In her role as Head of Ticketing and Box Office Strategy at Queensland Music Festival (QMF) and Qld Music Trails, Ally Lane ventures to parts of Australia few city-folk ever get to see. Music Trails in particular is designed to bring events to rural communities throughout Queensland – a goal that can present a unique set of marketing and ticket-selling challenges.
“This year we went to St. George, Charleville, Cunnamulla,” she smiles. “Some of them are one-street towns, like Tambo, and we had a picnic event and chicken races at that. And the chicken races were the coolest thing. Like the music was amazing, we have really cool artists, but things like a chicken race for marketing... It's gold that they can say, ‘Come and see chicken races at the one-street town, Tambo.’”
Having previously worked as the Client Relations Manager at ticketing platform Moshtix, Lane has an acute understanding of the ticketing business from the perspective of a provider and a customer. Here, she puts that experience to use to discuss marketing events in rural communities, email marketing best practices, and more…
Qld Music Trails covers so many diverse audiences across the state, from a major city like Brisbane through to quite remote indigenous communities. How do you tailor your ticketing strategies to those different demographics?
Of course we need to sell tickets to every show, but particularly for regional areas, or really remote communities, it's not so much about selling the highest ticket price you can and making the most revenue, it's all about providing the event and getting high attendance.
So we 100% will tailor pricing, we will tailor marketing to be much more experience-focused as opposed to price-drive heavy and pushing tickets. For example, we just had an event up in Yarrabah, which was a free event.
So we made sure that we actually printed out thousands of tickets for this event, and we sent them to the local council building, the local library, because we know that communities in those remote areas don't have the same access to marketing, or to even digital ads, digital phones even. So we ensure that we reach those audiences from old school strategies, but really important ones.
So you have to think outside the box a little bit…
Yeah, and go into tried and true, traditional means of marketing and getting the word out. Like when we did our Outback Trail for the first time this year, in its full glory, we realized that even just communication with local community Facebook groups is really where you're going to get all of that traction of reach and conversions of sales.
"So we made sure that we actually printed out thousands of tickets for this event, and we sent them to the local council building, the local library..."
If some of the tickets are for free events, do you still have a way of collecting people's data?
For sure. And it's definitely a tricky one sometimes to communicate as to why, because we know that everyone is protective of their data, as they should be.
But for us, it's more so ensuring that number one, we know we're putting on an event and we know people are going to come.
We need to know who, what, when, where, why. So we need to know if we’re marketing to 18 to 35 year olds, are they the people who are RSVPing or registering? If not, then why? Should we be going out to other people? Even if it's a free event, we still need to put on a production and know the numbers of who’s coming.
So we will still likely do pretty much exactly the same things that we would do if it was a paid ticket, all the way up to event entry – we need to make sure that we know how many people are on the ground at all times.
So 100% we still collect data, safely and securely. But for maybe alternate reasons.
No-show rates can be notoriously high with free tickets. Aside from regular reminders, are there any other techniques to reduce that rate?
Yeah, for sure. It's always oversold to a reasonable amount because there is a huge no-show rate – it can be up to 50%, which is wild.
And food vendors and things like that still need to make their money, they're still trying to provide a service, so we oversell it. And then as well it comes back to that value in the experience. We really drive home what's happening the days before in that town, what's happening after, and then what's happening at our event to make sure people know it's a hot ticket, a hot RSVP.
In more metropolitan areas where there have been plenty of gigs, you've got more audience purchase data which can help with targeting and marketing. When you're going to outback communities where this might be the first show, what kind of data can you use to sell or even give away a ticket?
The word data in that area is a bit grey, because as you mentioned, there's not a lot of it. So we really focus on engagement.
So we have an engagement team, and their sole focus is to go out on recreational visits to those towns a year before we're even going to put a ticket on sale, because we need to know from the ground up, who are the people in the community that are the organizers, who are the people in the council that actually know the last five years’ of events that have happened, and they can really tell us from the source what the community wants, what the community needs, and what not to do.
So that is a really strong point of data that we collect, and that we really respect and try to really shape our strategy around. I guess the main point of data would be age and demo, like who lives there, and who goes to shows in the surrounding radius. I say radius, because it could be 50 kilometres away.
But it's really all about engagement with regional towns and making sure you're actually doing the legwork to go out there and speak face to face.
When you think of some of the more metropolitan shows, are you seeing any major trends in terms of customer behavior when it comes to buying tickets, or even things like how long you're leaving shows on sale?
People are buying late, and you just have to hope and pray that they will purchase in the month leading up to the event.
And you've got to adhere your strategy for that. A solution might be tiered pricing – you might have four separate releases, as opposed to three years ago when you could go out with a flat $95 ticket and it'd sell.
But now you need to have a really strong presale strategy or discovery phase, as we like to call it. The discovery phase needs to be really strong. So the customer needs to have visibility of your event almost everywhere that they can, which means you need to plan well and have really strong content. They need heaps of information on when they can purchase tickets, if there's any exclusivity around that, how to sign up for any discounts or anything like that.
"A solution might be tiered pricing – you might have four separate releases, as opposed to three years ago when you could go out with a flat $95 ticket and it'd sell."
What’s the best way to get that information out? Are there particular social channels, or is it direct to fan communication via email?
It’s a bit of everything, which isn't a good answer, but it's dependent on what you're selling.
We all know that Facebook is really great for older demos and at QMF we have an average [audience] age of about 39 years old. So Meta for us is really, really important.
But email is also a massive tool, because a lot of our events like Opera at Jimbour, they have an average age of I think 65. And they are waiting for that email.
And so for that event EDMs are crucial. And making sure that we’re targeting and emailing previous ticket buyers before prospecting ticket buyers. So they have some form of loyalty – we're doing right by them because they're purchasing a ticket. So there's a mutual respect.
Typically, where do you put your ask in your emails?
For me, being the ticket-hungry girl that I am, my main thing is links to the ticket page. Making sure that the link to the information needs to be at the tippity top.
Because people have no attention span. I don't care how much they're a fan of the opera or Taylor Swift or whatever it might be, if they can't click on the image, and it doesn't take them to Taylor Swift’s page or to the opera’s page, you've lost them. They're not going to scroll through the email.
Of course, they might do that once they've purchased a ticket. But the information and the call to action needs to be the first thing in that email.
And then of course it's being super clear with the information there. I'm talking dot points, images they can click into.
Time of on sale, link for on sale, your refund policy, even the artists that are going to be there if you're blessed enough to already have a full lineup. It all needs to be concise and clear in that email.
In terms of your socials content, what do you find tends to work best for conversions?
Funnily enough, still images work the best. And it's not even just here at QMF; previous marketing campaigns that I've run with Moshtix and my clients there. Videos are really cool, but for conversions, it's like a carousel of what's going on at that venue – let's say, the five different events, date, time, who it is, and the ticket link, all in that little square.
And then the customer can just kind of see that as a rolling ad. Those carousels seem to be the highest converters as opposed to a really cool video. People might argue with me about that, but that's just what I've seen: still images really weirdly seem to be the highest converter.
I don't know if, again, it's because of attention spans – if you haven't got a really cool video that grabs them within the first three seconds you're doomed – but a still image with a name and a date, it's pretty easy to digest. You're going to click on it and convert.
What are the common pain points for event organizers when it comes to ticketing?
The elephant in the room is the fees, right? It's sometimes really difficult to explain to a promoter why you have a fee that's up on a percent base, or why you have a fee that's a flat fee, and really making sure that that party understands. That is the most crucial step.
Ticketing providers are providing a service just like a promoter’s putting on a show. So I think the solution around that major pain point is make sure both parties are clear on contractual obligations and fees, before you put a ticket on sale. Before you even discuss the build element. It’s got to be in writing, super clear.
There have been so many instances where promoters put on a sale, and they might have an external party that's helping them or putting in some element of money. And that party wasn't clear on the fees or wasn't brought into the conversation.
So you just need to be upfront and super communicative about why they're there and what they do and when they come into play, and how it affects your net at the end of the day.
