🎟️ ⚽ 🏈 Talking Tickets: Even Inflation Can't Stop the NFL?! New Format! More!
#152
Hey!
I've updated the format here to deliver more ideas about growing your business, more effectively.
Why This Matters: The items that seem to have the most impact are the lists and action items. So I’m going to adjust my style to give you more bullets and action items that let you get the information and use it immediately.
What to Expect:
More information, condensed.
Ideas from everywhere. Not just tickets.
A more direct style.
Help Me Out:
Share the newsletter.
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Share what you like or don’t like about the new style.
To the Tickets!
BTW, I’m in NYC on Sunday and Monday. Let me know if you are around!
I. The Big Story: Inflation may not stop the NFL:
What’s new? Inflation in game attendance has been an issue for a while, but now inflation is impacting fans at multiple levels.
Why does it matter? There aren’t a finite number of fans with the money to spend on a game and the associated costs.
Competition for consumer spending is intense. You’ll need to work harder to win customers’ business.
The cost of attendance hasn’t been an issue because fans were spending on experiences, the economy was strong, and inflation wasn’t an issue. Even as the price of attendance had exploded.
Inflation has hit everyone’s wallet now.
That’s changed how people are spending their money.
Does this mean that people won’t go to events?
No.
You will need to do research to know what the market looks like.
Deeper: Surveying the market is great. But the question to answer is “How often were these people going to events before the pandemic?”
Do these replies indicate a behavioral change?
You need to know:
What a fan values.
What actions or behaviors they are exhibiting?
What role does attending the game fill?
Focus on behaviors is not easy to measure attributes like demographics.
Next steps:
Backward market research. Start with the question you want to answer.
Go to the customer.
Create a hypothesis of what you think will happen.
II. Tools: Kaizen Ticketing is a great partner to football clubs:
100 football clubs mean that something is working.
What’s happening: Kaizen has been expanding rapidly.
As Kaizen expands its product is expanding to offer more solutions to football clubs.
What I like:
Focus on goals and objectives and work backward.
Focus. Kaizen focuses on football clubs.
Service.
Be Smart With Your Tech:
Know what success looks like for you. Be very clear on this.
Tech should make your job easier.
Buy from a partner that makes your life better.
Check out David and Kaizen.
III. Ideas and Concepts: ROI
ROI doesn’t tell you marketing’s real impact.
Why it matters: People throw around ROI like Oprah giving out cars.
What to know: ROI often leads people to focus on the short-term.
Last-click attribution is a dangerous hole that many marketers fell into due to being rewarded by the algorithms.
Last-click attribution fails to account for:
Brand power
Brand building
Pricing sensitivity
Research shows that investing in short-term sales activation at the expense of long-term brand building will cause your sales to crater.
It isn’t one or the other, but both.
Use this: Invest in your brand and sales activation.
Example: A theatre’s season subscription should focus on their vision of theatre. Not the specific shows.
Those specific shows, help.
The big win is creating a brand that your audience trusts and buys: no matter what.
Example: Why do legacy acts sell better than newer musicians?
Brand Power: Pearl Jam’s fan club has spent 30 years building a brand for the band.
Another way: Billie Elish seems to pop up everywhere.
She sells tickets.
Brand power.
It isn’t chicken or egg, attention drives brand power. Brand power drives ticket sales. Everything else is luck.
IV. Bullets: Today’s topic of thinking is Winning Back Buyers:
Focus on what customers value. Think “Jobs to Be Done” like Ruth Hartt.
Focus on people not things like “human-centered”. They are people. Think like a human.
Be consistent in your marketing. Throwing your doors open, and posting an event on your site…not enough.
Expand your audience outreach: non-buyers are always a bigger part of your market than buyers. There are usually more light buyers than heavy buyers.
Design your events around the 3 levels of the product: the core value, the actual product, and the augmented product.
Look at new partnerships that can help you reach a new or different audience. In Seattle, the recovery is on and new neighborhoods are gaining strength. Use things like this to your advantage.
Inflation is real. Don’t think about it from your POV, but from your customer’s POV. What can they afford or handle? Not what you need.
Bring your art or entertainment to new locations. Don’t forget the lessons of the pandemic like Dave Chappelle’s outdoor comedy shows and the Festival Ballet Providence hosting performances in their parking lots.
Rethink what success looks like. Make sure your definition of success is still accurate.
Use this time as an opportunity to reset your pricing, your product, and your mission. Then, bring that to your market.
V. Links:
Jim VandeHei teaches us about “smart brevity”:
Write less. Say more. That’s the Axios.com formula. It consists of 5 steps:
Stop being selfish: write for the reader.
Grab me: What’s important?
Keep it simple: Simple, strong words and sentences.
Be human: Cut out the jargon
Just stop: Be as concise as possible
There are three steps to “winning” a price war, if you must:
Avoid the price war at all costs.
Go deeper earlier.
Have a plan for ending it ASAP. Don’t wing it.
The subscription model was hurting before the pandemic:
The decline of subscriptions is accelerating.
What I’m hearing: Audience development is the number one issue facing organizations around the world.
There isn’t a magic wand here, but three steps:
Do your research.
Expand your audience.
Focus on growing your casual buyers. There are always more of them than subscribers.
NFT’s come to Fashion Week in NYC:
Afterpay is partnering with designers at Fashion Week in NYC to offer limited edition NFTs with access to the events.
While this seems like some of the experiences are very cool for folks that love fashion, I’m also not sure that any of these needed to be NFTs.
From a marketing standpoint, this is a good way of elevating awareness about Fashion Week, Afterpay, and some of the designers.
I’m not anti-NFTs, but I am still looking for something where they specifically do something that can’t be done anywhere else.
Linktree: Find everything I’m up to.
Join the ‘Talking Tickets’ Slack Group. Almost 300 people from around the world.
Customers are buying refund protection at rates 2x higher than before the pandemic.
Offering your customers refund protection:
Gives customers certainty in their purchase.
Gives you a new revenue stream.
Improves your customer service.
Great podcast conversations: Take your business to new heights by learning from the best in the business.
Share your ideas with me here.