Using Audience Answers to increase loyalty and frequency

For many cultural organisations, the pattern is familiar: audiences book for a major seasonal event,  such as a Christmas production, but don’t return at other times of the year. While these spikes are welcome, they also highlight a missed opportunity. If those attendees already know and trust your organisation, how we can we persuade them to engage more regularly?

The key is taking a structured, data-informed approach.

This step-by-step guide is adapted from a webinar in February 2026 which you can watch in full here > 

First, a quick introduction:

Audience Answers is a set of tools to help cultural organisations understand who their audiences are, identify potential new or underserved audiences and learn how best to reach them.

At its heart is Audience Spectrum, a UK-wide population segmentation. It groups people into 10 segments (and 20 sub-segments) based on their real engagement with arts and culture as well as demographics, lifestyle and geography.  

Start by examining who your infrequent or one-off bookers are. Rather than guessing who your Christmas attenders might be, you can build a clear picture of their segment characteristics.

There are several ways to approach uncovering this - each with increasing levels of precision:
 

• FREE: Ask Audience Spectrum Genie for some clues about who once-only bookers generally are. You could try a query like:
  
  "We're a medium-sized theatre in a north of England city. Every year, we see the same pattern: people booking for the Christmas show but not returning at any other point in the year. Which Audience Spectrum segments are these infrequent bookers likely to be?" 
  
   
• FREE: Log in to your Audience Answers ticketing dashboard where you’ll find the Audience Spectrum profile of all your bookers over the past 12 months. 

• £: If you have the Essentials dashboard upgrade (free for organisations in Scotland and Wales), you can build an Audience Spectrum profile for bookers of specific events eg your Christmas show.
   
• £: If you have Audience Spectrum integrated into your ticketing system, build a first-time booker report for the events you're interested in, then look at the associated Audience Spectrum tags for those bookers.

Whichever route you choose, by now, you should be narrowing your focus and getting a sense of who your target segment(s) should be.
 

Once you’ve identified your segments:
 

• Read the relevant Motivation Guides and segment profiles to learn what they value, what motivates them, and what barriers to engagement they may face.
   
• Pay attention to lifestyle, price sensitivity, and arts/ culture preferences. 

This insight is crucial for shaping your messaging.

Now refine your marketing tactics:
 

• Adjust tone, language, imagery, and key selling points to match your chosen segments' motivations, values and preferences. 
   
• Highlight the benefits that matter most to them (e.g. escapism, social experience, quality, familiarity).
   
• Consider any relevant add-ons such as food/drink offers, flexible pricing etc.

Audience Spectrum Genie can offer guidance on what typically resonates.

You could of course, just send a 'Book again' campaign to all your first time bookers - if you've done the work in Step 1, there's a good chance a lot of them will fall into the segment(s) you identified, and your refined communications will resonate with them.

But - if you want to get really precise, you'll need to use Audience Spectrum data integrated into your ticketing / CRM system. 

If you have this set up, each booker will be 'tagged' in your system with their segment. You can then build a mailing list based on this, and be sure you're reaching exactly the right people with your targeted messaging.

Audience Answers helps you move towards focused,  confident decision-making. By understanding who your audiences are, what motivates them, and where to find them, you can make your marketing campaigns more relevant, efficient, and effective. 

Get in touch if we can help further.