More museums and galleries are now ticketing at entry – a necessary response in many cases to the need to manage numbers during the pandemic. However, once your ticketing system is connected to Audience Finder, you’ll also be building up a bank of information collected during the booking process which could be very valuable for future planning. We have a number of resources to help you get started with contributing data to Audience Finder, check if your system is a compatible system with Audience Finder or has the capability to produce reports to the correct specification.
N.B. If you use Art Tickets, you can now integrate with Audience Finder. To find out more, please contact our Support Desk.
Understand your visitors, and your local area
While you’ve probably already got a good idea of who your visitors are, just from seeing them come through the doors every day, your ticketing data can help confirm and quantify this for you.
Log in to your Audience Finder dashboard and you’ll find a personalised overview of your ticket bookers by Audience Spectrum segment, giving you a rich source of information about their general lifestyles and attitudes towards arts and culture. You can also use the filters on the dashboard to compare your visitor profile with the general population of your area, to help understand who you’re currently not reaching.
Similarly, you can explore the Audience Spectrum profile of your bookers against the population in your catchment area using the 'what is the Audience Spectrum profile of my bookers' insight in your Audience Finder 2.0 Beta account. They are also further insights available looking at your catchment area based on your ticketing data.
Identify the best time to send out emails and social media posts
Knowing when your visitors' most commonly book before attendance is essential information if you’re planning any marketing activity. If the general trend is for booking 2-4 weeks ahead, and you’ve (for example) got some events planned for upcoming school holidays, then concentrating marketing efforts at 4 weeks out is likely to stand the best chance of success.
Similarly, you could also look at which days of the week see the most bookings – if no-one books on a Monday, that’s probably not the best day to send out the big announcement email to your mailing list!
Benchmark your results
Benchmarking is about putting your data in context. It allows you to define what ‘doing well’ means, and understand if you are over- or under- performing in a particular area.
For example, you could determine if your visitors attend more frequently than the average for similar organisations? Or whether you’re reaching more young people than other organisations in your region?
Armed with this information, you can then begin see the opportunities to both shout about your successes, and identify areas for improvement.
If you are looking for further support in getting started with implementing your data, we have personalised 1-2-1 sessions available which you can book through our team.