Marketing the Tank Museum

It started with a fundraising video.

The Tank Museum in the UK wanted to drum up some additional money to restore a Tiger 1 tank. So it posted a video to YouTube.

After more than a decade, that video has a little over 21,000. But the Tank Museum’s most popular video has nearly 3 million views.

The museum has more than half a million YouTube subscribers.

That’s more than the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre, a New York Times profile points out. The Tank Museum was the first museum to hit 100 million YouTube views.

A Case Study in Content Marketing

The Tank Museum’s early video efforts were fundraising appeals and PR bids. But when the team switched to more informative and engaging content (starting with a series called “Tank Chats”), they started attracting a larger audience.

Those early videos didn’t have a lot of production value, but they had knowledgeable experts talking about a topic they’re passionate about. It’s a textbook example of how we define content marketing at Braithwaite:

“The generous act of helping your target audiences solve their most pressing problems — with information, insights, authority and empathy.”

The videos have since gotten far more involved and have become an integral part of the museum’s offering and operations. Ten staff members work on the YouTube channel, and the museum recently hired someone to run its TikTok channel (which has more than 55 million views).

The museum’s digital success is also a lesson in expanding your audience across digital channels. There are only so many armored vehicle aficionados who can make it to a tank museum in the UK countryside.

Today, a quarter of the museum’s annual revenue comes from non-visitors. Tank Museum Head of marketing Nik Wyness put it well:

“As a rural regimental museum, we see YouTube as an essential means of reaching a wider audience – helping us to fulfil our mission to tell the story of the tank and the people that served in them.”