Museums are the fastest-growing sector in the tourism industry. In fact, the market size of museums has risen to $16.3B in 2022, with an expected annual growth rate of 6%. This means that museums are becoming increasingly important to tourists around the globe.

Museums are places where history is preserved and displayed. They offer visitors a chance to explore the past through exhibits, artifacts, and other art forms. The main purpose of a museum is to preserve cultural heritage and educate the public about the arts, science, and history.

Museums, therefore, need to create interesting exhibits and events to draw crowds. However, in today’s competitive landscape, attracting new visitors becomes a challenge, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although museums offer educational and entertaining activities for everyone, they struggle to reach out to their audiences. Here are some museum marketing ideas to consider to attract new customers and keep existing visitors.

1. Invest in Building Partnerships
A museum needs to embrace the cultural heritage of the community it’s in. So, find local restaurants, attractions, parks, or events to partner with. Also, find other museums or nonprofit organizations with a similar cause or audience to yours and partner with them to give your visitors the best museum experience through sponsored events or co-marketing campaigns. Also, it’s a great marketing strategy to reach new audiences or museum visitors.

2. Embrace Technology
You can create a museum website that allows visitors to schedule visits, get more information on a particular image, or guide them through your museum exhibits. Also, you can create an app for the same. This way, visitors can find you and go through all the activities you provide whenever they are looking for fun activities within that location. If you constantly update this information or include content marketing and SEO, you will get repeat visitors who can also help you get new visitors through word-of-mouth referrals.

3. Encourage Social Media
Another great museum marketing strategy is creating exhibits that encourage visitors to promote the museum on their preferred social media platform. Museums mostly encourage visitors to enjoy the artifacts and images before them without using smartphones. As much as this helps visitors savor the moment, technology can be a great win for the museum.

Digital marketing can work effectively for your museum. If visitors take pictures of the images or selfies inside the museum and share them with their social media followers, your museum gets to reach many people from a single photo. Allowing them to talk about artifacts or share images online is a great way to boost visibility and increase brand awareness through social media marketing. Also, you can create a hashtag to use and encourage them to tag you in their posts as a digital marketing strategy. User-generated content is a great museum marketing plan.

4. Create Unique Events
Your art museum doesn’t need to be boring. For new visitors to become repeat customers and, finally, members, you need to think creatively. You need to give them enough reason to come back. Creating unique events all year is a great way to keep them coming back. Think of sleepovers in the museum, public art exhibits, creativity competitions, happy hour at regular intervals, and more.

5. Create Community Exhibitions
Your regular visitors are the community members. Hold new exhibitions and feature local artists to draw their attention and make them feel the museum is a part of their community. You can also liaise with local schools to encourage students to be creative as part of your marketing efforts.

6. Collaborate With Local Influencers
Reaching out to local publishers or newspapers is a brilliant marketing strategy for your museum. But as a new marketing plan, contact local blogs and websites to use the digital space. Also, try advertising your events on online radio like Spotify instead of traditional radio broadcasts to draw the attention of potential visitors.

7. Use Programmatic Advertising
This advertising allows you to reach a highly targeted audience cost-effectively. Try retargeting website visitors and sharing new events and exhibitions to increase awareness.

8. Use Digital Signage
Visuals help you engage visitors. Place digital signage screens in your museum with content ideas, from quizzes to jigsaw puzzles and quotes. You can also reward visitors who complete the puzzles the fastest or get the quizzes correct. This engagement allows your visitors to have a memorable museum experience.

9. Be Different
If you visit different museums, you find that they do things similarly. Find out how you can make your museum unique by offering a novel experience and creating a much-needed disruption

culture. This could include changing your tone and appearance or giving visitors more of what they need. Once your visitors are happy, you have done enough marketing.

10. Adjust Your Opening Hours Accordingly
Adjust the conventional opening hours to accommodate working adults or professionals looking for after-work activities to unwind. You will draw in more visitors when you embrace flexible opening hours as it demystifies the traditional sacred space of a museum and makes it accessible and practical.

Ready to Market Your Museum?
Museums are places where people can engage with the arts, humanities, and sciences. And you don’t need a huge budget to market your museum. Instead, incorporate these marketing ideas to grow your museum and increase its visibility.