GROWING REVENUE AND AUDIENCES AT OLAVSHALLEN CONCERT HALL

At Olavshallen the ambition is clear:

“We want to be the preferred venue – both regionally and nationally!”

But how does Norway’s fourth biggest concert hall achieve such an ambitious goal? And how do they succeed creating growing revenue and audiences?

Olavshallen only do rentals of their venues. Therefore, they need to show the promoters that they are capable of selling out every time by constantly looking for ways to improve sales channels.

“We need to show the promoters that we can generate a high number of bookings in order to fill the seats every time. That is the key to ensure that both the promoter, audience, and artist have a great experience”, explains Marit Glimstad, Program and Marketing Director.

Sales and marketing prioritizations at Olavshallen

Olavshallen was the first Concert Hall in Norway to go all digital in 2015. And they never looked back. Their marketing initiatives cover a wide field, but newsletters and Facebook event pages account for the majority of their sales efforts and are also the preferred communication channels when reaching out to audiences with relevant information.

“We aim to create personalized and segmented newsletters and messages on social media in order to catch the attention of our audiences as well as local and national promoters. A website, which is informative and easy to access, is also vital to ensure that a potential customer complete a purchase. We also use a lot of time analyzing the customer feedback we receive after the different events and shows in order to improve customer experience.”

Olavshallen continuously strive to improve their sales channels, visual identity, amount of communications creating a balanced use of content through their most effective marketing channels and increase their database with RELEVANT subscribers and fans.

AdWords, remarketing and display advertising such as Google ads is also a prioritization when the economy allows it. “In 2019 we are going to make several long-term branding campaigns through the use of display advertising and remarketing.”

“Time is a scarce resource”

In an industry where nothing goes as planned, and where time is a scarce resource, Olavshallen constantly focuses on optimizing work procedures.

“We must be more efficient with our time in order to reach our sales targets. The fact that we not only do marketing for Olavshallen, but also do short-term marketing for the promoters means that we suddenly might need to create campaigns to push sales, book the venue and open new events for sale including reaching out to promoters to encourage them to book shows or tours in Olavshallen.”

To increase efficiency and to gain deeper insights into sales patterns and customer behavior to take the necessary actions to convert customers into sales, Olavshallen has subscribed to Activity Stream.

“I use Activity Stream to test the results after or during a campaign. The event status dashboard presents a great overview and you can easily monitor the current status of your different events. The dashboard allows us to easily identify performance issues including those events we need to push to generate sales.”

But the promoters also benefit by increasing their insights into campaign performance:

“Many of our clients are excellent marketers and they are often eager to check daily sales. Activity Stream strengthen our collaboration with the promoters as I can invite them to view their own dashboards to get the ultimate overview of sales figures and campaign performance and spot where to adjust to increase sales. Additionally, they can also track the performance of their own campaigns.”

Beyond offering insights into sales performance, Activity Stream also provides valuable customers learnings ensuring that clients can analyze hundreds of thousands of customers in seconds. For example, which customers live close by or far away? And for a specific event category? What about the behavioral difference and demography of key segments?

“Using Activity Stream, we are now able to explore our customer base in depth. The fact that we, among other things, are able to see where our audience lives, is of tremendous value. At the moment, we are working on outlining a huge sales and marketing strategy in the greater region in cooperation with the city management, hotels, the local theatre and other event and concert planners. It makes it a whole lot easier, when we can calculate the number of people we sell tickets to who might also need a hotel room.”

Marit concludes: “Activity Stream makes us more effective. Instead of spending too much time on setting up campaign reports and analyses, we can easily explore our data and focus on the value-adding tasks which in the long run improve our business. In the future, my top priority is also to use the platform to get an overview to see which categories are the most popular, if we lack a category or need more events for families or in other genres to complete our program and offer our audiences the best selection of performances.”

Activity Stream: We make data work for you

In order to get started and learn more about how to harness the power in your data to help you increase revenue and customer experience, contact us here for a demo.