Savvy live event marketers know that data and analytics strategies are crucial to a successful marketing campaign. But how is this achieved? With the four phases of marketing strategy — learn, plan, activate and analyze — you can develop marketing plans for fans that want to hear from you to score more ticket sales.
Learn: Uncover & Understand Your Audience
Your goal as a marketer is to lay a solid foundation to guide you when developing your campaign. Your strategy should include:
- What you will be marketing
- Who you will be marketing to
- Which marketing channels or tactics are likely to perform best
At Ticketmaster, we use LiveAnalytics—our proprietary tool which yields insights for enhanced, data-driven decision-making. LiveAnalytics can help you better understand the ideal fan for your event by looking at demographics and creating profiles of your audiences so you can focus your marketing efforts on the fans with the highest likelihood of purchasing tickets.
Once you have determined your ideal audience, begin identifying channels and tactics that are likely to be most effective in engaging with the fans who want to hear from you. During this phase, historical data can provide helpful insights—such as which channels were most successful in engaging with your audience during each stage of your event lifecycle.
Plan: Identify the Right Channels & Timing for Your Sales Cycle
Live event marketers want to ensure their plan addresses fan needs at each stage of the sales cycle. To do so, it’s essential to consider the audience you want to engage, which channels you will use, the timing of campaign activation, and the budget you will allocate.
Suggested Audiences is a campaign marketing tool in the TM1 Marketing platform that helps you better understand your known fans. This tool can help you determine which fans within your database are most likely to be interested in your events based on their past event preferences.
Activate: Triggers & Tools to Launch Your Campaign
Once you’ve developed your plan, you’re ready to activate campaigns. Before starting, pixel tracking should be in place to capture important conversion data resulting from your campaigns. The prep work of placing the pixel can be completed entirely within TM1. The simple user interface allows you to select your desired events and landing pages, place your pixel, and see it go live on Ticketmaster.com in seconds.
Analyze: Lean Into Your Reporting to Optimize Your Campaigns
Once you’ve built reporting and activated your campaign, you’re ready to analyze your campaign performance data. The goal is to understand how well your plan advances your business goals, making adjustments as necessary.
As you begin to see results, we recommend not coming to conclusions too soon. Just because you can access performance data as soon as the campaign activates does not mean you should immediately act on that data. For example, Facebook recommends that you not make changes to your social campaign until the learning phase is complete, which can take up to a few weeks, depending on the type of campaign. Similarly, it is important not to prematurely analyze A/B test data from email campaigns. When looking at A/B tests, wait until you have statistical significance—in other words, a big enough dataset—before drawing conclusions or making any significant changes.
Lastly, make sure to focus on which metrics matter in your conversion funnel; click-through rate (CTR) will be an essential metric. CTR indicates interest, so you want to move prospects who click on your communications further down the funnel. When looking at the bottom of the funnel, it is more important to focus on conversion rate since those people are further along their journey.
Interested in hearing more? Take the Modern Ticketing Essentials: Beyond the Ticket course and learn directly from Ticketmaster experts! For a deeper dive into the topic above, see Lesson 3 entitled Toward the Red Zone: Data Strategies That Drive Fan Conversion.
Existing clients can learn more about marketing solutions by visiting our Product Education and Solutions & Services space in the TM1 Support Community. If you are not yet partnered with Ticketmaster, we would love to speak with you about Ticketmaster’s innovative solutions – please contact us by completing this form.
