The Marketing Behind Musicals: Chatting with Colby Dezelick from The Muny in Forest Park

The Muny in Forest Park has been a theater staple for decades — how has your message and mission changed in that time? 

The Muny was revolutionary when it was first created back in 1919. It was this civic idea of leaders coming together to create a theater in Forest Park for the whole St. Louis community. It’s had that ethos at its core the entire time and it’s only grown. Because it’s a theater for the people, it evolves with society as it moves, grows and learns.

The Muny in Forest Park has totally stepped up its game. The capital campaign for the 100th anniversary was all about bringing the theater into the 21st century — setting up the stage with the latest technology and innovations being used on Broadway and around the world today. 

How has your marketing strategy evolved from the pandemic to now?

It is tricky to fill 11,000 seats every night, but I think people are really connecting with The Muny’s vision of being a theater for the people and the community of St. Louis.

It’s exciting as a marketing department to showcase the top-tier talent and technology that’s being put onto the stage. From a marketing perspective, we’re reminding people why The Muny was created and showcasing the incredible people coming through here. 

Before working with Paradigm, what were some of the challenges The Muny faced?

Paradigm has been instrumental in presenting us well on the web. Working with Paradigm, we came up with a strategic workflow and architecture for the website that makes sense both on our end and for the user from an SEO standpoint. 

By honing in on keywords and optimizing searches, The Muny in Forest Park saw growth over this last year — from the number of internships that we had to the people coming to the show’s pages and finding their way to the proper donation pages.

It’s been great to see how we’re converting traffic, where those people are coming from, what they’re doing when they’re on our website and how data changes year over year. Paradigm has been instrumental in helping us both capture and analyze.

Why did you choose to Paradigm? 

Paradigm does a lot of different things — obviously web design and analytics, but also branding, copywriting and all of these different elements. It’s helpful for us to be able to reach out with any technical or design questions. You have someone there who can speak each language and help us.

How would you characterize your ongoing partnership with Paradigm?

The Muny in Forest Park looks at cycles a lot. Q1 versus Q2 doesn’t make a lot of sense for us because all of our traffic is coming in during the summer. Being able to work with Paradigm on a cyclical basis, we look at Q3 versus last year’s Q3 and customize our reports to see, summer over summer, how we’re evolving and changing.

When we get to the fall and our objectives shift to education and support. Paradigm has done a great job of helping us find the best metrics to measure success for our organization and not only track them but start to influence them and help them grow.

How has our website analytics work improved your decision-making?

A lot of people like to walk around with hunches or untested hypotheses. But it’s really helpful to have data that says: “A lot of people are getting lost on our support pages.” We saw a low engagement rate and people not landing on the pages that were relevant to them.

With Paradigm’s analytics, we learned The Muny in Forest Park was losing people who probably still wanted to donate. We were able to take data to our development department and tell them: “I know you think these pages are important and you want to keep this information, but the data is showing how people are navigating the website. It’s not making sense to them, so here are some ways we can refine.”

Now, there’s a higher engagement rate. People are landing on more relevant pages based on the keywords that they’re searching. It ultimately ends up in more conversions on our end, which makes everyone happy.

A lot of businesses struggle with their search engine rankings. What motivated The Muny to jump in on SEO?

The impetus behind it was trying to drive more people to the website. It’s an awareness thing but it’s also a user experience thing. We saw a lot of people landing on pages that weren’t relevant to them — we wanted fewer clicks on their journey so they landed on the page they wanted.

Paradigm narrowed down what the relevant information was, who the people looking for that page were and what they would be searching for. The keyword surveys were really helpful in updating the copy on those pages so that those people could find it.

How do you see The Muny’s marketing strategy evolving in the future?

From a marketing perspective, we’re finding new ways to create more awareness for new generations. Our team is doing that through a lot more social media that is relevant on all platforms. We’re looking at new ways of ad buying and transitioning traditional advertising to digital marketing. 

We’re trying to stay fresh and top-of-mind year-round, even though The Muny in Forest Park pops up in the middle of the summer and then disappears for a lot of people. Our team aims to continue creating media that is relevant to people and keep The Muny as an industry expert, in both the theater community and Saint Louis.

What’s one piece of wisdom you’ve gained from our partnership that you would share with others?

The biggest thing is understanding the amount of data we have at our fingertips but also understanding how insightful the smallest metric can be. Seeing a lower engagement rate over time with a higher percentage of people — while it looked like a decrease in the red, it was just that people were finding what they wanted faster. 

Having Paradigm there to help us analyze that data and make sense of it showed us where what looks like a negative was actually a positive for The Muny in Forest Park.

Anything else you’d like to add? 

Paradigm has been so helpful to us over these last few years. We’ve started to hit our stride. We’re finding the metrics important to us and finding ways to track them.  It’s exciting knowing that Paradigm has so many more resources and capabilities to start tapping into. It’s been great to build a relationship and solidify it — you all have been great partners in that way.

We’re excited to keep going, knowing that as we face new challenges we have tools and techniques to help combat it with Paradigm at our side.

Partner with Paradigm 

We’ve been in the marketing game for nearly 30 years — in that time, we’ve worked with some incredible people: business owners, attorneys, scholars and manufacturers. Paradigm’s expertise has become invaluable to ambitious brands, like The Muny in Forest Park, searching for custom websites, analytics tracking and beyond. 

Have a project for us? Contact our team to uncover real results for your organization.