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The problem isn't effort. It's that most venue marketing still runs on one-off campaigns instead of systems.
The venues pulling ahead right now aren't necessarily spending more on marketing. They're spending smarter — building repeatable audience pipelines that turn every show announcement into a compounding growth moment rather than a standalone blast.
Three shifts are reshaping how the best operators think about show promotion:
Automation is replacing repetition. The venues seeing the strongest ticket sales aren't sending more emails — they're triggering the right message at the right time. Behavior-based automations (abandoned carts, browse-based recommendations, post-purchase upsells) are outperforming batch sends by significant margins. Across Opendate venues, 25% of ticket sales are now attributed to marketing automations.
Distribution is expanding beyond owned channels. Email and social are table stakes. The next wave of ticket sales is coming from third-party distribution, embedded widgets, and partner channels that put your shows in front of fans where they already are — not just where you can reach them.
Fan data is becoming a strategic asset. Knowing who bought a ticket is useful. Knowing what they browse, when they buy, and what makes them come back is transformative. The venues treating their fan data like a growth engine — not just a mailing list — are seeing meaningfully different results.
The core issue with campaign-based marketing is that every show starts from zero. New creative, new list pull, new send. Nothing compounds.
System-based marketing flips this. A fan who buys a ticket to a Friday night show automatically gets recommended similar upcoming events. A first-time buyer enters a welcome sequence. A lapsed attendee gets a re-engagement trigger. Each interaction builds on the last.
This isn't theoretical. It's what happens when your ticketing, booking, and marketing actually talk to each other — when fan behavior in one system informs actions in another without manual work.
The good news: this shift isn't about buying new tools or hiring a bigger team. It's about rethinking the workflow. And it starts with understanding what's possible when your marketing is connected to your ticketing and booking data in real time.
That's exactly what we're digging into at this month's Make More Money webinar.
We're bringing together two operators who are rethinking show promotion from the ground up:
Vivian Donohue, Chief Growth Officer at Rostr — Vivian leads growth strategy at Rostr, where she's built distribution and audience development systems that help venues and artists reach new fans beyond traditional channels.
Liz Pjesky, Head of Marketing & Ticketing at High Road Touring — Liz sits at the intersection of marketing and ticketing for one of the top independent touring agencies in the country, giving her a unique vantage point on what's actually moving the needle for show promotion.
Moderated by Jonathan Gandolf, VP of Operations at Opendate.
📅 Tuesday, April 29 at 2:00 PM ET
Can't make it live? Register anyway — we'll send you the recording.
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