smARTstart

Who do you create for? Yourself? Your peers? The public at large? Probably a mix of the three. Before developing any communication materials, you need do understand your audience and define who you would like to reach.

Consumer analysis: who are they and what do they need?
To identify and understand your existing and/or potential customers, you need to collect all available and accessible information about each of them:

• Contact information (name, address, phone number and email address).
• Psycho-demographic data, (age and generation, gender, income, occupation, education, location, marital status and family configuration, ethnicity, lifestyle, etc…)
• Information to assess their interest in your product (consumer behavior and history, motivation, satisfaction level, transaction details, etc…)
• ‘clickographics’ (website visiting behavior and online transaction history).

You can ask your customers for information during their direct transactions with your organization. Alternatively, you could buy the information from a third party or get it from an organization targeting the same audience, in exchange for information about other consumers.

Capturing, integrating and leveraging all customer data available demand a solid process, documented rules and the discipline to effectively use them. But the rewards, in the form of consistent, quantifiable, clean data ready to be easily converted to actionable marketing intelligence, are great.

Motivational analysis: Why do they buy your product?
Because you present great art? Probably, but not exclusively. According to a survey conducted by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO)[1], luring people to concerts is more than a matter of appealing to classical connoisseurs. That group, in fact, doesn't even make up the majority of the classical concert customers.

• 25% of the DSO’s ticket buyers go to the Symphony because they want a “romantic evening out.”
• 21% attend for “social display”. They believe that going to the concerts “reflects social status.”
• Those who say they come only for the music rank third, at 16 percent of the audience.

Exploring what truly motivates your audience in visiting you might be a sobering experience, but an essential one to understand how to retain their clientele.

According to Fred Bronstein, president of the Dallas Symphony Association, “There is a core group of people who love to come no matter what you play, but there has to be an expanding circle of others. We're interested in audience development. There's a lot of work we're doing around the whole concert experience, the programming and other things.”[2]

Targeting: who do you want to reach?
You probably won’t have enough time or money to convince every body of your product’s merits. You will have to concentrate your resources on a group of prospects who have the will & capacity to buy and are the most susceptible to respond to you r offer. Selecting this group is called targeting. Ideally, your target market should be:

• sizable and expected to grow
• not cluttered with competition
• practical & affordable to reach
• compatible with your values and objectives

If you're not specific about the target audience, you will fail to generate sufficient return from any segment. You are not starting from scratch: understanding the characteristics of your current audience will help you build a profile of the target audience.

Links

1. Arts Research Digest (provides a unique overview of recent and current research in the arts, media and cultural sectors): www.arts-research-digest.com
2. Marketing Research Association: www.mra-net.org
3. National Endowment for the Arts (publishes regular audience surveys): www.Nea.gov/research
4. Survey Monkey (Easy-to-use software to create customer surveys): www.SurveyMonkey.com
5. See also the special Audience Development Research section of smARTstart.

Footnotes

[1] John Kirkpatrick, "After Years of Hanging Up the 'Sold Out' Sign, Dallas Symphony Raises Its Marketing Volume," Dallas Morning News, 10 November 2003.
[2] Ibid