Brian Bauer is seeing a worrying trend in 2024: a number of festival organizers are deciding to take the year off, troubled by the increased costs of holding their event.
“I would say it wasn't as dictated candidly by ticket sales as it was expenses – artists and production costs are just so much higher than they have been,” offers the President of Nashville’s Bauer Entertainment Marketing. “The economics in terms of proceeding and investing in all of these upfront costs for festival producers has just become prohibitive for a lot of them.
“So that's really been the biggest challenge – just being able to afford the risk of putting these things on.”
Here, Bauer outlines some key trends for the upcoming summer festival season, and how organizers can maximize their ticket sales in the face of such challenges.
“The decision phase is getting pushed further and further away from the announcements; people are just waiting longer to make decisions about where to spend their money.
“And so the emphasis on experience is really having to ramp up and elevate in order to make an impact. Being able to present to prospective buyers that this is the bang for the buck that you're gonna get is helping move the needle and convince people to buy sooner.
“There's an exercise that we've been recommending to clients about listing everything that's included in the ticket, things that you would normally perhaps take for granted: how many steps away are you from a clean restroom, easy ingress and egress, simple parking, the sightlines, vendor options, merch options.
“All of these things that get included in a ticket that don't necessarily always get written out when presented to fans, really ought to be. And just by going through that exercise, it's really helpful to pinpoint where the holes are in what we're offering, because ultimately the product is going to be the best marketing.”
“Price sensitivity is still very much an issue. I think people were maybe more willing to spend on premium experiences the prior festival season than we're seeing this season.
“Last season, we saw a significant bump in VIP tickets, and probably a decline in GA tickets – we're seeing that even out this go around.
“And that can be for a variety of reasons – [people] just don't have the discretionary income, but it could also be related to [the fact that] some of the VIP experiences just didn't live up to what they thought it would be.
“So we're seeing that hesitancy around larger investment. And so the thing that we definitely recommend is emphasizing the buy now pay later model, trying to come out of the gate very early with pricing that people can pay in installments.
“We find that to be really effective at reducing that barrier to entry around price sensitivity.”
“Last season, we saw a significant bump in VIP tickets, and probably a decline in GA tickets – we're seeing that even out this go around."
“Larger festivals are seemingly struggling a lot more than niche festivals. I think the day and age of trying to be everything to everyone with eclectic line-ups is over for now.
“The way that those [larger] events can remain successful is presenting themselves as if they were mini festivals happening all at once. You can have maybe three or four campaigns instead of one large one, so that you can speak more directly to [each] audience and excite those audiences so that it feels more curated, tailored to their experience and their affinities.
“Spending the time at the forefront to really identify your personas, your target audiences, and really narrowing down on those, and identifying what their needs and desires are in an experience [is important]. What are the things that they're willing to pay for? And really making that clear and mapping that out as to why this speaks to exactly what they’re seeking, and why this is not just great value, but a unique value.”
“I think there's a lot of missed opportunities with most festival marketers… It's not that they're not paying attention to their numbers, but they're not looking at it from an angle of acquisition, and how that compares to revenue.
“Let's say you're seeing it cost you 10 bucks to acquire an order, and each of those orders is worth 200 bucks to you – that's a really solid profit margin. And you can build upon that. So there is an opportunity for some festivals that are scratching their head thinking, man, why aren't we selling enough tickets? Well, it's because they haven't budgeted appropriately.
“If they take a look at what that ratio looks like, it's a spend more to make more scenario. If that cost per acquisition is significantly lower than the average order amount, they can scale up their spend to sell more tickets.
"If that cost per acquisition is significantly lower than the average order amount, they can scale up their spend to sell more tickets."
“I think that there's just not enough attention being paid to those metrics. I think that there's a lot of looks at cost per clicks and click through rates and the type of traffic that's getting driven to the site, but ultimately, from a full conversion flow, you’ve got to know what it's going to cost to actually win a sale, and how much is that sale worth to you.
“And if you just know those kinds of basic metrics, it opens the door to so many more opportunities to sell tickets. That can even be more granular as well – you can break out your average order values based off of different ticket types. You can look at your VIP, you can look at your GA, you can look at your camping, you can look at all these different things and identify, okay, cool, our acquisition costs for this particular ticket type are actually super profitable, or this one, not so much. And then you can shift your budget around to align with what should be scaled up. Because you can spend more money to make more money.”
“A lot of festivals are releasing their schedules and line-ups a lot sooner than past years. And part of that speaks to [people] taking a lot longer to commit; they really want to understand the full value of what they're buying before they're willing to invest.
“Because, again, their expectations haven't been met by an event that they've attended, or they're just more discerning with how they're spending their discretionary money. And so it speaks to the emphasis on value needing to be conveyed before people are willing to make that decision and submit their credit card.”
Visit Bauer Entertainment Marketing here. Follow Brian on Linkedin here.
