Content Strategy: what Arts Organisations can learn from Creative Brands… and vice versa
Guest post from Tim Woodall
Hello team content,
Today, we’ve got a Good Read lined up from Tim Woodall.
Tim’s career has been spent working with creative industries (music, performing arts, book publishing), always in a marketing role. He spent six years as Marketing Director at the Philharmonia Orchestra in London – an orchestra that does amazing work with digital technology – and until last year sat on the Strategic Board of Turner Sims concert hall in Southampton. He’s currently Head of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing at Faber and Faber. In his own words, “as my day-to-day work has become ever more digital-focused, I’ve become fascinated in the relationship between arts and culture, audiences and digital technology.”
In this post, Tim will be looking at what arts organisations can learn from creative brands and vice versa. It’s a really interesting piece on the strengths and blind spots of different types of organisation and the shifting dynamics of digital consumer culture. Over to Tim…
The digital landscape has shifted dramatically in the last six months, let alone the past decade – you don’t need me to tell you that.
Generative AI is disrupting traditional search, changing how people discover and interact with content. Organic web traffic is in sharp decline due in part to Google’s AI overviews. Generative AIs have the ability to create content at scale, leading to an even greater tide of dross. It’s harder to track user behaviour (a good thing overall, but a loss of visibility all the same.)
Social media platforms kill content that links out to third-party websites. Amanda Natividad coined the phrase zero-click marketing to capture this reality: content now needs to work without expecting users to leave the platform they’re on.
For everyone looking to connect, convert and re-engage with audiences online, these shifts pose what can feel like an existential challenge. So it’s a good time to rethink pretty much everything and to learn from others.
In the last decade, I’ve been lucky enough to work both for a publicly funded arts organisation and a for-profit company in the creative sector, and I’ve seen content strategy approached from a variety of perspectives. Looking at other sectors can be a useful part of planning for this new digital world.
Creative commercial brands can be super effective at delivering content for target audiences and measuring the effect of the work, especially its impact on revenue. Cultural organisations, nearly all of whom have better stories to draw from, are freer from the dead hand of revenue KPIs yet often struggle with stakeholder pressures and unhelpful legacy ways of working.
This post explores what arts organisations can learn from creative commercial brands – and what those companies, in turn, can learn from the non-profit culture sector.
What Arts Organisations Can Learn from Commercial Brands
1. Choose channels with care
A common trap for arts organisations is trying to be everywhere at once, maintaining a presence on every social platform, running email campaigns, producing videos, blogs, etc. The result is often shallow and unsustainable. The fear is: ‘if we’re not on TikTok, board member so-and-so is going to pick us up on it.’
Commercial brands succeed by choosing their battles. Take Monocle, the media and lifestyle brand. I’ve noticed the magazine’s lack of social media presence and wondered about it, so was interested to read a post by CMO Anders Braso. “People sometimes ask why Monocle isn’t on the big social platforms: TikTok, Instagram or Facebook. The short answer: we’ve chosen to focus elsewhere.”
For Monocle, that means a carefully curated set of channels – its magazine, radio station, events – that their audience likes and responds to. They’ve recognised that, for them, social media would be a distraction.
2. Distribution matters as much as creation
This is one of a few hills I’ll die on.
Arts organisations, and I know this from personal experience, often put immense effort into content creation without devoting the same energy to distribution. The result can be excellent work that barely reaches its intended audience.
Distribution is half the strategy and it’s also harder to do, which is why it’s tempting for hard-pressed arts marketers to post and move on. It takes time, expertise and – sometimes – budget. PR, partnerships, paid media, SEO and repurposing content for different platforms all take blood, sweat and tears.
But it’s worth it. Without a distribution plan, even the best content risks vanishing into the void. Emily Kramer, Founder of agency MKT1, has a useful motoring metaphor for marketing that maps across to content strategy. The content we create is the fuel of what we do, but we need the distribution engine for it to get moving. One can’t work without the other.
3. Audience-first, not stakeholder-first
Marketers in publicly funded arts organisations face in multiple directions and are often under pressure to satisfy funders, trustees, artists, and staff. The result can be content designed to please internal stakeholders rather than serve an external audience. By their nature, commercial brands have simpler stakeholder maps. Content is for customers or potential customers. This makes everything easier. Who are my audience and where do they spend their time? What impression of our brand does this content need to leave with our audience?
It’s not easy to say what is to be done about this. You’re not going to be able to shift the underlying dynamics on you’re own. If you’re in charge of content at your organisation, you might need to be a bit tactical here, thinking ahead and keeping those stakeholder groups happy while diverting as much resource as possible towards your target audience.
4. Understand the problem you’re solving
Content works best when it addresses a specific problem. That could be an audience issue (‘X audience is engaging with us online but not coming through the door’) or a brand challenge (‘Y audience segment knows who we are but thinks we’re stuffy’). That problem, or set of problems, is helpful as a point of focus.
LEGO provides an example that always pops in business school case studies. Thirty years ago, in one of the strands of its re-imergence as a force, LEGO began to take more notice of adult enthusiasts (AFOLs – adult fans of LEGO). But how to help nurture this emerging customer base? The answer was that AFOLs were hungry to engage with each other. So, LEGO helped them to do that, creating fan forums and an ambassador network. And it was the AFOLs who created and distributed the content that drove growth in the community. (More on the rise of LEGO.)
Not every example needs to be so transformative. The equivalent for cultural organisations might be building content for lapsed visitors or digital-only audiences. Clarity about the approach will lead to content that is genuinely strategic.
5. Learn from the big players
Good content marketers are compulsive students. Large commercial brands generate endless Substack posts, white papers and podcasts dissecting what works and what doesn’t. Although their resources – especially in terms of research and ad budgets – are beyond the wildest dreams of marketers working for smaller, creative brands, there is a lot to pick up in terms of tools and tactics.
Arts marketers can do the same, looking at both the commercial and cultural worlds. Look at what the Royal Opera House, British Museum and the Tate are doing with their content. Sign up to newsletters, trawl social channels, follow the marketers creating the content.
The maxim here is simple: steal, steal, steal. Learn voraciously from the big beasts, then adapt those lessons to your scale and context.
Part II: What Commercial Brands Can Learn from Arts Organisations
6. Creativity beats optimisation
In corporate settings, content is constantly tested, optimised and refined. Ideas are workshopped; workflows are built brick by brick. Smaller SME-type brands will be more agile but will at least have commercial KPIs against their content. This drives efficiency but it also stifles originality and experimentation.
Arts organisations, by dint of their multiple sources of funding (i.e. commercial pressures are less pressing), have, at least in theory, more space to experiment. Creativity for its own sake will hopefully be prized in these organisational cultures. Arts organisations can be brilliant at jumping on a new channel, type of media, or a way of telling the story. Or it can simply be a matter of creating something beautiful for the sake of it, to see how it lands. This video from New York Ballet always springs to mind for me:
7. Pilot small-scale experiments
Arts organisations, especially smaller ones, do a lot with less. With tight budgets and limited staff resource (which could mean single roles covering what a team would cover elsewhere), content strategy might just mean carving out a bit of time to try a new idea. That sounds like a disadvantage, but it can also be dynamic and genuinely lead somewhere.
A few years ago, the London Philharmonic Orchestra started posting videos with a simple scrolling score running alongside the action of the video. Not a massive innovation but it just opened-up the music and the orchestra in a neat way. The scrolling score could also be developed and reimagined in multiple ways so they could keep going with it. The orchestra’s YouTube, Instagram and TikTok presence has soared:
Some Closing Tips
All marketers working with content face the same challenges: a rapidly shifting digital ecosystem shaped by AI, changes in search behaviour and new distribution opportunities and pitfalls. But when it comes to content strategy I think it’s better to be living in interesting times (this doesn’t apply to other areas of life perhaps…).
If you are creating and distributing content, for whatever type of organisation, I’d recommend starting with the following:
Audit your content: is it audience-first, or stakeholder-first?
Define your priority channels and start with the one that offers most potential. Build for that channel before moving on to the next.
Have a distribution plan for every piece of content you work on.
Try new ideas, iterate and don’t worry about moving on if they don’t work.
Develop a learning habit. Look out for content you like and study it.