Event marketers figured out years ago that the best way to reach millennials was through social media. Now it’s not just millennials spending time online and the tactic is now heavily relied upon for getting events in front of eyeballs and to beef up databases for all demographics. While a breeze for marketing managers, especially the younger ones, the how, why, where and what of social media marketing remain a mystery to the vast majority of venue operators.
One of the savviest users of social media marketing is ticket company Paciolan, whose PacSocial product has become a vital tool for many of its customers. Venues Today spoke with the company and its customers to help unravel the social media marketing mystery.
Social media marketing can be broken down into two categories. The first aspect could be described as “pulling content” that fans and artists post from the various social media platforms and getting it to the venue’s fans.
“PacSocial allows our different schools and fans to pull in social content and get it onto screens in the concourse or website for the fans to see,” explained Jules Butler, social media marketing specialist, Paciolan. “If your venue wants to run fan pictures from Instagram or Facebook posts or fan tweets on large screens, our software makes the process easy for our clients. They don’t need a large IT department to make that happen; we make that happen for them.”
It’s sort of like a fancam, but for social media. “Fans love to see what other fans are thinking and posting about an event they are attending,” said Butler. “If someone is following the feed from somewhere else, they’ll see the posts in real time and they’ll see all the fun going on and hopefully be persuaded to buy a ticket for the next game.”
“We set up a social feed at all our events, and we display them all on one feed in the concourse,” said Viki Arias, marketing manager, Iowa Events Center, Des Moines, a PacSocial client. “People love seeing themselves on the big screen.”
The second aspect could be called “pushing content” to your fans. “This is the opposite of pulling posts and tweets,” said Butler. “When we push market it means we are creating the content and trying to engage fans with the content.”
That content goes onto the various social media platforms as a way for potential ticket-buyers to discover an event they haven’t heard about, or get engaged with an event that may have been interested in but haven’t acted on yet.
Venues decide which events they want to promote. Once they identify an event, they can go to the PacSocial team who put the post together. “PacSocial is perfect for a venue that has a small marketing staff as we do the heavy-lifting for them,” said Butler.
Alli Flock, director of marketing, Crown Complex, Fayetteville, N.C., is a big fan of the program. “We’re a department of two here so having PacSocial do most of the work for us frees us up to do all the other things we need to do. It saves me a lot of time.
Flock said she picks her activations by “looking at sales and seeing what we think needs that extra push.”
Tying the promotion into a contest is often a great way to get the fan’s attention. “We used PacSocial for a recent Price Is Right Live event,” she said. “We tied it into a contest, and the prizes were tickets to the show; a limo to the show and dinner at a local restaurant.”
The post was placed on Facebook and the campaign got close to 700 entries, said Flock. “Of the 700 entries around 70 percent were people who were not in our database, so we added them to the database and we’ll market similar events to them in the future. All the entrants who did not win, also got an email saying, ‘we’re sorry you did not win but here’s a promo code for savings on tickets,’ which yielded several hundred ticket buyers.”
A Harlem Globetrotters activation got over 500 hits. “We consider it a major success if we get 500 hits,” said Flock. “Normally we only get 200 or so. And the new people are all hard leads, and we put all of the names and email addresses into our cyber club to market to.”
The cost? “Around $50,” said Flock. “It’s really inexpensive. We also got them to like our Facebook page to enter, which is another bonus.” Flock said that Crown Complex activates a campaign about once a month, but mentioned that the amount of activations is unlimited.
Arias said that she employs PacSocial “for every single concert” and for a monthly contest on the venue’s Facebook page. “We use it one to five times a month,” she said.
One example Arias was especially pleased with was an activation for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). “We drew people in with a poll where we asked fans to vote for their favorite wrestler,” she said. “On the landing page we had a contest and hashtag, and all the tweets from people using that hashtag. We got over 500 entrants, which is really high.”
Arias said the cost was “really inexpensive” and provided “really great ROI (Return On Investment).”
Brandon Mellor, senior marketing manager, Paciolan, said, “What we’ve seen since last summer is that Facebook is making it really easy for fans to discover events through their Events Page,” he explained. “We created a custom API that allows us to publish a client’s ticketed-event directly onto Facebook.” He estimated that since creating the API they’ve put over 3,000 posts up.
Facebook introduced a standalone event app last year as well, said Mellor. “It’s a really neat way to get your event in front of the fans.” Event listing on Facebook is free.
Mellor said that “to move the needle, the venue needs to put marketing dollars around the event. All campaigns have a ‘call to action’ button; it pushes the reader to the venue page, and the best part is that with Facebook’s sophistication, it can target exactly who you want to reach by geographical location or affinities or that a team you follow is playing or an artist you love is performing.”
Mellor confirmed the investment to Facebook can be as little as $50, but did say for a big campaign the cost can go up to $5,000. “It’s all based on impressions,” he said. “A venue can invest as little or as much into a social media campaign as they want to.”
Mellor said that social media advertising is exploding. “A year ago we didn’t even do Facebook advertising,” he said. “Now we’re doing a ton of it, and people are really starting to see its value,” he said.
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