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Emarketing Effectiveness

by:

Joe Patti

I was taking a gander over at Artsmarketing.org and found a link to an arts e-marketing study that was done in England. While buying and attending habits of people in the US may differ from our European cousins, I found the suggestions about how to employ email and websites to good effect and the findings of the study to be quite thought provoking. Also, one of the really valuable pieces of information they provided was how to interpret the data logs from your website to determine how many hits, return visits, etc you are getting (pg 59-60) if you don’t have access to report software like Awstats. (And even if you do, it is tough to recognize what the heck you are looking at.)

Among their key findings were:

E-marketing can be seen to be cost-effective and valuable. However, there are many areas of potential development for participants and for the industry as a whole.

The ‘typical’ arts organisation (i.e. benchmarks for an arts organisation) will:
– spend less than 3% of their direct marketing budget on e-marketing activity
– spend less than 1p (marketing costs only) to attract each visit and each unique (different)
visitor to their site
– spend less than 3p (total online spend e.g. including maintenance) to attract each visit and
each unique visitor to their site
– spend less than 40p (marketing costs only) to achieve one ticket sale
– spend less than 10 seconds of staff time working on e-marketing to attract each visit
– spend 30 seconds – 1 minute to attract each unique visitor to their site
– attract between 2,000 and 8,000 unique visitors each month to the web site
– attract 30 – 45% of the visits to their site from unique visitors – different people
– receive 2 – 3% of all bookings online
– receive �2 – �4 more per ticket bought online than per ticket bought offline
Of those who visit the ‘typical’ arts organisations website (benchmarks for visitor statistics):
– 15 – 25% will return within the month, making 55 – 77% of the total visits to the site (the
Pareto effect works online!)
– they will visit 3 – 6 pages on the site each visit and will stay for 2 – 6 minutes
– each unique visitor will view just under 20 pages over any one month
– less than 2% will ‘convert’ to live visitors i.e. make a booking online (this is just slightly lower
than results found by other industries)
– less than 2% of them will sign up for further communication

The Arts Marketing Association felt that their research was somewhat incomplete simply because a number of organizations declined to participate because they had no idea how to access the web data needed or felt uncomfortable doing so. (They survey actually did provide instructions about which numbers to refer to.)

This lead to a fairly easily made conclusion that arts organizations were under utilizing their websites as a marketing resource and that the number of conversions to ticket sales or involvement with an organization could be increased if more attention was paid to designing and maintaining an effective site.

As much as I have been harping on the power of blogs and the internet for spreading the word about issues and ideas, I am ashamed to admit that I am hardly any better than the respondents in the survey and haven’t really taken a look at who is visiting my organization’s webpage or ticketing site. (And even worse, I know how to do it. I check the report on the people visit my blog regularly.)

Marketing/PR

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Listening is Hard

by:

Joe Patti

I came across a very interesting article on Artsjournal.com today. In “Hearing Voices”, J. Mark Scearce essentially says that not only aren’t students being exposed to enough music these days, the ones that are aren’t being taught how to listen to it correctly. Now that may sound strange, but if you read the article, it makes sense. My favorite part of the article is his suggestion that a bumper sticker be created says “Listening: It’s Not As Easy As It Sounds.”

I could see what he meant a little from my own experience. As I have grown older, I have actually come to realize that when I was a teen and adults asked why I was listening to the “crap” I was, they were pretty much right. I go back and listen to the music and while I do feel a sense of nostalgia for those good old days, I have to admit the music is junk.

In fact, I have to admit, I may be responsible for the current state of popular music. I remember hearing an interview at one time about the group Depeche Mode’s heavy use of synthesizers and I recall thinking that it would be great if people could become rich and famous musicians without having to spend the time learning to play an instrument or have much musical talent.

Be careful what you wish for indeed!

Now that I am older and wiser or whatever, I really have grown to appreciate the skill with which musicians create their work. I suddenly become aware of the subtle use of instruments beneath the other instruments to support them with a clever little bit of phrasing. I am not talking about classical music either. Some of the people I refer to are singer-songwriter types. Certainly some of their works are more complexly crafted than others.

I can’t quite name of the quality, but there is something about some music that makes you aware of the investment of time in the song and possession of talent. In some cases, the difference between musicians is obvious in the extreme. But other times, there is just some intangible quality that is a result of the sum of 1000 elements from the length of pauses to personal charisma that determines the difference between good and great.

It isn’t just in music of course. Dance, Drama and the Visual Arts are the same. In fact, if anything should have a bumper sticker, it should be “Acting is harder than it looks”. If someone is a novice with a violin, everyone recognizes that fact pretty quickly. However, everyone thinks they can act because you simply do what you would do in real life.

Just as Scearce says composers have to learn to listen, so too do actors have to learn to listen and watch as a first step. Reality goes on all around us, but it is tricky to recreate it convincingly for an audience.

Certainly it is the same for dance and visual arts. Only through constant observation and exposure does one recognize how movement, texture, color, shape, etc all work together to a desired end.

To some extent, the arts community has become so fixiated on simply trying to get butts in the seats/through the door and perhaps into an outreach program, the fact that long term exposure is really necessary for comprehension to occur. A person may have been coming to performances for two years and that seems like sufficient time to acquire comprehension and appreciation. However, the person may have had only 12 exposures total in those 2 years.

Twelve consecutive days of class is hardly enough to make someone comfortable with art. Stretch that over two years and that is one day every 2 months which hardly affords any sense of continuity at all.

State of the Arts

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New Year, New Look

by:

Joe Patti

So I have been away from blogging for a little bit due in part to the holiday season, but also because the service that was hosting my blog has gone out of business. (Which reminds me, I have to take their link off the blog.) Unfortunately, I didn’t find out they were shutting down until two weeks before they did. So not only was I doing some last minute shopping for gifts, I was looking around for a new hosting service.

This is essentially the reason for the new look. The entries came over intact from my old server, however the template settings didn’t. I am going to reset things to a different template shortly, however, now that I have access to Photoshop and other goodies, I think I will take this opportunity to revamp my logo a little on a lunch break.

I have discovered I have a fair number of regular readers out there. I have been getting emails from people over the break telling me how much they appreciate my insights, etc., and mentioning that other people turned them on to my blog.

Thanks to you all for spreading the word –keep telling your friends! As far as I know, I am the only working theatre manager keeping a regular blog (and when I was unemployed, the only unemployed one too!) But if people know of any other performing arts bloggers outside of Artsjournal.com, let me know. I am always interested in reading other people’s stuff.

I started out almost a year ago with the purpose of making this blog a resource for other people in regard to creating a central clearinghouse of links and tips. I really need to collect those I have cited into a running list on the side of the blog (note to self for revamp process) but a good number of people seem to appreciate my discussing the practical details of my job as well as my thoughts and readings on the general philosophy of arts management. (Which is good since I have had less time to read these days.) I will try to do a little more of both in the coming days.

EDIT: OK, apparently, all I needed to do was hit rebuild and the template I had set up engaged so there isn’t a new look. Heh heh, sorry about any confusion.

General Musings

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Where Did I Go Wrong?

by:

Joe Patti

So today, just a few days before Christmas, I end up interviewing 3 people for the position as my assistant. As you may or may not know from past entries. We had a little problem with the first round of the search and have had to reopen the position. There was some urgency connected with the search as I am told if we don’t fill it, we will lose the position to another department. It got me to wondering how many unqualified people had been hired into a position just so that the position wouldn’t be lost.

I am sure any reader who has had any interaction with state employees anywhere will answer with–pretty much all of them.

One thing that happened during the process caught my attention. At the end of the interview, during the “Do You Have Any Questions For Us” phase, an applicant asked us what areas of the job was she least qualified for. This pretty much took me aback since it not only put me in an awkward position, but also placed me in the role of emphasizing her unsuitable qualities in my mind rather than leaving me with a good impression. That being said, she was probably the strongest candidate and will receive our strong recommendation for hiring.

It did get me to wondering if surveying people right at a performance is premature. Typically you balance the questions asking what they liked and didn’t like so that you aren’t unscoring a particularly bad experience in their minds. Also, surveying immediately ensures a higher response rate than one done later.

I can’t find it, but I could have sworn Terry Teachout had a column that talked about needing time after seeing a performance to digest ones feelings about what had just been seen rather than succumbing to the demands of one’s companions to opine immediately once the lobby is reached.

It could be that people would give better feedback if they had time to mull over exactly why they did and didn’t like a performance.

Ah, but how to reach them?

One way would be to send surveys to attendees after the fact inviting them to respond on paper or online. (The festival I once worked for actually approached a 50% response rate which is absolutely phenominal for surveys) Another option is to email a sample of the audience, (hope you don’t hit a spam blocking shield) and direct them to a link on your web site where your survey resides. If you really have the money for it, there are actually sites online which will host your survey and do all the tabulation of results for you automatically. (Google online survey services)

I imagine that the response rate will fluctuate depending on how strongly people felt one way or the other about a show, but I bet the quality of the responses will be much greater and show more thought invested in them.

On the other hand, according to research, there is a perfect one question survey.

General Musings

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Butts In The Seats by Joe Patti is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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