Since everything has shifted online, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get heard amongst the online noise. Now, more than ever, businesses must not cut corners and ensure they understand exactly what their audiences want. Personalisation is the key to success. Whether you are a festival fan keen to get back to your regular events, or work in the ever-growing music industry, there’s plenty to learn.
Audience intelligence makes it possible to understand your existing customers and build personalised campaigns. When you correctly target your audiences, you will see an increase in ROI. This article will outline how audience intelligence can support the events industry, and how festival and music events alike can use it to appeal to larger audiences and increase repeat ticket buyers. Let’s get this party started!
How can audience intelligence be used in the events industry?
In Adroit Data & Insight’s experience, audience intelligence not only paints a detailed picture of your customer, which helps you shape your events around them, but it also helps find authentic hashtags, influencers and partners that will boost event awareness.
You may think you already know who your followers are, which allows you to create the ‘right’ content. However, not only do audiences change at a rapid rate in this digital world, you can also dream bigger by reaching your potential audiences too. Knowing similar artists and relevant festivals for your music allows you to uncover their followers/ audiences to promote to.
Identifying audiences and affinities
We started by using Audiense to segment the audience for the followers of Slam Dunk Festival. We then pulled out smaller entities with a small following (under 10 thousand followers) associated with Slam Dunk. We also pulled out entities with a larger following (over 1 million followers). This allowed for us to have the opportunity to learn from the audience of the associated festival as well as a larger band.
To put this into context, when we used Audiense to look at the followers of Slam Dunk Festival it revealed all the influencers they could partner with. The larger influencers are typically bands that are affiliated with the festival. For example, “Bring me the Horizon” have a large following of 1.9 million followers. Knowing this, you could look at the overlap between this audience and your own (if it was relevant to the festival/band) and see the similarities and differences to attract the potential audience.
Polar are a UK band with less than 5,000 followers. This band is also affiliated with Slam Dunk Festival (41.4 thousand followers), so looking at the audience from both Slam Dunk and “Bring me the horizon” are great options to explore to grow this band’s awareness and event prospects.
We used audience intelligence to improve targeting. When you understands who they are reaching online, you can tweak their messages and reach your audiences at the perfect point in the sales funnel.
If you’re aiming to increase your following, use hashtags. Think of hashtags like a search bar. On Instagram, users can use hashtags to find relevant posts. Therefore, for the music industry, we would use audience intelligence to find the types of hashtags your audience are using to look at venues, nearby hotels, artists, etc. The more recognition your brand gains, the higher credibility your event has, which in turn will attract the high-profile and in demand artists that bring in more fans.
Going beyond demographic data
We can even go further than audience demographics… Audiense incorporates IBM Watson which allows us to uncover personality traits which can help structure the campaign in terms of wording, influence, style, imagery, aesthetics, branding and interests.
In this instance, neuroticism is the highest trait which would mean playing on FOMO would be influential. In terms of branding, ‘skater style’ and ‘emo’ was highlighted which can help shape the ads or posts. Here are some example ads for audience’s where neuroticism is the highest trait:
This audience are reactive, alert and threat-sensitive so playing into the fear of missing out would work well. For instance, using the imagery similar to the above with the post wording: "Avoid missing out on listening to us play at Slam Dunk, buy your tickets here."
We can also see the popular posts associated with the audience which can help inform content decisions too. As well as see the handles of popular posts which may help with influencer marketing too.
This coupled with the intelligence from interests can create more influential ads, in this case the audience insights show us 50% of the audience love movies which is 25% more than the general UK population so this can be used in ads or to join conversations to increase reach. By increasing the reach using trending relevant conversations you can increase your follower network too.
Principaux enseignements
At Adroit Data & Insight we use audience intelligence to improve our client’s targeting. When the client better understands who they are reaching online, they can tweak their messages and reach them at the perfect point in the sales funnel.
The impact of audience intelligence is vast but, in this case, specifically it is clear to see how a smaller band could:
- Use evidence-based decisions in their post wording (using the Personality Insights)
- Tag the most authentic influencers as the audience follow the same festival and genre of music to widen the reach
The more recognition your entity gains, the higher credibility your event or band has, which in turn will attract the high-profile and in demand artists/events that bring in more fans.
