Life as an Arts Admin moves fast, and most of the time it feels like a race just to keep up with your day-to-day operations! With so many changes all the time, it can be difficult to know where to focus your time and energy, especially when it comes to the success of your performing arts marketing campaign.
At Confluence, we stress the importance of data, especially tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This will allow you to measure the success of your campaigns, and pivot to the most effective options, and this is crucial!
By understanding what works and what doesn’t, you can optimize your tasks and strategies and have a clear picture of where to focus your efforts. So, let’s dive in and explore some key metrics and approaches to measuring your campaign’s success in 2023!
1. First You Must Have GOALS!
Before diving into metrics, it’s important to first establish clear and measurable goals for your arts marketing campaigns. To do this, you will need to determine what it is that you want to achieve. Is it increasing your ticket sales? Building brand awareness about your organization? Or do you want to boost your audience engagement?
Once you have defined your specific objectives, you can align your measurement efforts accordingly. This means that the metrics you collect will actually gauge the success of your campaigns and show you if you are achieving your goals.
2. Track Website Analytics
Next, you will need to start monitoring your website analytics. Monitoring your website analytics is crucial for evaluating the impact of your marketing efforts. We recommend utilizing tools like Google Analytics 4 to track key metrics such as website traffic, time spent on site, and conversion rates. It is super helpful to analyze which marketing channels and campaigns are driving the most traffic to your site and leading to conversions for you.
You should also pay attention to specific landing pages and track how visitors navigate through your site. This can help you to identify areas that are the most sought out or those that need improvement, and this in turn will optimize your users’ experience.
Yes, GA4 can get confusing! So if you are not super savvy, we suggest hiring someone to help with the setup and create the reports you need to track your key metrics.
3. Measure Social Media Engagement
The world of performing arts marketing has largely gone digital, and with that, social media platforms play a vital role. One great thing about this is that most social media platforms make it super easy to assess your organization’s social media engagement and understand the effectiveness of your campaigns.
These platforms allow you to look at metrics like followers, likes, comments, shares, and click-through rates. By monitoring all of these things, you will be able to track the effectiveness of paid social media campaigns. It will even allow you to analyze the conversion rates and the cost per conversion on your ads. And more!
From here, you can use this data to help you identify which platforms and content resonate most with your target audience and create more of what works for you.
4. Evaluate Email Marketing Performance
Email marketing still remains the most valuable tool for engaging with your audience (and is currently the highest driver of ticket sales for our performing arts clients!). It is important to monitor key email metrics such as deliverability, unsubscribe rates, and conversion rates to make sure your emails are serving their purpose. In case you haven’t heard, click through rates are not as accurate of a measurement anymore due to privacy settings on mobile devices.
If you are struggling with this part, check out our blog “7 Effective Steps to Crafting Engaging Mass Emails For Arts Organizations: Boost Ticket Sales And Audience Engagement” for more tips!
However, this isn’t the only way to judge how your email campaigns are doing. You can also compare the performance of different email campaigns, A/B tests, and personalized content to see what resonates best with your audience. You can then use this information to evaluate the impact of your email marketing efforts on tickets sales, website traffic, and audience engagement.
By analyzing these metrics, you can refine your email campaigns and tailor them to better meet your audience’s needs and in turn, yield better results!
5. Assess Ticket Sales And Revenue
While all of the other things mentioned above are very important, the ultimate measure of your performing arts marketing campaigns is without a doubt, ticket sales and revenue. That’s what it is all for in the end, right!? We can’t stress enough how important it is to track your ticket sales data and the revenue generated during your campaign period.
And don’t just record it, ANALYZE IT!
By analyzing the impact of different marketing channels, campaigns, and promotional offers on ticket purchases, you will be able to identify trends, such as peak sales periods or popular performances, and you will be able to adjust your strategy accordingly and in a timely manner. This will also help to inform your future marketing strategies too!
At Confluence, while we don’t love to recommend discounts, they can be a great way to track very specific marketing efforts and see if they are converting to sales. For example, if your board is pressuring you into buying an ad in a small local newspaper, one way to check if it is an effective tactic for your audience is to include a small discount with a code that is unique to that newspaper ad.
Then, after the show is over, you will be able to see how many tickets were sold using that discount code and therefore how many sales you can attribute to that ad. This will then allow you to decide moving forward if it is an effective and worthwhile campaign for your organization and your audiences.
And remember, when the final curtain closes, don’t think your work stops there! Make sure to compare your total ticket sales to your goals and reanalyze previous campaigns to assess growth and identify areas for improvement.
Recap: How To Measure The Success Of Your Performing Arts Marketing Campaign in 2023
Measuring the success of your performing arts campaigns is essential for optimizing your strategies and achieving better results. By setting clear goals, tracking website analytics, evaluating social media engagement, assessing email marketing performance, and analyzing ticket sales and revenue, you can gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Remember to regularly review and adjust your marketing efforts based on the metrics and data you collect. By continuously refining your approach, you can drive better results and ensure the success of your performing arts marketing campaigns in 2023 and beyond!