Survey Advertising Museum Apps I BalticMuseumsXchange 20190912 - Knowledge Baltic Museums Knowledge Baltic Museums

Several members of the student consultancy in Stralsund (Studentische Unternehmensberatung, SUS) joined forces to develop a guide for advertising of museum apps (Bring Your Own Device, BYOD) as a support for the project “BalticMuseums: LoveIT!”. Within the Baltic Museums Beratungs GbR they researched online and in interviews towards building their own recommendations to the BalticMuseums community.

Step 1 – Website Search

At the beginning of the project, the focus was on getting an overview about how often and where applications in museums are used. A research on 52 museum websites accomplished that. For a more detailed research on single museums and their advertising measures. It was checked if the museum has an application or a similar guide for the visitors how and where the app is advertised. The last try of checking if the museums are offering those features was to use the search bar on the website for searching “application”.

Step 2 – Interviews

The next step was developing a suitable questionnaire to obtain precise information about the advertising measures applied to the app and what recommendations the museums can give in general. In the following, the focus was on museums that offer their visitors the opportunity to use an app for their smartphone and thus have experience in this area. The questionnaire formed the basis for the interviews, which were conducted in both written and telephone form. This gave us 9 usable and meaningful outputs of telephone interviews but just one completed questionnaire, completed in written form.

Step 3 – Recommendations

The interview phase was followed by an analysis of the collected information, during which the information collected was viewed and evaluated. Based on this analysis, strategies for advertising an app in the museum sector were derived. As we found out that it is important to not just promote the digital offers but to avoid common mistakes of museums and appearing problems of the usage, we started to give solution ideas for the most common problems which hold the visitor from the use and how to improve the efficiency of marketing in general. Then the results were expanded with own considerations and in consultation with marketing professors.

Webinar BalticMuseums Xchange 12.09.2019

In this Webinar, Philip Werner, head of the project team from Stralsund Student Consultancy, presented the results of the survey and the students’ recommendations to the project team. Further in this session, we discuss ideas about gamified/playable ads.