How to add user-generated content to your museum's marketing plan
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Most museum marketing ideas start with spending money you probably don't have. This one starts with the visitors already in your building… The nine-year-old having the best day of their life. The couple who just found a surprise joint-favourite exhibition. The friends who came for a laugh and left inspired.
Their experiences are user-generated content (UGC) in the making. And it's a huge opportunity for your museum: it's free, it's trusted far more than any ad campaign, and it gets shared everywhere.
To make the most of it, you need to harness the power of UGC in your marketing strategy. Here's how.
The realistic budget for museum marketing ideas
Remuseum looked at over 150 major American art museums and found they spend an average of just 2% of their budgets on advertising. Industry advice says it should be far higher, with the IMPACTS Experience report recommending 13.9% to 18.7% of annual revenues to reach your full audience potential.
There isn’t a standard figure for what a museum spends on marketing. Every museum is different. Not just in purpose, but even in something as basic as size: from a niche museum targeting a special interest group, to the internationally renowned British Museum. The range is incredible, with a wide budget range to match.
Museums don’t exist to generate profit. And most have free permanent exhibits and paid temporary ones. Funding is rarely from a permanently reliable, predictable source. There's simply not going to be a pile of spare cash marked "advertising."
Nearly every museum has to be savvy with their marketing spend – which is exactly why a marketing channel that's free, trusted, and already happening in your building deserves a proper place in your strategy.
Utilise your visitors’ creativity for museum marketing ideas
User-generated content is every marketer's dream as consumers find UGC 2.4x more authentic than branded content.
UGC can't be faked, which is why people trust it like a recommendation from a friend. It's completely free and it travels into feeds and group chats your budget could never reach, working away long after the visit ends.
Museums are already better at creating shareable moments than almost any other sector. You're the masters of multimodal engagement, layering objects, live events, immersive rooms, and digital elements so every visitor finds their own way into the story.
From props at the pirate exhibit to selfie stations built into the route, creative interactive ideas are your bread and butter. Your visitors are already taking tonnes of photos and videos, every single day.
But, hardly any of that content is branded. People might mean to tag your official account or use the hashtag, but how many actually remember? And who has the budget for a dedicated social media manager to chase it all? (Nobody.)
What you need is a way to, literally, be in the picture...
The photo booth: UGC by design
This is where a photo booth earns its floor space in your museum. Your branding sits in every single frame, so each photo leaves the building with your name on it.
When your visitors step into a booth themed around your collection, they’re not just observing the story any more. Suddenly, they’re at the dinosaur dig or travelling through Victorian London, laughing with the people they came with – and people want to hold onto the memories.
Every photo booth session ends with printed strips in hand and a digital copy available in image, GIF and video formats. That gives visitor content two routes out into the world:
The photo strips are photographed, posted and displayed at home for years. The fun memories they made at your museum stay in view long after the visit.
The digital versions go straight into feeds and group chats. Your branding travels, on both routes, with no briefing, shooting or agency fees attached.
For special-interest museums, this works even harder. Your visitors are your community. When someone shares a photo, it lands in front of the exact people most likely to care: in forums, group chats and specialist online groups.
That's word-of-mouth targeting no ad budget can replicate.
Surprising benefits of a photo booth (and the catches you're worried about)
The biggest benefit is obvious the moment you hear an explosion of giggles from inside the booth: pure joy, another layer of it, woven into your guests' visit. But there's a load of business benefits such as:
Income with nothing to pay upfront (and no paperwork either)
You receive a profit share of every photo sold, paid monthly. There's nothing to buy, so there's also no funding application to write, no grant deadline to hit, and no procurement process to survive. Especially for volunteer-run museums, that makes it one of the easiest innovation wins available.
Crucially, this income stream involves no compromise on your charitable or social purpose.
Nothing for your team to do
Servicing, software updates and 24/7 remote monitoring are all handled for you, with a technician dispatched if anything needs hands-on attention. The booth works away while your staff and volunteers stay focused on visitors. No upskilling courses required.
Our booths can keep pace with your programme
Changing exhibitions regularly is what brings visitors back, and our booth software can be updated with campaigns to match. A new temporary exhibition can have its own frames, prompts and templates without anyone on your team lifting a finger, and today's photo becomes a reminder to see what's on next.
Photo booths take up less space than you'd think
A booth needs roughly 1.5m x 2m, so you can easily design it into your carefully curated customer journey.
Share discount codes that encourage spending or repeat visits
A code on the printed strip can nudge visitors towards the café today, or give them a reason to return tomorrow. The booth becomes a thread through this visit and the next. You choose where the nudge points, and we update it when your priorities change.
An email list that builds itself
Every guest enters an email address to receive their digital photos, giving you a GDPR-compliant, already segmented audience of proven visitors to nurture.
Visitor engagement you can actually measure
Museums need to collect and use data intelligently, and photo volume gives you another simple measure to sit alongside ticket patterns and surveys.
Is a photo booth partnership right for your museum?
Honestly, it might not be. Some museums suit a booth perfectly, and some don't, and we'd rather you knew which before anything gets built.
Our whole model depends on it: we only earn when your booth is earning, so a partnership that doesn't work for you doesn't work for us either.
If you’re still not sure, spend a couple of minutes taking our quiz. It’s all about your museum and you get instant insights into the four key areas that determine if a photo booth partnership will thrive in your space.
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