An Táin Arts Centre

For our Integrated marketing/E-Tourism project Rosa McGovern and I decided to tackle An Táin Theatre in Dundalk’s Town hall. The two main elements of the assignment involved the rebranding and online communications strategy. Following extensive research through interviews with Louth Co. Co. Arts officer Dennis Darcy and benchmarking against similar venues in the Northeast e.g. Droichead Arts Centre and

Swan Lane Music Venue, we decided to rebrand the venue “An Táin Arts Centre.” We decided to use the mythology of An Táin Bó Cuailnge across all marketing materials to create a “One Voice, One Look” campaign for the new arts centre.

The tools we used

The online communications strategy focused on redesigning the old  dormant website using a very useful online tool  Balsamiq. Balsamiq allowed us to create a mock-up of the proposed new web pages for An Táin Arts Centre. We carried our theme of “An Táin Bó Cuailnge” across the web pages. We placed an emphasis on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) with a different set of keywords and title for each page of the website e.g. a person searching with any of the following words: theatre, Dundalk, town hall, Cu Chulainn would be likely to have Cu Culainn Theatre’s web page high on their organic listing. Similarly linking the website to social media such as Twitter and Face book via a live feed on the homepage would help ensure the website was continually updated.

The tricky bit

The most challenging part of the project was deciding on an appropriate layout. The difficulty associated with an integrated assignment is deciding on which content is most relevant and assuring you address both subjects equally. I’d be lying if I said Rosa and I didn’t spend hours at loggerheads debating on the structure and content of the final report. Furthermore the fact I was on vacation in Blackpool the weekend before submission represented a whole other challenge but we’ll save that for a different blog! We got there in the end, we always do.

The best bit

The part of the assignment I found most enjoyable was our Prezi "An Táin Arts Centre Story Board". It allowed us to bring all the elements of theory together in a cohesive way that also incorporated the mythology of An Táin. For me it was a prototype of how the current venue could go about their marketing. Prezi allowed us to demonstrate what we were trying to convey in our report. It explained things better than any paper could.

Learning outcomes

There were many learning outcomes from this challenging project but I will just mention two. From an Integrated marketing perspective it was the use of a theme (the mythology) to help maintain a consistent brand message. In terms of E-Tourism Applications I gained a greater understanding of how to make a website more useable and appealing for your potential customers.