Events begin long before the curtain rises. It starts when a customer spots your poster in town, when they click on to your site to look for tickets, or when they chat with a neighbor about upcoming plans. While you’re working on marketing and preparing, your sales start rolling in, and that information is vital to gaining a better understanding of your audience. By analyzing sales reports, you can spot trends, anticipate your organization’s needs, and create a stronger outreach strategy that’s motivated by your actual customers’ behaviors. Reports go beyond just showing what has happened; when you look closely, you can find out WHY it’s happened, and how to build on it.
Access to real data helps you understand what your customers are seeking from your organization, which can shape your programming and the overall success of events. Regardless of your organization’s mission, be it a school theatre program or a professional sports arena, reports can be the backbone to building consistency, increasing attendance, and planning better events all year.
Reveals Buying Patterns
One of the best uses of sales reports is to analyze your customers’ buying patterns. This provides insight into how your customers behave, including what they buy and when, and even how long they might be waiting to make decisions. Over time, this lets you in on your audience’s rhythm, including if they purchase early or last minute, after social posts or email reminders, and more. With this type of insight, you can schedule your promotions and campaigns to match their behavior, or can use the information to change their behavior, if you want to change the time frame and patterns of their purchasing. It helps you send emails at the right time, anticipate surges in demand, and overall, lets you plan based on reality.
ACTION STEP: Review past event sales timelines and identify the peak buying time.
Improves Marketing Strategies
Marketing is essential to ticket sales, but there’s no “one size fits all” approach that can be made to marketing. Each audience will be moved by something different, and sales reports can help you understand which marketing efforts are actually moving the needle. Instead of just guessing at what might work, sales reports show you how emails, social media posts, in person marketing, and community outreach actually affect your audience, turning engagement into actual ticket sales. Beyond just the platform that engages your customers most, you can even go so far as to track what type of messaging resonates best, and can shape how and where you put energy into marketing to fit what your audience responds to best. By basing your marketing decision on the data of your ticket sales, you avoid wasting time and effort, and maximize your sales.
ACTION STEP: Track which types of marketing make your ticket sales spike the most.
Optimizes Pricing & Seating
Reports will highlight how your existing seating and pricing structure is performing when it comes to sales. You’ll be able to see which sections and price points sell first, as well as which sections and price points struggle. These insights offer opportunities to balance based on demand, and over time it helps you refine your seating chart, your pricing tiers, and even the way you might be using packages and sponsorships or the way you might be running a recurring annual event. These adjustments ultimately can lead your organization to stronger financial outcomes without increasing your workload.
ACTION STEP: Review sales based on your sections and prices, and identify those that under-perform, then consider making adjustments.
Forecasts Future Attendance
Sales reports don’t just reveal what happened in that event, they show larger trends of attendance. By studying those patterns from past events, you can predict your turn out more accurately. This gives you the ability to plan for what volunteers and staff you might need, helps you be sure to buy enough concessions and merchandise, and overall lets you manage your resources in an informed way. This type of forecasting can also help you confidently expand your organization by running larger events or adjusting how you plan for smaller shows, all without fear of unknown turnout. Using turnout to predict future attendance helps you plan rather than just guess.
ACTION STEP: Look at the last 3 similar events, comparing attendance and calculating an average that you can use as your forecast for your next event.
Supports Better Decision-Making
At the end of the day, reporting helps your organization make smarter choices. Data is a way to take the guesswork out of your planning – it can help you decide what to produce next season, what time to schedule events, and which audiences to target. It empowers you to move insight into actual growth, and make more confident and more strategic choices. When you’re equipped with objective information, you can operate with more certainty in all facets for your event planning and marketing.
ACTION STEP: Make reviewing your sales reports a weekly habit, so you are quickly able to identify trends.
