Ultrasound of your event’s audience
Pierre-Henri DEBALLON, Co-founder and CEO at Weezevent
In a very Manichean way, the public of any event can be divided into two large groups: captives and non-captives. This classification must logically result in different ticketing strategies, both in terms of marketing mix and tools, and therefore sales channels. Firstly, it is essential to understand what defines and qualifies these two types of attendees.
CAPTIVES are generally acquired to your event or at least interested in your communication, which, let’s face it, is pretty cool! Here are the main reasons for their happy captivity:
- Passion: the concept, the universe, the quality or the spirit of the event managed to seduce and rally an audience around its values. Hellfest, which sells-out before even announcing its programming, perfectly illustrates this passion;
- Duty: in the world of start-ups, Web2day has become a must-attend for industry professionals;
- Social link: acquaintances planning to attend an event become its best ambassadors.
- Geographical proximity: the Standon Calling festival takes place in the city of Standon, Hertfordshire — 4,335 inhabitants. Each year, more than 10,000 festivalgoers from nearby attend it.
To sum-up, captives want, must, or will come. In economics, the definition of a captive customer even includes the concept of obligation.
And it’s all thanks to you! As an events producer, you take all the risks, book a venue, communicate, talk to the press, buy ad space, offer quality programming, work on your SEO, benefit from previous editions’ word of mouth… in short you invest, and, logically, you must therefore profit directly!
The main strategy for captives is to sell your product (i.e. tickets) directly to your consumers (i.e. attendees). In a word, self-distribute! And for that you must first have your own white label ticketing solution, in physical points of sale, but most importantly online.
NON-CAPTIVES on the other hand are well within your target but you cannot reach them or convince them alone. Here are the main reasons why they have not joined you yet:
- Lack of notoriety: While they are in your geographical and / or thematic target, they are not yet aware of your offer. This is often the case when opening a leisure site or for the first edition of an event;
- Competition: this audience hesitates with other proposals of events, other activities, or even other personal expenses (should I go to the F1 Grand Prix with my family or should I buy a new barbecue?);
- Opportunism: they are waiting for a reason to buy their tickets — this may be an acquaintance with whom to go or a promotional offer to fit into their budget. So you need a trigger to convince them to try you out;
- Insurance: this audience prefers to decide at the last minute to have all the cards in hand (weather, final programming, personal calendar…) at the risk of paying more. As such, they indirectly purchase a form of cancellation insurance.
To summarise, non-captives could come, but it is absolutely not certain that they will — and it is even less likely if you don’t take any action.
For non-captives, while your offer potentially interests them, a trigger is missing. And we must acknowledge from the outset that any help is welcome to make up their mind.
For sales that you do not know how to convert, for tickets you cannot sell — and only these — it is necessary to go through distribution networks or resellers whose job it is.
So, while the captives are to be dealt with by you directly, you should get help to convince the non-captives. But be careful that your rescuer does not come to devour easy sales, a phenomenon that I call ticket-jacking and that I introduce in another article: My retailer ticket-jacked me.
Pierre-Henri DEBALLON
CEO & co-founder at Weezevent
Organiser of the Velotour event and co-founder of a ticketing and cashless software used by over 180,000 event planners across Europe, I have been advocating direct sales for 10+ years.
