Marketing and Touring - a practical guide to marketing an event on tourArts Council England logo

Choosing target markets

At its most basic, marketing is about talking to the right people about the right things in the right way at the right time. This means that the first stage of setting up the marketing for a tour involves deciding which groups of people, or even which individual people you are going to target. These are target markets .

You need to communicate with groups of people who have something in common - they may be interested in the same things or have a common attitude to your organisation or the kind of activities it offers. This common factor means that if you talk to them about the same things in the same way, you are likely to get results.

You might be able to identify individual people who are the key to communicating with entire target groups. You will need to invest time to find them, but when you do communication becomes easy and cost-effective. When Music Theatre Wales toured The Roswell Incident, a music theatre piece about aliens landing, they identified a key contact in the UFO society in each of the towns and cities they visited. That contact communicated on their behalf with everyone interested in the possibility of extraterrestrial life forms in the area.

The first priority is to identify the target markets most likely to respond to your campaign, your 'best bets'. This will use the available resources most effectively to achieve your income targets. You are most likely to succeed in increasing the audience base by attracting people similar to existing attenders. Your best bets are likely to include:

Core audiences who attend the venue frequently feel a strong relationship with the venue rather than the company. Core audiences who frequently attend the artform or even the particular company's performances are primarily motivated by the company brand. You therefore need to consider whether each target market is most likely to respond to marketing activity from the venue or company.

Once marketing activities aimed at achieving income targets have been covered, you can look at broadening your audience mix by targeting new audience segments. This means persuading existing arts attenders who have never experienced your particular artform, or people who have never attended an arts event at all, to give your event a try. Just as before, there are non-attenders who are more likely to attend than others. People who don't think the arts are for them will need a significant investment of time and money to persuade them to try your event.

There are two sorts of new audiences. If arts organisations know what their existing audiences are like, they can find more of the same sort of people. They can also look at their audiences, compare them to the local community and see if there are any groups of people who are under-represented. The first group will need fewer resources than the second as these potential audiences are more likely to feel positive about the arts and arts organisations have more information to help find them.

Before identifying and selecting target markets designed to develop audiences the venue or promoter and the company should consider the following:

what outside support is available eg from the region's marketing and arts development agencies?