This is the last installment in a six-part series about research. Many arts organizations avoid research because they think it’s expensive or complicated, but that’s not a good excuse for staying ignorant. There are plenty of ways to gain useful insight into new audience motives without having to spend a lot of money.

Before you send out new marketing messages, test them on new audiences to see if they work.

My favorite way to test creative is one I’ve mentioned before: find a young person who embodies the characteristics of the new audiences you’re looking for and read her your copy. Try it. Read your promotional copy as if you’re actually trying to persuade a young person to come to your next event. If it sounds artificial, self-congratulatory, overblown, condescending, presumptuous and disconnected from the person you’re talking to (which is what 99% of arts marketing copy sounds like), start over.

Develop an advisory group of people who don’t care all that much about you. Identify opinion leaders in the community who represent the distant but nonetheless persuadable fringes of your patron universe and recruit them to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your messages. Show them your mock-ups and encourage them to tell you honestly if they work on people like them. If they say, “They don’t really tell me why I would want to go to this event,” develop new materials that tell them why they’d want to go to the event.

Find art directors who work for local agencies or companies that market to younger, more culturally diverse targets. Recruit them to serve as a second set of eyes and ask them to weigh in on your creative. These folks have access to all the research their companies have done, so getting their input can plug you into a vast and expensive knowledge base that wouldn’t otherwise be available. It’s tough to get pro bono work out of agencies these days, but there’s nothing to stop you from asking for expert advice from their employees. And of course you’ll want to thank them with tickets or other meaningful in-kind rewards.

Use social media. Ask your friends and followers to weigh in on campaign ideas as they’re being developed – or ask them to submit promotional ideas of their own. Including social networks in the message development process is an organic means of generating meaningful interaction with interested communities. It brings audience-centric voices into the discussion, it turns supporters into advocates and it disseminates marketing messages to desirable target audiences.

Test your churn. Pull those stubborn one-off buyers out of your database, divide them randomly into test groups and send them two emails. One email should be the canned, self-centered, preaching-to-the-choir stuff you normally send out. For the other, try a fresh, colloquial, audience-centered, this-is-what’s-in-it-for-you message. If you find that telling new audiences what’s in it for them is effective, you may want to start developing fresh messages that tell new audiences what’s in it for them.

Or why not just talk to people. New audiences come in and out of our venues every day. If you have three mock-ups of next season’s membership brochure and you need to learn which one will work best, mount them on some nice presentation boards, set up a display in the lobby and ask visitors who look like the audiences you’re trying to attract to pick the one they find most persuasive. Give them a free drink voucher for their trouble. People love to be asked for opinions and your new audiences will be flattered that they were invited to have a say in the process.

Learning how your marketing messages work before you send them out doesn’t cost much and it stands to significantly improve the results of your persuasive messaging efforts.

Suggested Guidelines

As with all research, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure you gather the most accurate, useful information.

1. Keep everything you learn in perspective. The methods above are all qualitative so the information must be evaluated according to its source, its context and its relationship to the other research you conduct. You’re the professional so it’s your responsibility to glean the most appropriate, relevant and useful knowledge from the data you collect.

2. Don’t cherry pick results that correspond with what you already believe or that point to the marketing materials you want to produce. Solicit, accept and be willing to honestly consider legitimate external input.

3. Ask people how they’d respond, not what they’d do if they were you. Most people think marketing is common sense and everybody wants to be Don Draper so unless you’re asking for advice from real marketing professionals who know what they’re talking about, limit the discussion to initial responses. You can ask people why they responded a certain way, but the minute they start playing armchair ad exec, their input is of limited value.

4. Weigh external perspectives honestly against internal imperatives. Your organization will want to keep producing boastful, self-flattering, presumptuous marketing materials because they reinforce all the things we arts professionals want to believe about ourselves. But if those messages aren’t resonating with new audiences, it’s time to take off the rose colored glasses and start dealing with the world as it is.

Go get some input from skeptical outsiders and let it influence the way you talk to them.

Andrew Taylor has a post over at Artsjournal.com this week called “Filling the house, or filling the heart. In it he mentions an executive search consultant who recruits for arts organizations and who is:

“concerned about the shift in senior-level marketing director candidates, who see their work increasingly as a job rather than a calling (an empty seat is a missed metric rather than a lost opportunity for joy).”

Personally, I think this is wonderful news. The arts need dispassionate marketers who want good marketing jobs. We need skilled professionals who understand that every empty seat is a missed metric and that the joy it represents is useful only to the extent that it can be leveraged to persuade someone to sit in it. For years we’ve been hiring insiders who are passionate about the arts, but what we need now are skilled practitioners with outside perspectives who are passionate about marketing. That may seem heretical to arts leaders who subscribe to the old “opportunity for joy” school of arts marketing, but it’s really the only sensible way forward in an era of diminishing demand and intense competition.

If you take a critical look at the “lost opportunity for joy” / “missed metric” dichotomy, you can’t help noticing that one is poetry while the other is math. One is an insider’s lament while the other is an objective description of reality. One is an emotional response to a sorry turn of events while the other is a statement of fact about a failed business strategy. They both do a good job of describing what happened, but only one sees the issue from a rational perspective and only one points to appropriate real world solutions.

Ask yourself this: What does an arts organization do when faced with lost opportunities for joy? If you’re like most arts pros, your answer will be to find more compelling ways to communicate how inherently joyful your products are. You’ll pursue strategies for developing more expressive copy, more dramatic photography and more creative design concepts. And if history is a guide, you’ll produce promotional materials that do a slightly better job of telling the world how wonderful you are and how lucky folks will be to experience the joy you believe your products can deliver.

But ask what an organization must do when confronted with missed metrics and the answer will be dramatically different. Metrics are measurements. Missing metrics are gaps in the strategic equation – necessary information that the marketers failed to gather or consider. Who were the people who didn’t buy those seats? Where were they? What did they do instead? What are their needs, wants and desires? What might we have done differently to persuade them to choose us over the competition? How can we go about gathering the information we need about this audience – and others like them – so we have the necessary metrics for developing successful new audience marketing initiatives?

The missed metrics approach asks us to use data rather than opinion, tradition or instinct. It tells us to gather objective, external intelligence so we can create rational persuasive strategies. It insists that we take a businesslike approach to marketing – no matter how unbusinesslike the rest of our organizations insist on remaining. And it forces us to plug the gaping holes in our joy-expressing strategies with audience oriented facts so our sales campaigns will be efficient, effective and predictable. In short, it demands that we learn why and how our new audiences seek joy long before we presume to tell them where they should find it.

Marketing is more about science and math than it is about creative expression. The arts didn’t need to know this back when there were plenty of people in the marketplace who actively sought joy in the products we sold. But those people are dying and young people aren’t looking for joy in the same places so we have a lot of quantitative catching up to do.

If we want stop losing audiences and start finding new audiences, we have to leave the poetry to the poets, hire smart, professional, businesslike marketers and then give them the support they need to do their jobs.

I know “sales” is a dirty word in the nonprofit arts, but I’m going to talk about it anyway. If you’re offended, please don’t read ahead.

Sales is one-on-one, personal, human interaction designed to motivate customers to buy your product. Some people use the word to refer to inside order-taking or customer service, but that’s not what we’re talking about today. You can call that stuff sales if you want, but if you’re not actively reaching out to persuade customers to buy your product, it’s really just operations.

Girl Scouts do sales. Businesses do sales. Used car dealers do sales. Art galleries do sales. Even prostitutes do sales, which means that sales has been around for a very long time. Fortunately, the relative integrity of sales as a revenue-generating endeavor is all about the motives of the people doing the sales, not the sales process itself.

Nonprofit arts organizations do sales, but we call it telemarketing so we can feel better about doing something we think is icky. We also do group “sales” but we do it so badly that it’s not even worth talking about.

I mention sales in the context of research because one the of the principal side benefits of sales is that by talking to our customers, we get information that helps us understand their needs, wants and desires. And when we understand our customers’ needs wants and desires, we can communicate with them more persuasively. People who do sales tend to identify with the people they sell to, which enables them to describe how the products they sell satisfy their customers’ yearnings.

In distancing ourselves from sales, we in the arts have inadvertently distanced ourselves from the people we most need to persuade – our new audiences. We don’t learn from them because we don’t endeavor to identify with them. And failing to learn from them prevents us from speaking to them in a language they understand.

Suggested Guidelines

As with all research, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure you gather the most accurate, useful information.

1. Take sales out of the boiler room. Hire a Director of Sales and give her an office next to the Director of Development and Director of Marketing. Put her in charge of everything that involves direct persuasive communication with key buyers, resellers or strategic selling partners, i.e:

• Sales to/through area businesses and corporations
• Sales through priority, discount or package offers
• Sales of sponsorships
• Sales through strategic marketing partners (media, credit card companies, etc.)
• Sales through strategic sales partners (hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc.)
• Sales through destination partners (BIDs, Chambers, CVB’s)
• Sales through legitimate secondary sales outlets, brokers and ticket agencies
• Sales through employee and membership perks companies
• Sales through affinity organizations and membership groups (AAA, AARP, alumni organizations., etc.)
• Sales through authorized, incentivized remote ticketing outlets
• Sales of whole-house buyouts, exclusive events and venue rentals to meeting & event planners and destination management companies
• Sales to/through tour operators & receptive service providers
• Sales through web-based discounters (Travelzoo, Groupon, Goldstar, etc.)
• Sales through/to educational systems, educators and students
• Sales of packages (dinner, parking, tickets, etc.)
• Sales through social media to consumer social networks
• Sales to senior, military, ethnic, religious, fraternal (SMERF) groups (a.k.a. traditional group sales)
• Sales to individual consumers through telemarketing, (a.k.a.”telesales”)

2. Develop, staff and empower a department that will engage in constant direct contact with the above, and that will channel external perspectives and expectations back into the organization at a senior management level.

3. Employ and enjoy best practices in sales including long-term relationship development, win-win partnership development, and the willingness to respond with alacrity and deference to the needs of willing but unfamiliar new buyers.

In the arts, sales is all about developing productive, mutually beneficial relationships with community decision makers who can buy or influence the purchase of tickets or admissions to our events or institutions. But it is also about opening a dialogue with those buyers/influencers so we can learn how to sell more effectively to them or through them to their various constituencies.

Sell. Learn. Sell.

Hi, All,

I’ll be heading to North Carolina this week to speak at the 2012 Entertainment Innovation Conference in Winston-Salem. Others may be heading to Charlotte (I’m told there’s some sort of conference happening there, too) but this is definitely where the action is.

I still owe two more Cheap, Easy Research Tips, but those may have to wait a few days.

Come see us in Winston-Salem if you’re in the neighborhood.

Otherwise, feel free to scroll down and browse.

See you next week.

Canadian psychologist Robert Gifford recently described seven psychological barriers that keep people from changing. Gifford’s area of interest is the environment – people don’t change their energy consumption habits even though global warming is likely to be catastrophic – but his observations apply just as well to the arts where leaders don’t change their management habits even though the industry suffers from chronic, potentially fatal, audience declines.

Here’s a brief paraphrase of what Dr. Gifford calls his “Seven Dragons of Inaction” along with some examples from the arts.

Limited Cognition

Humans simply may not be wired to anticipate future catastrophes and then change their behavior to prevent them from happening. For thousands of years we’ve dealt mostly with the here and now, and it’s only in the last few decades that we’ve been asked to gaze into the future, imagine the dire consequences of our actions and make wholesale changes in the way we live. Given the way we’ve evolved, we’re not very good at wrapping our minds around abstract future problems so we tend to drag our feet, assume that the problem is someone else’s or cling to irrational causes for optimism: “But sales were really strong for our Marvin Hamlisch tribute.”

Michael Kaiser complained recently in a Huffington Post blog that his consulting clients weren’t implementing sensible strategic plans even though they understood that inaction could have devastating consequences. It could be that when arts professionals fail to act it’s not because we’re lazy or stubborn, but because we simply don’t have the cognitive capacity to do it.

Ideologies

Some belief systems are so strong they blind people to reality. We all know how political ideologies can influence what people think about global warming, but there may be equally powerful ideologies preventing arts pros from understanding why change is necessary.

Long term tracking studies by the NEA have demonstrated chronic audience declines and conspicuous resistance among baby boomers to adopt the habits of their arts-consuming parents. Yet it’s still surprisingly easy to find arts professionals who’ve maintained a lifelong belief – and aren’t ashamed to profess – that people will somehow magically turn into arts patrons when their hair turns gray.

Significant Others

This one’s sort of like the blind leading the blind. I was working for a small museum a while back where I recommended some changes designed to appeal to new audiences. The museum decided they weren’t comfortable with the changes so they checked with other museums in the area, found that they weren’t contemplating such changes, and opted to stick with what they’d always done – even though it wasn’t working.

Sunken Costs

People who’ve made significant investments in the status quo are likely to defend those investments even if their long-term value is questionable. This helps to explain all those tuxedo-clad conductors on the covers of symphony orchestra brochures. From a new audience perspective they’re pure poison, but those photo shoots cost a fortune so there’s not a chance the pictures will be left out of the brochure.

Discredence

One of the easiest ways to avoid change is to discredit the people who tell us that change is necessary. The energy industry does it by casting doubt on accepted environmental science. The arts industry does it by categorically dismissing management approaches that forecast and prepare for future threats and opportunities. “We’re the arts. We shouldn’t be expected to behave like businesses!”

Perceived Risks

Change is risky. One of the benefits of refusing to change is that you can avoid responsibility for failure. In the arts, it may be easier to succumb to seemingly inescapable external threats than to make proactive choices and have to answer for what happens. “Despite our best efforts to attract new audiences (i.e. doing the same things we’ve always done), we simply couldn’t sell enough tickets to keep the doors open.”

Positive but Inadequate Change

People do change, but the changes we’re willing to make are often not enough. Assigning a low-level staffer to tweet out show announcements is a nice gesture, but if it’s not part of a comprehensive long-term plan to participate generously, humbly and meaningfully in the broader social media conversation, it’s the equivalent putting a “Save the Environment” sticker on a Lincoln Navigator.

Gifford suggests that change is possible, but that we’ll need to understand and address these psychological resistance factors before we can bring about the change we want. I’m not sure how that would work in the arts, but at least his seven dragons give us a more focused way to think about the problem.

I used to market engagements of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre at the Music Center of Los Angeles. One year I discovered an event called the Black Business Expo that was happening a few weeks before our upcoming Ailey appearance. The BBE, as it was called, was a three-day trade show at the Convention Center where hundreds of local businesses that were owned by, or that catered to, the African-American community promoted themselves to some 75,000 local consumers.

I negotiated a sponsorship with BBE (we sponsored them) and set up a booth with highly visible graphics on a well-traveled aisle, then I spent three days at the show meeting and talking to potential customers. I was the senior marketing person for the Music Center’s dance series and could easily have sent some volunteers or interns, but I made a point of being there myself and it was the single most important marketing decision I could have made.

At the Expo I met hundreds of people who were excited about Ailey but who had mixed feelings about the Music Center. Some of them chastised me for the Center’s less than engaging history with their community, some wondered why we only came to them with Black events, many wanted to see Ailey but didn’t have a clue what the Music Center was, some were tickled to see a white guy from such an aloof institution in their midst, and nearly all wanted information about the best seats in the house. Because I was present and fully engaged, I learned things that challenged most of what my colleagues and I thought we knew about Black audiences, and that engagement had a profound influence on our future marketing choices.

There’s no substitute for direct, personal interaction with audiences. If you’re a senior marketing exec who wants to understand new audiences, the best thing to do is find out where they are and go hang out with them. They’ll be glad to tell you everything you need to know.

Suggested Guidelines

As with all research, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure you gather the most accurate, useful information.

1. Get out of your office. Yes, you. The higher up you are, the more important it is for you to engage directly with those younger or more culturally diverse audiences you keep talking about. The reason most arts marketing is vapid, exclusive, self-important nonsense is that the leaders who sign off on it tend to be the most out of touch. The only way to make smart marketing choices is to have plenty of direct, personal experience with the people you’re marketing to.

2. Step out of your comfort zone. “Culturally diverse” audiences come from cultures that differ from ours. If we want to know them and learn how to market to them, we have to immerse ourselves in their cultures – even if those cultures are foreign and intimidating. The reason most arts marketing is repetitive insider shorthand is that we haven’t bothered to learn the languages our new audiences speak.

3. Listen. It wasn’t always easy standing in that booth listening to willing but skeptical audiences telling me how negligent we’d been or how grossly we’d misjudged their desires and dispositions, but it was information the Music Center needed to know.

4. Get the rest of your organization involved. I conspired with the folks at Ailey in New York to make sure that I wouldn’t be the senior-most person from the Music Center at the Black Business Expo and was thrilled when Ailey’s executive director, Sharon Luckman, showed up with my bosses in tow.

5. Record and disseminate what you learn. Develop a document that synthesizes your personal experience into credible objective observations that can be included in your accumulated research findings: “We learned that programs like Alvin Ailey are considered high-end social status events in the African American community and that seat location can trump price considerations.”

6. Engage on multiple levels. The other sponsors at the BBE were a veritable who’s who of movers and shakers in L.A.’s African-American business, neighborhood and religious communities. I spent as much time networking with potential marketing partners as I did with consumers – and wound up negotiating a 3,000-seat buyout for opening night!

7. Don’t do shotgun engagement. Doug Borwick will happily tell you that one weekend in your city’s African American community isn’t true engagement. Genuine engagement means establishing meaningful long-term relationships that offer benefits to both your arts organization and the communities it exists to serve. If you’re going to put your toe in the water, be ready to dive in and swim for a good long time.

Most arts professionals have deep, personal ties with communities of avid donors, members, subscribers and loyal patrons, and those ties shape the way we speak to the world around us. The key to reaching new audiences is to develop equally deep and personal ties with younger, more culturally diverse communities so we can speak a language that future audiences will understand.

This is the third installment in a six-part series about research. Many arts organizations avoid research because they think it’s expensive or complicated, but that’s not a good excuse for staying ignorant. There are plenty of ways to gain useful insight into new audience motives without having to spend a lot of money.

Focus group research is one of the most fascinating and most dangerous ways to learn what people think. It’s fascinating because if you do it right you can listen to potential customers talking frankly and honestly about your product or your marketing choices. It’s dangerous because it’s easy to manipulate and the results are easy to misconstrue.

Ideally focus group research should be organized by an independent research company that recruits the people you most want to learn from, invites them to a neutral facility and encourages them to discuss what you’re most interested in hearing – while you watch and listen behind a two-way mirror. The respondents know you’re there so it’s not entirely natural, but it’s a great way to gain insight that can’t be gotten in any other way.

Unfortunately, it’s expensive and imprecise. Focus group research should probably be conducted as part of a range of research activities to add qualitative color and depth to your intelligence gathering activities. Clearly, though, such comprehensive research is out of reach for many arts organizations.

That said, there’s nothing to stop arts organizations from talking to small groups of customers in an organized fashion. If you want to invite museum members to discuss benefit offerings, or series subscribers to discuss packages or single-ticket buyers to weigh in on new marketing campaign ideas, you certainly may, provided you follow some simple – but extremely important – guidelines. Informal focus groups can be a valuable extension of the process we discussed in Tip 1 if you’re willing to use a little bit more self-discipline and organizational rigor.

Suggested Guidelines

A simple online search for “focus group guidelines” will provide plenty of useful details, but there are a few general precautions worth mentioning here:

1. The most important is to avoid influencing the results by keeping yourselves, as much as possible, out of the process. At every step along the way you’ll have opportunities to nudge the information gathering in a direction that confirms what you want to believe or shields you from unwanted criticism. Since the purpose of focus groups is to get honest, direct, unfiltered feedback from real customers, you’ll want to keep the process as open and unbiased as possible – even if it hurts.

2. You can easily recruit any type of audience that’s in your database. If you’re curious about new audiences that aren’t in your database, start with the folks who inhabit the outermost fringes of your existing audience – the one-off buyers, discount buyers, late responders, once-in-a-blue-moon attendees, etc. Churn and new audiences are essentially the same thing so the more you learn about your churn, the more you’ll know about new audiences.

3. A good moderator is essential. Ideally, you’ll want a trained outsider, but if you can’t afford one, see if you can find a freelancer who’s willing to do some work for in-kind compensation or a grad student who’s studying research methods and needs some practical experience. If you have to use someone on staff, make sure he or she bones up on moderating techniques and maintains appropriate objectivity.

4. Listen unobtrusively. The great thing about agency focus groups is that you can put eight or ten staffers behind those two-way mirrors. But if everyone’s going to be in the same room, you may want only one or two staffers listening in. You moderator can introduce you as interested observers, but otherwise your role will be to blend into the woodwork.

5. Listen with humility. The most fascinating focus groups I ever participated in were for a Broadway show that was tanking because of some bad executive marketing decisions. For three hours we listened to regular theatergoers telling us with honest, thoughtful candor exactly how our messaging was missing the mark, but when the lights came up the executive producer stood up and said, “Well, that was a colossal waste of time. What do these people know about producing theatre?”

6. Add focus group results to the rest of your research and look for places where your collective findings overlap.

Any arts organization that gets in the habit of bringing customers together from time to time to ask them what they think can’t fail to make more informed, more productive marketing choices.

This is the second installment in a six-part series about research. Many arts organizations avoid research because they think it’s expensive or complicated, but that’s not a good excuse for staying ignorant. There are plenty of ways to gain useful insight into new audience motives without having to spend a lot of money.

If you can’t afford research of your own, for example, why not use someone else’s?

In grad school I learned the difference between primary research and secondary research. Primary research involves developing original research studies and then collecting and interpreting data, whereas secondary research involves gleaning knowledge from studies that have already been done and published. In academia, primary research is greatly prized whereas secondary research is thought to be somewhat less than…well…original.

Fortunately, in the non-academic world, nobody cares how you gained your knowledge as long as it works. So if you want to know what motivates millennials to buy certain products, you can design a study to measure their dispositions and behaviors, collect enough data to make statistically valid assumptions and then publish your findings in an appropriate peer-reviewed journal. Or you can go online and access mountains of useful research that was paid for by other people.

So for your next marketing meeting, rather than sitting in the conference room guessing about what makes new audiences buy tickets, why not come armed with a file folder crammed full of credible, objective, external market intelligence and a concise executive summary that outlines what you’ve learned?

Suggested Guidelines

As with all research, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure you gather the most accurate, useful information.

1. Ask clear, concise questions then find materials that provide the best answers, i.e. “How should I structure my marketing messages to appeal to millennial audiences?”

2. Start by searching online and tapping into professional discourse through social media. Information is widely available and there are plenty of pros out there – especially on Twitter – who can’t wait to share it with you.

3. Apply academic rigor. If the web sends you to books, periodicals or reports that can’t be accessed online, go to the library or buy the necessary material if possible. It’s easy to skim across the surface, but reliable research requires breadth and depth.

4. Look for current, relevant, authoritative information from credible sources. Double-check everything you find to make certain it’s legit.

5. Look for agreement across multiple sources. A single study may be interesting but the more agreement you discover, the more conclusive the findings are likely to be.

6. Don’t cherry pick information that confirms what you already think or supports marketing methods you’ve already decided on. Be eager to learn and willing to change.

7. Don’t draw conclusions that aren’t supported by the research.

8. Compare apples to apples. Research that’s designed to reveal the attitudes of urban teens toward new athletic shoe brands may not be applicable to marketers of Shakespearean plays.

9. Compare what you learn in secondary research to what you learn by speaking to your own new audiences. Pay special attention to places where the findings overlap.

10. Organize and record your research for future use.

In nonprofit arts marketing, where insider opinions prevail, there’s a good chance that the research you do will go unheeded and your organization will end up doing what it has always done, but the more credible knowledge you bring to the table, the better chance you’ll have of swaying the process in a more professional direction.

This is the first installment in a six-part series about research. Many arts organizations avoid research because they think it’s expensive or complicated, but that’s not a good excuse for staying ignorant. There are plenty of ways to gain useful insight into new audience motives without having to spend a lot of money.

The easiest is to talk to people.

I was speaking to a group of arts administrators at the League of American Orchestras conference recently where I asked, “How many of you stand in the lobby as audiences arrive looking for first-timers, greeting them, thanking them for coming and chatting with them about what made them decide to buy tickets?”

I actually knew the answer before I asked so I wasn’t surprised when nobody raised a hand. As an industry we don’t do this; it’s not in our culture. Having friendly conversations with arriving guests goes against established industry norms. In the same way that performers maintain a fourth wall between art and audiences, we administrators tend to keep our distance from ordinary patrons, preferring to remain behind the scenes with our databases and sales reports – which goes a long way toward explaining why our marketing is so artificial and impersonal.

I mentioned once here that I decided to break this convention while overseeing marketing for a long-running Broadway show in L.A. We were in our second year and having a hard time figuring out how to keep the sales momentum going so I did the unthinkable. I stood in the lobby as folks arrived and asked them what made them decide to come. For several weeks I just hung out in the midst of the arriving throng, introduced myself to people who looked least at home, and chatted with them about the show and what made the difference between them wanting to come and actually taking action.

Back in the conference room where my colleagues and I normally exchanged opinions about why people bought tickets, I was able to say, “I’ve spoken to several dozen ticket buyers in recent weeks and there appears to be a powerful trend in their decision making. Most people told me that they had a long-standing desire to see the show, but needed a trigger such as a special occasion, hot date or out of town visitor to get them to make the purchase.” From that day forward our mantra was “reasons to buy” and every marketing message we developed contained one of the triggers that our audience told us they were waiting for. It was astonishingly successful.

I can honestly say that over thirty years of conducting various types of research, the most useful information I’ve gained has come from simply talking to customers. It was easy because they were coming into the venue, it was cheap because all I had to do was arrange my day so I could be there, and it was extremely useful because there was no filter between source and decision maker. I learned what people wanted and made sure my marketing promised them what they were looking for.

Whether you stand in the lobby chatting with arriving guests or select a handful of names to call and thank the next morning, learning what makes new audiences tick could become your most productive work habit.

Suggested Guidelines:

As with all research, there are a few guidelines to follow to make sure the information you gather is accurate and useful:

1. Ask about motives, not newspapers and radio stations. Knowing where to advertise is great, but if you don’t know what to say, your ad money will be wasted.

2. Listen and hear. Don’t impose your own attitudes on the information or filter what they say to make it fit what you already think.

3. Focus on establishing rapport. Make the greeting the primary emphasis. Ask about motives as part of a friendly conversation and record what you learn later behind the scenes.

4. Get as much raw data as possible and look for trends. One customer’s experience is an anecdote, but if a majority of respondents start telling the same story, your data will begin telling you exactly what to do.

5. Absolutely no interns with clipboards. The people who most need to interact directly with new audiences are the senior decision makers who, in the arts, tend to be the most out of touch. If your organization is dependent on new audiences, there’s not a single person on staff who’s above getting to know them.

Take your boss and the rest of your marketing team down to the lobby for your next event and start listening to new audiences. Then go back to your conference room the next day and start talking to them.

Here’s a tip that will guarantee any arts organization a significant increase in sales. It’s easy to do, it doesn’t cost a cent and you can start today:

Write a “strategic messaging statement” every time you set out to develop a marketing piece. Before you engage in any creative discussions, take the time to think through and describe in writing exactly who the piece is talking to, what they want and how your product will satisfy their desires.

Here’s an example:

STRATEGIC MESSAGING STATEMENT

MEDIA: Spring Postcard/Email

TARGET: Fall/winter single-ticket buyers with emphasis on one-off buyers

OBJECTIVE: Reduce churn rate by stimulating return visits among one-off buyers

MESSAGE STRATEGY: Our research into younger one-off buyers revealed a desire to enjoy live music periodically with peers, but they were put off by a perceived lack of connection and a distaste for the formal trappings and presumed superiority of the traditional classical concert experience. Thus, this postcard will be written in a casual, conversational style and will feature images of young people enjoying themselves in the venue bar. The piece will focus on the buyers rather than the institution, and will describe the emotional rewards of enjoying live concerts with friends. Traditional classical music clichés will be strictly avoided.

At first glance it probably seems obvious: “Well, sure, we do this sort of thing all the time.” But I’m willing to bet that’s not true. There’s a big difference between sitting in a conference room with fellow insiders dreaming up creative marketing ideas, and doing the work it takes to research, develop and codify a legitimate persuasive strategy. Here’s how the differences tend to break down:

First, a well crafted strategy requires factual information about the target market’s desires and expectations. A lot of arts organizations don’t do research into what motivates new audiences, however, because they worry that it’s too complicated or expensive, and instead of knowing what motivates audiences, they tend to imagine what motivates audiences based on their own insider’s perspectives. This is why the language of arts marketing is so embarrassingly insular, exclusive and self-congratulatory.

Next, a well crafted strategy describes a motivating relationship between what’s being sold and what the audience wants. In the example above, the marketers learned that their audience wanted to enjoy live music with peers in a relaxed setting that was conducive to socialization, so they were able to craft a message that leveraged those desires in order to motivate the target to buy. If they’d done what arts marketers normally do and put a sweaty conductor swinging a baton on the cover, it wouldn’t have had the same motivating power – because sweaty conductors have nothing to do with what the targets said they were looking for.

And finally, you have to write the strategy down and get it approved by everyone who has a say in the marketing process. The postcard above looks nothing like the materials your boss is accustomed to vetting. If she’s dreaming about sweaty conductors and you’re showing her young people drinking in the lobby, it’ll never fly. But if you do your homework, develop a written strategy and have everyone – including your boss – sign off on it before anyone thinks about copy or design, you’ll stand a far greater chance of breaking the cycle of mindless self-absorption that keeps the arts from appealing to people outside the bubble.

I’m well aware that the sticking point here is research and that most arts organizations believe they don’t have the staff or resources to gather the necessary information, but I don’t buy it. There are all sorts of ways to gather credible market intelligence without having to hire outside firms or employ trained statisticians. I list fourteen of those methods in my book and will share several of them in subsequent posts.

But in the meantime, I recommend creating, writing down and disseminating well-supported message strategies long in advance of any creative marketing discussions. It’s a simple first step away from our industry’s hoary old traditions and toward the development of a disciplined, professional, fiscally responsible approach to strategic marketing. As I said above, It’s easy to do, it doesn’t cost a cent and you can start today.

So why not try it? If you do it right, I guarantee you’ll get better results.