When arts professionals use the phrase “new audiences” I like to ask them who they’re referring to, and the response usually goes like this: “You know, younger and more culturally diverse.” It’s an easy picture to conjure up – like a photo in a UCLA recruitment brochure – but press a little harder and you’ll find that most arts pros don’t have a clue who they’re talking about.

I once asked the executive leader of a top American opera company who these younger, more culturally diverse people were and he said, “I don’t know who they are, I just know they’re out there and we’re not doing enough to reach them.” He spoke hopefully, but wistfully, as if he were talking about leprechauns or fairies.

The problem with talking about ‘new audiences’ in a marketing context is that new audiences don’t exist. Audiences are comprised of individual human beings who don’t become audiences until their butts are in the seats and the lights start to dim. If we want to form new audiences, we have to focus on real, live, individual human beings, and we can’t focus on real, live, individual human beings if we’re dreaming about populations of mythical sprites who exist only in fairy tales.

If you use the phrase ‘new audiences’ to describe the people you’d like to see filling the empty seats in your venue, and you can’t identify exactly who those people are and how they relate to your organization, you are virtually guaranteeing that those seats will remain un-filled. It is impossible to market to people you don’t know.

But if you’re actively engaged in the process of identifying new customers, learning about their needs and desires, and convincing them that your events will satisfy their yearnings, your audiences will begin to grow again.

Here’s some practical advice for arts professionals who want to sell more tickets. Stop talking about audiences and start talking about individual members of your community who can be known, understood and persuaded to buy tickets. The more specific you are in identifying them, and the more thorough you are in learning about their lives, the easier it will be to turn them into customers.

Audiences don’t buy tickets; individual decision makers buy tickets.

There’s a special magic that happens when a room full of individuals becomes an audience. But that magic will never happen if we haven’t bothered to figure out which individuals we intend to have filling the room.