Webinar Recap: Driving Attendance - Early Findings (Part 1)

Advisory Board for the Arts was excited to share early insights from our latest Signature Research Initiative, Driving Attendance Post-Pandemic: Marketing Practices that Accelerate Audience Growth during a webinar on December 19th.

This one-hour virtual session, led by our Chief Research Officer, Pope Ward, explored early insights from the marketing study many ABA friends and member organizations took part in across the summer and autumn of 2023. Missed the webinar? Read on for a full recap, and scroll to the bottom of the page for a full video recording.

The current state of audience return

To set the stage for our marketing data, we first reviewed a few statistics about where arts organizations currently stand in certain key areas.

First, we reviewed ticket sales. From data out of our Driving Attendance study and recent benchmarking, we saw that today, paid ticket volume has returned to about 88% of pre-pandemic levels and ticket revenue is about 93% of pre-pandemic. This was a major reason why we focused our latest study on marketing — if arts organizations can’t achieve sustained audience growth, many will be in serious trouble.

Next, we looked at contributed income. Most organizations we have polled in recent months view contributed income as crucial to their futures. That’s because many organizations are realizing that earned income alone can’t save their business models.

That makes sense when you think about the state of the arts sector. Almost half of polled organizations are running deficits for the coming year. Combine that with the fact that the pandemic has punched a permanent hole in attendance habits and you see why contributed income is taking on greater strategic importance. Fully three quarters of respondents view it as a bigger part of their approach going forward.

So, with this looming crisis, why focus on attendance? We outlined two reasons:

• The first is that we are at a pivotal moment. Patterns were disrupted in the pandemic and new ones are being established right now. We must help shape those patterns, both to encourage the return of past audiences and to entice non-attendees who might be willing to establish new patterns that include us.

• Second, there is no strategy that is not reliant on strong audience attendance. Even if you’re thinking about dramatically re-weighting toward contributed income, you must show that you are delivering value and vitality to the community. Demonstrating your ability to grow your audience base is central to that.

With this, we dove into the collection and analysis of our marketing study data.

A look at our research methodology

The collection instrument for the Driving Attendance study had two parts: data-based questions in the first half and judgment-based questions in the back half.

In part one, we looked at ticket sales, budget and staffing, and time allocation, the content of marketing messages, channel use, and social media practices. Then we looked at a range of behaviors, including program-marketing behaviors and the use of data & analytics.

In part two, we asked a set of strategy and judgment-related questions, such as departmental goals, priorities, structures, and metrics. Then we asked about the level of customer understanding the organization has, proficiency in key capabilities, and power dynamics of the marketing team. Finally, we asked about institutional branding efforts and the creation of differentiated experiences for audiences.

Our study participants were mostly from North America, but we welcomed participation from a few organizations around the world, such as Teatro alla Scala in Italy and Melbourne Symphony in Australia. The survey focused on organizations selling tickets for events at particular times, which meant it was not suited to our museum and cultural institution members — however, the findings do still have relevance to those genres.

Once we collected data from our participants, we had to build an outcome variable for the analysis.

After a lot of experimentation, we settled on a combined variable that included two factors:

• Change in ticket volume between 2018/2019 and 2022/23

• Change in ticket revenue for the same period

You can force-rank all participants on an index of those two variables. We gut checked that ranking using other data sources we have access to, such data from other surveys and the self-assessment of participants. But to keep the measuring stick as objective as possible, we stuck to those two variables.

Now, a question that comes up is whether sales performance in the arts is due to marketing, or if it is simply appealing programming. That’s a valid issue, so we asked participants to assess multiple attributes of their recent programming:

• How familiar is the title?

• Is the creative approach tried-and-true or experimental?

• Is it family oriented?

• Comforting or challenging subject matter

• Does it include someone who is especially well known?

We used those factors to score each production based on what we termed its “approachability.” We then added together the approachability scores for the five productions that each responding organization assessed in order to come up with an overall “approachability” score for each organization. We then controlled for that dimension, meaning that we adjusted sales results in order to factor out the role of “approachability” in their revenue results.

Using that adjusted ranking, we separated performance into “top-quartile” and “the rest.” We refer to “the rest” as “peers” throughout the report.

That group of top performers does do appreciably better than their peers — on revenue in particular.

With this foundation of the study methodology, we moved into an examination of the results.

Before analyzing our data, we developed seven hypotheses about what would separate the best marketers from the rest. In this webinar, we covered four of these hypotheses — the other three we’ll review in our Part II webinar on January 11th. For each hypothesis, we explained our expectations, then looked at the results to analyze how accurate they were.

We started with the first foundational hypothesis around the size of marketing budgets.

Hypothesis 1: top performers don’t invest more in marketing, they invest differently

Our going-in premise was that top performers do not spend more on marketing, they focus differently.

From research on consumer brands, we know that top performers don’t have bigger marketing budgets. Instead they zero in on a clear growth objective and have the discipline to align the organization around that single-minded growth idea. In other words, It’s not about how much they spend (within reason), but how clear and disciplined they are in spending it. We wanted to test whether the same is true in the arts.

At a high level, the data confirmed our hypothesis. Top performers spend roughly the same amount of their operating budgets on marketing. If anything, they spend a little less than their peers. Top performers are also much more likely to say that their whole organization is aligned around marketing goals, and they’re also more likely to say that the organization has serious fiscal discipline to spend in line with those objectives.

Before moving on to the next hypotheses, we took a moment to talk about how to interpret these results. Here’s how not to think about it: “We spend 9% of our operating budget on marketing and top performers spend 8%, so we need to cut our budget in order to prosper.”

The numbers are directional, but what matters is the underlying story. What do the numbers tell us about how top performers think and act differently? Learn from their example and adapt their larger lessons to your situation.

With that, we moved on to our next hypothesis.

Hypothesis #2: top performers build a robust data & analytics capability

Our second hypothesis was that organizations who double down on analytics will outperform their peers. That includes how adept they are in understanding their audience, their use of metrics and other data practices, as well as their discipline in using data as a key part of decision-making.

A few things are true of top performers. They are more likely to:

• State that they make data-driven decisions

• Employ a range of data practices, from tracking performance systematically to capturing customer voice consistently

They are about as likely as their peers to:

• Employ the same number of team members in analytics positions

• Spend about the same amount of time on analytics

• Use common data practices such as forecasting, tracking sales vs. projections, etc.

And finally, they are less likely to outsource analytics than are their peers. Diving deeper, though, this is a story of focus, not just data sophistication.

The first area of focus has to do with marketing priorities. Top performing marketing departments disproportionately prioritize growth-related goals. We gave marketers a long list of goals to choose from, and top performers were twice as likely to choose growth objectives in their top two. And they were only one third as likely to prioritize “percentage of house filled,” which is an important goal but not one that prioritizes new audiences. We also asked marketing departments to identify their top-priority customer segments. Top performers were more likely to prioritize segments that could generate growth in the near term, rather than long term.

The next area of focus is metrics. We looked at both the number of metrics employed by each survey participant and the frequency with which they tracked each of those metrics, and we converted those two factors into an overall “metrics activity” score for every survey participant. Top performers, surprisingly, turn out to be less active metrics users. They don’t track everything, but rather pick and choose what they measure based on the goals they’re trying to achieve.

The final area of focus is organizational alignment. Top performers are a good bit more likely to say that the rest of the organization would prioritize goals and customer segments in “exactly the same way” as the marketing team does. They’re also much less likely to say that the rest of the organization is only “partially” or “not at all” aligned. No top performers said that. Additionally, top performers are more than twice as likely to say that the whole organization is aligned around what the brand stands for, and no top performers would say that “less than half” of the organization is aligned.

This four quadrant graph below is a look at the combined impact of those two factors: alignment around goals and alignment around what the brand stands for.

If you improve alignment around either goals or what the brand stands for, you can move to a much higher score; and if you do both, you can take a significant leap in performance. This is a demonstration of the synergistic effect of employing two related management practices together.

So we see that this is not about spending more, or about a wholesale upgrade of analytic capabilities. It’s about getting clear about your specific goals, getting the whole organization bought in, and rigorously tracking the few things that matter to make sure you’re making progress. That discipline is by no means easy, but it doesn’t require intervention beyond our control or capabilities.

Back to our hypothesis, it is true that top performers exhibit general data savvy, but more important is that laser focus on growth.

Hypothesis #3: top performers are more active in digital & social marketing

There are two parts to this hypothesis: content creation and content distribution.

At the highest level, top performers do spend a bit more of their budget and time on digital marketing. They are also a bit more active on social media — more likely to post multiple times a day and more likely to tailor content to each social channel.

What is more interesting is where top performers are focusing their “digital energy.” Not only do these organizations have a dedicated role for digital and social media, they also are more likely to carve out specialized positions for videography and creative design. These two roles suggest a desire for very close control of the creation of digital content.

So, why are top performers creating these specialized videography and creative roles? These organizations allocated less than their peers for every type of content (from behind-the-scenes streams to social takeovers) except for original, specially produced content. This is content that tells a story, and a story that marketing can closely control.

Another key ingredient seems to be what top performing organizations value about their social media lead. Top performers are more inclined than their peers to rate their social media person as far above average. What they especially valued about them included:

• Story telling

• Deep understanding of the brand

• A tone that fits the brand and resonates with online audiences

• A strong sense of conversations taking place in the current cultural landscape and how to be relevant to them

Activation of content is important, of course, but the probability that it will catch fire depends on whether it’s emotionally engaging in these ways. So how do top performers prioritize marketing content? There are four main ways:

• First, top performers prioritize content that showcases the emotional benefits of attendance.

• Second, they focus on the story, pulling people into the dramatic tension

• Third, they deprioritize literal photographic or video imagery of the performance or performers.

• Fourth, and related to that point, top performers are more likely to use representative imagery about the performance and a good bit less likely to prioritize actual photographic images. One way to think about this is that they are emphasizing the “emotional” over the “literal.”

All in all, when you look at what roles top performers emphasize, what makes their people great, and how they prioritize content elements, you get a very clear picture around dialing up highly emotional content in order to engage and resonate with consumers online.

There is one more social practice that had the biggest gap between top performers and their peers: proficiency in the use of social influencers. Top performers also work with more influencers, on average.

Influencers are part of important conversations taking place on social media — often they’re actually shaping those conversations. Of course not every social conversation is one we need to be a part of, so experimenting with multiple influencers can help us find out which conversations are ones where we have something especially meaningful to say.

One member told us they are working with the Hummingbird network, a network of micro- or even nano-influencers that have narrow niches of followers who trust their opinion. In fact, the hummingbirds have small enough follower bases that they look to get paid in-kind rather than with actual money. These micro-influencers are a really great way to experiment, because you can test a whole lot of different customer segments with very small bets and see which resonate most with what you have to offer.

On this hypothesis, we were correct that top performers do spend more time and money on social. They’re also more active online. But the insight here is about social content, not about social activity. Top performers prioritize the creation of emotionally engaging content, and they prioritize control over content in order to get that emotional engagement just right.

Hypothesis #4: top performers consistently invest more in institutional branding

Specifically, our hypothesis was that organizations who protect funds to invest in institutional branding – specifically, what the brand stands for and the emotional benefits of attendance – will outperform organizations that focus most or all of their marketing budgets on program marketing.

In this case, our hypothesis was wrong. At the high level, top performers actually spend a bit more on program marketing as a percentage of budget compared to their peers. And they are more likely than their peers to set aside no funding for institutional branding. This surprised us! Especially as organizations are trying to engage audiences that are less familiar with productions, we felt strongly that top performers would try to connect emotionally above the level of particular shows.

The story is a bit more nuanced here, and it gets back to the earlier theme of the importance of focus and alignment.

As we saw earlier, top performers are twice as likely to say the whole organization is aligned around what the brand stands for — or, institutional brand. That tight alignment may make it possible for top performers to invest less, but consistently over time, with a clear message.

Top performers are more likely than their peers to infuse their program marketing efforts with an institutional brand message. So, even if you’re facing a financially challenging environment, it doesn’t mean you need to divest from institutional branding. If you are crystal clear about what the brand stands for, you can communicate it at the same time that you are marketing specific programming.

The Utah Symphony is a useful case study to illustrate this point.

Before 2018, the organization used a pretty traditional marketing approach. Awareness campaigns for upcoming programming that highlighted well-known compositions by well-known composers, highlighting their well-known music director. That’s great for folks familiar with those musicians and works, but for those who don’t, this kind of marketing is more likely to turn them off than intrigue them. It sends the message that this program is for insiders.

After conducting a set of interviews with audience members that elicit emotional associations with the organization, the marketing team surfaced a set of emotional themes that brought meaning to the symphony-going experience for Utah Symphony audiences. Their marketing efforts now focus on those emotional elements, but at the same time that they are pushing individual performances.

This was a winning approach for the symphony. In the first campaign, they increased ticket sales by 8% for their Masterworks series, which blends classical music with immersive elements. Revenue was up 16% and reactivated ticket buyers increased 18%.

Wrapping up: the discipline of marketing leaders

To close, we took a look back at the lessons of the day:

In our next session on January 11th (which you can register for here), we look at at our final three hypotheses:

• Do top performers create differentiated experiences that are closely aligned with the institutional brand?

• Do top marketing departments have greater influence over artistic programming in their organizations?

• Do top performers shift money to build on the success of winning programming or do they focus on shoring up under-performers?

Click below to watch the full recording of this webinar. Find more information about our Driving Attendance study here.