Development of a Marketing Strategy for Online Promotion of Cultural Events

Purpose - The purpose of this research is to formulate recommendations for developing a marketing strategy for online promotion of various types of cultural events in St. Petersburg. Design / methodology / approach - A mixed methods approach was used. As a qualitative method, a content analysis of websites, groups and meetings in social networks of cultural events was performed. As a quantitative analysis, the Delphi method, web scraping, network text analysis, comparative analysis were used, and 73 autoregressive models were built. These methods, as well as literature review, allowed us to identify the types of cultural events of St. Petersburg, their online promotion channels, types of visitors and their needs for the period 2017-2020, and also the most effective phrases for promoting cultural events. Findings - This study identified 14 needs of visitors to cultural events. In addition, it was found that each type of cultural event in St. Petersburg depending on their target audience has its own most effective promotion channels, and there are also the most effective phrases for using them in promoting cultural events. Also, schemes were developed in this paper, guided by which the organizers of cultural events can build marketing strategies for online promotion. Research limitations / implications - The limitations of this study include limited time - only 3 years of studying the needs of visitors to cultural events, as well as limited geographically - only St. Petersburg, Russia. In addition, the data source for this study is only TripAdvisor platform; the study analyzes the needs of only 5 types of event visitors. In addition, only Yandex.Wordstat was used to collect statistics on search queries, which did not take into account the region of the query and did not include queries in other search engines. Originality / value - This research provides an academic literature with a greater understanding of importance of online promotion of cultural events. Furthermore, the study has responded to calls from the events practitioners to provide a more understandable algorithm for building a marketing strategy for such events. Keywords cultural events, marketing strategy, online promotion, needs of event visitors. Paper type - Research paper.