“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” chuckles Mike Mauer, VP Marketing/Data/Tech at SaveLive. “The things I say here could apply to any other year. But I do think they are more pronounced this year.”
The “things” Mauer is referring to are trends in festivals and festival marketing in 2024.
He speaks from a place of experience: prior to joining SaveLive, which he estimates will be involved in around 3000 shows in 2024, Mauer worked across festivals such as Tortuga Music Festival, Warped Tour, Hogs For The Cause, BeachLife, Pemberton Music Festival and many others. He was also the Head of Marketing at Stage Right Entertainment, developing and leading the marketing strategy for venues such as White Oak Music Hall and Nashville’s Exit/In.
Oh, and did we mention he founded concert marketing platform Sparrow? Yep, he did that too.
Suffice it to say, Mauer is well and truly up to date when it comes to event marketing trends. Here are six he's currently seeing...
I don't necessarily see sales being softer, but I do see people buying later than ever. And that's both across festivals and venues.
The festival that I did a few weeks back, we were neck and neck for year over year sales, up until really the last 10 days. And almost literally in the last four days, sales picked up and we ended up outpacing the previous year by over 20%.
I think a lot of people when their sales aren't up automatically jump to more awareness in the market. But it's also quite possible that people know about it, and they're waiting to buy.
If your sales are lacking year over year, look up the funnel and see what is actually going on. And if you're seeing, for example, a lot of traffic and people are just bouncing off the page, or if you're seeing high Facebook RSVPs, those are indicators that it's not necessarily lack of interest, it's a lack of commitment.
And so that's when strategies like retargeting become a lot more important, or getting people committed early through highly urgent messaging or payment plans, or even giving them an option to show interest without necessarily purchasing.
If they're not ready for the ‘buy now’ messaging, how do I make sure that I'm capturing their phone number or their email address?
And that way, not only is it building an audience for me to remarket to organically through SMS or email, or inorganically or through paid media, but then also I'm just getting these indicators that are saying, maybe sales are a little bit slower right now, but traffic is actually up 20%. So the interest is there. And people are engaging, and maybe they're just waiting to buy.
For marketing, where you're tracking ROI constantly, and you're tracking your cost per acquisition, etc., having less efficient campaigns early on is worth it.
Even if you're at a lower ROI, or a higher CPA, the fact that you're getting them committed early is worth a lot to your operations team, to your own stress levels, to the planning process in general.
"If your sales are lacking year over year, look up the funnel and see what is actually going on."
Ticket prices are getting more expensive, but people are buying more than ever before.
More people are spending more money on experiences, so selling the entire experience becomes such a larger component.
For festivals and especially venues, people fall into this trap of, hey, the artists will sell the tickets.
But I think that people, because they're spending more, they're also demanding a lot more out of the experience. They're caring maybe a little bit less about the artist – as artists are touring more frequently, you’re seeing line-ups become more homogenized. And so your value proposition is focusing on the core brand and the full experience 360, rather than just who's playing on stage.
The bonus there is that it deleverages the line-up, which is always good, because artist costs have gotten so inflated, so margins are getting slimmer and risk remains very high.
So deleveraging the line-up as much as you possibly can is just a good business decision, because then people are buying into the thing that is within your control and consistent every single year, which is a great experience.
As a marketer, but also as boots on the ground operations, if you spend a lot of energy focusing on the things that people remember, that pays dividends. I think about the peak end rule a lot – when people go to an event or experience they'll remember the intense positives and negatives and the last moment of the experience. They don't tend to remember the neutral stuff.
And so as a producer, you always want to focus on, how do I make those peaks more shareable? How do I make the activations or the headliners easy to remember and shareable? How could somebody pull out their phone, snap a picture, look back and be like, that was my high point.
And same thing with the last moment. I think a lot of producers rein it in on the last day, take their victory lap, but it becomes even more important to have that last moment be flashy, fireworks; a celebration of everybody being together and focusing on those final hours.
Referrals are becoming much more important as a sales driver. I think they are probably the most important sales driver in a lot of ways.
That festival I did earlier this month, we tracked referrals for it. And 60% of our sales were referred to by somebody. The biggest thing that sells a ticket isn't the artist who's playing on stage. It’s, hey, are your friends going? That's the thing that drives the sale more than almost anything else.
And so on the marketing end, what I think you want to do is really focus on [building] out a referral program. And I don't mean, oh, if you do this, we'll give you tickets. But how does marketing not stop after the festival?
You can't force somebody's friends to go, but as a marketer you could give that one person the ammunition that they need to convince their friends. Give them the talking points, the value proposition of the festival. Make sure that you're communicating effectively so they can communicate effectively.
Put forth a lot of content that is easily shareable, that is easy for people to send to their friends through different mediums. A big thank you email with a photo gallery, and recap videos. Your socials are still going to be highly engaged with those moments. It's gonna naturally die off afterwards, but you still want to attempt to capture those super fans.
You're not trying to drive sales necessarily at that point, you're trying to harbor engagement.
And then when you're back in cycle in a few months or later that year, you want to be able to have those people as part of your audience, as part of your socials, part of your community, your email list, etc, that you can tap into and remind them what a great time they had.
Content is more important than almost anything else right now.
"Referrals are becoming much more important as a sales driver. I think they are probably the most important sales driver in a lot of ways."
People are spending more time online than ever before. And a good part of that is social media.
[Creating] these really shareable moments is one of the best things that a producer could do to benefit their future years. I would encourage everyone, both venues and festivals, to have a content program, to have a detailed shot list – stills, video as well – and really get down to the specific minutia of what you want to capture.
Knowing that you want to capture shots with fans with a good amount of space above them that you can see the sky so you can put text over it; or you want the headliner, a shot over their shoulder looking out into a full crowd. Getting that granular and specific with your shot list and video list and doing a variety of content.
And I think that when it comes to a content program, I don't know if this is a hot take or not. But I do believe that quantity is more important than quality.
Try to capture all these little magical moments that are happening. And the magical moments aren't just what's happening on stage, that's probably a very small part of it. It's fans dressed up silly and people who are dancing with their eyes closed and feeling the music, which you can just use year after year in all of your collateral and your organic content, your paid content, etc.
That's just going to a) reinforce the referral part of it by user generated content; and b) also just show rather than tell the experience. And I think that's a huge part of it.
One thing that is not necessarily marketing related, but is a trend and worth noting, is that people are more health focused this year and drinking less. And that's affecting your F&B per caps. That's affecting your projections on revenue, because people are drinking less.
You have to as an operations team develop a good non-alcoholic program to capture those sales and offer a good experience for those people. And then you as a marketer have to actually advertise that, or market it, so people know about it, and it's not a block.
And so everything kind of works together. Those micro trends of people maybe being a little bit more health conscious, or at least drinking less, end up affecting the bottom line, unless you are smart enough to look ahead a little bit and come up with a game plan both operationally and marketing wise around it.
Visit SaveLive here. Follow Mike on LinkedIn here.
