Da Capo Digital

Everyone worries about the other concert on the same night.

Honestly? That's rarely the problem.

You're not really up against the orchestra across town.
You're up against the sofa, the telly, a long week, and "we'll catch the next one." The whole comfortable world of staying in.

Which is oddly good news.

It means shouting the date louder is never going to help.
You have to make your concert feel worth leaving the house for.

The feeling, the story, the reason. That's the bit that sells tickets.

What's your usual excuse for missing a concert?

Maybe not too much.

But quite possibly too much of the wrong thing.

Most arts orgs aren't doing too little online. They're doing loads, overwhelmed and exhausted by it, and not much is coming back.

The fix usually isn't more posts. It's fewer, but the right ones.

Honestly, sometimes the most useful thing we do for clients is to tell them what to stop posting.

If your content feels like a lot of effort for not much back, that's usually where we start.

Posting this as much for me as for you.

If your reach has dipped, a post’s flopped, or you’re wondering whether you’ve lost your touch... you almost certainly haven’t.

This is just what social media looks like up close.

Especially in the arts, where audiences are built slowly, seats matter more than likes, and going viral was never really the point.

None of it means you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it.

Save this for the next time you have a wobble or send it to whoever runs your socials 🫶

It's easy to forget this when you're on the inside.

Where to park. When it really starts. Whether the bar takes card. What to wear. Whether the sound will be acoustic or coming through the speakers.

None of it is glamorous. None of it makes a nice graphic. But it's the difference between someone feeling invited and someone quietly deciding it's too much effort.

The people asking aren't being difficult. They just haven't been before.

Nobody worries about a thing they already know the answer to.

Answer the practical questions. It's one of the simplest ways to tell a new audience the concert is for them too.

Because we love performing to an empty front row 🫠

Recently we didn't post about one of our ensemble's concerts. Kind of on purpose.

It's a regular series with a loyal, growing audience. They hadn't sent us any useable content so we decided to treat it as an experiment.

Guess what happened.

Around half the normal audience turned up. Which meant roughly half the ticket sales and half the donations too.

All because we didn't remind people it was happening.

Not every post should be a ticket push. We absolutely believe that.

But your audience is busy. They forget. A single post the day before can be the difference between a full room and a half-empty one.

Make it easy for people to come to you.

I spent yesterday afternoon at my kids’ school career fair.

Thirty-odd parents, all from different industries, sitting at desks while teenagers did the rounds.

The questions were good. One that came up more than once: what does a typical day actually look like?

Honestly, oddly timed phone calls feature more than I’d like to admit.

This week alone we’ve worked across five time zones, translated content from Danish and German, and written in three different varieties of English — each for a different artist with a completely different voice.

We work with musicians who are known globally, we go to their concerts, we’re in the room for things most people never get near.

It’s not just posting on Facebook.

Arts marketing sits at this particular intersection of culture, communication, and strategy that doesn’t get talked about enough.

You have to understand the art deeply enough to represent it honestly. You have to understand audiences well enough to invite them in. And you have to care about both.

We think it’s a pretty great place to work.