify where the actual results deviated from your estimates. Once you have found them, you can take satisfaction in the partial gains you have made and can be confident of improving on your results next time.

The only clear failure of a marketing plan is when none of the anticipated benefits are realized and no one can understand why.

Marketing Evaluation

10 Checkpoints