Staff a the Nuffield theatre in Southampton used Audience Finder and Audience Spectrum in their everyday audience development and marketing work with some great results. Bill Sainsbury, then Head of Marketing and Press, shares just how they did it.

“I started using Audience Finder for our The Glass Menagerie campaign. Since then, for every show campaign, we analyse audience segments in consultation with the programming team. I then convert this information into Audience Spectrum segments. Using Audience Finder, I use the mapping tool to identify hot spots within a 60-minute drivetime area. I check the findings (hot spots) against our key audience development postcode targets for lapsed attenders and pick the top two for each segment based on the highest percentage of households.

I also look at different genres (if appropriate) in these hot spots to cross sell (we had success with comedy only bookers for our comedy drama Madame Bovary). We then direct mailshot and eshot these postcode areas using data from our database.”

Bill and her team have seen some incredibly positive results from this ongoing work.

Some key outcomes include:

• Number of tickets sold for Madame Bovary (March 2016) compared to The Glass Menagerie (October 2015) and The Hudsucker Proxy (March 2015) increased by an average of at least 35% in all key audience development target areas.
• For Madame Bovary we increased conversion of first time bookers who had booked within the last 12 months by 24%.
• For Madame Bovary, we converted 192 of our comedy stand up only bookers to attend.
• Our audience capacity for Nuffield Productions is up 15% from The Glass Menagerie to Madame Bovary