5 Lessons Marketers Can Learn From the Opening Act

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This blog was written by Joe Koufman, Founder + CEO of Setup.

Joe is the connector behind Setup. He leads the company’s vision, relationships, and broader marketing community strategy, helping brands find better-fit agency partners and cut through the noise of the agency search process. With decades of business development and marketing leadership experience across small, independent, and holding-company agency environments, Joe believes better marketing relationships start with better connections. He is also the author of The Connector’s Compass.

He also is an avid concert goer and former radio host, which inspired him to write this piece comparing concert elements to the marketing relationship.

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Opening for a famous band sounds like an opportunity you would be crazy to turn down. You get access to an audience you could never attract on your own, and your name appears alongside an artist people already love.

But those people bought tickets to see someone else. Your success depends on whether you give them a reason to become your fans, too.

Eric Alper’s article about choosing opening slots for concert tours got me thinking about how marketers evaluate opportunities. We choose events to sponsor, creators to partner with, and places to advertise. Audience size is easy to compare. Knowing whether they'll care about what we offer takes more work.

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The opening act offers a few useful lessons:

Lesson #1 | Get specific about the audience before committing money.

“Senior business leaders” might sound like the right audience until you learn that most attendees work at companies you cannot serve. Likewise, a creator’s large following tells you little about whether those followers would buy your product.

Ask an event organizer for a breakdown of attendees by role, industry, and company size. Ask a potential creator partner for audience demographics and results from comparable partnerships. Compare that information with what you know about your customers.

If audience fit is the reason you are investing, you need enough information to assess it.

Lesson #2 | Decide what you want people to do next.

An opening set can introduce someone to a band they want to hear again. Your marketing should make the next step equally clear.

For a conference sponsorship, that might mean booking a working session around a specific challenge. For a creator partnership, it could mean trying a product. Choose a next step that fits both the audience and how much they already know about you.

Then get it ready before you launch. Build the relevant landing page, test the signup process, and make sure someone owns the response. Do not spend money generating interest and leave people to figure out what to do with it.

Lesson #3 | Give people something useful during the first interaction.

A band has limited time to introduce its music. Marketers face a similar constraint when someone stops at a booth or gives a presentation a few minutes of attention.

At Setup, understanding a marketing leader’s challenge gives us a basis for recommending an agency. A general list of capabilities would not be enough to make a useful match.

Apply that thinking to your next event or campaign. Choose a problem your audience faces and prepare something that helps them address it. That could be a relevant case study, a short assessment, or access to someone who can offer practical advice.

Give your team enough preparation to have a substantive conversation beyond explaining what your company sells.

Lesson #4 | Follow up on the conversation you actually had.

I love making introductions. Seeing people build a relationship afterward is the rewarding part. That requires paying attention to what matters to the other person.

If someone tells you they are struggling to coordinate several agencies, follow up on that challenge. Send a resource that addresses it or offer a conversation with someone who can help.

Before your team leaves an event, capture the person’s stated need, the next step you discussed, and who will follow up. Set a deadline. A stack of scanned badges is a poor substitute for knowing why someone wanted to talk with you.

Lesson #5 | Judge the opportunity against its full cost and intended result.

The sponsorship fee is only part of the investment. Include travel, production, preparation, and the time your team will spend following up.

Agree on what would make the investment worthwhile before signing. If the goal is new business, track qualified conversations and how they progress. If the goal is awareness, decide how you will assess whether more of the right people know you.

Some relationships take time to produce business. Set a review date that reflects that reality, and use what you learn to decide whether to invest again.

Before approving your next sponsorship, partnership, or campaign, write down:

• The specific audience you want to reach.

• What you will offer that is useful to them.

• The action you want them to take.

• Who owns the follow-up and when it will happen.

• The full cost and the result that would justify it.

Use those answers in your next budget conversation. If your team cannot answer one of them, resolve it before committing the money.

Know what you need to accomplish, but not which agency can get you there?

Setup helps marketing leaders turn business needs into the right agency brief — then identifies partners with the capabilities, experience, and fit to do the work.

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