Recorded Webinars

In this webinar, you will learn of the power of trademarks and copyrights. You will also find out how to acquire a trademark or copyright and how to protect your rights.

You will learn:

• How to protect your trademark
• How to deal with trademark infringement
• What is a copyright
• What can and cannot be copyrighted

As a trademark attorney with more than 20 years of experience, Laurie Marshall helps small businesses and entrepreneurs with the legal aspects of branding their company. Laurie represents nearly 500 clients in a variety of industries. She handles a broad range of trademark matters including worldwide trademark prosecution and trademark clearance and enforcement.

Laurie Marshall is the founder and president of Marshall Law Group.

In this data-packed webinar you will explore strategies to reach, engage, and convert online consumers in the ever changing social media landscape. Learn how to improve your social media presence, opportunities to engage audiences on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, and how to measure the impact of social media on your store’s bottom line.

Key Takeaways:

• How store messaging can support the institution’s brand and mission
• Best practices in social media content management
• Trends in social media marketing
• Key metrics in social media measurement

Rosie Siemer is the founder and CEO of fiveseed, a digital marketing agency and interactive design studio.

Ever notice how some people’s ideas seem to carry more weight? You too can be someone whose ideas are valued and who is listened to when decisions need to be made. During her March 2nd webinar, executive coach Donna Miller will provide a wealth of ideas to help you enhance your stature and influence at work so you have a greater impact on your organization.

Learn:
• Why it is important to increase your influence
• How you can grow your influence without formal authority
• How to frame your ideas for maximum impact with key stakeholders
• How to adapt your communication style to the styles of others
• Ways to overcome resistance to your ideas

When out of town visitors come to your community, they likely do an online search for hotels and restaurants. Along with descriptions, the restaurants and hotels are rated on a five star basis. This webinar will help you to rate your store on a five star basis with comparisons to other businesses and suggestions of what you can do to improve your store.

Whether you have paid staff, volunteers or a combination of the two, you need to do what it takes to ensure customer engagement. An engaged staff results in a fulfilling patron experience, and that means more spending and higher sales. This webinar will discuss the management technique matching the personal goals of individual staff with their role as a representative of your institution, where the rules of engagement mean more than just finding the right person.

Whether it’s continuing year-end momentum, making improvements to the current year or making plans for the next, much of what you do at the end of this year can have a significant impact on the next. This webinar will address business planning and detail specific activities for gathering the data and ideas you need to make 2016 as good as it can be.

Not able to make it to a trade show? Need some fresh ideas for great museum store products? Join museum store trend spotter, Stuart Hata, in this virtual product tour sponsored by the Las Vegas Market. Stuart will reveal products he found at the Las Vegas Market that are perfect for museum stores.

Nonprofit retail gives institutions advantages beyond the exhibit to drive home a strong, mission-driven brand experience to visitors and the public. This webinar will explore retail store communications as a department of the institution, extending the museum experience, gathering support from all museum staff, and nurturing the relationship between retail and marketing.

This webinar will answer these questions:

• How do I communicate the museum brand in my store?
• Do I have an interdepartmental communication procedure?
• How can I control the public and/or onsite image of my store?
• What operational decisions can I take to drive traffic to the store?

As store managers, we do it all, so often it’s easiest to avoid difficult conversations, hoping some problems will just go away. But, if left unaddressed, issues with problem employees can fester, causing even bigger problems for you and your team. Gallup estimates that problem employees cost companies a staggering $300 billion in lost productivity each year. When disengaged or disheartened employees are allowed to continue along that course, everyone on the staff suffers. This webinar will empower you to handle difficult conversations by exploring the top reasons we often do not hold employees accountable, and sharing valuable tips on the proper way to administer progressive discipline. You’ll take away an understanding of the expected behaviors in the workplace, and real world tactics you can put to use immediately to turn around your most frustrating staff members.

This webinar is a virtual tour through the myriad technological tools that are available today for a modern museum store. Presenter Terra Russo will share tools that can help you better manage inventory, buying, margin maintenance and customer engagement before, during and after the sale. You’ll learn about tech tools for people counting and labor optimization, loss prevention, mobile in all its forms, traditional and emerging payment options, cloud and infrastructure options to reduce the impact of technology on day-to-day operations and more. Spend an hour and experience a day in the life of a museum store that incorporates all of these tools to improve its business operations.

That doggie in the window may look cute as a puppy. But, if it doesn’t sell, it grows, the cute factor disappears and it eats a lot of food. As a retailer, you know what happens next: the dog must go on sale, while the cost of keeping it in the window goes up. This scenario applies to your entire inventory. During this webinar, we’ll take a look at inventory solely from a financial perspective, and discover how your return on investment can be greatly affected by how your inventory is turning.

Buying local and supporting local small business has been catching on! Small Business Saturday has more than 3 million likes on Facebook. How can local retailers use this trend to advantage of their stores? This seminar will focus on new ways to promote your business, boost sales and gain exposure in the local market and benefit from the buy local buzz.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• Understand how the buy local movement has grown to include a wide variety of retailers
• Create a strategy to connect with local buyers and build your brand awareness
• Identify free and low cost resources to help capitalize on the buy local movement

Pinterest, among all social media, is highly appropriate for Museum Stores. Key demographics, especially females and shoppers, are “in love” with Pinterest and use it to create wishlists, and to share design ideas with friends, families and connections. Pinterest, therefore, can and should be leveraged to reach key demographic shoppers for museum stores. In this practical session, you’ll learn the basics of Pinterest and conceptualize how to use it as a marketing tool.

– Understand Pinterest basics
– See how Pinterest can be used to nurture eWOM (electronic word of mouth)
– Create a calendar of things to pin

Learn how you can use a 6-step process to create a customer experience that will turn your prospects into raving fans and customers for life. Learn how to fine tune each touch point that helps you understand what your customers truly desire and endear your brand to your customers that turns them into advocates.

Today’s female shopper controls more than 80% of the purchasing decisions—but it is not business as usual for these shoppers. This session will explore consumer research that highlights the “purse-i-nality traits of today’s female shopper and WHY she buys is more important than WHERE. Did you know that the easiest way to show support of a cause or institution is to make a retail purchase? Strategies, tips and ideas are shared that you can use with women across all demographic categories. In this webinar, you will:

• List three key factors that influence a woman’s purchase
• Describe how retail purchases relate to philanthropy
• Review key strategies to tap into the emerging women’s demographic buying power

Assuming the location and size of your store, office, storage and operations areas will not change, this webinar will explore what can be done to increase revenue and enhance the visitor experience. The webinar will focus on flexibility, functionality, and layout and design changes. Although lighting will be addressed, much of the focus will be on the merchandising and display of high-volume, quick-turnover and high-margin products and how to get the customer to linger and concentrate on the products you most want them to see—without spending a lot of money from your store’s budget. In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Determine how to decide what to change.
• Maximize the use of perimeter walls and the cash-wrap.
• Determine which changes have the biggest potential impact.
• Implement simple changes to signage that will have a big impact.
• Determine what kind of ROI you can expect.

Practical daily procedures streamline the process of operating your store. They help you, your staff and your volunteers feel comfortable and make good choices about providing consistent service, performing regular tasks, and completing accurate transactions and reports. This webinar will de-mystify the sometimes daunting process of developing procedures and answer your procedures questions. In this webinar, you will:

• Understand the importance of documenting policies and procedures.
• Learn best practices for developing a policy and procedures manual.
• Learn how to continuously update policies and procedures.
• Understand the connection between policy and procedures and customer service, staff training and retention.

The use of popular culture is one of the best strategic partners in the arts and culture marketing world. Using popular culture to help you gain sales is a great way to bridge your customers with your merchandise. This webinar will help show you ways to leverage what is happening in popular culture to create interest, increase time in store and drive sales. Everything from your promotional materials to your display techniques to your merchandise can be used to connect with customers and develop sales when incorporating popular culture. This strategic sales and marketing approach is something that your entire team can be a part of, as everyone’s collective cultural interests can be tapped into for inspiration. In this webinar you will:

• Understand how popular culture is a great tool to gain interest from markets.
• Learn how to use topical events, television, film, music and art to connect your audience with your merchandise.
• Ensure that you don’t miss the moment!

Retail stores offer several benefits to customers that they cannot get when they shop on the Internet: touching and feeling products, personal service, risk reduction, immediate gratification, cash payments, and entertainment and social experiences. In contrast, an e-commerce site offers convenience, safety, broader and deeper assortments, more information and personalization. Learn how to add and place more emphasis on your e-sales to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and build the image of your institution and store. Providing this seamless experience for customers and exploiting the synergies between the store and the Web can be demanding. Learn the challenges of operational differences in information and supply chain systems, organizing for managing multiple channel operations, and making decisions on pricing, branding and assortments. In this webinar, you will:

• Understand why retailers are using e-commerce to complement their store offerings.
• Consider the synergies between the museum, the museum store, and an e-commerce site.
• Learn about how retailers overcome some of the challenges in selling merchandise over the Internet.

Looking for ways to create a one-of-a-kind destination? Increase traffic and keep visitors in the store longer? Gain a competitive edge and increase revenues in challenging economic times? Learn how to transform your gift shop into a museum store by extending the museum experience into your store. We’ll explore and discuss how to blur the lines between the museum and retail experience through the integration of interpretive graphics and vignettes, artifact exhibits, special feature areas, archival imagery, interactive displays, etc. In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Brand your store and make it a one-of-kind destination by extending the museum experience into the store to increase visitorship and earned income.
• Work with the museum staff and the curatorial department to access the tools and resources available to execute this unique approach.
• Create and implement an “interpretive plan” for your store.

Are you looking for ways to take your store’s visual merchandising to the next level? Want to see how your products can be displayed to their best advantage? Appealing, shoppable displays offer the potential to increase store revenue and engage your visitors more deeply with your institution’s mission. This webinar will walk you through the steps of creating a display, while explaining its underlying visual structure. In this webinar, you will:

• Learn to create and execute a visual merchandising plan.
• Understand basic visual merchandising design principles.
• Know how to incorporate institutional goals into store merchandising.
• Understand how to create a plan to maximize revenue per square foot.

In these days of accelerating costs and uncertain funding, managing your museum store like a business requires a combination of art (product selection, merchandising, display, etc.) and science (the numbers). This webinar will focus on basic, practical statistical analysis of key parts of your store, including the management of financial resources and measurements of the visitor experience as evidenced by purchases. The results of this effort can lead to incremental sales, greater profits to help support the museum and a more satisfying visitor retail experience. In this webinar, you will learn how to:

• Understand which calculations help to paint a picture of your customer experience and selling success.
• Measure your revenue and expenses line items.
• Determine how successful your efforts to control cost of goods (your biggest expense) are.
• Establish your desired range of retail prices.
• Measure how hard your inventory dollars are working for you

Communicating with customers is part of your job. But what you talk about shouldn’t include you. While it’s natural to share personal stories, opinions and more, it’s important to steer clear of talking about yourself while chatting with customers. In this webinar, you can expect to learn ways to cater customer conversations about them, your store inventory or an experience. You’ll also learn ways to avoid chatting about yourself, despite natural instincts to do so. Finally, we’ll unveil hard facts on why customers don’t care about you when it comes to making their purchase decisions and friendly tips on how to make any customer happy! In this webinar, you will:

• Discover the value in always putting the customer first, despite a natural instinct to talk about yourself.
• Learn ways to cater conversations and experiences to your customer in multiple shopping scenarios.
• Find out why catering to the customer is always the right way to handle any customer scenario.