Our blog post highlighting mobile website traffic statistics for arts organisations has been featured in a double-page spread in JAM, the Arts Marketing Association’s quarterly journal.

The issue (which you can read online here) focussed on mobile marketing and also features contributions from Roger Tomlinson, MoMA’s Allegra Burnette and the RSC’s Amy Clarke.

We’re finally able to announce some very exciting news.

Made has acquired digital media agency Firechaser.

This means that we now count the National Theatre, Southbank Centre and Roundhouse among the prestige arts and culture clients in our portfolio. Other clients joining us include King’s Place, Young Vic, Wigmore Hall, Newcastle Theatre Royal, global construction company, Mace Group and several more.

The Drum have more on the news here.

This is our third acquisition in recent years, having taken over Fireloop Creative in 2009 and added a social media service by picking up Meshed Media last year.

We’re on a bit of a roll at the moment. We’re in the midst of a flurry of new website launches and we’re continuing to build up our international client list. More info about all of that will follow but, in the meantime, you can follow @MadeHQ on Twitter.

Cadogan Hall is a 900-seat venue that opened in 1907 in the heart of Chelsea and acts as home to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Our brief was to provide a classy and modern website that reflects its history and reputation.

In terms of look and feel, we’ve provided a complete aesthetic overhaul, which includes seasonal colour palettes, bold images and a clear, functional design.

We’ve also significantly enhanced the functionality of the site. Alongside a shop and members’ section, we’ve provided integration with Cadogan TV’s free and paid video feeds, which offers access to live and on-demand streams of concerts, performances, interviews and features.

On the ticketing side, we’ve given visitors access to seating plans for select-your-own-seat functionality including a ‘view-from-seat’ option to give customers complete control before and during their ticket transaction.

Take a look at the site at cadoganhall.com.

Not surprisingly, more and more of the work we’re doing has a mobile component to it. We recently looked at the mobile traffic stats from some of our clients’ Google Analytics profiles (all significant arts venues and organisations) and thought we’d share some top-level findings with you.

Types of mobile website

Firstly, it might help to know that there are broadly two ways to ‘go mobile’:

1. Build your site to be ‘responsive’, meaning that the layout will adapt to the size of the browser. For an example, see the site we built for Birmingham Rep (if you’re on a desktop/laptop then resize your browser to see how the site shifts depending on the width).

2. Automatically direct mobile browsers to a separate, mobile-optimised site. For example, see our work for Birmingham Hippodrome and Warwick Arts Centre

In general, we believe that it’s preferable to go for responsive design when developing a new website. That said, there are good use-cases for mobile specific sites too, especially when you want to provide a particular experience to the mobile user.

Headline stats

Here’s a sample of what we found, representing an average across a number of our clients:

• Mobile traffic splits 50:50 between mobile phones (of any sort) and iPads. Each represents ~5% of total website traffic, or 10% of total traffic on a website with responsive design.
•iPad users are the best types of mobile user, looking at more things and spending around 30% more per person.
•iPad users still don’t spend as much as desktop or laptop users.
•A mobile phone user is worth roughly 50% of a desktop user in average revenue per visit.
•A tablet user is worth roughly 80% of a desktop user in average revenue per visit.
•When people buy tickets on mobile devices, they buy the same number and value of tickets, they just do so between 20%-50% less often

It’s interesting to see the extent to which Apple devices dominate. As for other operating systems:

• Android users don’t spend so much. Certain people in the office always suspected that was the case, now they have stats to prove it.
•We identified one Windows Phone ticket-buying user. He or she buys expensive tickets and apparently has at least 2 friends (although we’re not drawing firm conclusions from a sample this size!).

If you’d like to hear more then get in touch to discuss what we can do for you.

A little more detail

Websites that account for mobile visitors get more mobile visitors. It’s as simple as that.

The screenshot below shows mobile traffic for Warwick Arts Centre, whose mobile site launched roughly one year ago. As you can clearly see, the initial spike in traffic has come to be dwarfed by continued, sustained growth.This is typical across the sites that we track.

Mobile v standard. We’re seeing higher mobile usage on sites that have accounted for mobile (20%) against those that provide the standard site to mobile users (10%).

Page views. Visitors to a website with responsive design view the same number of pages on mobile as users on desktops/laptops. For websites with mobile-specific websites or no mobile support, the figure is about 30% lower than desktop/laptop users.

Ticket buying. We’ve observed that mobile users spend the same amount per transaction (and purchase the same quantity of tickets) compared to normal users, but only half as many of them buy tickets.

The iPad effect. Users on iPads spend even more than non-mobile users per average transaction. A smaller percentage of them use the website to purchase tickets, but it’s close.

Responsive design v mobile-specific websites. We’re interested in seeing whether one style of mobile site offers a better average value per visit than the other. However, we can’t do a proper comparison due to the limitations of certain ticketing systems (are mobile ticketing pathways and transaction tracking too much to ask for?). From the information we do have, we suspect there may be a slight preference towards a website with a responsive design, with an additional improvement where there is a mobile purchase path.

Finally

We haven’t touched on the use of mobile apps here – although we have plenty of experience in that area, apps are a very different beast. We’ve also not specifically mentioned mobile-friendly select-your-own-seat ticket purchasing, although it’s something that we’re currently working on for a few clients. We’d love to show this to anyone who’s interested.

Also, here’s a little bonus for Google Analytics users – a custom report for comparing mobile v standard traffic. Just log into your Google Analytics account and then come back here and follow that link.

If you’re interested in hearing more about our work and what we can do for you then please get in touch.

The opportunities are considerable and, although some have been slow to react, many publishers have rolled out digital strategies, with the likes of Hearst, Penton Media and Random House going so far as to acquire specialist agencies.

Of course, we’ve supported our clients in this – see our work with perennial award winners Tindal Street Press for one example. The website not only allows them to showcase themselves, their writers and their publications but also upcoming events, educational resources and their recently launched creative writing programme.

Beyond their websites, publishers also need to think hard about how they can facilitate and promote online engagement with readers. While some have stolen a march in this area, others have hesitated and now find themselves lagging behind. Still, at this stage, plenty of potential remains.

Here are just three examples of digital opportunities for publishers:

1. Giving authors the support and tools they need to build their profile
When done properly, we find that individual authors are able to build much larger online followings than their publishers. We believe that publishers can play an important role in supporting this, working with their authors to ensure that they reach more people – connecting with readers and reaping the benefits.

2. Building relationships with online influencers
It’s not just the traditional broadcast media that has a voice these days – it’s not even limited to the lit bloggers, forums and online reading groups. These days everyone with a Facebook account could be considered to be a publisher and what’s more, study after study has shown that people trust recommendations from their friends more than anything else.

Publishers can take advantage of this by tapping into the conversations taking place around them, nurturing advocates and helping them to share their enthusiasm with others.

3. Building online communities around different verticals
As well as building followers for individual authors, we see a lot of scope for publishers in building online communities around particular themes – whether that be by genre, subject matter or audience. A few attempts has been made in this area and we’ve seen both good and bad examples as companies scrabble to hold their readers that bit closer. There’s certainly more to come in this area.

…and that’s really just scratching the surface. There are many more exciting developments in ebooks, apps, creative digital campaigns… the list goes on.

If you’re a publisher and have been looking to build out your capabilities in this area then we’d like to share our specific expertise and experience with you. Get in touch to find out more.

A very Happy New Year to you all.

It hasn’t taken us long to get back to business as usual and I’ll be posting news of some client wins and website launches here soon. However, before we get carried away with all that, we should mention our recent move.

Just before Christmas, our London team moved into a new office. Our presence in London grew steadily throughout 2011 and a recent growth spurt has given us the opportunity to establish a full development team, led by our Technical Director, Mark James.

The new address is 359 Goswell Road, London EC1V 7JL. If you fancy coming to visit then just drop us a line. We’re right opposite Angel tube station, so we’re well sorted for transport connections. In fact, I’m told we’re just 2 hours 20 minutes from Paris. Now there’s a thought…

And so 2011 draws to close. We’re closing our doors today and will be back in full force with more devastating puns from Tuesday 3 January (with a skeleton crew in London from 28-30 December – they’re on 0207 060 6233).

This year has been by far our busiest. We’ve turned out some fantastic work for an ever-growing stable of excellent clients and picked up an award (and another nomination) in the process.

The company has grown, with some new hires and the acquisition of a brand new social media team. In fact, we grew so much that our London team have had to move to a new office (photos coming soon).

We’ll be starting 2012 as an award-winning agency working for clients on three continents. We’ve got big plans for 2012 but, in the meantime, thanks to everyone who’s been a part of Made’s 2011.

Around the office, we often say that they should be used as a case study for how to do this kind digital/marketing integration properly. However, the small team at Warwick Arts Centre spend more time promoting their venue and shows than talking at conferences, so we thought we’d take matters in our own hands and write something about them ourselves.

This post will briefly cover:

• Main website and content management system
• Mobile-friendly website
• Email marketing
• Venue screens
• Facebook integration
• Overall strategy

Introducing Warwick Arts Centre

First of all, for those that don’t know, Warwick Arts Centre is situated at the heart of the University of Warwick in Coventry and is one of the largest arts centres in the UK outside of London, with audiences that number 200,000+ a year. There are five performance venues –  a concert hall, theatre, two studio spaces, cinema and gallery with other creative spaces around the building.

With a programme that spans everything from a classical concert series, independent cinema, theatre, pop music and exhibitions, the Arts Centre’s digital content has to appeal to a diverse audience, 30% of whom are young people under the age of 26.

The main website

This is the foundation for everything that has followed, and a piece of work that we’re very proud of. The site is powered by Backstage, the CMS that we developed specifically to handle the demands of arts centres, especially ones that present a high volume of shows across a variety of venues. Clients always tell us how easy it is to use, but under the hood the programming architecture is correct, the code is clean and it’s SEO friendly too.

Backstage also powers all of the other features that we’ve built – either by serving the required information or by bringing additional functionality into the marketing team’s existing workflow.

Mobile site

We’d seen an increase in mobile traffic across many of our clients’ website and were aware that, good as the main website is, the mobile user was not being catered for adequately. The solution was to create a mobile-friendly version of the website that works across operating systems, with most traffic coming from iPhones, followed by Android and Blackberry devices.

The effect on mobile traffic was immediate and has been sustained. This graph shows visits in the months before and after the mobile site’s launch:

Impressive, right? We think it’s still one of the better mobile website implementations we’ve seen for an arts organisation, so we were really pleased with how well it went down at the recent Arts Marketing Association conference, where it was used as an example in at least two sessions.

Email marketing

We’ve integrated listings information from Backstage into a set of flexible email templates that make marketing emails visually rich and easier to pull together. A simple system pulls in images, associated information and links to tickets with campaign URLs so they can be properly tracked with Google Analytics.

Screens

Large screens all over Warwick Arts Centre’s foyers display information about current exhibitions, upcoming shows and special offers. In fact, the screens are very flexible – they’re also used to direct people to social media profiles (for instance, reminding people to follow Warwick Arts Centre on Twitter) and will eventually incorporate comments on social media accounts.

As with the emails, this information is pulled from Backstage. For instance, when a show is identified as ‘promoted’, a slide is pulled together from available information, images and video. That slide then goes into rotation on the venue’s screens – including in the cinema, where information is shown before screenings.

Facebook

Having got their own house in order with all of the above, attention has moved to social platforms, and Facebook in particular. On the Warwick Arts Centre Facebook Page itself:

• We recently launched a new What’s On tab which links through to the main site for ticket buying. It’s actually a modified version of the mobile site, allowing us to give even greater value for that earlier work
• We’re about to give the page an optional ‘Likegate’ or splash page for the site to coax visitors to Like the Page

We’ve done a lot more with Facebook on the main site recently too. When a member of the marketing team uploads information about a new event, they can choose to have a Facebook Event published automatically (saving the effort of doing this separately). We’ve not seen that done anywhere else.

We’ve integrated Facebook Connect, giving people information about their friends’ interactions with the site when they log in. They can also RSVP to Facebook events via the show information pages and see which of their friends are attending.

Strategy

We don’t just react to briefs that we’re given – we’ve developed a good, two-way dialogue with Warwick Arts Centre, scheduling regular strategy review meetings to keep up with what’s happening at the venues. That way, we can check that everything’s working as well as it should do, suggest solutions to any problems the marketing team might have and present any new ideas that we’ve come up with.

This has allowed us (meaning ourselves and the client) to build up all of the above functionality in a measured and strategic manner. And we’ve not stopped yet – this is a work in progress, with more features on the way as we start to look at functionality offered by location-based services and more.

Get in touch

We hope you found this case study interesting. If you’‘d like to talk about how we can work with you in a similar way then please just get in touch.

We’ve enjoyed a good relationship with the team at THSH for some time, having built (but not designed) the last version of their website. That was a few years ago now, and we all felt that the design and underlying code needed to be updated.

With full control over the design and build of the site we’ve been able to improve the interface, functionality and UI. The site, which integrates with the existing AudienceView ticketing service, also has more interactive features (such as commenting) and a refreshed design.

We’re really pleased with the new site. Have a look at thsh.co.uk

We’d also recommend you check out the film about THSH that Vermillion Films have put together, called Connecting People to Music:

It’s called The Stake and aims to get young people thinking about their finances. Not in a boring, traditional way though – it’s much more remarkable and ambitious than that.

The Stake is a unique competition that gives young people the chance to decide how £100,000 is spent AND allows them to turn a bright idea in to a reality.

The site went live a couple of weeks ago and there are now hundreds of great ideas backed by thousands of stakeholders. We’re looking forward to seeing who gets to turn their idea into reality.

We’d like to thank everybody who’s been involved – especially all the young people who have helped to test the site along the way.

Have a look at The Stake, earn some stakes, back some ideas and check out the trailer below: