
What does value, return on investment, and success mean for your organisation? In arts and culture marketing, especially for digital projects, measuring impact can be challenging. The metrics that matter most often stem from your project’s original goals—whether it’s increasing ticket sales, engaging younger audiences on social media, or deepening audience connections through a brand refresh.
Value goes beyond financial returns; it encompasses the broader impact on audiences, communities, and your mission. For arts and culture organisations, return on investment might mean higher ticket sales or donations, but it could also reflect increased inclusivity, engagement, or brand awareness.
As sponsors of the Let’s Get Real conference in 2025, themed around Value, we’re taking a look at how arts and culture projects can define, measure, and communicate their value effectively.
Setting the right goals
To measure value effectively, it’s essential to define clear goals that align with your organisation’s priorities. Consider what success looks like for your digital marketing efforts. Are you aiming to:
- Attract new audiences?
- Increase engagement with existing audiences?
- Drive revenue through ticket sales or memberships?
By setting specific, measurable goals, you can ensure that your marketing activities are purposeful and aligned with your ambitions.
Make sure that you understand your goals fully from the start. You’ll also want to make sure your team knows and understands these goals, so you don’t run into problems later down the line when others may have had different objectives in mind.
Tracking metrics and KPIs
You’ll also want to figure out the ways that you will accurately measure and continuously track these goals.
‘Metrics’ are the ways of measuring performance through a standard quantitative system. There are many different metrics you could measure for digital or marketing performance, and it would be nearly impossible to keep track of all of them regularly. So it’s important to know which ones are actually valuable for you.
You can establish ‘KPIs’, which are ‘Key Performance Indicators’, to know which metrics are the right ones you want to track over a period of time.
- Some KPIs might be easier to establish. For example, if you’re looking to grow the number of people who know about your organisation through social media, the KPI you’d be looking for are ‘Impressions’, and you might want to measure this monthly to see growth.
- Some KPIs can be a little bit more complicated. If you’re having changes made to your website, and you want to know if users are finding it easy to navigate, you might want to track metrics like Average Session Duration or Exit Rates through your website analytics.
- If you want to see that your ticket sales are increasing through digital advertising, your KPI will likely be focused on clicks and conversions.
- But if you’re looking to see your broader social impact or audience engagement, you might be better off conducting qualitative research surveys or interviews to better understand your users or audiences, and establish some KPIs that work for you, like brand awareness or experience impact.
Tools you can use
Fortunately, digital marketing platforms offer a wealth of tools to help you track and measure your performance:
- Google Analytics: Monitor website traffic, user behaviour and conversions. For example, you can track how many visitors come to your site from a specific campaign.
- Social media insights: Platforms like Instagram and Facebook provide data on reach, impressions and engagement, allowing you to see which posts resonate with your audience.
- Email marketing platforms: Measure open rates, click-through rates and sign-ups to assess the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
- UTM tracking: Add UTM parameters to links to pinpoint exactly where your traffic and conversions are coming from.
These are just a few of the tools that can enable you to connect your marketing efforts with tangible results, helping you demonstrate value to funders and stakeholders.
Taking a holistic approach to value
While data is vital, it’s important to remember that not all value can be measured in numbers. Many outcomes, like building audience loyalty or fostering inclusivity, are just as important but harder to quantify.
And there are sometimes data barriers to accessing qualitative KPIs, even for key marketing channels. For example, a social media campaign might drive a lot of awareness about your upcoming show or production, but the likelihood that you can measure click-throughs or ticket conversions from your posts? Close to zero. For that, you’d be better off combining a series of social media posts to promote awareness, followed by a strong and targeted newsletter to drive click-throughs.
A holistic approach to ROI considers both quantitative and qualitative outcomes. For instance, audience feedback, testimonials and case studies can provide powerful evidence of impact, complementing the data from analytics tools.
Tell your story
As a marketer, you’ll know that your audience’s experience with your organisation can’t just be measured in numbers and quotes.
You’ll also know that communicating this to stakeholders or funders can be tricky.
Understanding what drives value in your marketing – and the journeys that your audiences take through your digital presence to achieve real outcomes – can be the difference between creating iterative, successful, valuable campaigns or projects, versus doing the same thing as usual and hoping it works.
Demonstrating value in arts and culture marketing is about more than just crunching numbers. It’s about connecting your efforts to your mission, celebrating your successes and showing stakeholders the value you bring to the community.
At HdK, we work with arts and culture organisations to help them optimise their digital marketing and communicate their impact effectively. If you’d like to explore how we can support you, get in touch – we’d love to hear from you.