We just wrapped up our first of our summer Crowdcasts, “Marketing for Independent Venues” featuring Sarah Silcox from The Vogue Theater in Indianapolis, Indiana. Following that we wanted to share five of the top takeaways that Indie Venues should be doing to fill their rooms!

1. Stay organized! Tools like Opendate and Airtable can really help streamline processes - but don’t forget to use your team meetings well and share often what you’re working on. With so many things going on at once, it can be easy to miss something in motion!
2. Most venues measure success through how many tickets are sold to shows - find the small ways you can measure the points in between and the things you can do to influence the entire cycle. Things like email open rates and social media following numbers and engagement can be helpful checkpoints. Review those across the team often (monthly) and adjust strategy as needed!
3. Think local! Local businesses and groups can be a great place to build a relationship and help others in your community. Doing things like ticket drops, giftcard giveaways, or promoting each others events or businesses can create great mutually beneficial relationships!
4. Don’t be afraid to experiment. There are a lot of little tweaks, changes, or approaches that a team can take with little risk or effort that could lead to big payoff. For things like email marketing, try adjusting messaging, doing A/B testing, or identifying one part of the buying process you’d like to improve!
5. Understand your audience. It can be easy to look at ticket counts and think that things are going well or poorly. Understand your audience, the band’s fanbase, and the music genre to better predict how and when people purchase tickets. Some shows may sell great initially and have a lower than normal walk up crowd, where others may sell slowly in the beginning but have a much higher walk up turnout!

A huge thanks to Sarah for sharing these gems!

If you missed the conversation and would like to listen in for more great insight, check out the recording.