Jane Kleinberger addresses the Spectra Ticketing & Fan Engagement community.
REPORTING FROM NEWPORT BEACH, CALIF. — With 90 client presenters and a new analytics and technology track, a record number of over 750 registered attendees gathered for the 33rd PACnet, Feb. 21-24. As usual, Spectra Ticketing & Fan Engagement’s client roster grew substantially in the last year with the addition of a number of universities, venues, organizations and regional ticketing services. Spectra Ticketing’s collection of new partners was also on display as PACnet ’16 focused on event discovery and investing in new resources for additional distribution.
“The key to this is how we can bring partners into this environment to make it easy for you to extend your reach and partner with other organizations that can bring new fans to you,” said President and CEO Dave Butler. “Whether that’s listing your seats on SeatGeek for certain events, or working with Carbonhouse to make your website more compelling and engaging, our goal is to bring in the partners you recommend.”
Butler stressed that the number one reason people say they didn’t attend an event is they didn’t know it was happening until they read the review afterward. Part of remedying this issue is meeting the fans where they are. And that means mobile, Google and even
secondary markets.
Rather than heading directly to your event’s or venue’s website, people are simply searching for tickets on Google. Every minute, nearly 29,000 searches are happening around sports on the search engine, and seven out of 10 people at any event used Google in their research process. Even people who end up buying offline use Google to research, and more than half of those are happening on mobile devices.
“When you think about a search from a marketer’s point of view, that’s a hand raise,” said Mike Lorenc, who heads up Google’s Ticketing and Live Events category. “That’s someone telling you I’m interested in your product, I’m ready to do business with you, will you please take my money.”
To most fans, there’s no difference between primary and secondary tickets. They just want tickets and where they find them is where they’ll buy them. Secondaries were born on the web and were born for search, but now primaries are starting to play the game. By working with Google’s Search Engine Marketing, Spectra Ticketing clients like the University of Southern California, are making sure they’re the number one listing on Google. They can even populate and control the knowledge graph on Google so fans can easily find their events.
“So the question is are you giving the hand raisers the opportunity to do business with you or are you just relying on other partners to do it?” said Lorenc.
Through a partnership with SeatGeek, Spectra Ticketing clients are now able to list their events on SeatGeek and link back to their own online ecommerce pages for purchases. Their popular mobile app aggregates primary and secondary markets inventory all in one place. With over 8 million consumers visiting the SeatGeek site every month, the partnership provides a whole other audience to tap into, especially when it comes to millennials, since 55 percent of the SeatGeek user base is between 18-34 years old.
“This is all about discovery,” said Nihar Singhal, EVP of Business Development and Strategy, SeatGeek. “People want to come to either Google or SeatGeek and want to be able to see the options that are available. For rights holders you want to be where the people are. By allowing your inventory on SeatGeek it allows the fan to buy that ticket from you very easily.”
In another example of reaching fans where they’re at, another Spectra Ticketing partner, ReplyBuy, has turned to an older technology, text messaging, to reach everyone from millennials to baby boomers through a form of communication most people use every day.
“In our opinion, people have app fatigue,” said Brandon O’Halloran, VP of Sales and Retention, ReplyBuy. “Email is becoming more and more dated. Every second it takes a page or app to load, you’re losing 7 percent of your audience. Even for social they need to be scrolling through an app to find it.”
This conversational commerce is able to send campaigns on demand, offering recipients available tickets, to which they simply reply “buy” to purchase. Clients like Auburn University have found success in using it for last-minute buyers and as a way to get rid of tickets that were being held and then became available at the last minute.
“We’re taking a different position in the market,” said Josh Manley, CEO, ReplyBuy. “We leverage the most universal form of communication on the planet to help our clients engage their fans and remove the buying friction. As far as cutting through the noise and engaging a fan on demand in a matter of seconds we found text to be extremely effective.”
With so many options available, Butler stressed that all these activities have to be measured to matter. Measure it, refine it, improve it and roll it back out. “Fact-based decision making works.”
Interviewed for this story: Dave Butler, (949) 823-1636; Mike Lorenc, Michal.lorenc@gmail.com; Nihar Singhal, (888) 506-4101; Josh Manley and Brandon O’Halloran, (402) 659-8921