We’re going to get to the bigger problem by the end of this blog, but first, here’s a scenario for you.

Imagine that your run an orchestra… and make it a big one. You have a concert coming up and you decide to task your entire marketing team to come up with a print campaign, to advertise at bus stops all over the city.

The company that owns the advertising spaces at bus stops tells you the exact dimensions you would need for your poster. As well as telling you the specific size, this also tells you that they the poster should vertical.

But you already knew that the poster at a bus stop should be vertical. You’ve walked past countless bus stops over the years and seen the advertising there. And not just in your city, you’ve been all over the world and seen this.

You even walk past a bus stop on your way to work. As your marketing team are organising the campaign you stop to look at the advertising there, picturing your orchestra filling the display board.

So, it then comes as a shock when it comes to launch day of your big advertising campaign, you walk past the bus stop on your way to work to admire the new poster and you see this…

*Obviously not a real photo - I’ve photoshopped this*

Does this look ridiculous to you? Of course it does.

It would be unthinkable for any dedicated marketing team of a multi-million pound arts organisation to get such a basic thing wrong. Especially when they are told what the best dimensions are and it being clear to any consumer seeing the advert that it is the wrong shape.

If it is so ridiculous and unthinkable for a marketing department to do this for a print campaign, why is it acceptable that orchestras are making the same mistake on social media?

Instagram is the 3rd largest social media platform with 2 billion active monthly users. Way back in 2015, Instagram moved from just allowing users to post square photos, to also allowing them to upload vertical and landscape photos.

Within weeks, users and content creators quickly figured out that that most effective content to post would be vertical. For the same reason as the bus stop, vertical photos allowed posts to fill the most space – in this case on a mobile phone and the Instagram app.

Since 2015, users have been used to seeing vertical content on Instagram. Just like walking past a poster at a bus stop, they know that content on Instagram should be vertical. For years, if you Google “how to do a good Instagram” you find millions of blogs and YouTube tutorials explaining that you need to have vertical photos and that the correct aspect ratio is 4:5.

And yet, the vast majority of orchestras ignore this and predominately post landscape photos on Instagram. This problem is so widespread, that I found enough examples in 5 minutes to make a whole gallery of examples.

The marketing departments of orchestras continue to make the same painfully basic mistake over and over again with no sign of change. But this is by no means the only ridiculous mistake that is being made on Instagram.

Let’s head back to our scenario of you running an orchestra. You now ask the marketing department to upload this season’s concert onto the website. Each concert should have a big call to action button that says “buy tickets” that you click on and get taken to a page to the check-out to buy your tickets.

At the end of the week, everything is published, and you go on the website to test it out. On the first concert you see the big “buy tickets” button and click it… but nothing happens. You go to the next concert to try clicking the button and nothing happens again.

After going through the whole season you find that none of the “buy tickets” buttons work. There is no link to take you to the check out.

Again, this would be ridiculous and unacceptable. You can’t imagine that a dedicated marketing department would continue to use call to actions that don’t work and have broken link on the website.

And yet again, this is exactly what some orchestras have been doing for years on Instagram!

On Instagram you can write a caption under a post. You can write whatever you like here, even the address of a website. However, Instagram has never allowed web addresses in the captions to turn into links. If you write a web address it is just plain text. There is no way to click on it, it does nothing! You can’t even copy and paste it. For years, users on Instagram have been used to seeing “link in bio” in captions as the default way for them to find links they can click on.

Despite the fact that these links don’t work, some orchestras continue to try and post them on Instagram.

You can’t click on these links and no one in their right mind is going to sit down and try and type them by hand into a browser. If the purpose of these posts is to drive ticket sales, then they fail at the most basic level that would be totally unacceptable anywhere else. Again, this is a problem that could be solved in a 5 second Google or from experience using Instagram as a user for just a day.

It’s clear that orchestras suck at Instagram and (as you can tell) it’s something I could rant about all day. But that’s not really helpful and isn’t the point of this blog. It’s more important to look at why this is all of this a sign of a bigger problem?

The classical music industry continues to struggle with ticket sales. It’s 2023 and audiences are still around 20% down from pre-pandemic levels. This is an existential threat and something that we should be discussing more. As we’re seeing cuts in arts funding globally, it’s going to become more and more important to be able to connect to audiences and convince them to attend concerts. This is both to demonstrate that we deserve funding and to generate income.

Our frequent blunders on Instagram highlight a deeper issue of complacency in both our marketing skills and our understanding of audiences. Previously, the loyalty of our existing audiences and our funding models have meant that we haven’t really been required to market well. Making incredibly basic mistakes has become acceptable as, until now, there have been no consequences. It is incredibly entitled of us to keep marketing so badly and assume that audiences will come back.

An organisation in any other industry would struggle if it constantly made the same basic marketing mistakes. Can you imagine Apple, Nike, or H&M surviving if for 5 years straight they posted about their products with links that didn’t work? In no marketplace and in no meritocracy would this approach succeed.

Since the pandemic we have seen musicians of all levels make the move online. Some of these were digital novices, with no technical knowledge or previous experience using social media. And yet they rolled up their sleeves, used Google to find out how to use social media properly, and now they are creating more appropriate digital content than multi-million pound arts organisations with dedicated marketing departments!

Now that our funding models are under threat and our loyal audience have moved on, we need to do better. We insist on excellence on stage, so there is no excuse for accepting basic mistakes offstage. And if we can’t get these simple basics right, what chance to we have of getting more complex and meaningful marketing strategies right? If we can’t be bothered to check if the link to buy tickets works on any of our posts for the last 5 years, do we deserve to sell any tickets?

As there are more demands on audiences’ time and money, we are competing against organisations outside of our industry. For our industry to survive in this free market, it is vital for marketing departments to raise their game to bring audiences in. It’s time for us to stop making basic mistakes, taking our audience for granted, and do better.

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