Over Easter I had the pleasure to spend 6 days on the Central Coast and go to Bluesfest. Five stages, each one playing live music for about 12 hours for five days – epic festival.
While watching the
likes of Crosby Stills and Nash, The Pogues, John Foggarty, Maceo Parker, G3, Lucinda Williams, Seasick Steve, Canned Heat, Earth Wind and Fire, The Specials, Sublime (with Rome), Trombone Shorty, Buddy Guy, Keb Mo, Eugene ‘Hidaway’ Bridges, Brian Setzer’s Rockabilly Riot (The Stray Cats came too), Steve Earle, his son Justin Townes Earle, Slightly Stoopid, Zappa Plays Zappa The Melbourne Ska Orchestra and the Round Mountain Girls to name but a few… I noticed some marketing ideas being implemented in and around all that music.
Some 80,000 people attended over the five days. Each person shells out a considerable sum of money. Over $100 a day for short passes once the line up is announced. You can get 5 day passes for $299.00 if you buy next year’s ticket within a couple of months of the last festival finishing. But most will buy based on line-up and pay more for the privilege. Add food, beverages accommodation and narcotics to the bill.
Peter Noble and the marketing team are putting their brains to work. They secured their own venue, which is a Tea Tree farm the rest of the year. Don’t snicker. They get harvestable cash crop every year that pays for the venue and its own costs. It is the agricultural equivalent of buying a large commercial space. Leasing part of it to your own business and tenanting the rest of it to pay the mortgage.
These guys are getting much more aggressive and sophisticated about their marketing and business operation in general. The 23rd Bluesfest will run Easter 2013, (80,000 people a year for many years) so they have built a sizeable database of people many of whom are willing to come up every year and people within ‘driving distance’ of the festival grounds.
Now they are adding multiple single day music events, another multiday festival to their calendar. They already have a large database of music fans for a handful of specific genres. The database is full of big spenders – this isn’t a cheap festival. Odds are you get bands they want to see to play at their festivals and concerts then you can be sure that they will come.
Work to sell the tickets to these extra events amounts to a few emails, text messages putting up a few new web pages and creating a new entry in their shopping cart. That isn’t Rocket Surgery for them it’s only brain science…
This is the power of being able to acquire new customers to build your database at a profit or breakeven then find all these additional ways to make money off of the same customers. The value of their database to them has can be expanded no end because they have all these additional sales they make to their existing customers.
Every business can be enhanced by copying this strategy. But it can’t happen without that database and securing each person on the database’s loyalty with good products and services as well as a strong personal relationship. To find out how you can build that relationship with your customers automatically go to newslettermarketingsystems.com.au/get-started or call 1300 120 006.