Introduction
The web site occupies an unusual position for it is both a marketing tool and a product to be marketed.
If you can’t market your events without the web, the Internet will not solve your problems. New Media provide powerful new marketing tools. They are, however, merely tools, emerging methods for reaching out to target audiences and providing exceptional customer service with minimal expenditure of staff time.
New media cannot overcome fundamental weaknesses in your marketing program, anymore than marketing can overcome a weak product. Internet marketing must join a functioning set of efforts. With a sound foundation, marketing, advertising, customer service, and public relations will drive potential customers to your website, where their positive experiences will make them part of your audience.
Those positive experiences depend on a strong product as well as an excellent site. Ultimately, the success of MerleFest the brand drives folks to www.merlefest.org more so than the web site bringing folks to MerleFest. Our site, while extremely well done and successful with many internal characteristics of superior sites, could be better marketed in almost every respect externally. The site thrives because of good content and design, the powerful product it represents, and the aggressive marketing of MerleFest.

Fundamentals
Well-done marketing provides the energy for excellent customer service and the architecture for the entire successful event – building blocks for establishing your arts council, events, or venue as a brand. Marketing unites sales, customer service, programming, media and public relations, and advertising. Marketing involves hard work and creativity, number crunching and daydreaming. It requires looking at your events and organizations from the outside in, from the ticket buyers’ points of view. To paraphrase Peter Drucker: Marketing is the whole event or organization, taken from the audience’s point of view. A complimentary concept is that marketing consists of each and every contact you have with the any segment of public or media serving them. Marketing takes the consumer-based view instead of the product development viewpoint.
Marketing demands enumeration and evaluation of every point of contact, direct or indirect, between the event and its actual and potential audiences – These are the only things that matter to the customer. New media join these contact points. Success requires pulling the entire event in the same direction and involves more creativity than anything else you do. Clean restrooms, friendly yet efficient folks at the door, and even the smell of an outdoor event provide, in the big picture, just one of many marketing initiatives, right along side effective advertising!
While lacking the big budgets of Fortune 500 companies, arts councils and roots music presenters have advantages, which derive from their small scale. Unlike brand managers in big corporations, the manager of a festival or arts council can still infuse the entire organization with a marketing based approach to doing everything well and consistently with the event’s image as a brand. We have the advantage that our hard-core audiences are loyal and value their relationships with presenters. And we can advertise in an efficient, targeted manner. Guerilla marketing approaches fit the field well also. Guerilla marketing is geared to small business. Guerilla Marketing tactics include investing time, energy, and creativity rather than big bucks in marketing. It uses the bottom line as its yardstick, not statistical mumbo jumbo. It demands fervent devotion to customer service and building long-term relationships rather than just trying to sell tickets.
New media dovetail perfectly with this approach and can serve to keep your other marketing tools working well and on target. Your marketing plan is a strategy for a successful event. Your ads, web site, direct mail, and media relations all have to work together with every other aspect of the event as a team to insure your success.

MARKETING AND NEW MEDIA TOOLS
To make your new media marketing work, you need to deal with the same issues as with traditional media programs: the brand image, the target audiences, understanding marketing cycles and limitations, and allocating resources effectively. With a small budget and a world wide web full of sites, you’ll need to be preternaturally resourceful, cunning, and indefatigable with unlimited determination. The larger the organization, the more difficult and essential becomes the remarkable cooperation demanded between marketing and information technology.
A. YOUR WWW
The web lets you narrow cast 7/24 to an interested audience. The problem remains, according to Lee Chiat, founder of the ad agency once known as Chiat/Day, that no one is yet quite sure how to use it. Simultaneously a marketing devise and something to be marketed, a web site cannot function independently of the product and its marketing. British web designer Nic Drew correctly wrote on "The Philosophy Service" site, "If you build it, and promote it thoroughly and constantly, they will come – but if it is badly designed they will leave and if there is no content, they will not return." Singer-songwriter and web marketer Rick Beneteau defines three kinds of web sites: a) those that do not connect with a viewer, b) those which speak at a viewer, and c) those that speak directly to a viewer. Only the latter prove effective.
1. You Must Maintain an Excellent Web Site. The Internet provides the most cost effective direct advertising and marketing means available. The explosion of high-speed Internet access happening right now will bring more change in the cyber world than anything that has preceded it. It is not enough just have a site. The site must be well designed, well promoted, and provide useful services or information. The Internet is the one place where small folk can do just as well as big corporations. You don’t need a big budget. The web is the first place a third of the people turn to in order to find information they need. What’s easier than typing the name of a festival into a favorite search engine and being transported to a web site with all the information you need about it? You can save space in your display ads by placing the bulk of the info on the web. Web sites are now essential for reaching every audience.
2. No more excuses. You don’t even need your own computer to have a web site. The options today for having a web site are endless. Freelance designers and service bureaus abound, including some specializing in the arts. Services are emerging which offer free web space. Most paid ISP accounts now include web server space and offer extra cost web hosting and domain name services. Plenty of free, shareware, and commercial web design software exists, and plenty of web designers are in business everywhere.
3. Commercial service bureaus now exist which will do everything from selling your tickets on the web and processing credit card to collecting maintaining email lists. You can find them by doing a web search with your favorite engine. This saves you the expensive issues of having proprietary software custom developed for you.
4. Some web principles.
All the basic elements of good design and ad copy still apply. Don’t let bells and whistles, however, distract from your basic message and image.
The top of the first screen is the most valuable place on your site
The opportunity to interact with visitors is a key advantage of the web.
The Rule of Thirds: Invest 1/3 of your web budget into initial design and posting, 1/3 into attracting visitors, and 1/3 into improvement and maintenance.
Web order forms, particularly where credit card information is collected, must display as secure on users’ browsers. Few users, however, want the rock solid protection of PGP public key and the like for they are too inconvenient. On line credit card processing services can be found in Yahoo!’s Merchant Services section.
If you want to engage in on line sales, you must offer an on line sales advantage. Web sales must offer some or all of such features as more convenient, more choices, lower prices. The MerleFest site, for example, uses convenience, special contests for web buyers, and the "gee whiz" of selecting seat locations.

B. Commercial Advertising in the New Media
1. On the web
Advertising on the web began in 1994. $2 billion was spent on web advertising in 1998, yet 90% of the visitors did not click on an ad. In return, this form offers powerful audience targeting.
Commercial web sites sell advertising space on their properties. With the right property for your target audience, these can drive a worthwhile volume of visitors to your site. Most charge either by the impression or by the click-through, but Yahoo! uses a flat fee for a set amount of time.
Specifications for various types of web ads, such as banners, have become fairly standardized. Fees are generally per thousands of viewers rather than the flat, per size and placement rates in print media. Costs for serious banner campaigns begin in excess of $1000. Some firms charge $750 or more just to design the ad.
Your decisions concerning web advertising need to be based on the same fundamentals as more conventional media. Can the potential extra traffic generate sufficient additional ticket sales to justify the cost? Currently MerleFest does not feel that purchasing banner ad space is an effective expenditure. We do, however, engage in some limited media sponsorship and trade out deals for banners.
2. On ezines or enewsletters
"Internet Marketing Issues" publisher Terry Williams argues with some passion that advertising in the right ezines with sufficient repetitiveness can draw significant click through rates. He makes a strong case that response far exceeds web site ads.
C. Direct Email
Building a list of folks interested in receiving email from you may be second only to developing a web site in ensuring success in online marketing. Use the email newsletter to market both your event or organization and its web site.
1 Direct email provides the great advantages of low cost and immediacy.
a. Direct email has three broad types: press releases to the media, e-newsletters to your audience, and brief notices to your audience with basic facts and your URL.
b. Include a link to your web site on the signature for your email.
c. Auto responders do not reflect well on your customer service image unless they are personalized and responsive to customer action, such as automated receipts for on line transactions. MerleFest uses these for on-line ticket sales.
d. Only 80% can use html format email. For the other fifth, it looks bad if it displays at all.
e. Get quickly to the point.
f. On average, 5% of email addresses go invalid monthly, according to CNET.
2. Use Opt-In Email.
Spamming breeds ill will and doesn’t make sales for you. It isn’t spam if people have requested to be on your list and freely provided their addresses. Include email addresses on your real world and virtual mailing list signup or address capture sheets. Collect this information in a database so that you can easily generate the distribution list for your mass email announcement. One and two click email list join buttons can be added to sites with ease. If needed, the form can use check boxes to permit one to choose whether to receive electronic newsletters. Once you’ve gathered their addresses, you need to contact them.
3. Don’t Annoy People
a. Don’t spam.
b. Don’t post unsolicited announcements to news groups or chat rooms. Wait for someone to post a question about your event and then answer with a link to your web site. If no one asks, then do what the big web marketers like Electric Artists do, have someone post the question for you so that you can answer it.
c. The final line of your announcement should state that the recipients had provided their email addresses for this purpose and that anyone requesting removal will be removed immediately.
d. Do not include any attachments with your email piece. Slowing folks’ download time and cluttering their hard drives is not the way to develop good will. Waiting three minutes for your mail to download because somebody sent you a .jpg of a new ad isn’t my idea of fun.
e. Protect the privacy of your list by not permitting the addresses to be seen by the recipients.
4. One can easily use popular email clients, such as Eudora Pro, to manage small email distribution lists. Software, including some shareware, exists for larger scale direct email. You can download, for example, a 30 day demo of one type from http://www.messagemedia.com/techsupt/mailkingeval.shtml. A list server is a similar software option. Application Service Providers (ASP’s) offer maintenance for even more complex address databases. Basic services from ASP’s such as ListBot can start as low as around $100 per annum.
5. Direct email offers a superior method for distributing press releases. Some outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, prefer not to accept press releases this way for fear of scams.
6. Ezines exist to drive folks to your web site. To accomplish that, they must include genuinely useful content. Something called Forrester Research claims a stunning 18% response rate for email newsletter. Banner ad click-through rates of 0.65% look rather weak by comparison.
a. Keep the readers’ attention with both real substance and attention grabbing headlines
b. Stay focused on the ezine’s purposes and target audiences
c. Keep things short and on theme
d. Stay on a regular "publication" schedule
e. Consistently maintain both the reality and the appearance that you are giving something of value freely to your subscribers.

INTERNAL ELEMENTS TO DRAW TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE
In a fundamental way, web sites share the same goals as old-fashioned television programs – draw and retain viewers. Thus the crude early measure of "hits" on a site has yield to the more sophisticated crude yardsticks of "unique visitors," "page views," and "stickiness," the later signifying time or the number of pages on your site that an average viewer visits. The point is to position your site as the best gateway to your world.
Some nerds have attempted to elevate web design to the level of science by calling it "Information Architecture." Despite that grandiosity, the information architects make some important points. They initiate the design process by examining the goals, audience, and competition for the site. Then they establish the content and structure for the site. Only having done that do the architects move to actual visual design, as defined in a "design document."
By "internal elements," I mean the intrinsic features of the web site itself. These include:
A. User Friendliness and Functionality
The site must load quickly, lack superfluous items, and maintain strong and consistent design features.
At MerleFest, we feel it is important not to clutter our site with banners. Ad revenue is not a goal of our site. Our site exists to disseminate information, save staff time while providing superior customer service 7/24, sell tickets, serve the media and audience, and build the MerleFest brand.
The visitor must find it easy to navigate the site with thorough, easy to understand indices and hyperlinks between pages.
B. A Web Site Must Be Kept Up To Date and Constantly Evolving
Almost nothing reflects your image more negatively than a neglected web site. Clicking in December 2000 on a page that reads "Our Fall 1999 – Spring 2000 Series" is the kiss of death.
A web site is like a dog, demanding regular attention. Content must be reviewed and revised at the least weekly.
Unlike billboards and print ads, web sites offer a dynamic environment. That means, however, that your customers expect you to take advantage of it for their benefit.
The webmaster must remain constantly mindful of details and timelines.
C. Content, Content, Content
Ultimately, a web site must offer fresh and compelling content that demands repeated visits. Ideally, the web site should provide everything a visitor would want to know about your arts council and its events. The site must offer reasons to visit, reasons to stay, and reasons to come back.
The web site should provide not just information or services otherwise available in traditional media, but information and services either available no place else or much more conveniently accessed on the Internet.
The site must be evaluated from the perspective of the end user.
At MerleFest we have implemented these principles to develop a nexus of features that draw folks to and back to www.merlefest.org. For a six week period ending December 3, 2000, 61.25% of our visitors were returning, 9.34% new, and 29.41% of unknown status. Thus roughly 86% of those whose status could be determined were repeat visitors to www.merlefest.org. These features include.
1. Artists Schedules and Roster
Until one arrives at the festival, the MerleFest web site provides the only source of a complete festival schedule. One quarter of our visitors during that same six-week period apparently sought artist and schedule information.
2. Pictures ad Video
Surprisingly, pages offering photographs of MerleFest and the Watson Family combined with our Promotional Video page provided the second most popular type of feature (excluding home page and site guide and index) during that time, albeit a distant one almost 7% of page views.
3. Accommodations Information
Although almost a half year away from the event, November visitors sought information on motels and campgrounds, accounting for 4% of page views.
4. Contest Information
MerleFest includes three instrumental and one songwriting contests. During the six-week period about 3.9% of page views were of contest information.
5. Chat
A chat room keeps folks talking about your event. The MerleFest Talk Page provided the fourth most popular feature during that time, at less than 3% of page views. Nonetheless, throughout the year the chat room stands near the top of page view and provides that festival with a constant stream of feedback about both the event and the web site. We find that when some folks complain, others in our audience address the complaints! Chat also works well because it is self-updating and a guarantee of new, unsolicited content.
6. Cybercast
With our partner Acoustic Box Office, we offered streaming live audio and video for the first time from MerleFest 2000. The cybercast, offered free in 2000, generated some 23,000 streams. At this stage, the cybercast is viewed primarily as building the brand and maintaining contact with those unable to attend. We hope, however, with the installation of high speed Internet access, to develop webcasting into a revenue center. Almost halfway between festivals, 2.2% of page views sought information about the cybercast, so it does provide a year-round payback.
7. The MerleFest Mall
The web site permits almost year-round sales of MerleFest logo items. Even during November when the on-line store is closed, nearly 1.9% of page views attempted to shop there.
8. Links
Although one would surmise that improving roadmaps to the web would make links less valuable, lots of folks still use them. We have always attempted to make the MerleFest site a wide-ranging and thorough source of artist, organization, and business site links. During November, 1.8% of our site views concerned links.
9. On-Line Ticket Sales
On Line Ticket Sales involves some of our most sophisticated technology and brings the festival into the ecommerce world. The number of page visits to this area, however, remains remarkably low. Although we sold some 1600 of our highest priced, reserved seats sold on line during the survey period, only 509 unique visitors accounted for these purchases with but 1.5% of the views.
10. Contact Information
The MerleFest web site currently does not function as well as it could as a contact directory for the event. Ideally, the web site should offer the ultimate staff directory presented in such a manner that the visitor can determine the correct staff person to contact for their particular issue.
11. Mailing List Registration
Capturing visitor information may not prove popular with viewers relative to other features, but it serves one of the key functions of any web site. At MerleFest we capture both snail mail and email addresses with our mailing list form, although we have so far only employed the former for promotion. During November 2000 the mailing list form accounted for about 0.9% of views at www.merlefest.org.

EXTERNAL METHODS TO DRIVE TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE
External methods frankly refers to the way one markets a web site and to how the web site connects with and forms a component of the overall marketing effort. Basically, one can either attract more visitors or get visitors to spend more time at one’s site in order to increase traffic.
The five "killer apps" for promoting web sites on a budget are:
Search Engines
Links
Email marketing
Word of mouth
Worthwhile, evolving content and a strong product
A. Get Indexed
1. Registering with indices to the Web proves another essential step. Our software tracks visits from around 120 search engine users per week to www.merlefest.org. Yahoo provides 26.3%, MSN 18.4%, and Google 17.2%. These are so-called Deep Search Engines, among which less than ten services dominate. The top eight account for 100% of search engine visits to MerleFest’s site and 99% of all searches.
In general, these services explore the web using robots and spiders, which follow links to their conclusion, indexing the web into vast databases. Yahoo! proves the exception. It employs actual human beings to review each site submitted. They serve as editors of their listings, which in part makes Yahoo! listings so valuable. Yet even Yahoo has for a long time engaged in partnerships with services such as Hotbot to default to unmediated listings when true Yahoo listings prove insufficient.
2. Much more targeted that these popular Deep Search Engines are the Standard Search Engines. These depend on submissions to them rather than engaging in their own searches of the Web. At www.directoryguide.com one can find a catalog of more than 400 of these.
3. Although they are the toughest listing, first go to www.yahoo.com. Apply for Yahoo to include your site using the on screen instructions. Then use Yahoo to locate a roster of search engine listing services. Several of these, for example, Add It!, will automatically register your site with the essential major search engines for free in hopes of getting your business to have them unnecessarily list with more specialized search engines for a fee. All this can be done on line.
4. Listing alone is not enough. One must list effectively – employing a variety of industry tricks to ensure hits on your keywords and ranking at or near the top of search reports. These include:
a. A good descriptive title up to 15 words long can be placed between the <TITLE> and </TITLE> tags in HTML code. You can use this to best describe your site and add keywords.
b. META tags are used to generate hidden keywords and page descriptions. META tags can run up to 250 characters. Software, some of it freeware, exists to check and write META tags, which provide one of the few ways to influence the listing of your site.
c. Careful choice of keywords. This falls back on a basic principle – looking at things from the customer perspective. What words would a consumer enter to find my site? A large list of keywords will result in the most searches uncovering your site, while a more limited, focused set of keywords will place your site closer to the top of search results. Plurals, i.e. concerts, not concert, music festivals, not festival, produces more results in searches.
d. These matters should be addressed before submitting your listings to search engines.
5. Some advise submitting the URL of each page on the site in an effort to maximize listings and ensure that the search engine spiders visit your entire site.
6. Software, including freeware, exists to monitor your listings on search engines.
B. Linking Logs
Link, link, and link. Links not only bring traffic, but also provide a service for visitors. An important service in our business is links to the web sites for all the artists appearing on your event. One should not, however, accept links indiscriminately. Your links reflect your image and must be on topic, relevant to the subject of your site. The webmaster should provide a real service by serving as a link editor, reviewing where they lead.
Links, moreover, require constant maintenance. The webmaster must regularly check them and repair or delete broken links.
Some of the deep search engines offer free services that provide a list of all sites linked to yours.
A hybrid of links and banner advertising is the link exchange banner. This involves joining a service that delivers a changing set of banner ads to your homepage. Your exchange ads get placed similarly, based on the volume of traffic through your homepage, meaning that if you’re getting light traffic this will help you very little. The exchange banners, moreover, become the first thing visitors see at your site, beckoning them elsewhere, including destinations which may not reflect well on your site. The exchange service exists by selling advertising on the banners it administers, including those on your site.
C. Direct Email
Whether to audience or media members, all your direct email pieces need to direct folks to your site. A fundamental purpose, in fact, of some ezines is to drive web site traffic.
Whether written to one person or sent to your email opt-in list, each email you send is going to a potential customer and should be treated with the care of a personal contact.
Your email signature should include URL, email and snail mail addresses, and phone and fax.
D. Word of Mouth
1. A lot of advertisers look at all marketing as a way to generate positive word of mouth. Although they may be more likely to use email, if you offer a superior website, folks will spread the URL.
2. Make sure your URL is easy to remember and pass along verbally.
E. Make Your URL Ubiquitous
Your URL needs to appear prominently on everything – all ads, radio spots, press releases, business cards, email signatures, brochures, and letterhead – EVERYWHERE! Your easy-to-remember URL needs to function almost as an integral part of your name. We endeavor to make the URL the first contact anyone thinks of for MerleFest. We attempt subtly to suggest that if one can use either the telephone or the web, to pick the later. If available, get the domain name of your event or organization to aid searching.
F. Other Methods
1. Media Relations
Similarly, your press releases should stress that the web site provides the best and most current source of information about your activities.
2. Media Partnerships
Form partnerships with strong web sites in your field or community to cross promote.
3. Advertising via New Media
As noted above, MerleFest does not currently engage in cash purchases of web-based or ezine advertising, although we do accept a few media sponsorships in the area. Nonetheless, many other businesses have done so to drive traffic to their sites.
4. Usenet Announcement
comp.infosystems.www.announce is a Usenet discussion group for posting announcements of new and substantially revised web publications, sites, resources, conferences, and software.
5. ezine reviews
Some on line newsletters review web sites. One can, for example, nominate a web site for consideration by "Netsurfer Digest" by sending a brief email to pressroom@netsurf.com.

Traditional Media Advertising Basics APPLIED TO THE WEB

D. ALLOCATING MARKETING RESOUCES
Everyone feels they operate restrained by inadequate resources for marketing and advertising. In the 1880s, Philadelphia department store giant John Wanamaker said that he knew half his ad budget was wasted, but he didn’t know which half. Two points remain true: If people don’t want a product, they’re not going to buy it. If you have a good product, spend the money, and advertise well, the results will prove enormous. Thus models for their allocation have appeared. Guerilla marketers tend to employ the 60/30/10 model.
1) 10% to the general public or universe.
2) 30% to those who fit your audience profile but are not part of
your core market
3) 60% to your core market.
Putting too little into marketing and advertising often amounts to little more than throwing some money away instead of spending a bit more to reach your ends. Within reason, money spent on marketing is going to gain the presenter a lot more than money spent on talent. What use having the best talent if no one knows about it?

American Demographics Online: www.marketingtools.com is a strong source of free marketing information.

"The Art of Business Web Site Promotion" site at www.deadlock.com/promote/ provides, in order to draw traffic, a number of thorough articles on various aspects of marketing web sites.

CNET Builder.com, http://home.cnet.com/webbuilding/0-3880.html?tag=sb offers several articles pertinent to email newsletters and marketing web sites.

The Directory Guide, www.directoryguide.com, lists about 400 themed search engines and directories.

Earthlink’s Web Site Workshop http://earthlink.net/internet/workshop/publicize.html . provides a free compact, common sense primer useful to anyone considering their first web site.

Guerilla Marketing: www.gmarketing.com Up to date and content rich, this is your best source for free, on line information about advertising and marketing with limited resources

Mastering Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson of www.gmarketing.com Chapter 5 of this 251 page tome focuses on online marketing. (Houghton-Mifflin, 1999).

NetMartketing www.netb2b.com, an AdAge subsidiary webzine, provides a strong source for web marketing information.

Project 2000 http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu/ archives an impressive collection of academic studies about web marketing and advertising

Promotion World, www.promotionworld.com, provides the single most extensive collection of free information about marketing a web site.

Web Monkey, www.hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey, contains articles about all web site issues including promotion and design.

Web Promote Weekly is a monthly (search me) ezine concerning web marketing issues, archived at www.webpromote.com.