In the world of arts and culture, having a robust CMS platform is crucial for venues looking to thrive and grow their audience. Integrations, automation, and personalisation are key features that can transform a venue’s digital presence and make website management more efficient for digital marketing teams.
Seamless integrations with ticketing and email systems streamline operations and reduce manual work, allowing teams to focus on creative and strategic initiatives. Automation ensures that routine tasks are handled efficiently, saving time and reducing errors. Meanwhile, personalisation enhances the visitor experience by tailoring content to individual preferences, driving engagement and loyalty. For venues aiming to thrive in a competitive landscape, these features are not just beneficial. They are essential.
Why your website is more than just a shop window
Your website should be a dynamic platform that serves as the cornerstone of digital engagement and customer interaction. Beyond showcasing events, artist information and venue details, a website provides a multi-faceted experience that can educate, entertain, and build lasting relationships with customers.
It acts as a powerful marketing tool, offering personalised content, seamless integrations with other digital tools, and automated processes that enhance operational efficiency. Moreover, a well-designed website fosters trust, boosts brand credibility, and drives conversions through data-driven insights and tailored user experiences. In essence, a website is not just a display; it's a powerful engine for business growth and customer connection.
But this is reliant on having a website that integrates with your event planning system, segments your audience and collects data about them so you can deliver information that’s most relevant to each audience profile.
That’s why it’s important to regularly audit your website and evaluate its performance. In this website audit checklist, we’ll help you evaluate what features your website might be missing and how it could be impacting website management and digital marketing performance for your venue. We’ll focus on three key areas that all venue websites should consider: integrations, automations and personalisation.
Integrations
- Does your website integrate with an event planning tool e.g. YesPlan, Artifax etc.?
- How does your website integrate with your ticketing system?
- Does your ticketing system talk to your event planning tool?
Considerations
Integrations offer venues a wide range of ways to streamline processes and make website management easier. By connecting all of your systems with one another, you can enable data to flow between them all, giving you a single source of truth and unifying your digital marketing efforts.
This will avoid having your tools and data in separate silos, leaving you unable to see trends and common themes. Your website could help bring all these disparate tools and data together via integrations, enabling you to build a much clearer picture of your audience’s needs and purchasing behaviours.
Integrations aren’t always the simplest things to set up though. So it’s worth speaking to your web developer to see how this could work for you and your existing website. We believe that it should be an essential part of your website – that’s why CultureSuite’s CMS, called Peppered, offers seamless integrations right out of the box, allowing you to bring all your tools and data together in one place.
To learn more about how data can flow between your event and ticketing platform, we wrote about how Peppered websites can connect to YesPlan and Tixly.
- How do you add events to your website?
- How do you add non-ticketed events to your website?
- Can you control where the ‘book now’ button goes?
- What form tools (if any) are you and colleagues using to collect data?
- How many of them talk to your ticketing system?
- Do you have Google Analytics or similar on your site?
- Do you have something like HotJar or MS Clarity on your website?
- Are you using that data when making decisions?
Considerations
With so many events running throughout the year, automating this process can save a huge amount of time, allowing you and your team to focus on more strategic work – this is why integrations are essential for venues. With a single click, you can publish all your events, and any future events, quickly and easily.
But it doesn’t have to end with ticketing or event planning tools. Integrating your website with form software, analytics platforms, UX tools, marketing systems, and practically anything else will enable more efficient, effective workflows.
Data from these tools can then be extracted to inform decision-making and future strategy.
Automations
- Do you have a double opt-in step for any sign-up forms for marketing content?
- Are you actioning opt-outs everywhere that data is held?
- Are you deleting data in an appropriate timeline?
- Are you able to change an event start time in one system and have this information update automatically across your website?
- Have you tested what happens if someone signs up for every type of communication? Are they getting bombarded?
Considerations
If you’re collecting data about your audience, it’s imperative that you comply with Data Protection and GDPR laws to avoid potential fines and penalties. This might seem like a daunting process if you don’t have this set up but it can easily be rectified with automation.
The same can be said of changes to events in your planning tools. But again, if your event planning tool is seamlessly integrated with your website and your website automatically updates based on the latest information, then you won’t have to lift a finger to ensure your web visitors have access to accurate event details.
There are many ways in which automation can be utilised to improve operational efficiency and make digital marketing more effective. It depends on what systems you use and how you’ve connected them together. If you want to learn more, reach out to the CultureSuite team.
Personalisation
- Who are your key audiences?
- Are they represented on your website and socials?
- Does your imagery and videos represent a diversity of people?
- Is your website content accessible for a range of abilities and audience needs?
- Are you asking appropriate questions? some text
- Do you need to know someone’s year of birth?
- Do you need to know their gender?
- Have you offered pronouns?
- Does your prefix field allow for alternatives to ‘Mr’ ‘Miss’ and ‘Mrs’?
- Do you allow for suffixes?
- Do you allow for last names with hyphens or other characters?
Considerations
Personalisation is crucial for creating a meaningful connection with your audience. By understanding and reflecting the diversity of your key audiences, you can make your website more relatable and engaging. This involves representing different ages, sizes, expressions, and abilities in your imagery and videos, ensuring everyone feels seen and valued.
Moreover, accessibility should be a priority. Implementing features like alt text for images, captions, sign language options, and good colour contrast can make your website more inclusive. Ensuring your content is accessible to people with disabilities not only broadens your audience but also demonstrates your commitment to inclusivity.
Sometimes, this isn’t always easy to get right. But we’ve found that intention matters. For example, symbols for people who are visually impaired or hearing impaired are relatively easy to understand. What about those with hypersensitivity? There’s no universally agreed-upon symbol for this, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying to speak to this audience.
Asking the right questions during data collection will help you action any personalisation initiatives. Only request information that is necessary and be sensitive to privacy. Offering options for pronouns and providing alternatives to traditional titles (Mr., Miss, Mrs.) can make your forms more inclusive and respectful of individual identities. Allowing for suffixes and special characters in names ensures that all users can input their information accurately.
Having the right website platform will enable personalisation. With Peppered, visitor tags allow you to segment your audience appropriately allowing you to market to them more effectively or simply fulfil their needs accordingly.
Next steps
These questions give you a starting point to assess the effectiveness of your website and the systems that power it. If you don’t use integrations at all, then that’s a great place to start. If you do use integrations, are you using them to full effect?
With the right systems and processes in place, your website can save you a huge amount of time and engage more effectively with audiences.
If you want more help auditing the performance of your website or simply want to learn more about integrations, automation and personalisation, book a call with the team at CultureSuite.
- Want to see how Peppered works?
We’re proud of how easy we make it for venues to manage their website. That’s why live event venues around the world trust Peppered. Book a personalised demo. - Looking to partner with us?
If you’re a technology provider, design agency or supplier for the arts and culture sector, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us here. - Want to learn more about digital tools for venues?
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