Audiences in the Arts Bought a Second Show 30% More Often in 2023...

Mar 09, 2024

Hey!

Indigo and Spektrix are out with a new report on audience growth and development in the arts.

I like it because it seems like it has been done in a way that you can learn some interesting stuff that’s actually actionable.

This isn’t always the case.

The top line: Audience growth returned in 2023.

People that would are called “rebookers” were about ⅓ of the audiences in 2023. Stable.
19.5% of first time buyers rebooked as well. That’s up from an expected 15%.

What’s interesting to me is the percentage of the customers that were first buyers: 54%.

Especially when paired with the 20% of new attendees that had never heard of the theatre or event before…meaning they are totally fresh.

Why?

That shows a healthy growth of new people coming to see an arts or theatre performance for the first time.

I’ve mentioned this often: light buyers are your greatest source of opportunity.

How can you use this to your advantage?

Let’s look at what barriers were in the way of people coming to a performance:

These are all marketing problems.

But the last two point directly to the challenge of branding:

You want to show up consistently because breaking through in a crowded media environment and a distracted society is tougher than ever.

Remember this: If you map your touchpoints, you’ll see that they start sooner than you imagine and they go on longer than you think. The key is that the small stuff matters more than the big stuff.

Final point: I’ve worked with some of the best brands in the business of tickets and I’ve seen a common number pop up again and again.

That number is the number of trackable contacts that it takes for a sale to happen, even with a strong brand.

Typically, you’ll see 8-11 touches are needed to finish a sale for the strongest brands.

This means that the sales process is more complex than we imagine.

What does this say to us?

You can’t ignore your brand and hope to become more stable as an organization.
No brand.
No business.
You have to recognize the real barriers to buying and address them.

My guess from working on these kinds of things is that the travel time and show time evaporates if you fix the bottom two challenges of awareness and perception of value.

I’ve seen it happen over and over again that you flip those two to be positives as soon as you fix the awareness and perception of value. (Keep in mind, value to money doesn’t mean discounting. You can’t make someone value something just by the price of it. You have to create the perception of value.)

Spread a wider net!

Your non-buyers are a much larger percentage of your audience than your buyers.

Turning some of these non-buyers into buyers will give you a much bigger base for all of your activities like rebooking, donations, sponsorships, and more.

What do you think?

How do you deal with getting new customers into your venue?
Do you think you overemphasize re-booking and heavy buyers at the expense of first time customers?

Let me know by hitting reply.

You can also hang out with us in the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack Channel.

Do me a favor and share this post with one person or on social media! It means a ton to me!

Talking Tickets!