Two weeks after starting at Roundhouse Entertainment – the Melbourne-based promoters of the A Day On The Green events, which place iconic artists in picturesque locations such as wineries around Australia and Zealand – Hasan Huseyin was charged with marketing his first tour: the reunited Fleetwood Mac.
“It was a great tour to kick off with. It was huge,” he smiles. “It was one of those ones that sold out within two hours. And then my biggest problem was pulling all our marketing back. And then actually going to the event and seeing 22,000 patrons there and standing in the back of the venue and looking at the show and thinking, wow, I had something to do with this. You know, I helped get these 22,000 people here to this event. It was a surreal moment.”
Huseyin has spent the past nine years as the National Marketing Manager at Roundhouse Entertainment, which put on its 500th A Day On The Green in November 2022, and is currently hosting UK superstar Robbie Williams, with Jackson Browne, The Chemical Brothers and Tom Jones also scheduled to perform over the coming months.
Here, Huseyin lifts the lid on marketing A Day On The Green, his varying tactics across different digital platforms, best practices for managing their email database, audience segmentation and more…
A Day On The Green features fantastic artists in picturesque settings with a wine and food element. Do you market different elements of the experience to different audience segments?
When we first announce a tour, our main objective is really to raise awareness for the event. And so we launch quite robust above the line and below the line marketing campaigns.
But then we also tap into our venue databases, our ticketing databases, and we try to reach as many people as possible to encourage member signups. But we also tailor all that marketing to the audience that we're hitting.
So for example, if we're emailing the A Day On The Green database, we'll be promoting the member presale for discounted ticket prices. If we're emailing a venue's database, we're not only promoting the event, but we're also promoting the food and beverage options, the concert and dining experience.
So we're always tailoring that information to suit the audience that we're hitting.
What are some of those above the line and below the line activations?
When we announce a tour we go hard across a lot of platforms, whether it's television, radio; we've generally always got a radio media partner on board for every single tour.
And then, depending on the artist and their audience determines what percentage of our marketing budget we're allocating to certain areas. If it's an older artist, we'll go down the traditional line of TV, radio, press. But if it's a younger band, it will be primarily focused across digital music sites, radio.
So a lot of it’s really doing research prior and knowing the artist’s demographic and audience and targeting those areas effectively.
Do you find that any digital channels in particular are consistently reliable for you?
A Day On The Green’s core demographic is aged between 35 and 55, so we find that Facebook is really strong for us. So a lot of our budget would go towards Facebook or Instagram. But then we obviously monitor those statistics. And we've got the option to pivot budgets and allocations into different areas if we find that something's not working.
For someone like Tom Jones or Jackson Browne, a lot of the budget was across Facebook. But then someone like The Chemical Brothers, it was across TikTok. It was across Instagram. The percentages change to suit the audience and the artist.
Do you find that any executions work better for you on TikTok specifically?
What I found with TikTok is I generally run two campaigns. I run a sponsored ad across TikTok, but the problem with sponsored ads is you're hitting your audience and you're getting engagement, but you're not getting followers.
Then I also run a campaign to increase followers at the same time using the same creative. And I've found that that is increasing our numbers and our followers on TikTok quite significantly.
And how about Instagram?
Instagram is quite a big one for us as well. We generally run Facebook and Instagram in line together. And we usually run display ads and video ads and story ads at the same time, and we usually run our marketing in two phases – we run it from [announce], right through to presale, and then it rests for a couple of days, and then it starts up again and goes right through the onsale period, past general public onsale and runs for about a week after that.
But in saying that, we’ve found that we're increasing the length of our marketing campaigns a lot longer than what they used to be. And we’ve found that we need to keep engaging with the audience and stay in their feeds to keep those ticket sales ticking along. Otherwise, we find that if your marketing completely stops – and whether it's paid or organic, it doesn't really matter – but your ticket sales slow down.
How do you manage your creative over the course of a campaign?
We mix it up. We generally have creative for what we call the onsale day, promoting the onsale day and presale, then we've got a different creative from general public onsale, and onwards.
And then in between, we post organic stuff like artist images – we always request artist video IDs, we find that a personal message from the artist always helps promote the event.
And then we also do posts about transport, bus shuttles, set times; we're mixing up the content constantly to remain engaged with the audience, and to create awareness about the event.
You mentioned the campaign length is longer now. When did that start?
Times right now are tough for a lot of people. And ticket sales in general are slower than what they used to be, with increasing interest rate rises and things like that.
So we've found that increasing our marketing campaigns to run longer keeps those ticket sales going. [Previously] we focused just on the presale and the onsale and then stopped completely, and then we would keep a certain amount of the allocated budget aside and do a run home push three weeks out from the event. And that was it.
But the problem with doing that these days is if you don't stay in people's feeds, or you're not marketing to people throughout the duration to show day, ticket sales tend to stop or they slow down significantly.
So our goal is to remain engaged with our audience – whether it's paid or organic – to keep ticket sales ticking along through the entire duration until show day.
"We've found that increasing our marketing campaigns to run longer keeps those ticket sales going."
How important are SMS and email marketing for you?
Email is huge for us. We've got an extremely engaged and highly active database, and quite a large one. And we're very particular – we're only ever serving information that's relevant to our database. I believe that should be everybody's rule: only serve information that people are signing up to receive.
And a really good example of that is we ran two campaigns. One of them was to win a season pass to A Day On The Green events for an entire year. And the other one was to win a $70,000 car. And our open rates and click through rates were significantly higher to win a season pass than to win a $70,000 car. Unsubscribe rates were ridiculously high.
People just weren't interested in it, because that's not what they signed up for. They were signing up to receive information about music and concerts, and not about winning a car. So we're really big on serving the right information to the people, and only information they're really signing up for.
Don’t serve them information that they don't want to see.
SMS, not so much. We only really reserve SMS for emergency messaging – say, for example, there's been a flood on the day of the event and the event’s been canceled, or it's been rescheduled. We would only ever usually use SMS services for that, just to get the message out as soon as possible.
How often do you email your database about an event?
We only ever email our database two times for a specific tour.
One will be on the announcement of the tour, obviously to create awareness, to relay the presale information, the ticketing, pricing, show dates, etc. And then we also email them the morning of the presale as a reminder email. And that's it.
So we'll only ever email our database two times about a specific tour. In saying that, we always have at the bottom of our emails: ‘Also touring’.
So we've got banners promoting the shows that are also on sale in other emails as well, so they're always getting hit with the tour a few times, but there'll only ever be two emails specific about that tour.
If it's sponsor related content, we always make sure that our sponsor content is relatable to an event or a show. It's never specific about that sponsor. For example, if a sponsor is running a competition to win tickets to one of our events, it'll be about that because it's relatable. If the information is not relatable, we won't run it in our EDMs, because the audience just doesn't want to see it.
What if the tour isn't performing as you'd hoped and it needs a bit of a push. Do you ever break that two-email rule?
Very, very rarely. We would do another run of marketing, provided the budget allows it. Or I'd seek approval to increase my budget. But at some point, we've just got to look at it and say, okay, no matter how much more we invest in this, we're not going to generate more ticket sales. It is what it is.
But yeah, very rarely would we email a third or fourth time about a specific event. We would find other ways of doing it. We would try to get artists interviews on radio, a lot of publicity. Things that don't really have a huge cost behind it.
How finely do you segment your audience?
We always segment out our data by region and state. So for example, if there's a show in Geelong, we would always send to our Victoria database. If the artist is big enough we will always send to Tasmania also, because we don't do so many events in Tasmania and we find that a lot of Tasmanians come across to Melbourne or Victoria to our events.
Or, for example, if we've got a show in Bowral, near Sydney, we would also hit Canberra, because it's not so far away.
We only really segment by state or region. Not so much by genre.
When you're announcing a show and you've got people at the top of the funnel, do you have any failsafe techniques to convert them into ticket buyers?
I can honestly say it's just to remain engaged, and almost create that FOMO feeling. Because with our events, they take a bit of research and time for people to book tickets, because generally, it's a day thing. They've got to consider their travel, how many people are going to be traveling in their group, how many tickets they're going to need, it generally takes time for people to do that research and determine what they want and how many tickets they need and how they're going to get to the venue.
So for us, it's about constantly remaining engaged with them, whether it's through paid or through organic social media posts, and just reminding them about the event to make sure that they eventually do make that ticket purchase.
"We've found post-COVID, we're announcing tours so far in advance."
How far in advance do you start pushing tours?
It's really dependent. Our touring season generally starts end of October and runs right through to the end of March. Back in the day you'd then have a month of a quiet period, and then in May, June, July, you're announcing tours for the upcoming season.
But we've found post-COVID, we're announcing tours so far in advance. So for example, we announced Robbie Williams a year and a half ago. So the onsale periods vary from tour to tour. And we start promoting them once they're announced.
A year and a half is a long time to keep people engaged…
We coincided it with his performance at the AFL Grand Final last year. And the tour was announced a week later.
Are you seeing any trends in customer behavior at the moment?
People are definitely thinking twice before they buy a ticket. It's definitely a harder sell. And that's why it's extremely important to extend those marketing campaigns to run longer. Because people generally aren't buying the first time they see it, you generally have to continually market to them, retarget them and stay in their feeds and hopefully, eventually convert them into buying a ticket.
Visit Roundhouse Entertainment here. Follow Hasan on LinkedIn here.
