When you’ve worked hard to gather audience information, the last thing you want to hear is that you’ve only scratched the surface. But the truth is, whatever you think you know about your audience really is just the tip of the iceberg. True audience insights are waiting to be unleashed through the power of digital program books.
Digital program books offer a unique avenue of insight into your audience, bringing an array of information that is both broad and deep. But how can this information directly benefit your performing arts organization, and more importantly, how can it improve and elevate the patron experience? From tailored promotions to targeted marketing content, from better audience outreach to better audience engagement, digital program book data can change the landscape of your business.
Understanding Your Audience is the First Step
Any organization can derive high-level information from ticket sales and subscriber sign-ups. But while this data helps you know more about your audience, it doesn’t help you understand your audience. And understanding the audience is essential for any organization to create targeted, personalized content that opens the door to true audience engagement. It can mean the difference between a patron clicking ‘Unsubscribe’ or ‘Learn more’ on your email and can quickly drive higher ticket sales and new customer growth. By applying analytics to the robust data set provided by digital program books, you can reveal insights that will truly lead to a better understanding of your audience.
Digital Program Books Provide a Window into a World of Patron Data
Where you might have traditionally relied on email blasts and ticket sales to glean patron data, digital program books flip this model on its head. Instead, every audience member is provided a link to the digital program book through their phone, allowing them to click, read and engage with their highly interactive program. With this model, you now have the phone number and contact information for every person in your audience! And where you might have sold a block of 20 ‘anonymous’ tickets to one person in the past, you can now gain insight into every single patron in that group through their digital program book clicks.
Digital program books are also designed to seamlessly collect valuable insights about the audience: demographics, interests, feedback, and behavior are available for every patron. These insights can help organizations make informed decisions about their marketing and content strategies, rather than promoting programs blindly or taking a one-size-fits-all marketing approach.
What Can You Do with Unlimited Insights?
On top of gathering contact information for every patron watching the performance, digital program books also let you track truly insightful data like page views, time spent on the program book, clicks on specific content, and more. With this information, organizations can gain insights into their audience’s behavior and preferences. Which ads or promotions were most often clicked? What did a poll on upcoming performances reveal? And where did patrons spend the most time browsing? This type of data can then drive everything from tailoring your marketing based on audience segment to informing your advertising, spending or programming decisions.
This same data can help improve the patron experience and increase overall audience engagement as well. For example, you can tailor your patron outreach based on analysis of their program book habits, clicks, or responses. Promotional campaigns can now be tied to how well certain program book features were received. And live or post-performance surveys can lead directly to venue or performance offerings that improve the patron experience. Ultimately, performing arts organizations can use the data to create more effective marketing campaigns and drive ticket sales. Patrons walk away happy, and so do your business stakeholders.
Understand Your Audience Through Digital Program Book Insights and Analytics
The unique data collected through a digital program book can transform your typical ‘purchaser’ profile into a real patron, one with individual interests, preferences, and needs. As you gain a better understanding of your audience members, the opportunities to segment your audience outreach and target your promotions and advertising will lead to higher ticket sales and happier patrons. Ready to explore how digital program books can go to work for you? Contact Audience Access today to learn how we can help your organization collect, analyze, and learn from this valuable patron data.
