Anyone working in the performing arts today knows one of the biggest headaches facing our industry: getting the word out about concerts. Once upon a time, mainstream newspapers and alternative weeklies like The Village Voice served as our comprehensive cultural guides, but the proliferation of today's digital media landscape has caused a massive splintering of audiences.

Megan Ihnen knows this new landscape well. Her multi-hyphenate career as a singer, arts executive, coach, and writer has provided her with the wealth of perspective needed to help today's presenters succeed in the digital space.

She knows first-hand how much arts presenters are struggling to keep up online — especially small organizations that don't have the team to build the robust content plan needed to please social media algorithms, or the tech-savvy to leverage search engine optimization, also known as SEO, to help people discover their work.

As Executive Director of Live Music Project — a Seattle-based nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to the arts — Ihnen oversees the development of LMP's calendar of classical concerts taking place around the world, from student recitals to professional symphony concerts and everything in between. And as I learned in a recent discussion, helping ensembles reach their local communities online was the inspiration behind Live Music Project.

"When LMP started in 2014, our founder, Shaya Lyon, realized there was something like 20 community orchestras in Seattle. She would end up on their website to find more information, and at the time these ensembles would post their season calendar as a JPG on their website. 

"If you don't know about the technology there, Google can't read that image to then tell you, Hey, this concert is coming up at a certain time! So those arts organizations didn't know that the beautifully made graphic of their season announcement wouldn't turn into Google being able to help connect people who are literally searching for concerts in their area. 

"That's one of the reasons why LMP works the way it does. When we ask people to fill out their concert detail information for the site, it turns into high-ranking SEO for them, because Google is looking at it all the time. Listeners say, I want to hear a piece that features the violin near me — and they end up on the LMP website because of the back-end SEO that a lot of smaller-budget organizations perhaps wouldn't be able to achieve on their own."

In this episode of the Classical Post podcast, Ihnen and I dig deep into the ways arts presenters can harness the power of digital marketing today. We discuss the decline in traditional media coverage, some of the specific challenges arts organizations face when trying to gain media coverage, and tips for leveraging digital and social media to increase visibility and reach — and most importantly, connect audiences with the power of live music. 

If you're an arts administrator, I hope you find a lot of valuable takeaways from this episode.

Listen to the episode today on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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