Join the following panelists as they share tips on event management for venue owners and operators: Katie Nowak, VP of Marketing and Partnerships at TBA Agency, Ashley Ryan, VP of Marketing at First Avenue, Kylie Stine, Community Marketing Manager at Forty5 Presents, and Chris Copen, owner of Bottle Rocket Social Hall.

Register for the January Make More Money webinar here, where we'll be discussing event fads and trends at venues.

‍

Watch the recording of the December Make More Money webinar:

‍

Transcript of (RECORDING) MAKE MORE MONEY WEBINAR: EVENT & TOUR VENUE MARKETING:

Jeb Banner:

Hi. Let's get going. Again, I'm Jeb Banner, CEO at Opendate. This is the first Make More Money webinar and we've got some great panelists here. We're going to go around the horn and each panelist is going to share what their current marketing toolkit is, along with their name and where they work. I'll kick it off to Katie.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Hi there, I'm Katie. I'm the VP of marketing and partnerships at TBA Agency and our marketing toolkit probably looks a little bit different than everyone else's because we work on the agency side of things, and so our toolkit is information. It includes announced dates, strategy, pre-sale information, ticket links, artwork, and really anything that we can take to pass along to our promoter, friends and partners to align and get the show up and on sale smoothly. And then on the back end of that, the rest of our toolkit is what we get back from the promoters, so ad plans, localized art, radio proposals, if that's applicable. But yeah, that's what our toolkit looks like.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. Ashley?

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Hey there, I'm Ashley. I'm the VP of marketing at First Avenue and all of our associated venues in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. Yeah, I mean, I am the opposite answer of Katie, so I am hoping and praying that the agency or artist team is sending over assets, lists of maybe affinity artists, just really any data that they have about the artist, whether that's streaming information, what radio targets they might be looking for. So we're getting a toolkit from the agency side, but then localizing it, customizing it for the market, reaching out to all kinds of different partners.

We've been working with a lot of retail partners lately on top of radio, a lot of what we call tastemakers. We're just folks in the market who might be a good fit to help promote an event. I think our toolkit also, Katie's point of information is exactly right. Our toolkit sometimes is previous buyer data or our toolkit can be some of the digital platforms that we're utilizing. I would consider Hive, which is a CMS, which also does newsletter and SMS is a toolkit for me and it's an industry specific one. So I think the more industry specific products you can be using, the more robust your toolkit is as well.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. Thank you. Chris.

‍

Chris Copen:

Hi there, I'm Chris. I own Bottle Rocket Social Hall in Pittsburgh. I guess our toolkit is really focused on curation and really getting that messaging across. We're 200, 240 cap room, so our toolkit, it's the typical stuff. It's Instagram, it's MailChimp, and then we have a zine that we run. We have a YouTube channel that we put up interviews with, really try and connect local talent with the national talent that's coming in and interviews, radio relationships with the stations in town. But we're definitely a small team, so we definitely have a smaller, more basic toolkit I feel like, and really our focus is on maximizing those resources that we do have.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. Thanks Chris. Kylie?

‍

Kylie Stine:

Yeah. Hi, everybody. My name's Kylie. I'm the community marketing manager at Forty5. We're based in Indianapolis and our toolkit's pretty similar to what Ashley mentioned, a lot of things from tour managers and agencies that we get, have to send back. But then from a team perspective, our toolkit is our digital marketing manager, community marketing, which is myself, and then we have our marketing director. We divvy up all of our work by show marketing, community marketing and digital marketing. So we have our project management tool, our social media scheduling tool, our ticketing provider, our website hosting, email marketing tools, paid advertising, and then our press and community relations too, community calendars, just trying to get our events on our local city calendars, our Yelp calendar, Google my business, radio partnerships, that kind of thing.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great, great. And Andrew's joining us as well from our team. You want to say, Hey, Andrew?

‍

Andrew:

Hey, everybody. I'm Andrew Jensen with Opendate. I'm the director of business development. Happy to have you guys all here and as I put in the chat if you have anything specific or interesting from your own toolkits that you'd like to share, feel free to drop it in the chat there, and that goes for questions as well. If you have questions or anything to add throughout this panel, feel free to put them in there and we'll respond as we go, but thanks for joining. Happy to have everyone here.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. So we talked a little bit about toolkits. I want to dial in a little bit more on what's working, what's not working right now for you? Just thinking about the social media landscape and how quickly that's changing, how much in the last year with threads blowing up and then seems to be dying down, with Twitter going through a lot of changes to X. A lot of things out there in flux right now, privacy changes as well coming out with Apple and Google. So I'm just curious, anybody want to kick us off? Just what do you see working right now and specifically how has that changed over maybe the last year for you and your team? Anyone want to take us on that?

‍

Ashley Ryan:

If anyone what's working, I would love to hear it. There are a lot of changes. Privacy changes I think were the thing that everyone at least expected and knew was on the horizon. I don't think everyone expected the X/Twitter/threads implosion of is any of that worthwhile to be on? Yes, no, maybe, every day is different. I think we have seen some really positive results from just regular old Google ads, but it's tried and true right now. I feel like we are constantly testing new things and we are constantly talking with artist teams about like, Hey, no, you don't think maybe your artist is big on TikTok, but there is a space for everything on TikTok, so just trust us. Let us put a little piece of the budget over there. We'll test it, we'll see how it does. If we're not getting great results, we'll just move that money back into Instagram, Google, Facebook, the stuff where you would expect to see it.

But I think the most important thing is trying to understand the audience and finding that audience where they are. Reddit ads do not make sense for every show, but Reddit ads are essential for certain podcasts or comedians. So I think it's working with the artist team on the front end, again, back to information, and getting as much info as you can and trying to understand that audience and finding them and meeting them where they're at and not just expecting Facebook ads are going to save the day.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah, I think that algorithm has really just ... It's a crapshoot, right? It works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't and it takes A-B testing, it takes having a really robust menu of assets to really figure out what works and what doesn't work. And it's not a great strategy to say let's just try it and see what happens, but sometimes that's what you have to do in order to figure out what is going to move the needle, especially if something doesn't go on sale well off the bat, right? If something goes up really soft then you want to test it out and see what's going to make the biggest impact and then move everything in the budget over to that. So everything is working and nothing is working, I think is the answer.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Kylie?

‍

Kylie Stine:

Yeah, so I can echo everything that's been said so far. Something that I really value about our team here is we all, like Ashley mentioned, are willing to be adaptive to the constant changes and always stay on top of what industry knowledge is out there, like reading articles about things that are always changing. Something that our team has found effective is being able to use our data by genre instead of by age, but divvying up our audience by the shows that they've been to and the genre those shows are in, and then seeing what platforms those genre users like. So with an EDM show, a lot of the time that's a social ad and it's really close to the actual day of show, but if it's a traditional classic rock, it's earlier buyers and it's via email that we're seeing that they're buying their tickets from. So we've been able to adapt our ad plans, our marketing plans to meet those fans where they're at instead of trying to change their behavior and get them to buy from a different platform that they might not be using.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. Chris, any thoughts to add?

‍

Chris Copen:

I feel like for us it all comes back to the email list. The email list is the most powerful tool that we have. We do do a lot of emerging artists. It's a small room, it's acts that people probably haven't heard before, so there's a high degree of audience education for a lot of our shows that have to be done and that's really where the zine comes in or videos on our socials. But really we found to actually move tickets, it's the email list and targeting that email list based on shows, based on genres. That's what we've started doing more recently and seeing great results from.

‍

Jeb Banner:

We just had a question on that topic from Jordan in the Q&A. He said, sorry, I'm assuming it's a he, apologize, I'd love to know as a part two of this question, any tips, tricks or secret sauce thoughts on marketing specifically for smaller acts in the come up or development stage? It sounds like [inaudible 00:10:50] speaking directly to that.

‍

Chris Copen:

I can talk about that. Sure. On the smaller acts, I feel like something that we've done really well is just we have a specific taste and a curation that our audience trusts. And so there's an element to, oh, if this is a bottle rocket, it must be good. And that I think for small acts is the dream is to get the co-sign of the space, and just get ticket sales off of that alone I think goes a long way. But we have that because we do have a pretty selective booking process for newer up and coming acts. We're not going to just take acts that want to date. There is a curation element, especially if we know that they're smaller, because then it does become like, Hey, we're saying this is good, so come to it. And if you do that and it's bad, then you're never going to get those people back. So that's a big thing for me.

And really I think especially with comedians, it's a lot about getting the personality across and that's where the videos and the interviews come in. We'll tie in local artists. We've done a singer for a really popular local band, knew this touring comedian, and we had them do an interview together. We put that out and then that's like an in-market co-sign. Comedians are tougher than music. Music, you can always just put the opening acts on and if the opening acts are there, then the local audience comes and that's how we do a lot of the smaller music acts. But the comedians, it really is getting the personality across. What projects are they in that you would care about? Yeah, we spent a lot of time trying to get the right people at the right shows, especially with comedians because if you don't like a comedian, I feel like the reaction is more, I guess, rough for an audience than a music show that they don't like.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Sorry. This is going to sound obvious, and also it sounds sad and annoying, but the more you promote yourself on your platform, the more you're going to engage the algorithm, the more people are going to be able to engage with your posts. Perhaps you show up on someone's Discover page. I mean, it's the same with musicians and comedians. I follow a lot of comedians and the trend right now is to post clips of your best jokes and then people will want to come see your show or they're going to watch your special or they're going to want to engage with you online.

And as daunting as constantly making content can be, I think that is how you reach people right now. And whether that's on Instagram or on TikTok or what have you, having, like I said, a robust menu of different kinds of content and engaging in different kinds of platforms for different audiences is really going to help grow your following and get you to a place where you can come to a small venue and sell it out. On the artist side of things, I think that's what we've seen work really, really well.

‍

Kylie Stine:

I agree that a lot of it is artist driven. We did a huge survey to our email list this past year and we found that the reason someone would go to a show 99% of the time is because of the artist that's performing. The answer can also be that it's because of the venue, but that's only two thirds. 67% of our audience said the venue matters, 99% said the artist matters. And our interns just did an awesome presentation about reaching younger demographics, like 21 to 25, and it's all up and coming artists that are constantly posting on TikTok. So a lot of promotion, a lot of just content creation over and over. It might get picked up, it might not by the algorithm, but a lot of it is artist-driven.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I will just echo what everybody else is saying, which is fresh content. It can be tough if it's a newer developing act because they might not have any content of their own. They don't have the budget, they don't have the resources, they haven't shot a video, nobody's interviewed them. So we have a bit of a content creation in-house team here where we are constantly making videos for folks or guiding people like, Hey, we've got a few questions. Can you just record yourself answering these? We'll edit it, we'll put music behind it. We'll take care of creating something for you to use and share because it's a big ask for us, I think, sometimes, especially if we're talking about local bands or, again, just up and coming bands to expect that they would have a full EPK or a press kit ready to go.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Yeah, that's right. We've got a good question from Maria here. Outside of e-blast and SMS, if you're using, how are you utilizing the data that you have from past shows? I know we touched on this a little bit, dig a little deeper, what's working and not working? We'll pause there and I want to tag onto this a little bit of a side question around attribution, because I know from my background in marketing, attribution is the bane of a marketer's existence because it's so hard to say, Hey, you've got multi-touch attribution, you've got all these different channels at play. What's working for you on that level as well? So you've got a question around how are you utilizing data from past shows? And I'm also curious, if you want to touch on it, how are you attributing spends to ticket sales? Because I think that that's part of that data piece as well. I'm curious for what people are seeing out there using.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I'll say just to maybe start, because I think there's so much good stuff here, but when it comes to how are we using data from previous shows, I mean exactly right, we are using SMS and email blasts and we're using that to create lookalike audiences on Facebook and Instagram. Especially if we have an event with an artist or recurring event year over year, we're looking at the sales cycle. So how strong did the show go up last year, four years ago, 10 years ago, whatever the data is? How many tickets sold pre-sale, on sale, one month out, four weeks, not four, one month and four weeks, one month out, one week out and using that. So that's maybe informing how much money we're spending on the front end at maintenance and at back end. But there's a lot of good stuff here, so I'll let somebody else talk.

‍

Katie Nowak:

I mean, from our side of things, the way that ... because we don't always have access to customer data, but we have access to fan data and we get that data through doing a sign-up for a presale campaign through something like Seated or something like Lay Low where you can click a link and sign up and put in your name and your email address and your phone number and you'll get an email or a text and those things ... Basically at the end of the day, any fan of any artist wants to hear from them directly, even if they know it's not actually them talking to you, right? So a great example is Ethel Cain. We just put up a Greek in LA and a summer stage in New York and used Lay Low to gather fan data to then send out a presale code, and both of those shows sold out almost immediately at the on sale.

So even though those two techniques of e-blast and SMS feel very like duh, and also they're not the most jazzed up marketing strategy, they work because people want to hear from her. They want to know when she's coming to their city and they want to go ahead and click yes and buy a ticket immediately. And I think that just direct communication oftentimes works a lot better than trying to go down a road of some big, creative, sassy strategy that is like, what if we did a scavenger hunt and we hid the tickets and then people ... And it's like, just tell them what's going on and if you build it, they will come.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Bless you, Katie. No more scavenger hunts. Heard it here first.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Done with the scavenger hunts.

‍

Chris Copen:

Something that we do a lot with the data that I feel like it's unique for us, because we do rely on a lot of repeat business and people just trusting the taste is we really look at how many people are coming to this show are coming for the first time to the venue and then the staff knows that. So they know, Hey, this is 90% new people, let's really do something. Maybe let's give out some more free drink vouchers tonight. Maybe let's talk about upcoming acts. I think a lot of our business, what we've really been successful at is getting the second visit, the third visit, the regular habit, and that's because we are a bar as well as a venue. In the bar business, if you can get the third visit, then you're golden. You're in that person's life forever. But if they come to the third time, they're 80% likely to come a fourth, fifth, sixth. So we really focus on getting that third visit.

And so when we look at emails, maybe we'll look at people that have been two times in the last month and if we need to paper a show, maybe we'll give them the free ticket. So then that's their third visit and now it's more of a habit for them. So there's the typical stuff we do, matching acts with other acts. Hey, if you liked this comedian, then you'll like this comedian who wrote for their TV show. But I feel like that data, the customer data at the bar end is something that we look at a lot.

‍

Kylie Stine:

Yeah, I echo a lot of what Ashley mentioned already with using past buyer data for also local audiences when doing Facebook ads, manager ads. Another thing we do is we use our website Pixel to say if someone's visited these pages on the website, then they might also be interested in this show, target them with this ad. When people are in the venue, like what Chris mentioned, something we've started doing a lot, and Maria, I've been to your venue so I know that you do this too, but having paper tickets for upcoming shows that are similar genre, similar audience we give away during raffles and contests.

And then in terms of the attribution question, the data is not always 100% reliable on the platforms that we are looking at all the time with our paid advertising platforms, but we do use Google Data Studio for a lot of our shows where we can see with all of the conversions that came from a certain show when everyone who bought tickets. How many of them originally came from an email? How many came directly from a Google search? How many came from a paid ad? How many came from an email that they clicked on? It's not always 100% accurate, but it's closer than nothing. So a lot of the time we look at that and we know, okay, let's spend more of our efforts on this type of a platform and less on this one for this type of show.

I know you mentioned radio specifically, that is very hard to track. It's direct impact. The one thing that we've tried to do is check our direct searches that week based on when the radio ads are running, running it against those same timelines. Sometimes if a radio station also has a website that they maintain, we give them a special link so we can track traffic from that reference link, but it is difficult. I don't know if there is a great answer for that.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Well, I think there's a difference between awareness tactics and conversion tactics, right? Radio is an awareness tactic. You're not expecting someone to listen to a radio ad and then immediately go to Ticketmaster.com and buy a ticket. That's why you supplement it with the Instagram ad or the Google ad or whatever. And so flyers, also an awareness tactic, not a conversion tactic. And so when you're talking about attribution, I think talking about something that is inherently an awareness tactic, the attribution is unknown. There's truly really no way to really measure that against what you can measure by clicks and conversions in a digital space.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I do like to run radio pre-sales and have that be a really easy way to attribute sales to it, just make sure that they have a unique password. But yeah, Kylie and Katie are exactly right. It's in the mix. It's something that's great for awareness and good to supplement, but I would never expect to be able to directly, besides a pre-sale, draw a lot of attribution from it, but it should be if you have the budget, I think a part of the mix.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Is that effective for you, Ashley, those radio pre-sales?

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Yeah, I think it really depends on your market. We have some really strong radio in Minneapolis still, and I don't think that is everybody's experience, but it does work for us here.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like there's a consensus, but I just want to ask the question. Is email still the killer app? Is there anything more effective than email? No. Yeah, it's still the ... Sorry.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

SMS is-

‍

Jeb Banner:

Right, right.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

SMS or an email from the artist versus an email from the venue. Yeah.

‍

Jeb Banner:

So if you were to spend a buck on marketing, those are the two places you'd start, email and SMS?

‍

Katie Nowak:

Mm-hmm.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Yeah, and in terms of social, digging in a little bit more, what is the most effective platform in general for you right now? I think it comes down to two, well, maybe three, but you have TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. I know there's different markets for that, but where do you feel like you end up spending most of your money? And that's probably a little specific to your venue, but I'm just curious, I think for the audience here is where do you end up spending most of your money across those platforms?

‍

Chris Copen:

For us, it's all Instagram. That is where we see so much conversion. Our Instagram does very, very well. We're about to turn two years old and we're about to hit I think 12,000 Instagram followers and they're super engaged and there's a lot of ... We can see the metrics, who's sharing it. All of our posts are doing pretty well there. So for us it's all Instagram, and when we do spend marketing ads, it's Meta, Business suite, but it's video content that we're spending on. We're very rarely posting flyers anymore unless it's ... We do some shows that are just concept dance nights, so we'd post a flyer for that. But if it's a comedian, we have to have two solid one minute clips so we can use, and that's really what drives all of our advertising is those two one minute clips.

‍

Kylie Stine:

I would say Facebook and Instagram we're posting on constantly. I think our engagement's better on Instagram just with where people are, the type of shows we're putting out, the type of content we're putting out. Similar to Chris, we've done a lot with video, especially short form, vertical video this year, and we've seen that pay off well. I would say that that's probably our most engaging content that's the most interactive with our audience. We've wanted to spend on TikTok, but it's gotten difficult because we are currently a creator account on TikTok and not a business account because when you become a business account, you lose access to a lot of sounds, but if you're just a creator account, you can't run ads. So it's that cat and mouse, I don't know, potato, potato game, where which is more beneficial for us. So we use TikTok as an awareness building tool right now. The majority of our sales come from a 21 plus venue, so TikTok is not our main source of audience. I guess they are more on that Facebook and Instagram.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I think we have a little bit more of a mix between the three platforms, but I would say that Instagram is probably number one followed by Facebook Meta, followed by TikTok in terms of ad [inaudible 00:28:00] spend and probably even where organic efforts are as well. I think TikTok is the most time-consuming, obviously when it comes to organic content. And it also is the thing that can just be flagged by the audience as inauthentic or just lame, not cool, whatever. So you just have to be really careful about what you're putting out there, making sure that it's going to hit a wide enough base for it to be worthwhile.

When it comes to running ads, though, I really like running ads on TikTok. I think they're super effective. It absolutely sucks losing the music, no problem admitting that it's the least favorite thing I have about it, and I tell our TikTok rep that all the time. But until other people with more ability to clear rights than me get involved, that's not going to change anytime soon, so I don't know. I think unless you're really planning on spending money on a regular basis, I would stay on creator. But if it's something that you feel like it's a good part of the mix for you, I would encourage anyone who's thinking about it to move over to the business side because the add set up is really pretty simple, especially if you get an artist or an artist team who is also really in that space and they can send you just a Spark ad code. It's basically running a dark ad. It's so simple. It's really good targeting as well. So that's where we're at.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Could someone took a second to explain to some of the folks that maybe aren't familiar with dark ads, what they are and how to leverage them? Because I think that's one of the secret weapons out there, if someone could explain that to the group.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Yeah, I'll jump in. So from our venue account, I can request advertiser access to an artist page and essentially we can work with the artist team on the language, the video or the image that we're going to use. What we do then is set up an ad, our team is setting up the ad, but it will run from the artist page, it will be in the artist's voice. It will be using artwork or a video that the artist or the artist team has approved, but it just takes the burden off the artist's team from setting those up in 50 different markets if they're on tour. It also I think allows us to help with some local targeting too.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Katie, I'm curious for your perspective on dark ads. I'm sure you're a part of this in some way, I guess, I would think on the artist side.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah, I mean we recognize and encourage all of our artists to run dark ads because they are ... Like I said, people want to hear from the artist directly. So an ad from Jungle is going to go a lot farther than an ad from the forum. People are going to go to their Instagram first before they go to anybody else's. And what's true is that a lot of artists really don't like having ads run from their page because they feel like they're selling out to the man or whatever. But at the end of the day, the goal is to sell as many tickets as possible and utilize the data that they have, but also the data that the local venue has to target correctly and make sure that, like Ashley said, it's in their voice and it's approved copy and it's approved assets so that it feels like it's true to them even though it is an ad.

And I think it takes a lot of explaining to them sometimes that no one's going to go to your Instagram and see the ad on your feed. It comes up randomly depending on if you're part of the targeting mix. So it's not like I go to someone's Instagram and the ad is just there for everyone to see. And over time, when that stuff first started coming out, it was very like, what is this? We don't know what's going on. Why are they running ads from our page? And now it's pretty much very standard practice to do that because like I said, it really does move the needle in a big way.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I'll add to that just from a consumer perspective, I've never been mad to get an ad for a thing I want, and I think that's the place that as consumers, a lot of us are. We have all given up some amount of data and privacy in order to get ads that are targeted or curated towards us a little bit more. And it's like if there's an artist or comedian or a show coming to town and it's someone I really like, I'm fine if I get an ad for it. I mean, maybe that's just a marketer seat, but I feel like as a consumer, that's what I would rather see anyways.

‍

Andrew:

Well, there's a lot of-

‍

Katie Nowak:

I like to compare people's ads, where I'm like, oh-

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Oh, that's what you got? Oh, weird. I love getting the ad where I'm like, you think I'm the demo for this? What am I doing wrong?

‍

Kylie Stine:

I know that's a prompt that we got for this webinar was what's a tool that you wish existed? And I wish that there was something that just automatically ... We do as much as we can targeting wise, but I wish it was like, here are all the fans in this city of this artist. We will reach them on the platform that they go to. We will go have this flyer in the stores that they go to. I wish we just had this ideal fan character persona that the marketing just went straight to them, connected them the right way.

‍

Jeb Banner:

You're leading right into my next question. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, so I was curious to know what do you wish existed? What tools do you wish existed? Sometimes when I ask a question like this, I encourage you to think of yourself as having a magic wand, so don't worry about the limitations. I think Kylie did a good magic wand answer of flyers in stores and everything else. But in your day-to-day role, marketing your venue, working with artists, what do you wish you had that you don't have right now that would greatly help in the effectiveness of your marketing work?

‍

Katie Nowak:

Customer data. It is the number one thing managers ask for every single tour. Can we have the customer data? And the answer is unfortunately no, because some venues are willing to share it, but obviously most are not. And there's obvious reasons for that, privacy laws and what have you, but it would make a lot of managers happy if I could just hand over the customer data. And I think there's an argument to be made that the customer data is the artist data because it's their show and they are their fans, and that argument has been contested time and time again with the powers that be. And at the end of the day, we might see it one day and we probably won't, but that is one thing that I think if we were able to have access to it from the artist side, we would sell out a lot of shows a lot faster because we would just be able to immediately communicate with those people.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I would say perfect attribution would be nice. Stop barking up the wrong tree on things. I would say automation, and I don't mean AI, not that I'm anti AI, but just specifically I feel like having been at this a while, there was a time where on the venue side you had a person confirming the show and typing that information up by hand, and then that would be sent to a ticketing person that would copy and paste or type that up by hand and that would be sent to a marketing person who would copy and paste or type that information by hand, right? And so we've moved obviously past that and there are a lot of automations and integrations and tools out there. But I think that for me is, to Katie's point of that customer data, moving all of the information through the chain faster and more reliably. And that's a lot of different things, but that would make me so happy.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Chris?

‍

Chris Copen:

Yeah, I mean, what do I wish existed at our level? I feel like the answer is more time in a day, really. I mean, it's tough wearing a lot of hats. We just hired our first marketing person last week. I know I was telling you Jeb, and until then marketing was the thing I did between running sound for the shows and hanging the lights for the shows and booking the shows. So because of that, I feel like we haven't got as deep into the data and stuff that we could. So I feel like my answer right now is just more time so that I could even know what is shortcoming for us. Yeah.

I will say being able to have all of our information live in one place with Opendate has been like, I'm not going to do an ad read for you, but it's been a real game changer. The fact that we do have a team that is spread very, very thin on every level and they're doing a lot of people's jobs and the fact that there's one place that the bar information lives and the marketing assets live and the show deal lives, it's saved a lot of angry Slack messages, so that's good.

‍

Jeb Banner:

We're happy.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Yeah, resources. Wish we had more resources.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, AI's coming, don't worry. It's here to help you. All right. In terms of tour marketing, curious to dig into this a little bit because I think this touches across everybody here. How are your venues currently adopting tour marketing requests, the plans that you get in terms of that side of it? Then also, Katie, on your side, the requests that you're putting in, curious to know how that is happening, the communication. Is there negotiation? Especially for some of the folks listening there may be, I know there's some venues are just getting going on this call. Looking at some of the attendees, they're going to be seeing this come their way. Maybe walk through the logistics of it a little bit, might be a good place to start. Anybody want to kick it off?

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah, I'll kick it off. I mean, I don't mean to say this in the way that it probably is going to sound, but we don't really make a request. Our team gets a request from an artist to market a tour for them, and we then go, okay, we'd love to market your tour. When do you want to announce it? Do you want to run pre-sales? When's it going to go on sale? Do you have artwork you can share? What assets do you want to use, photo, bio, et cetera? Do you want to sell VIP packages? Do you want to do a customer data retention campaign, i.e. Lay Low or Seated?

And once we get all that information together, then really it's on us to go to each individual promoter in each individual room and say, Hey, y'all, it's us. We have this tour going on sale. Here's our timeline, here's all the materials. Can you please send us back your ad plan, your radio proposals, if that's part of your mix, your localized art and your ticket link? And every venue is different and every promoter is different. So if it's a really small show, they might say, we don't really have an ad plan. We're just going to spend a couple hundred dollars on Instagram, along with organic marketing, which for a smaller show usually works pretty well. If it's a larger show and it's something like Red Rocks, then we're going to get a huge plan with the spend really broken out and the radio proposal and probably some digital proposals and a bit more of a huge swath of ideas and spends that we then have to go get approved by the manager.

And so our job here as tour marketers is to act as a middleman between the artist team and the promoter team to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that what we are doing is good with the promoter and what the promoter is doing is good with them. And so that's a very broad, swath explanation of what our day-to-day in tour marketing looks like.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I would say, sorry, Chris, I work with Katie and her team a lot and on a lot of different size shows, and I think that they do an incredible job of recognizing where the artist is at in their career and what they're looking for to help market that show. And I think that's something that's maybe missing right now, where people expect the same kind of marketing out of a 250 cap room as Red Rocks. And you're like, well, you have the offer and I have the offer and the budget is showing both of us that that's just not going to be possible. We're not going to have radio spends and digital spends and print and outdoor.

And so I think that's been a big thing in the last year, year and a half of really making sure that when we're talking with our partners at the agencies that we're being really upfront and realistic about what we can do and what those spends look like and when those buys will run and we try to send a full marketing plan over knowing that it's going to be adjusted, or if a show is doing terribly or doing well, we're going to make updates to that. But we really try to lay everything out on the front end super clearly just so we're all in agreement like, Hey, we said we had this much to spend in digital, this much to spend in radio or streaming. Here's when we think the best plan is and make sure that we're getting that buy-in from the front end. But yeah, I think that's been a big challenge in the last year, year and a half is shows in our 250 cap room, the expectation or the marketing letter that we get looks really exactly the same to a 5,000, 6,000 cap room.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah, and it's also on us to educate the manager and the artist team that you're not going to get massive ad, but sometimes there's an unrealistic expectation where they're like, where are the ad plans for this 200 cap tour? And you're like, well, they don't really exist. They're going to throw some things up on social media and they're probably going to put some flyers around. And what's real is, like we were saying before, a lot of the work has to come from you to talk about these shows and talk about this tour and really help supplement what the promoter is doing because the promoter only has so much money to spend and what they're doing can only go so far. And so it is on us to educate the artist teams on what's realistic in those types of venues versus a Madison Square Garden where you're going to get a humongous plethora of resources at your disposal.

‍

Kylie Stine:

Yeah. Also, on the venue side, I think one goal of our organization is to provide a world-class experience for everyone who interacts with us. So whether that's artists, whether that's agents, whether that's audience, or whether that's even our own team. So we try to meet the requests that we get when we are putting a tour on sale, but we also have to be cognizant of all the things that we mentioned. So time, money, resources, our team's bandwidth. So two examples that I can think of that we've had are in the past we had a pretty big tour that asked for our venue to do a certain debit card presale where each person who holds this type of debit card, the last four digits of their debit card was supposed to be an individual presale code, and that was just not something that was possible with our current ticketing capabilities.

Oh, I had another one. Oh, when people want every 30 minutes count for tickets when we go on presale or on sale, and something that's just organizational psychology or relationship psychology is being like, while we can't do this, we can do this. So working with our ticketing platform and our team to say, while we can't sign you up for automated counts every 30 minutes, we can send you daily counts, or while we can't have someone watching this show because we have 60 other shows right now, we can give you something on a daily basis rather than a 30-minute basis. Or while we can't do 2000, 3000 individual credit card presale codes, we can do this code for anyone that's part of this program. And just working to make those compromises and being like what works best for both of us?

‍

Chris Copen:

Yeah, and I feel like at our level too with the zine, when we go to the artist to do a zine interview, they're usually so excited to do it and they're usually so excited that the venue cares enough to want to do that. And I feel like that goes a long way too of just like, Hey, we love your album and let's talk about it for 30 minutes. And that builds a relationship with the talent itself so much more, just creative ideas like that. I mean, I know with one band, we did a video where they baked a cake without instructions and they had a really fun time doing that at the venue. Just creative ideas to expose the artists to more people, I feel like the artists generally are so excited to be part of.

‍

Katie Nowak:

Yeah.

‍

Jeb Banner:

That's great.

‍

Katie Nowak:

It's part of our job on the artist side too, to trust the promoter and know that ... Artists' teams come up with crazy ideas like having the end of your credit card number be a pre-sale code. That is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the scavenger hunt of it all. It's like, we do not need to be doing that. But on our side of things it's like, okay, I get where you're going with that. Why don't we talk to the promoter and see if there is something that makes sense on their end of things that they know works with their audience that can help move this along or have a strong presale? There are some artist that are really great, and there are also ones that we unfortunately have to make against our will because we work for them, right?

And so we need to come to you with this idea that feels wild, but are like, we're sorry, can you do this? And oftentimes the answer is no. But then it's like, but what if we talked about this? And then it's easier for us to be like, Hey, they can't really do what you asked them to do, but they are willing to do this. And it's such an easier conversation for them to be like, okay, cool. That sounds great, fine. And then you've maneuvered the relationship with the promoter because you're not making them do something that they really don't want to do, but you're also managing the client because they have at least something that's going to be done in order to help the show. So it's a tap dance for sure.

‍

Jeb Banner:

I see a good question here that I want to tap into here, and we have about nine minutes left, so any other questions from the audience here, please feel free to put it into the chat or the Q&A. The question from Brad, "Other than obtaining ticket purchasers data to add to the venues email database, how do you suggest growing a new music venues email list?" And Ashley had some good comments, Chris chimed in. I'd like to open this up a little bit because I think this is such a critical point in a venue's journey of getting that critical mass where they have that database and there's a lot of young new venues on this call here. So let's unpack this a little bit further. Ashley, since you kicked that off on the answer, why don't you put together a little bit of a playbook? And then maybe Chris, you can add to it.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Yeah, I mean I think that contesting rewards, if there's any reason to get somebody to continually engage with you, that is a really easy one, offers some tickets to shows or maybe offer some drinks or some sort of incentive. If you've got shows that you think people want to go to, a presale I think is really a driver, obviously depends ... Pre-sales work the larger the artist is. So it depends on your venue, right? That's not always going to be the thing, and that's why I think rewards that the venue can offer can really come into play. So enter to win free tickets or free concert tickets in your subject line or in your preview line, I think can be super useful.

It's probably worth it if you are brand new to find $100 in your budget and run an ad. If you are just like, I just need to get a couple thousand people in this email list, and you're starting with nothing, you're not only advertising your email list, but you're advertising just your business or your venue as a whole, and then you're potentially getting somebody to even click on that profile that they might not have seen yet. So I think those are some places I would start, but then, yeah, I saw Chris's notes and I love the idea of Man on the Street. If you're a new venue, you have to let people know you're there and you've got to really engage with the community. So I want to hear more about, Chris, what you guys did.

‍

Chris Copen:

Yeah, I feel like at our scale, especially early on, we had an internal strategy of we're going to scrap for every ticket sold, every email we can get. And that was going to street fairs and festivals, and we wouldn't even buy a booth, we would just go and ... I mean there were some shows, I know Live Nation probably doesn't love us because we were standing outside the Tim Heidecker show at the Live Nation venue, handing out schedules, handing out free drink passes, sign up for the email list. We really were just as scrappy as you could possibly be.

And then once we got in business, I know the Joe Paris shows, we sold entirely through the email presale list, and that was the type of hype cycle. We were like, Hey, in a month we're going to have a huge announcement. You're going to want to be on the email list. In a week, we're going to have a huge announcement. Then we announced it and then when we announced, we were like, there's going to be more tickets that go only to the email list tomorrow. So that was a big step for us.

We use toast and we use mobile ordering. So a big thing as well was connecting the mobile ordering to capture the emails. The emails would then feed into the email list. Yeah, we were really, really scrappy with it and we still are definitely trying to get as many people on that list as possible because it really is worth its weight in gold. And yeah, I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I know standing outside the Live Nation venue, that was the most we were really working for it, just trying to get emails. But yeah, that's pretty much it.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Any other additions to the playbook for a young venue that's getting up and running, looking for database? Go ahead.

‍

Chris Copen:

I forgot. Another thing we would do is if a show sold out, so if we had Sarah's Sherman coming and it sold out instantly, we would run a carousel ad of 10 acts that are coming and maybe five of those acts are sold out. We would still link to the show and then on the show link be like, this show is sold out, but don't miss the next one. Join the email list here. It sounds dumb to advertise a sold out show, but if people know that you can pull that level of talent, especially at our small scale in our market, we were the only people bringing this type of talent to the market. They're like, oh, I love Sarah Sherman. I wonder who else they're going to get. I'm going to sign up for the email list. So that was another, yeah, it didn't cost anything. It just was adding to the ticket link, and that probably drove hundreds of emails.

‍

Ashley Ryan:

Yeah, wait lists are a great way to do that. So if you've got a sold out show and you can create a wait list form, you can just create a form pretty easily and link to that. And I was going to say too, ask local businesses to trade with you. We do trades on shows a lot with other venues, with other businesses in town, but ask other local businesses if they'd be willing to advertise your newsletter in their newsletter, offer them tickets to shows and get more people in the room too.

‍

Kylie Stine:

Those are going to be my two additions. I was going to say website pop-ups, so when people are visiting your website, pop up on the page that's just like, Hey, have you joined our email list for exclusive discounts, presale codes, giveaways? Be the first to know about upcoming shows, and then also partnering whether you have a co-promoter or a local business that you're doing trade with, just getting that call to action in their email to be sign up for this new organization or this young organization. Or did you see that the show's coming to your city? All sorts of cool things are happening. Sign up for this email list.

‍

Chris Copen:

Yeah. We've said email a lot and I feel like something that maybe goes un said, but is important to remember is the emails have to be interesting and they have to be good, and it's one thing to have an email list, but I'm on so many email lists that I just automatically tune out. It's too much information or not enough information or repeating information. If the emails are not dynamic and active and feel like they're getting sent to you and there's use in reading it, then you could have the biggest email list in the world. If your conversion rate is terrible, it doesn't matter.

‍

Jeb Banner:

All right, we have to wrap up here. Just a few minutes left. We did get a question from Amy around ticket scams. I think that's going to be more of a topic for a future Make More Money session, so I'm going to set that aside for right now. Thank you, Amy, for asking that. I think it would take up another half an hour to dig into how to combat all the different things. We were actually discussing that a little bit before we started this session officially at two o'clock here Eastern. A lot of things to dig in there. Real quick, around the horn, final word, a word of advice, a favorite marketing hack, anything that you want to leave our audience with as a, hey, here's something I've learned. I'll share mine, and it's very easy. It's simple travels further, simplify your messaging, [inaudible 00:56:03] your marketing, try to get your language out. Very simple language, it goes a lot further than large, complicated headers and everything else. So simple travels further is going to be my little piece of advice. Let's go to Katie.

‍

Katie Nowak:

I said this a couple of times already, but I think it still rings true, which is content is king, and the more of it you have, the farther it will go.

‍

Jeb Banner:

That's great. Ashley?

‍

Ashley Ryan:

I would say be collaborative. Other people have great ideas, listen to them and work with not against each other and stuff. I think those are the best partnerships and those are the places you're going to see the most success. I want to say hi, Amy. I know Amy. Amy, if you want to send me an email at at ashley@first-avenu.com, I'll talk your ear off about it.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Great. Thank you, Ashley. Chris?

‍

Chris Copen:

Yeah. I guess my final piece of advice, especially for a venue of our size is if you can lock in a taste and you can lock in a curation type of branding, then it pushes everything so much further. We get so many soft sales just because they're playing here, and that's very hard to accomplish, but it makes you save money on advertising. I mean, you don't have to spend hundreds and hundreds on every show if you know that 40, 50 people are going to walk in the door just because it's your venue on a Saturday.

‍

Jeb Banner:

Yep. You guys have done a great job with that.