Category: Marketing

It can’t have escaped your attention that Rossendale Art Trail is encouraging everyone involved to join the group’s Instagram feed. Thanks to Scott Sadler, Ella Cole and Anthony Black this has now been set up.

I’ve had an Instagram account for a while, but haven’t used it much until now. This past week I’ve tried to make it better suited to the RAT group – mainly by deleting images that weren’t of my work. I was a bit confused as to how best to make it work, and wrote to Scott. He got back to say:

“We just need people to email pictures to me, Ella and Anthony, and we can then add them to Our account. Using hashtags (#) is the best way to get people who don’t already follow you to see the images. If you click on #rossendalearttrail it will take you to all images with that tag, regardless of whether it is from our account or not. So others will use this hashtag when they are visiting RAT and/or sharing their own images. This will then direct others to our page. We will eventually build momentum so others will be promoting the RAT for us. 

“At the moment we are mainly sharing with our own followers, but we have built a small audience pretty quick already. I’ve held off sharing too much initially to avoid sharing with nobody!”

I though I would pass this on as I found it helped me understand the process.

Angela Towers, a Senior Lecturer at in Business, Retail and Tourism at MMU Business School visited the Art Trail in 2019 and was blown away by the number of artists and the quality of the work. She bought a few paintings, and wondered if her Post-Grad students could look at the event and perhaps suggest ways of marketing the event more widely.

The brief for the students would be “You should focus on presenting creative ideas for how to increase awareness of this annual event, consider the target audience, and low cost/no cost ways to reach them.  You should also explore opportunities for involvement of Rossendale Borough Council and any other potential partners.”

I can’t see any harm in this, and it could well produce some useful results – especially as I don’t feel I have the time to dedicate as much effort to promoting the Art Trail as it deserves. Megan Eastwood at Rossendale Council has already said that she is willing to participate in helping the students, and also that she would try and find some funding for the Art Trail to help in this process.

If Art Trail participants are keen on helping with this then please let me know, and I’ll pass on details. Otherwise I’ll report back to the group as things develop.