What is a classical music audience customer journey?
How the RACE framework can helps arts organisations interact with customers
Introduction
In classical music it is easy to get caught up in the music (but hey that’s what we are all there for right?). We are all passionate about music, artists, being creative, and wanting audiences to have the best experience possible. But how do we ensure that audiences interested in our programmes hear about our work, or how do we reach new people eager to try something new, and how do keep in touch with our audiences making them feel part of our community? To answer these questions is sometimes we just need to go back to the basics and apply some sturdy marketing models to help us gain clarity on our current situation and customer journey, and to shed a light on how we can improve it.
In this short article I will explain the RACE framework system and how it impacts your customer journey, how to apply it to your organisation to help you to see gaps in your marketing efforts, and how it can help you to reach those audiences in the most effective way.
What is a customer journey and what is RACE?
The customer journey is the process by which a customer interacts with an organisation in order to achieve a goal e.g. ticket sales. It is important that your organisation understands the needs of your customers so you can improve their journey and communicate your brand messages in the most effective way. A great way to do this is by using the RACE planning system (developed by Chaffey). The RACE planning system consists of these four steps to help your brand engage with customers throughout their lifecycle: Reach, Act, Convert and Engage. The framework essentially helps you to effectively communicate with your audience at each stage of their journey.
But what do these elements mean:
1. REACH. Reach is the awareness building stage of your brand, product or service to try and drive website traffic/visits. It involves maximising reach over time to create multiple interactions using different paid, owned and earned media touch points.
2 ACT. Act is short for Interact. It’s a separate stage since encouraging interactions on websites and on social media to generate leads is a big challenge. It’s about persuading visitors to take the next step, or Action, on their journey when they initially reach your site or social network. This could be finding out more about you, reading a blog post, or listening to a podcast. They have taken an Action by reading your blog because you successfully Reached them using your awareness building strategy.
3. CONVERT. This is conversion to sale — occurring either online or offline. It involves getting your audience to take that vital next step which turns them into paying customers e.g. they bought a ticket to your concert.
4. ENGAGE. This is the long-term engagement stage where you are building a relationship with first time buyers and building customer loyalty. The aim here is to get repeat purchases, social media interactions, or e-newsletters subscriber interactions, to ensure repeat business. Eventually this will turn them into advocates for your business (an advocate is where a customer shares their positive experience with their network usually by word of mouth/social media). Advocates are your flag bearers and your biggest supporters. They are worth their weight in gold!
Another important element of RACE is the concept of customer touch points. Simply touch points are moments when customers are open to influence, open to interacting with you, and are open channels for you to communicate with them. Touch points are a core element of RACE and really help with visualising your customer journey and where you can interact with your customers.
RACE Framework in action
I recommend starting your RACE assessment by looking at what elements of your current customer journey can be applied to each stage of RACE. In the example in Figure 1 you can see the RACE framework drawn out as arrows acting as each stage of the journey. Next to each stage, in the same colour, there are circle representing the customer touchpoint and a short description of what the touchpoint entails e.g. SEO, sales calls, of bespoke email content.
By looking at the current RACE customer journey you may conclude that this organisation uses limited digital touch points to communicate with customers. At the Reach stage there is no proactive outreach to customers to build awareness. The Act step has limited customer support or sales pushes, whereas Convert begins to include some advert targeting and bespoke content. Throughout all stages there is no marketing automation and limited personalisation. There are few touch points in the Engage stage to re-engage customers to reconnect with the brand. This means that this organisation is not nurturing or encouraging customers to make referrals or act as brand ambassadors and is losing out on additional brand awareness. Ultimately leading to loss of business and not remaining ‘top of the mind’ for customers.
From quickly doing the above framework for your current customer journey you can now clearly see what elements you may be missing or where you may need to repeat an action, or a stage of the journey that has been neglected. Usually the most neglected area is Engage, as many organisations just rely on the e-newsletter or season brochure to re-connect with repeat purchasers.
Figure 2 shows how you might adapt your RACE framework to include any missing areas or stages of the journey you were neglecting. You can now see that you have excellent coverage across all sections of the journey and that multiple touch points — both digital and physical- have now been included to give a bird’s eye view of the marketing journey. You can provide more depth on your RACE plan by including your different social media channels at particular points along the journey, or whether you have membership opportunities, or gated sections on your website.
Summary
The RACE planning framework can really help classical music organisations to visualise their customer journey and to identify touch points where they can interact with customers. These touch points can then be clearly assessed to establish what is and is not working, identify gaps, and allow for experimentation with new touch points such as podcasts or vlogs.
Review your RACE plan every 6 months and assess it with regards to ticket sales, Google Analytics, sales figures, subscriber numbers, or follower numbers/interactions to see if it is working the way that you want to, or if it needs tweaking.
The RACE framework will certainly help you to understand where your audiences are and where they interact with your brand. Then you can capitalise on their interactions on each stage of the journey to becoming brand advocates for your organisation!
