Theatre Forum is now Performing Arts Forum

Invitation
24 August – Marketing Forum
Zoom, 11.30am-1pm

You and your colleagues are invited to our next Marketing Forum.
As you get set to launch your autumn programme, join Katy, Heather, Lucy and marketing practitioners to figure out how to maximise the impact of your next burst of marketing communications. Please register for this Forum and feel free to extend this invitation to colleagues and other team members too.

Want to know more about the Marketing Forum and see previous recordings of meetings – have a look here.

The Audience Metrics Challenge
Before next week’s Forum, here are some questions about your audiences worth asking and using the answers to reset the dial of your marketing communications. A quantitative analysis of your database and audiences will enable you to maximise the return on your marketing effort and investment.

Audience Metrics worth knowing


Metric 1 – Database overview
Taking ticket purchase and permissions into account, how many of your database contacts can you actively talk to? And of those people, how many were frequent or 2+ bookers before Covid-19 and how many have been back?

Metric 2 – Communications Channels
What % of your database contacts have given you permission to send emails, post them programme or both?
Having mapped those %s, are they low, and do they need to be increased?

Metric 3 – Frequency pyramid
What % of my customers attend once in a year?
What additional income would result from getting a quarter of those one-event attenders to buy once more?

Here’s a summary of how to calculate your database metrics and why they are important for the effectiveness of your marketing. Watch back the Ticketsolve workshop if you want to find out more and how these metrics will help you reset the dial with your audiences.

Summary Audience Metrics – Resetting the dial
By Katy Raines, CEO, Indigo-Ltd

This week, Heather Maitland and I were part of a Ticketsolve online workshop with Theatre Forum joined by a bunch of keen Arts Marketers from arts centres and theatres across Ireland.

Following on from our Missing Audiences report back in July, we explored how we could ‘reset the dial’ with audiences and understand what to prioritise. Should we focus on luring back those who haven’t been back since before the pandemic? Or should we work hard to attract new audiences, and then keep them? These are big questions with implications for staff time and marketing budgets, both of which are at a premium right now.

So, our takeaways from yesterday’s workshop are to focus on three key audience metrics. Understanding these metrics from your booking systems data are the starting point for more effective marketing communications.

Metric 1 – Database overview
Take a look at all the people on your database – you might have 20,000 – how many have actually booked and paid for a ticket? This might only be 10,000. And then of those, how many do you have GDPR permissions to talk to? In many cases, this might be only 1 in 5 of all your database contacts. So, instead of thinking about a database of 20,000 potential customers, in fact, you can only actively talk to 4,000 people. And of THOSE people, how many were frequent bookers (2 or more per year) before Covid – and how many have been back?

Metric 1

This is essential information to know how to engage with those customers and persuade them to come to your events.

Metric 2 – Communication Channels Venn Diagram

Of those people you CAN talk to, it’s important to know HOW you can talk to them. There could be a whole swathe of people that you can ONLY post things out to. Others that you can ONLY send emails to. If you know that there is a significant proportion of your contacts that you can only send things to by post, that really helps with the decision-making around who gets your brochure. And if those who are only receiving emails aren’t opening them, then your only ‘bite of the cherry’ is wasted.

Metric 2

Using the Communication Channels Venn Diagram to map permissions will tell you where you need to focus. We’ll share ideas about how you can increase these permissions if yours are low so you can maximise the effectiveness of your email and post marketing campaigns.

Metric 3 – Frequency Pyramid
Look at your bookers in 2019 (pre-Covid) and work out what proportion of them fall into the various frequency bands in the frequency pyramid. The first frequency band is how many bookers came once only in 2019 as a percentage of all bookers in that year. Typically, this can be up to 70% for a regional theatre or arts centre.

Metric3

Understanding the value of these customer groups will help you work out whether you’re better investing efforts in encouraging the 2+ and more frequent attenders to buy once more. Or if focussing on the much larger cohort of one event attenders, ‘oncers’, would make a bigger impact. Targeted communications to get even one quarter of oncers to attend another event is typically the return on your effort and marketing investment.

Come and join us at next week’s Theatre Forum Marketing Forum when we’ll unpack these metrics some more. Or watch back our workshop from yesterday. I promise it will be time well spent and show you how resetting the dial with your audiences can increase the effectiveness of your marketing.