This is a sponsored post written by Mark Kelliher, Marketing Manager UK, ticketscript. More information about Event Manager Blog’s sponsored posts.
Data can help you sell more tickets. FACT.
Here are 3 tactics event planners need to know about.
The collection of customer data is constant. Every time a consumer browses a webpage, enters a Google search, or visits social media sites, information about the consumers online behaviour is collated. If analysed and applied correctly you could see a spike in revenue, a reduction in marketing expenditure and an increase in ticket sales. Here are a few simple tips that can truly help you gain more success with your event, regardless of your experience in working with data.
Time to ask yourself some questions
Are you converting potential customers into paying ticket-buyers? Is your marketing budget being spent on the correct platforms? Are your tickets easy to find on your website?
If there is one thing that can help us form more educated answers to these questions, it is data. Data doesn’t lie and although an event requires that emotive spirit in decision making to ensure your cultural ethos is adhered to, the analysis of data can help both validate your marketing decisions and benefit your bottom line.
Using data in Google Analytics to your advantage, there are three key areas to focus on.
Remember: data isn’t scary, not using it is.
Before you get started
When looking to use Google Analytics for your data reporting, it is always necessary to have a key performance indicator (KPI) in mind to measure against. We frequently recommend creating a custom goal for this purpose, which will typically be a trackable conversion i.e. a ticket purchase.
This conversion can then be used within your reports and add value to your data when looking at traffic sources or landing page performance as an example. This step by step guide on Google Analytics should make life a lot easier.
Acquisition Reports
Essentially, Acquisition Reports illustrate how users arrive to your site (or ticketshop). This provides you with an insight into which channels your potential customers are using to enter your website, e.g search platforms, clicking on paid advertising campaigns you’re running, being directed from social media posts you’re writing, or clicking on a link in your latest email campaign. This report can really have a significant effect on your cost per conversion which can be pivotal in generating the required profits for your event.
Take online advertising as an example. If you run a music event and you’ve traditionally spent marketing budget with a particular music magazine that seems to fit within your target audience, it might be worthwhile cross checking this use of money to justify the expense. Whilst your online banners might look pretty sitting on your favourite music website, are they actually generating traffic to your website and resulting in conversions (ticket sales) for your event? If the answer is no, could your money be utilised elsewhere? You might actually find that a lot of your traffic is being directed from organic social media posts. Take a look at the content you’ve been posting. If it’s video content, could you maybe allocate the paid banner campaign budget into creating additional videos that are actually working for your event?
These kind of questions create healthy debate for your business as you should always strive for maximum ROI (return on investment) when spending advertising budget.
Behaviour Reports
Once you have your potential customer on your website (or ticketshop), what are they doing? How are they interacting with your website and could there be improvements made to help increase conversion of ticket sales?
This report can really help with highlighting particular pages on your website that are either performing well, or more interestingly, causing users to drop-off (bounce) before purchasing a ticket. It can often be the case that the ticket purchasing journey is too clunky and by utilising this report you can be confident in your decisions to remove a certain page or redirect traffic to better performing pages.
You also might have created an interesting piece of video content that is sitting on a particular page other than the homepage. If this page seems to have the most engagement on the website, it could be useful to either divert your banner advertising links directly to this page or even move the video content to the homepage so you’re capturing your audience’s full attention as soon as they land on your website. Our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter with the nature of how content is being produced so don’t give potential customers a chance to leave without showing at least signs of converting into sales.
Remarketing
So you now know where your potential customers are coming from before they reach your website, what they’re doing once they get to your site, which has hopefully resulted in ticket sales. If that’s the case, congratulations! If you still need to sell more tickets then don’t be alarmed. There is a clever way to target those potential customers who have engaged with your ticketshop or website but have not yet purchased a ticket. Welcome to the wonderful world of remarketing.
By collecting remarketing data, you can start to build out numerous audiences that you can retarget with online ads using Google AdWords. This can really be as straightforward or as complex as you like but here are a couple frequent uses of remarketing that have proven very fruitful for event organisers.
A more straightforward approach is to target users who have started the ticket purchasing journey but not yet converted to an actual ticket sale. This way you know the user is interested in purchasing tickets to the point where they have made the decision to begin the process. It could be any number of things as to why they didn’t convert (e.g. had to run into a meeting, lost service on the train), so it’s a smart decision to trigger a reminder and send out an online ad to entice the completion of a ticket purchase.
You can also utilise remarketing to target more niche audiences with custom ads. This will show the potential ticket buyer you understand their behaviour and will provide you with a better chance of conversion. For example, you might find a certain group of users are spending time on the ‘Line-up’ page of your festival website, so you can make an informed decision that the bands involved are really important to their decision in buying a ticket. You can then serve this group with a tailored ad pushing a message such as, “new acts just announced!” to generate the best chance of re-engaging that user with your website and generating a ticket sale.
In Conclusion
We cannot stress enough how important it is to take ownership of your event ticketing and one thing that can assist with this is the correct utilisation of data. This can be something you start with at a very basic level and build up to more complex formulas as confidence grows within Google Analytics. Don’t be afraid! Get started now so you can gain a better understanding of your customers, track your return on investment, and produce more targeted campaigns to increase ticket sales.
June 23rd, 2016 at 10:00 AM EDT
