Step-By-Step Guide to Craft a Museum Content Strategy
In 2020, museums had to keep their doors closed to the public for months. Physical attendance was forbidden and all the events scheduled for that year were called off.
The only viable option was to go digital.
Museums have changed the way they promote themselves ever since, doubling down on a museum digital strategy to engage with audiences, increase visibility, and find new streams of income.
Finances and visitor numbers won’t easily go back to pre-COVID levels: the accessibility of physical sites is more limited now, and the amount of visitors is lower.
To make an example: the number of overseas tourist visits to the UK dropped by 73%, going from nearly 40.9 million in 2019 to 11.1 million in 2020, and it declined further to 7.4 million in 2021. (Statista)
Improving your museum’s virtual offer and online presence has become essential for your sustainability.
With effective online content, you CAN achieve this.
But…
All your attempts will be met with complete failure if you don’t formulate a cohesive digital content strategy.
You need to spend your energies wisely by learning the right steps to creating a museum content strategy that fulfills your business goals.
Let’s dive into six core tactics that will put you on the right path for success! 🚀
Museum Content Strategy - Table of Contents
What Is a Museum Content Strategy? Why Is It So Important?
6 Steps to Developing a Museum Content Strategy Plan
What Is a Museum Content Strategy? Why Is It So Important?
Before jumping into how to plan a museum content strategy, let’s focus on what content strategy means.
Content strategy is the process you follow to research, create, publish, and distribute content for a targeted audience online. It’s a set of decisions defining content success, how content will stand out, and who it’ll impact.
A strong content strategy enables your museum to expand audiences, attract new leads, drive sales, and achieve other marketing goals through top-notch content.
It’s an essential component of content marketing and is based on four keys representing the foundation for your content efforts:
Four keys of a base content strategy. (Search Engine Journal)
When executed well, a museum content strategy ensures that you’re pointing in the right direction.
You develop engaging quality content that…
Meets your audience’s needs.
Reinforces your museum brand identity.
Sets you apart from the competition.
The Content Marketing Institute states that 60% of most successful companies have a documented content strategy - which implies a better performance and higher ROI.
A content strategy takes time and hard work to build but, with a comprehensive, well-structured plan, it helps you…
Make the most of your content.
Deepen your audience engagement.
Boost your overall content marketing endeavors.
Increase your museum’s digital growth.
Having a museum content strategy is 100% better than having no strategy at all!
6 Steps to Developing a Museum Content Strategy Plan
How do you create content for a museum?
What is in a digital strategy?
To market your museum successfully and get long-lasting results, you need to build a content strategy.
There are six core steps to follow. Each of them is a fundamental piece of the overall framework. But if you skip a passage or overlook some details, your plan won’t work.
Let’s look into it!
1. Brand Building Foundations (Topic Areas, CDF, Goals)
When setting a content strategy plan, first analyze the foundations of your museum (what drives your whole strategy).
Topic Areas
Define your topic areas: What is your area of expertise? What will you write about? What does your audience want?
Creating content provides the audience with valuable and accurate information (through blogs, articles, ebooks, videos, podcasts, etc.) - when you do this consistently, you grow your online authority and build trust with your people!
Choose topics based on what is relevant to:
The services you offer.
Your audience’s needs.
Your industry.
The topic area is where your expertise and audience’s wants align, but it’s also “the big umbrella” under which lots of related sub-topics exist.
Remember to satisfy your public’s specific questions and pain points - this way, you’ll pinpoint the right topic areas and related topics.
CDF (Content Differentiation Factor)
Tying your expertise to your Content Differentiation Factor is another key fundamental.
The CDF refers to what sets you apart from the tons of art institutions out there and how you help your audience differently. It’s about your unique perspective in the field, your background, mission, and values.
Your CDF is the starting point of a high-ROI, impactful content strategy. (Express Writers)
Content Goals
Before launching a museum content strategy, it’s important to establish clear business goals - without them you can’t develop a proper plan nor measure your content success!
What do you expect to get from creating content?
What is the ROI you want to see?
Having SMART goals in mind will help you set the foundation of a strong strategy that revolves around three main areas.
The so-called “content goals” of content marketing are:
SEO Rankings: content ranked on Google for a keyword that is relevant to your business and audience.
Sales and Connection Content: content that builds trust and engagement.
Brand Awareness: content that positions you as an authority.
The three content goal buckets. (Express Writers)
Use them as a reference point for creating purposeful content that fulfills one, two, or even all three goal buckets (Will your topic idea impact SEO rankings? Does it help you increase sales and connections with your audience? Does it improve brand awareness?).
2. Target Audience Research
Audience research is an indispensable step when devising a museum content strategy.
You must know and understand your target on a deep and personal level:
Identify who you’re writing content for.
Look into their demographics, habits, preferences, and behavior.
Find out what their challenges/goals are.
Provide them with the answers and solutions they need.
This will determine the success of your content marketing activities!
You can do your research in many ways. From surveys and interviews to social listening, competitor analysis, and conversations with your existing audience and community, you’ll gather valuable intel to create your audience persona.
Source: Somiacx
An audience persona is a cheat sheet with useful details and notes describing your ideal visitor/customer.
Use this strategic tool to focus on the right people you aim to build content around; listen actively to them and ask the right questions to get the most out of your persona development.
Persona development checklist. (Wired Impact)
You’ll better empathize with your audience and discover who will be interested in your content - and by extension, your services and the type of museum experiences you offer.
Common information to include in your audience persona:
Name
Photo matching persona’s age and lifestyle
Demographics
Education
Career and salary
Habits and hobbies
Favorite brands/preferences
Social media channels
Goals/desires
Pain points/concerns
Example of an audience persona. (Culture Connect)
Come back to your persona often, update it with new information when necessary, and use it as a reference point in your content strategy.
3. SEO Analysis
Once you have a better perception of your audience, exploring the topics and information your ideal visitors/customers search online is the next step.
Target the keywords your leads are typing into the search bar and pinpoint the reasons behind users’ search (the so-called search intent).
This is where search engine optimization (SEO) analysis comes in.
SEO is an essential component of any digital content strategy. It involves keyword research - the key terms and phrases your ideal lead is searching for on Google - and works to attract qualified traffic to your museum’s website/blog.
First of all, find long-tail keywords (3-5 words in length) with low competition (terms with a keyword difficulty score of less than 50) and highly relevant to your industry. Then, create high-quality content around those keywords to stand every chance of bringing in targeted people interested in the topics you cover, who need the answers you provide, and look for the services you offer.
The “sweet spot” is where you find the most profitable keywords for your brand. (CMI)
Use keyword research tools, like SEMrush and KWFinder, to find the most relevant,
low-competition keywords for your museum content strategy.
Here’s an overview of how to find killer SEO keywords for your online content:
Start with broad seed keywords describing your industry (e.g. “museum marketing strategy”).
Find long-tail variations with a low difficulty score in the list of “related keywords” in the results.
Check keyword difficulty and search volume to choose the most relevant ones.
Weed out the keywords that are too competitive and hard to rank for.
Repeat the process with different keywords and make a list of those you could target in your content.
4. Online Authority Building
Building your digital presence and authority is another key point of your museum content strategy.
You need to define HOW and WHERE you’ll do this so as to…
Show your expertise in the field.
Nurture strong relationships with your audience based on trust.
Stand out from the competition.
Develop your brand identity.
The best way to get these positive outcomes is through your website, your “home sweet home” on the web.
The content house by Julia McCoy. (Express Writers)
On your museum website you’ll publish all of your best long-form content pieces (blog posts, landing pages, etc.). It’ll be the main focus of your content strategy efforts and the point of attraction for your leads.
You may wonder… Why not build my online authority on social media?
Because outside platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, are proprietary as you don’t fully own the content you post there. This works differently with a website that you own - you have total control over it, and the content produced there will never get lost.
So, should I ever share content on social media?
Of course!
Social media are a great tool to promote yourself and expand your thought leadership, reach, and engagement. But they mainly serve to point back to your “content house.”
Remember: proprietary platforms come and go, but your website is there to stay.
Invest in your “house,” make it user-friendly, update it regularly, and prioritize the quality of your website content.
5. Practical Content Creation
Content creation is the most important part of your museum content strategy plan.
Now that you have your audience persona, keyword list, topic areas, and content goals ready, it’s time to establish your content creation flowchart.
Optimize Content With Focus Keywords
Use the relevant, low-competition keywords you singled out in step 3 to both ideate content topics and write valuable copy around those keywords.
Base each content piece on one focus keyword and use it naturally, along with synonymous keywords, in the body text.
Be strategic about where to place your keywords in the content (title tag, headlines, meta description, page URL, etc.) - if you do better than the top results, you’ll have more chances of ranking higher on Google.
Set an Effective Workflow
A good content creation workflow is made up of three basic stages:
Ideation: come up with content ideas that resonate with your audience, and align with your topic areas and content goals.
Creation: research, draft, write, optimize, and edit your content.
Preparation: schedule the content to publish on an editorial calendar, and think strategically about where to share and promote it besides your website (via social media, emails, etc.).
Whenever you ideate, create, and prepare content for publishing, a well-organized, repeatable workflow will help you map out every step of the way without feeling overwhelmed or getting lost in the process.
Create Audience-Focused Content
Think of the audience persona you outlined in step 2 of your museum content strategy and start writing content based on where your leads currently stand in the marketing lifecycle.
The secret for an audience-focused content that works is to know which content types to create for which stage of the cycle. This way, you’ll tackle your audience’s pain points effectively and help them move through the lifecycle stages.
The marketing lifecycle chart by Julia McCoy. (CMI)
Unlike the traditional, rigid funnel, the marketing lifecycle presents a series of open pathways where personas move from one stage to another fluidly - just like in real life.
Thanks to this method, you’ll provide powerful content that speaks to your audience and ignites trust and loyalty.
Map Content Topics to Your Goals
To ensure the content you write connects with your goals, refer to the three content goal buckets I mentioned in step 1 of your content strategy.
The three-bucket topic strategy. (Content Hacker)
Your museum goals may look a bit different, but these three content marketing goals are a great starting point for your strategy.
Every content piece you’re about to create must fit inside at least one of the goal buckets (certain content types may fit into each bucket); if a content idea doesn’t align with any of those, ditch it and move on to the next idea.
By doing so, you’ll identify the best content types that will help you fulfill your goals and reach profitable results.
6. Budgeting, Content Promotion, and Maintenance
The last step for a results-driven museum content strategy involves setting a budget, promoting, tracking, and maintaining your content.
Set a Budget For Your Major Content Activities
Investing in content marketing depends on some factors:
Who you hire to help out with content creation
Web hosting
Tools and software for your content marketing activities (keyword research, email marketing, analytics, etc.)
Brainstorm how much money you plan to spend to have everything set, and what resources you currently have to make your content strategy work.
Remember: content marketing is a long-term investment that only pays off with patience, determination, and consistency. With all the necessary budget and commitment, the average time to start seeing results is between 12 and 18 months.
“If you want to build a real asset for your organization, you need to set expectations that it might take two years to see a real payoff. Content marketing is a marathon not a sprint.”
Promote Your Content
Content promotion and distribution requires just as much planning as content creation.
SEO will contribute to draw traffic to your content, but you also need to focus on where your target audience is more active on the web.
Some content distribution methods:
Social media posts
Social media groups/communities
Email newsletters
Influencer mentions
Webinars/online events
The aim is to get as many eyes as possible on your content - so choose what methods work best for you.
If you want to overcome budget limits and have a wider margin of success with personalized content, opt for organic promotion instead of jumping into paid ads. You’ll form more authentic relationships with your audience and earn their trust.
Maintain Your Museum Content Strategy
Maintaining a content strategy consists in auditing your content, tracking your progress, and measuring your results.
If you overlook these activities, you won’t have a clear idea of how far you’ve come with content marketing and whether you achieved your business goals.
Audit your old content regularly to keep it fresh and in line with your mission and values - updating blog posts and content pieces will boost your Google rankings!
In this phase, check for:
Quality and accuracy.
Relevancy to your focus keywords and user/search intent.
Outdated information, missing CTAs, broken links, or images.
Track and measure your actions to figure out if you’ve met your content marketing goals - also known as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Some metrics to track:
Organic traffic
Engagement
Reach
Social media sentiment
The bottom line is you should always optimize your museum content strategy. Revise it constantly and make changes when needed for better long-term results.
Your Museum Content Strategy Is The Secret Tool For Marketing Success
“From my experience, the biggest recent shift that many museums now must face is the reality that they now have to serve a digital audience and physical audience, and need to develop content for that potential digital visitor who may never be able to visit in person.”
The best answer to give those questioning how museums are going digital is… through content marketing!
Yep, that’s right.
Content marketing has proved to be one of the best ways to nurture audience engagement, increase brand awareness, grow online authority, and generate income. It comes with no surprise that 91% of B2B marketers already use content marketing in their marketing activity.
But to make your museum sustainable and profitable with content, it’s vital to have a documented content strategy in place.
CoSchedule reports that top marketers are 414% more likely to report success when they document their strategy. That’s impressive and shows how planning out your content marketing efforts makes all the difference!
In six clear steps, you have the map to craft a museum content strategy that works.
To reach new heights with content, refer to this guide and start forging your marketing success.
You got this! 💪
