🧮🔢Numbers to Know to Sell Tickets in 2023: 60, 30, 2.5B, and More.

Hey!

Don’t miss my annual numbers webinar! I’ll get into more below. 

Here’s a sneak preview number:

• There’s a projected 60% drop in Australia’s GDP in 2023. Where is it coming from? A drop in consumer spending. 

Who do you have in the France v. England match? 

New podcast with Eduardo Lebre from Circular Unity about sustainability in the events industry. 

To the Tickets!

I. Next week, we look at the numbers that can help you create more sales opportunities in 2023.

10 numbers that tell the story of what to look for in the year ahead. 

The Big Idea: Numbers tell a story. Not always a linear story, but if you look and think…you’ll see opportunity. 

A Sneak Preview: A few of the ideas I’ll share with you on next week’s webinar:

• 2023 projects to see a 30% increase in international travel. Great, but still behind 2019’s numbers. This boost does provide an opportunity for theatre districts, teams, venues, and arts organizations to begin to rebuild some of the audience they lost due to lack of tourists. 
• The death of streaming investment that was floated by Wall Street analysts earlier in the year might be overstated. Just look at Apple’s $2.5B investment in MLS. What’s interesting about this is what impact will the investment and distribution have on the brand awareness of MLS? 
• College football attendance has declined for the last 8 years. That’s alarming when you think about MLB’s decline in reported attendance since 2007. We are also seeing other alarming numbers in arts and theatre like the Baltimore Symphony’s attendance sitting at 40% of capacity down from 61% before the pandemic. These numbers all point to a challenging environment that was only accelerated by the pandemic and one that won’t be fixed by doing the same old same old. 

Don’t miss the webinar: 11 AM Eastern 13 December 2022. 

II. Market Research Creates Opportunities to Sell More Tickets:

Organizations are in danger if they only look at data and don’t do research. 

Defintion: Research v. Data

• Data is passive. You wait for the numbers to come in and read them. 
• Research is proactive. You come up with a hypothesis to test or a question to answer. Then you build your research instrument around that. 

Why Does This Matter?: I’ve worked with over a half dozen of the biggest sports’ brands in the world the last 18 months on some variation of market research. 

During this time, I picked up a few lessons learned. 

The most important lesson: listen to your customers and they will point you toward opportunity. 

III. Brand Awareness ads work in podcasts…and they are having a moment. This idea can sell tickets, partnerships, sponsorships, and more: 

I don’t want to tell you I told you so, but the things I share or talk about in the podcast have had some pretty good success over the years:

• Workshops in Melbourne.
• Conference Appearances that drew people from South America to Europe, New Zealand to Australia, mainland China to Hong Kong, Continental Europe to England. 
• Projects with some of the leading brands in the world: sports, venues, and beyond into professional services, B2C, and more. 

One Big Thing: I’m going to be teaching an applied brand management class in 2023. So call me Prof D! 

Why is brand awareness important?

• Elevated brand awareness can act as a short cut for purchase decisions. 
• Higher brand awereness can give you pricing power meaning you won’t have to discount. 
• More brand awareness builds demand because more folks know about you.

Why do brand awareness ads work in podcasts?

A few reasons:

• Emotional connection. The connection between podcast host and audience is personal. 
• Repitition. Brand awareness is about consistent delivery of a message. The best partnerships last so that the message penetrates into the audience’s mind. 
• These ads can help you express your strategy. By targeting your partners, brands can reach their best audience with a message that fits them best. 

Keys To Action: You can use this to sell your tickets and packages:

• Think top of the funnel. This is emotional, brand awareness stuff. The example below is from a box wine, but the idea of picking an enemy is a key example here. 
• Use your position. What do you stand for or against? I’m focused, effective, and profitable. Meaning I stand against the strategist and marketers that talk about “engagement”, only tactics, or whatever the buzzword du jour is. 
• Remember, A + B > 2A or 2B. This means that putting your message in several places gets you more bang for your buck than having your message in only one place. 

Bonus: A “Facebook Strategy”, a “TikTok Strategy”, “SEO”, or anything in that vein is a tactic. That’s bottom of the funnel stuff usually. 

Be careful with it. 

It has its place, but it might not be for building brand awareness. 

IV. Box Wine?! Teaches us about picking an enemy in our marketing:

Picking an enemy is one of marketing’s greatest gifts. 

The Big Idea: Most brands fail because they lack an edge, distinctiveness. 

Picking an enemy is a natural way to push back against blandness and draw a distinction. 

I’ll repeat, I do this all the time! 

V. Links:

Jukebox musicals are la….what?!

Britney on Broadway! 

I know who I am calling to go to NYC for this one…

Sir Elton John says good bye at Glastonbury: 

This is great! 

I’ll have to make the trek for this. 

The World Cup protestor was practicing an old marketing concept called “The Kitchen Sink”:

Positioning is about standing for something, not everything. 

To see it in action, all you needed to do was watch the World Cup. 

Linktree: Find everything I’m up to.

Join the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack Group. Almost 300 people from around the world.

Booking Protect:

The folks from Booking Protect will be at INTIX in Seattle in January. You’ll be able to meet the Booking Protect team in person.

Offering your customers refund protection:

• Gives customers certainty in their purchase.
• Gives you a new revenue stream.
• Improves your customer service.

Great podcast conversations: Take your business to new heights by learning from the best in the business.

Recent Conversations:

• Aren Murray
• Bill Guertin
• Scott Goodacre