How We Helped Crystal Bridges Museum Of American Art Run Bilingual Campaigns
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas is home to five generations of American art and five miles of sculpture and walking trails. The museum houses an extensive permanent collection, in addition to several rotating exhibitions.
One of those recent exhibitions was Diego Rivera’s America, which focused on the work of the famous Mexican artist and showcased over 130 of his vibrant paintings, murals, and more. Though general admission to the museum is free, this was a ticketed experience, and thus required a robust marketing strategy to help reach the organization’s goals.
When planning campaigns for this exhibition, it became clear that reaching Spanish-speaking audiences was an important goal for Crystal Bridges—not only due to the cultural significance of this particular exhibition, but also due to the fact that the drive market area surrounding Crystal Bridges has a high concentration of Hispanic and Latinx households.
Like many arts organizations, the museum also has ambitious goals in place to diversify its existing visitor base as part of their ongoing DEIBA (diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and accessibility) efforts—yet another reason to extend outside of our typical audience pools.
To help support these goals, we landed on a bilingual approach for Diego Rivera’s America. We used the same content on the same platforms, but included both an English and Spanish version of each ad to try and reach both new and existing audiences.
THE RESULTS
Our Meta campaign drove 551 purchases for Diego Rivera’s America. Of those, 59 purchases were driven by our Spanish-language ads, with 12% of those transactions coming from acquisition audiences, meaning that these were entirely new patrons who had not visited the museum before.
These ads also drove over 4,000 visits to the Spanish-translated version of the Diego Rivera’s America landing page. Capturing these views will allow us to further build our remarketing pools so that we can engage these patrons again in future bilingual campaigns.
On Google, we saw similar results: Of the 433 purchases generated by our bilingual display and YouTube ads, 113 purchases (nearly 26%) were from our ads in Spanish. These ads also drove over 104,000 visits to the Spanish-translated landing page.
LOOKING AT THE BIGGER PICTURE
While it can be tempting to evaluate these campaign results as an isolated success, the reality is that DEIBA efforts don’t happen in a vacuum.
Choosing to run bilingual ads for a single show or exhibition is a great way to engage select audiences, but unless your campaigns are paired with a holistic strategy to welcome and include all visitors once they arrive on site, you may find yourself extrañando el bosque por los árboles.
(That’s “missing the forest for the trees” in Spanish.)
The campaigns we ran for Diego Rivera’s America were part of a multi-layered, ongoing DEIBA strategy at Crystal Bridges. The museum has made a conscious effort to create an inclusive, accessible space for all patrons, both on site and through their digital presence, further extending their mission to “welcome all”.
On site, there is bilingual signage for parking and restrooms, brochures in multiple languages including Spanish, and bilingual labels next to every piece of art in the museum’s galleries. Audio and guided tours are also offered in Spanish upon request. Online, efforts are being made to translate key pages of the Crystal Bridges site into Spanish.
This is an important detail: having a Spanish version of the Diego Rivera’s America landing page allowed us to create a seamless digital experience and build trust with Spanish-speaking audiences.
START WITH INCREMENTAL CHANGES
If any of this feels overwhelming for your arts organization, you’re not alone! Many organizations are grappling with how to create inclusive physical spaces and online experiences. Instead of shying away from these efforts, focus on small, consistent changes.
In the case of Crystal Bridges, it’s quite an impressive feat to have fully bilingual signage throughout the museum, but this change didn’t happen overnight!
READY TO GET STARTED?
Let’s chat about infusing your DEIBA values into your campaign strategies. And for more information on how your arts organization can begin to deepen its DEIBA commitments, check out our recent CI to Eye podcast interview with Dr. Evelyn Carter!
