Use your online presence to drive ticket sales
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Promogogo presents Helga Waage at the Digital Doughnut meetup in London, April 2015. The topic was how to use your online presence effectively for touring musicians. Read our blogpost about this topic here: http://gogo.promogogo.com/words/promogogo-spoke-at-the-digital-dougnut-e?&offset=0 The key points of the topic were: 1) Our expertise is mobile, e-commerce and live ticket sales 2) Selling tickets is really, really hard 3) Consumers spend their money on live shows 4) – and that drives their other music consumption 5) Finding the audience 6) – the fan 7) vs. the audience 8) Who are these people? 9) Example: Garth Brook's audience 10) Example: Arcade Fire's audience 11) Now you know them! 12) A little trick! Audience photos have better conversion. 13) Now is when you put a product in front of them 14) Make sure to track everything & monitor the stats 15) Know what you're looking for
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Use your online presence to drive ticket sales
- 15. Salesmap Observe the result in real-time
Editor's Notes
- Hi My name is Helga Waage and I am the CTO and Co-founder of Mobilitus. My background is in Computer Science, I have a Masters Degree in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Pittsburgh, in the US. I have spent my carrier on the bleeding edge of technology – doing mobile solutions for the first Ericsson WAP phone, did a SIRI like dialog system for a 3-D back in the last century. – I’m still unsure how to interpret the fact that the main persona I developed has gotten more proposals online than I have. For the past 6 years we have been operating the mobile website for Ticketmaster in the British Empire and old colonies, such as the US. We have seen the mobile traffic of a major ecommerce site go from 0 to about 20%, we have seen a lot of approaches in the marketplace, so we think we know a couple of things – mobile, ecommerce and ticket sales for the music industry.
- So we realized that it is really, really hard to sell tickets to live shows. There are a lot of parameters that affect the outcome, the needs of different types of artists are very different, but also, there is a very limited set of tools available for this industry. So we decided to address that need, with a specific focus on aiding promoters and mangers for live events. We think our solution is manages to address the needs of modern marketing people, with a strong digital focus and real-time data analysis.
- So my talk today will be based on our findings during the past few years – most of them have been integrated into our product and I will base a lot of my examples on that, but I do like to think that our findings have a more general appeal, both outside our specific solution but also outside the field of ticket sales.
- Most analysis of the music industry is based on music sales. The bulk of this discussion is fighting over digital downloads v.s. streaming v.s. sales of CDs – all while blaming all of the value chain for greed. However, the average US customer spends the bulk of their music money on seeing a live show. Half of their music spending will go to seeing a live event – and the odds are that their streaming interests / album purchases will be highly influenced by the live shows they will see. Artists must spend more of their time touring – AND - they must tour to sell their streams and albums, so the album sales also depend heavily on touring – as does merchandise sale and other potential sources of income for the artist. Even artists such as The Rolling Stones – one of the highest grossing tours of last year – they will tour to “promote” their newest album. But the fact is that their old albums outsell the new ones 10 to 1. And they sell them when they tour.
- If we look at an example from Spotify – they looked into their data and found out that artists that are playing festivals will outperform artists that are not playing – Such as this example for the Bonnaroo Festival. The week before the festival, a performing artist will be streamed 14% more often than a similar artist that didn’t get out of bed. So – the one thing that will increase an artists’ overall performance is increasing concert attendance; - getting more people to show up for the shows, play more gigs and try to move up to a slightly bigger venue each time.
- The music industry likes to talk about “the fan”. And they like to do all kinds of stuff for “the fan”. The Fan is nice, because she tends to make herself known. She follows in SM, likes the pictures, retweets whatever and is on the mailing list. – BUT – unless you’re Taylor Swift or one of a dozen other artists, you will never actually fill the venue you want to play in – unless you are successful in attracting “the audience” as well.
- . – BUT – unless you’re Taylor Swift or one of a dozen other artists, you will never actually fill the venue you want to play in – unless you are successful in attracting “the audience” as well. Because let face it: Who over the age of 25 is really a fan of anything? Except for the bands that were popular when they were comng of age, but then it is probably because of fond memories, such as the song that was playing when they got their first kiss. So who are these people?
- Well – they are actually telling us. During each and every gig happy concert goers will snap, snap snap, selfies, and weefies – pictures of their friends and their shoes and the beer and the band – (especially during that looong time when everybody is waiting for the main act to show up. I like to call that the selfie hour). We make it very easy for the user to surface SM pictures from the audience during a gig – even from these pesky people that don’t understand the marketing value of the #HASHTAG among these pictures we can get very valuable info – if we just go through. the pictures and highlight the ones of the audience we will have a visual profile of the target audience. If we look at the audience for Garth Brooks, who recently started touring after a 15 year hiatus you will see the expected pictures of couples, cute girls, the lucky fan with the artist, selfies, group photos etc.
- But if we spend a little bit of time looking at these people, what do you see? A lot of the pictures are pictures of mother-daughter, father-daughter, mother-son or even the whole family.
- Lets contrast this with another successful band – Arcade Fire. Some of these pictures are of the same demographics (women 25-35) in the same locations (Portland, Philadelphia) but it is obvious that these are two very different audiences. It should also be obvious how these market segments should be addressed.
- (transision mode with a joke about how I would never again get away with saying I’m too old for the pit)
- Here I talked about how artists like to share nice photoshopped pictures of themselves. And people like those pictures and share them. But the pictures of the audience get better conversion because that is what people are buying – especailly those who are not “fans”
- So once you have crafted your message – keeping in mind brand voice, target audience and delivery method and timing, it is vitally important that the call-to-action is obvious, device-appropriate and on-brand throughout the whole flow. You don’t want to get people all exited about your special offer, only to end up on a website that is unreadable on the device and your carefully crafted message is lost in future and past events, with a multitude of different offers that are all oh-so-special. So make sure that the call-to-action ends up on a landing page where the appropriate offer is highlighted.
- It is very important to be able to meaningful results in real-time (not just clicks-throughs and likes but also purchases or signups).
- So, the typical sales circle for an event is this: There is a set Onsale date – the point in time when the tickets go on sale, often preceded by one or more pre-sales, for fanclubs, sponsors and other targeted groups of people. The onsale is a 24 hour period and at the end of that period the promoter will want to have sold between 1/3 and half of her tickets. Those are the fan-ticket-sales. The rest of the tickets will need a lot of marketing, because you are not selling these tickets to the fans – you are selling these tickets to the audience. And there is no 50% off for tickets to yesterdays’ gig. Odds are that your first approach reached mostly the fans – those that are following your artist or on the mailing list. And you still need to fill that venue. So you need to broaden your approach, reach those that might not be passionate about your artist, but thinks that going to a gig, with a group of friends, is a great idea. Once you get the audience to come to the gig (setting the mood by playing the artists’ music first) it is up to the artist to convert the audience into a fan – to make her easily approachable next year.