There was an article on the FastCompany website talking about how companies can’t expect to scale customer connection. It needs to happen on a individualize basis through a relatively painstaken process rather than via high volume communication channels.
The industry’s current obsession with scaling connection misses the point. When brands treat connection like a growth metric, it’s a sign the audience has become abstract. You earn connection at the individual level when the right brand leverages the right voice for the right audience—the same way relationships work in real life.
This made me think of a mini case study regarding the efforts of the New Bedford Symphony (NBS) Ruth Hartt has been sharing via her newsletter and LinkedIn posts. Hartt relates how NBS learned about what motivated their patrons by speaking and surveying them directly rather than making assumptions about them based on demographic data.
She says that people can feel uncomfortable collecting data in this manner because you end up having some very personal conversations with audience members.
What NBS has done is create a handful of personalized landing pages that align with audience motivations (i.e. seeking to relax/recharge, learn something new/expand horizons, spend time with family and friends). They sent emails that connected people to personalized landing pages that best aligned with their desired outcomes.
For the last 14 weeks NBS has been doing a little experiment sending personalized emails to those they surveyed and general non-personalized emails about concerts to the rest of their mailing list. The personalized emails have been out performing the non-personalized ones handily.
Hartt says it is the fact the marketing messaging is focused on the customer needs and interests rather than on the organization or the work being performed that makes the difference.
Because the instinct in arts marketing is to make the product do all the work upfront:
Here’s the composer.
Here’s the soloist.
Here’s the repertoire.
Here’s the conductor.
Please care.
But in this pilot, the stronger path was different. Start with the patron’s need. Then let the concert become the answer.
[…]
“Don’t talk about the concert” is not the lesson here. The lesson is: Relevance comes first. The product comes second.
