Sporting Event Success Story: Professional Soccer Team Dominates Ticket Sales with Digital!

A professional soccer team needed to boost Season tickets for their upcoming season as well as single game ticket sales throughout the year.

Digital Strategy:
Our client is a professional soccer team that hosts over 30 games a year at a stadium that holds 7900 attendees.  Previous media strategies for ticket sales included traditional tactics like TV and Radio. With a young and active fan base, digital media was going to be a focus for the upcoming season. The soccer team has an active Social Media presence and that would be the springboard to amping up awareness and driving sales. For Social Media a combination of News Feed ads were recommended using static images, video and carousel ads to showcase a variety of the excitement of professional soccer.

What is Paid Social Media?
Showing your display or video ads across all devices on Facebook and Instagram and on any of the Facebook advertising platforms

In the early phases of the season, Mobile Conquesting was utilized with several tactics: Address Targeting & Retargeting of past ticket purchaser’s database, geo-fencing and geo-retargeting of local places of interests like other sporting venues, family entertainment venues and geo targeting in the area to sports-enthusiasts. Mobile provided a ton of versatility to make past purchasers aware of the season and attract new ticket purchasers as well.

What is Mobile Conquesting?
Using location based, demographic, and behavioral targeting to reach consumers with display and video ads on their mobile devices.  We can even “geo-fence” around your competitor’s locations or places of interest down to a 500 feet radius and then retarget those devices with ads.

Address Targeting and Address Retargeting is drawing hundreds or even thousands of tiny geo-fences around an address (business or residential) to serve ads to consumers on their mobile phones and tablets.  Address Retargeting is continuing to serve ads to those same people when they leave their houses and use their mobile devices.  Advertisers can target a list of current customers, past customers, or any type of first party database list they have collected.  These ads can be mobile display or video ads.

As consumers spend more of their online time on smartphones and tablets, it’s important to include a mobile strategy in your digital marketing. The Mobile Conquesting product allows advertisers to use both location based targeting combined with demographic and behavioral targeting to reach desired consumers on their mobile devices.

Social Media and Social Mirror were added in to increase awareness and drive ticket purchasing online as the season began. To continue to build hype and awareness from game-to-game, Amazon video and OTT and Display Ads launched targeting sports fans, soccer fans and families with game highlights and clips and touting the next game in the schedule. Schedules were also flighted to start promote the next game in the schedule immediately after each game, as well as increased impression serve 3-4 days before each game.

Social Mirror was a natural addition since the brand is very active on Social Media. Social Mirror helps amplify this message by mirroring key posts and running it on other website and apps to the targeted audience.

What are Social Mirror ads?
Social Mirror ads look like your social media display or video posts but appear on other websites and apps, linking back to the social media platform and your website, and run across all devices using our targeting strategies. We are “mirroring” the EXACT look of your social post as an ad that runs on thousands of OTHER websites and apps, targeted just to the people you want to reach across all devices.  Social Mirror ads can be done with any organic or paid posts from your business account on these 8 social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, or YouTube.  Ads can be display, video, OTT across connected TVs or carousel.

With the amazing footage of in-game play and crowd participation video and OTT on Amazon gave the team added awareness to build ticket sales. Amazon Video and OTT ran on Amazon-owned properties like Twitch, Freevee and Fire TV as well as the thousand of high-end publishers Amazing has partnered with like ESPN, MLB, DIY Network, CNN and more. Amazon knows a lot of it’s users and partnership data. With 8 and every 10 home owners using Amazon, the Amazon family it is a great place to target sport lovers and soccer fans!

What are Amazon ads?
Using Amazon targeting data to reach people with your display, video, or OTT ads on Amazon.com, Amazon-owned properties and thousands of other websites and apps Amazon has partnered with, across all devices. 

With a ton of sports fans constantly checking game highlights and sports scores online, digital display ads were also a part of the digital mix. The goal was to have a presence online as many places as possible that made sense leading up to each game. With Targeted Display, we offer campaigns that include Keyword Targeting, Behavioral Targeting, Retargeting and Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Targeting designed to show your ads to the exact audience you want to reach, to deliver the right message on the right device at the right time. With thousand of categories to choose from we could target avid sports and soccer fans as well as families that enjoy live events and activities.

What are display ads?  
Display ads go across all devices, appearing on websites or apps, using targeting strategies. 

Results:

GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLL!

The 2022 Season was a HUGE Success! Overall, the CTR across all digital was .93% and Social Media saw as high as a 3.5% CTR. The campaign really gained momentum after two months and quickly saw a spike in ticket sale 72 hours before each game and shattered records of the most ticket sales sold to date. The Director of Ticketing shared,”100% of our media plan was dedicated to digital and the results showed! We attribute all our success to the advanced digital tactics combined with our compelling visuals and video! Next season will be a repeat of what we adopted in this Season!”

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Should You Advertise During Your Slow Season?

How are you doing with your New Year’s Resolution? Have you skipped the gym already? Have you polished off that bag of Cheetos all by yourself? Have you already thrown out your 40oz Stanley mug because carrying around 40oz of water turns out to be way more annoying than you thought? Or maybe you have changed out water for wine in that Stanley mug and already threw in the towel for Dry January.

Over that awkward period between Christmas and the New Year where no one has any idea what day it is, I was scrolling through Instagram and saw the most genius marketing tactic by Tito’s vodka. Here is a business that was heading into a time where anticipated to drop, but they were still advertising. Now, as a business that sells alcohol, it might seem like a good idea to save some money by NOT advertising during a time when people aren’t drinking alcohol, but that is one of the worst things a business can do. Marketing is an essential part of any business, and it is especially important during times when you don’t think you need to advertise because maybe “you are busy enough”, or “it’s not “in-season” at the moment.

One of the reasons you want to continue to advertise is because you want to stay top-of-mind with consumers. A typical sales funnel starts off with Branding and Awareness, also known as Top-of-Mind Awareness, then moves into the Consideration and Evaluation phase, or the research phase, and then down at the bottom there is the conversions phase, where people take action. One of the benefits of Digital Marketing is that there are several ways to incorporate all of those different phases into a single marketing campaign.

Let’s play a little branding and awareness game, shall we? If I were standing in a line at the grocery store and I sneezed, I might ask someone for a Kleenex, right? Technically, Kleenex isn’t a tissue; it’s a brand. I am actually looking for a facial tissue, but Kleenex has done such a good job of marketing their brand, that you immediately think of the word Kleenex when you need a tissue. Same thing with Band-Aid. If I am cutting some potatoes for dinner and cut my finger, I will say I need a Band-Aid, but that is the brand. What I technically need is an adhesive bandage.

The point of a marketing campaign is to create top-of-mind awareness so that when someone enters the need for your product or service, you are the first place they think of. This is a tough nut to swallow for certain verticals like insurance agents, collision repair, or HVAC companies. As a business owner, they want their phones to ring off the hook when they start advertising, but that’s not how consumers work. Just because I see or hear an ad for a collision repair center doesn’t mean I’m going to run my car into a tree so we can go to Katie’s Collison Repair. Instead, when that unfortunate evet happens, with top-of-mind awareness, Katie’s Collision Repair could be the first place I think of due to an effective marketing campaign.

Some digital products that are great for keeping that brand awareness out there are Over-the-Top (OTT), Video Pre-Roll, and Online Audio. These products are all about getting the advertiser’s name, products, or services known so that potential customers are aware they exist and think of them when they want what the advertiser offers.

When it comes to video ads, viewers retain 95% of a video message compared to 10% when reading text. All three of these digital products have several ways that they can be utilized to target consumers and potential consumers:

Behavioral Targeting
Keyword Targeting (not available for OTT or Online Audio)
Artificial Intelligence
Retargeting
Custom Audience Matching/Lookalike

With OTT and Video Pre-Roll, these products also allow a business to show how their product works, or why it works. Animated explanation videos increase conversion rates by at least 20%.  As consumers, we don’t want to take the time to figure out how a product or service works, or why Brand A is better than Brand B. Instead, we want to be told how that product or service is going to benefit us. In a society where we want everything yesterday, we don’t have time to read long product descriptions and would rather be shown that information.

Online Audio is great for brand awareness because it fosters strong relationships between listeners and brands. This is also more of a passive type marketing strategy because people are tuning into specific podcasts that they want to listen to or have music on all day while they are working. On average, a user hears 1 ad every 15 minutes. Audio ads also allow for the consumer to create their own image so the options for creativity are endless. If you have ever wondered why a book is always better than a movie, it’s because the reader creates their own image in their mind of what the characters look like or what the scenes look like. An audio ad creates that same sense of wonder.

Moving further into a typical sales funnel is the Consideration and Evaluation phase. This is the phase where consumers want to get all the information they can. They want to make sure that if they are spending their money on your product or service, it’s going to be worth their time and money. This is also where the importance of frequency comes in. The key to getting people to do what you want them to do is frequency; the more times they can see or hear your ad, the better off they are. Amazon Targeting, LinkedIn, Display, Mobile Conquesting, Social Mirror, Facebook and Instagram, and Native ads are all products that will deliver that frequency and will also reach consumers as they are searching for certain products and services

With Display, Native, and Social Mirror, you can target through Behaviors, Keywords, Artificial Intelligence, Retargeting, and Custom Audience Matching so you are able to reach people in different parts of that buying journey. As people are doing research, you can reach them through certain keywords, or if they are looking for something in particular, you can reach them through various behaviors that they have put themselves in. If you have a list of customers that have purchased from you before, you can use that list to send them a more tailored type of message.

With Amazon Targeting, you can also reach consumers through Behavioral Targeting, but here you are using Amazon’s amazing first party data that they have collected about its users. Using Product Targeting, we can reach Amazon users that have searched for, browsed, or purchased specific products that you can get on Amazon. For example, if I recently looked for a new coffee table on Amazon, I might start seeing ads for Wayfair or Ashley Furniture because they could be targeting me through product targeting on Amazon.

Now we have reached the bottom of the sales funnel, the consideration phase. This is reaching people who are about to make a purchase decision. As a business, the goal is to get as many people as possible from the first two stages of the sales funnel to this purchase point. When they reach this point, they are in the home stretch. Some products here that will help with getting that consumer over the edge are Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Google Pay-Per-Click (PPC), and Live Chat.

With SEO, this is the practice of improving and promoting a website to increase the number of visitors the site receives from search engines. This is an important piece of the marketing puzzle because people are going to gravitate towards the top results that appear with a search page. Seventy six percent of Google searchers click on one of the first three organic listing, and less than one percent of searchers clicked past page two of results.

Google Pay-Per-Click is a good strategy to add in if a budget allows because you’re reaching for something specific and you need immediate results. If your heat goes on in the middle of the winter, you need an HVAC company so you’re going to Google something like “furnace repair near me” and click on the first thing that pops up. It is also a good strategy to use if you have good brand awareness because people are already familiar with you. If they aren’t familiar with you, they will continue their search and scroll right past. Consumers are creatures of habit and change is hard and they like what they know.

Live Chat is also a great tool for that last phase because it shows that people are reaching out and wanting more information, which is a big buying sign. It’s also nice to be able to watch that consumer journey since we can track live chat as a conversion and show that on the monthly reports.

Marketing is an essential part of any business, and it is especially important during those times where you think you might be able to lay off and save a couple bucks. By staying top-of-mind, keeping your brand active, finding new opportunities, and creating compelling content to grab and keep the consumers’ attention, you can stand apart from your competitors that might decide to take that marketing break.

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What Digital Products Are Businesses Using To Promote Their Business?

Looking at the entire landscape of digital advertising, there is a plethora of digital products out there.   Here at Vici, we have a wheel that we introduce businesses to that incorporates 14 top level products, with lots of elements within each product.

In 2022, we saw two products take the lead in usage from our partners.  Those two products are Mobile Conquesting and Social Mirror. 

A quick read on the links above will give you some background and information on each of the two products.  However, knowing the uses of each, and how to target with each product will give you insight into why they are used so much by our clients.

Starting with Mobile Conquesting, we take a look at 6 different ways to target potential customers.  Usually we see clients utilize a combination of the following:

Let’s start with Behavioral Targeting.

Behavioral Targeting, when it comes to Mobile Conquesting can refer to both Online Behaviors and Offline Behaviors.   Online Behaviors refers to targeting people who have shown specific behaviors online, or are within a certain demographic.  Offline Behaviors refers to targeting people by where they have been tracked with their phone recently, such as a location, business, or even a specific brand name store.

Here is just a sample of some of the thousands of categories available:

Next, we take a look at 3 terms you’ve probably heard before:

Geo-Fencing
Geo-Retargeting
Geo-Retargeting Lookalike

Geo-Fencing is a pretty common term in digital these days, and a lot of companies utilize it.  Geo-fencing is targeting people in real time while they are at your competitors, local businesses, or even a specific location or event.  Simply put, this strategy builds a virtual fence around said location(s).   As people enter these locations, if they happen to be browsing on their mobile device (smart phone or tablet), we have the ability to start serving them ads through mobile apps or mobile websites.

Geo-Retargeting, used in conjunction with Geo-Fencing, is the ability to continue to serve ads to those devices when they leave the Geo-Fenced location.

Geo-Retargeting Lookalike takes it one step further.  Not only do we target the people in the Geo-Fence, and continue to serve ads to those devices after they leave that location, but now we have the ability to create a lookalike audience based on geography, utilizing their home as the central location.  We have the ability to start targeting their neighbors.

The next targeting strategy is Weather Trigger.  Do you know of a company whose business is dependent on the weather?   Hail Repair companies?  Roofers?  Solar? Car Washes? Ski Resorts? Landscaping Companies?

With Weather Trigger, we have the ability to serve ads only when a specific weather condition is taking place, or is forecasted!   Maybe you have a restaurant that wants to promote their ice cold margaritas when it gets over 100 degrees (pretty common in the summers of Las Vegas)?  Maybe you have a car wash that wants to promote a special offer when it’s raining outside?  Or, maybe you have a Ski Resort that wants to let you know when there is fresh powder on the slopes?

This strategy is pretty specific, but typically layered on top of another Mobile strategy like Behavioral.

Next up is Address Targeting.  This is a newer enhancement to our mobile product over the last two years.   There are a lot of businesses out there with databases of client addresses.  Maybe they’ve collected them over the years in their CRM.  It’s possible that they bought a list through a direct mail vendor to send direct mail pieces.   In one way or another, they’ve created a database of physical addresses that they want to reach.

We call this Direct Mail for the Internet.   With the strategy, we take the database of addresses that you have, and map out each address and put a geo-fence around each address.   We have the ability to serve ads to mobile devices that are within the home, and then we add in Address Retargeting, where we continue to serve ads to those mobile devices after they leave their homes.

With so many uses and ways to target with Mobile Conquesting, you can see why it’s so utilized by businesses to reach and promote themselves to their potential customers.  They are meeting their potential customers where they are… on their phones!

The 2nd most popular product that we saw businesses gravitating to in 2022 was Social Mirror.  These ads are one of the newest products to grace the “Wheel of Fun” at Vici.

What’s great about Social Mirror is it takes the content from your Social Media posts (any of the 8 major social platforms – seen above) and creates an ad to be served to your target audience outside of that platform.  What’s great about this is that there is a likelihood that your potential customers don’t follow you on social media yet.  Another key point of this product is that potential customers can click through to your website, but they can also click through to your social media platform, depending on where they click on the ad.

Targeting options for Social Mirror vary from what is offered with Mobile Conquesting.

Behavioral Targeting with Social Mirror works somewhat similar to Mobile.  Here, we’re still targeting people based on their previous behaviors and what they’ve shown interest in online.   **Side Note, Social Mirror ads are also shown across all devices, not just mobile.

As consumers online, we leave a trail of breadcrumbs on what our interests are by where we go online, what we search for, what we buy, the apps we use, etc.  All of that data is collected and puts us into different behavioral buckets that businesses can then select to target.

For example, here are some (just a fraction of the 100,000+) general targeting categories available:

The next targeting strategy available is Keyword Targeting.  With Keyword Targeting, we are showing your ads on webpages and apps that contain keywords related to your business.

Unlike Pay-per-Click Ads (or Google Ad Words), we aren’t just showing a text ad to potential customers, we’re actually showing an ad on a website or app that someone has clicked to that contains keywords related to your business.  Here’s an example of a company targeting the keyword Nutrition.

You may have heard the phrase A.I., or Artificial Intelligence.  This is a targeting strategy that Social Mirror campaigns can use to take advantage of the machine learning that’s available to them.  With this strategy, as the campaign is executed, data is constantly collected (every minute) and analyzed about who is engaging with your ad: clicks, conversions, browser type, device, ad size, and more.  Once the data is analyzed, the machine learning then starts to serve your ad to more people like the ones who have engaged with it.  The longer the campaign, the smarter the A.I. gets, and the more targeted the ads become.

A foundation in digital marketing is Retargeting.  With Retargeting, we are taking advantage of traffic that comes to your website.  As traffic comes to your website and leaves, we are following them and showing them your Social Mirror Ad on other apps and websites that they go to (still across all devices).   With the function of all digital ads driving traffic to your website, our goal is to stay top of mind by adding Retargeting to the majority of ad campaigns.

Lastly, we introduce Custom Audience Matching and Lookalike.   One of the newest strategies employed by Social Mirror, it’s become a huge success.   Think about all of the data you collect about your customers.  You may collect their emails, their addresses, and/or their phone numbers.  We can take that data and find those customers when they go online.  Then, we show them your Social Mirror Ad when they are browsing across apps and websites.  This is a perfect way to stay in front of previous customers, current customers, or even prospects whose information you’ve collected.  As I mentioned, we also can create a Lookalike Audience to those on your list as well, and then serve ads to that new audience.

Between both Mobile Conquesting and Social Mirror, you can see the array of options you have for targeting with each, which is why we see a lot of businesses utilizing these products as part of their marketing mix.

If you’re looking to move the needle in your business, and you want to talk about either of these two products, or any digital products (maybe one you see on the “Wheel of Fun” above), let us know how we can support you.

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The Future of Cookie-less Technology brought to you by ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the new AI writing tool that is sweeping the Internet and potentially putting copywriters out to pasture and making non-writers look like geniuses.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chatgpt-for-google/jgjaeacdkonaoafenlfkkkmbaopkbilf

What Is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3.5. It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.

Large language models perform the task of predicting the next word in a series of words.

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional layer of training that uses human feedback to help ChatGPT learn the ability to follow directions and generate responses that are satisfactory to humans.

I thought I would put this ChatGPT to the test. Cookie-less Technology is HOT topic in the digital world and what this means when Cookies go away. So I asked ChatGPT to write a blog about it and here is it working in action:

http://sc.com.ly/show/3e625cd5-a2e4-401e-b259-640d54bb7974

And here is the final result:

Cookies have been a mainstay of the internet for decades, but recent developments in technology are leading some experts to predict that the era of the cookie is coming to an end. In this blog post, we’ll explore the reasons for this shift, and what the future of cookie-less technology might look like.

So, why are cookies on the way out? One reason is that they have become increasingly controversial from a privacy standpoint. Cookies are small pieces of data that websites store on a user’s computer, and they can be used to track a user’s browsing habits and activity across different sites. While this can be useful for personalizing user experiences and serving relevant ads, it has also raised concerns about user privacy and the potential for data abuse.

Another factor driving the move away from cookies is the rise of mobile devices. Unlike desktop computers, which typically have a single browser that is used consistently, mobile devices often have multiple browsers and apps that a user might switch between. This makes it difficult for cookies to track a user’s activity across different apps and browsers, leading to a decline in their effectiveness.

So, if cookies are on their way out, what will take their place? One possibility is the use of browser fingerprinting, which involves collecting a variety of data points about a user’s device and using them to create a unique “fingerprint” that can be used to track the user’s activity. While browser fingerprinting can be more effective at tracking users across different apps and browsers, it also raises concerns about privacy and the potential for data abuse.

Another option is the use of device-level identifiers, such as Apple’s IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers) or Google’s GAID (Google Advertising ID). These identifiers are unique to each device and can be used to track a user’s activity across different apps and websites. However, they can also be reset or deleted by the user, which limits their effectiveness.

Ultimately, it’s difficult to predict exactly what the future of cookie-less technology will look like. What is clear, however, is that the era of the cookie is coming to an end, and that new technologies will be needed to take its place. Whether these technologies will be able to effectively replace the capabilities of cookies while also respecting user privacy remains to be seen.

Conclusion:

WHOAH! How did they do that?

As I proof and re-read, what would I add or change?

Their facts and explanation are spot on. And they are right about the uncertainty of a cookie-less future being unknown. However, in my experience when something goes away there is always an immediate sense of panic, then we live through it and we say, “well that was not that bad!”. I think the same likely will hold true here. Google, Apple and other entities have known this is coming and have been feverishly working on other ad tracking technologies. And if machine-learning developers can create an Internet extension to answer questions Human-like, write poems, and blogs, something tells me the future of cookies going away will be nothing but a blip on our radar.

So, time will tell.

I leave you with a poem about the Digital World without Cookies by ChatGPT.

Digital without cookies,

A world that’s hard to see,

Where websites don’t remember,

And personalization is a mystery.

No ads tailored just for me,

No saved passwords or login keys,

A world where privacy is free,

But convenience is hard to please.

Digital without cookies,

A strange and unfamiliar place,

Where the internet is colder,

And the human touch is hard to trace.

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