Recently our team have been working alongside Customer Insights Professional, Katy Raines of Indigo. We're accessing the best method for segmenting audiences and creating personas for our customers. To date, it’s been an exciting project with plenty of new ideas, learnings, and insights. We’ll be sharing our initial thoughts and ideas over the coming months with the entire Ticketsolve Community.
‘How to be an audience-focused organisation’ was presented by Annabel Turpin, Chief Executive & Artistic Director at ARC in Stockon on Tees. This was a really exciting session as it was made apparent quickly that the team at ARC have also been working with Katy on segmentation. It was a great opportunity to reflect on the work already completed to date by our team and consider some of the results that are waiting ahead for our customers.
Audiences are at the heart of every arts organisation—Fact! The tough question that we all need to ask ourselves is how many organisations really know their audiences? Their trends and habits, their purchasing patterns, their values, and their likes and dislikes are all important details to understand to be able to offer audience members the optimum experience at your venue. After all, we are an important part of the experience economy and our audience members expect nothing less than a great experience while attending the arts.
The first step that the ARC took to get started with personas was to get all team members participating in an audience development workshop to really drill down and define their audience members. Their main objective for this workshop was to question everything that they were doing to communicate with audience members. An important learning from this session was the necessity to build momentum and get the whole team on board with your project.
“The box office and FOH teams will know our audiences better than anyone”
After the workshop exercise, the team at ARC created 4 or 5 personas that they used as their core audience model. Similarly, this is an approach we are taking with our customers. It’s important to dig down within these core personas and decipher how these audience members interact with their organisation. Writing down details like the average value of purchase, audience demographics such as age and location, type of events attended, allowed their team to create 5 ideal profiles for audience members attending ARC. These profiles would then depict which customer campaigns the team would implement. Our team have put together a few ideas on different campaigns which can be utilised through audience segmentation to get you started quickly.
Through persona-driven marketing, the team at ARC could then tweak and pivot their marketing strategies for each of their personas. For example, the team decided to change the look and feel of each of their brochures to cater to the preferences of each persona.
Their cinema brochure was originally text-heavy and the cover included imagery from art-house films. After building their personas, the team discovered that families were regular attendees at the cinema. Therefore, the team trialled including more popular films on the front cover and for brochures released during term holidays, the team would include a children’s blockbuster film.
Annabel shared with us graphics of the changes to their brochures. The image on the left if their previous design and their updated cover sits on the right.
Little changes and tweaks can make a huge difference in audience engagement. The results experienced by the team at ARC has certainly justified their move to persona-driven marketing. Their audience attendance figures have increased by 8.6% since adding these changes to their brochures. Average audience per event has also increased by 4.3%.
Persona-driven marketing is a project our team are looking forward to sharing with our customers. At the moment we are looking at perfecting our strategy and trialling different ideas around the campaign. To keep updated on the project, make sure to sign up for our Ticketsolve Updates, by scrolling down to our ‘Stay in Touch’ section below.
