Does Your Arts Organization Have a Marketing Plan?
If your marketing lives in 12 different documents, this is for you. Many arts organizations have campaign calendars, budgets, and media plans—but not a true marketing plan. Here’s a practical guide to creating a marketing roadmap and annual marketing plan that aligns your team, supports organizational goals, grows audiences, and drives earned revenue.
If someone asked to see your marketing plan today, what would you tell them?
If your answer is: "Absolutely, here you go," fantastic. (Although this five-minute read may still give you a few ideas.)
If your answer is, "Well...we have the media plan. And a content calendar. And a budget spreadsheet. And a season timeline. And some notes from last year's planning meeting..." then keep reading.
Because those are all useful documents. They're just not a marketing plan.
When I returned to arts administration after a decade in the commercial agency world, one thing surprised me: how many arts organizations were operating without a comprehensive marketing plan.
Coming into a new role, I'd ask to see the plan and someone would proudly hand me the media schedule or the content calendar. Which is great. But that's like asking an architect for the blueprint to a house and getting the plumbing diagram.
Important? Definitely. But not even close to the whole picture.
A marketing plan should rally your team around a shared vision, clarify priorities, connect day-to-day tactics to long-term organizational goals, and make it much easier to communicate your strategy to executive leadership and the board.
Without one, marketing has a tendency to become repetitive or, worse, reactive. Every campaign feels urgent. Every request becomes a priority. And everyone ends up rowing hard—but not necessarily in the same direction.
Think Beyond the Current Season
One thing I've found incredibly valuable is separating marketing planning into two documents:
a two- to three-year marketing roadmap
an annual marketing plan
The roadmap answers the big strategic questions. Where are we trying to go?
The annual plan answers the tactical ones. What are we doing this year to get there?
The roadmap becomes an easy way to communicate your vision to leadership and the board. I like including a visual timeline because it's much easier to understand than forty pages of text. Then, each annual marketing plan ladders up to that roadmap.
Start with a SWOT (Yes, Really)
I know. SWOT analyses aren't exactly the hottest topic in marketing circles.
But hear me out.
A SWOT—looking at your organization's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats—is still one of the simplest and most effective ways to take stock of where your organization stands and identify the priorities your marketing strategy should address.
The trick is not treating it as a checkbox exercise. A good SWOT should be honest, specific, and evidence-based.
Instead of writing something like "We don’t sell enough tickets," dig deeper.
Why don't we sell enough tickets?
Is this a marketing issue, a pricing issue, a programming issue or something structural?
What's the underlying characteristic of our organization or business model that's creating this challenge?
A stronger weakness statement might be:
✓ Large fixed costs of venues, artist fees, and production may limit agility and require high break-even thresholds.
The goal isn't to fill in four boxes. It's to identify the handful of challenges and opportunities your marketing roadmap should actually address.
Build the Roadmap Before You Build Campaigns
Once you've identified the big opportunities (and the biggest weaknesses and threats), it's time to establish the foundations of your strategy.
Know Your Audience
Who is your audience today? Who do you want your audience to be three years from now? Those aren't always the same people.
Have you conducted an audience study in the last five years? If not, it may be time.
Audience behavior has changed dramatically since 2020. Expectations have changed. Buying habits have changed. Competition for people's time has changed.
The better you understand what motivates people to attend—and what's preventing them from doing so—the better every marketing decision becomes.
And if you discover significant knowledge gaps, planning for a comprehensive audience study might become one of the major initiatives on your roadmap.
Define the Goals
What are the organization's goals over the next three to five years?
Perhaps they're increasing earned revenue, strengthening contributed revenue, expanding audience engagement, or reaching younger audiences.
Then ask a second question: What are Marketing's goals?
Those shouldn't simply mirror organizational goals—they should translate them into outcomes Marketing can actually influence.
For example:
Increase unaided brand awareness
Grow first-time ticket buyers
Improve retention among subscribers
Expand the email database
Increase digital engagement with younger audiences
The clearer the goals, the easier it becomes to prioritize the work.
Plan for the Big Stuff
Some initiatives can't (and shouldn't) be squeezed into a single fiscal year. Maybe your 50th anniversary is approaching. Maybe your CRM has outlived its useful life. Maybe you don’t have a proper CRM.
Maybe your website no longer reflects who you are. Or perhaps your brand has gradually become diluted after years of incremental changes. Or you have a threat you need to address.
Those are roadmap projects.
Take branding, for example. A rebrand isn't just creating a new logo. It's a discovery process often led by a branding agency that explores who you are, what makes you distinctive, what your point of view is, and how you want audiences to experience your organization.
Done well, that work unfolds over multiple months, and there's lots of work leading up to it. Which is exactly why it belongs in a roadmap rather than next season's marketing calendar.
Turning the Roadmap into an Annual Marketing Plan
If the roadmap is your 10,000-foot view, the annual marketing plan is where strategy becomes action. This is the document your marketing team will actually use throughout the year.
And here's something I've learned over the years: Fight the urge to disappear into your office for three days, write the plan yourself, and unveil it at the staff meeting. Instead, build it together with your team.
I like to identify several strategic focus areas for the year and then bring the team together for structured brainstorming sessions. Not brainstorming for brainstorming's sake.
Returning to our milestone anniversary example, the year before the celebration might be devoted almost entirely to laying the groundwork. Preparing for that anniversary might become one of your strategic focus areas for the year.
Other focus areas might be more evergreen and will depend on your SWOT and what data is telling you:
Marketing the new season
Growing audiences
Improving retention
Turning ticket buyers to members
Gaining more brand awareness
People are far more motivated and invested in executing a plan they helped create.
Turning Goals into Results
Another confession: I'm also still a fan of the OKR framework. Like SWOT analyses, they're hardly the newest management trend, but in my view they're incredibly useful.
OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. The Objectives describe what you're trying to achieve and are qualitative in nature. It’s a phrase or sentence. The Key Results quantify how you'll know you've succeeded. I should add that I use Goals and Objectives interchangeably; the Goals mentioned above are the same as the Objectives in the OKR model.
For example:
Objective: Grow new audiences.
Key Results:
Increase first-time buyers by 20%
Grow the email database by 15%
Generate 2,000 qualified leads through audience acquisition campaigns
It’s important to set Key Results for each of your main Objectives.
Then come the KPIs. Think of KPIs as the monthly dashboard that tells you whether you're on track to achieve those key results. If you're consistently falling behind, it's much easier to identify the problem in March than in September. The point isn't measuring everything. It's measuring the things that matter.
Your Media Plan Is One Chapter, Not the Whole Book
Your annual marketing plan should absolutely include show marketing and your media strategy. And your revenue forecasts. Those are all essential.
But it should also answer questions like:
How are we building the brand?
What is our brand voice and our content strategy?
How are we acquiring new audiences?
How are we retaining the ones we already have?
What customer journeys are we creating?
What role do email, social media, PR, partnerships, and content each play?
How will we know whether we're succeeding?
In other words, the media plan shouldn't be the marketing plan. It should simply be one chapter in it.
Parting Thoughts
Marketing plans aren't glamorous. No one buys a ticket because you created a beautiful roadmap.
But organizations with clear marketing roadmaps and plans tend to make better decisions, ensure everyone is working toward the same goals, communicate more clearly with leadership, and stay focused when the inevitable surprises arrive.