Talking Tickets Global Survey Part 1: 39.3% of respondents think the secondary is a "nuisance" or "irrelevant". Season tickets...and more. Part 1.
Hi!
Let’s dig into our ‘Talking Tickets Global Survey’ today.
I’ve got numbers and insights.
Let’s go.
40% of you experiment as a way to find new revenue opportunities.
38% of you use market research.
What is interesting here is that 10% of you use your personal networks and direct outreach through your networks to try and sell.
38.3% of folks have no formal brand tracking process.
16.7% do formal brand tracking. Nice work!
15% do some sort of market research that includes your brand. Taking the second step to formal brand tracking is easy.
But 26.7% of folks only use social listening.
Using social listening can be dangerous for you because it can lead to a tendency to only listen to the loudest, most vocal people.
This doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of most people.
In most cases, you need to reach more people and convert them into first time buyers, so you need to conduct research in a different manner.
Wading into the comments, not a great ideas.
A formal brand tracking survey is just tagging along your normal market research by having a set of questions or attributes you test every year to see if you are meeting the expectations you have.
Examples:
You think people are coming out due to wins and losses. Ask the reason why folks enjoy coming to a game, and see what the answers are.
You might think your brand is fun. Ask folks the 2-3 things they think of when they think about you?
You may not know your competition. Very common. Ask what things people consider when they are going to visit you. You might find that the answers are surprising because your competitor set is much different from what you imagine.
Some interesting gaps exist between marketing and sales:
No funnel.
Inability to effectively segment the market.
A lack of connection between the marketing and sales functions.
Department silos.
Not driving new leads.
I could go on here.
Possibly, we can come back to this in a full post or series of posts about how to develop the connection of marketing and sales more completely.
Let’s look at the successes and failures of your marketing efforts:
Discounts don’t work as effectively in practice as they do in the real world: Several cases where targeting audiences that should be in the core demo didn’t work.
Sports. Opera. Theatre.
You should know by now, “Discounts are for dummies.”
Influencer marketing has been hit or miss.
Some of you have had great success with the idea. Others, not so much.
In my experience, the targeting and specificity of your influencer campaign is extra important.
Your answers were all over the place as far as what worked.
When I went back to speak with some of you, the key to success in your marketing and sales was directly related to how well you worked through a marketing process.
The process matters.
Groups worked for some of you.
Groups didn’t work for others.
You have to know your market.
29.2% of you are reactive in your pricing decisions?!
10.4% of you admit you stick your finger in the wind!?
I was proud of the 40% of respondents who use a more diagnostic approach, but a lot of you are modeling your diagnostics based on historical data.
That’s an iffy approach.
I use the 3 Ps approach with my clients:
The Process: We need to steep our pricing in a process.
The Price: We want to set a good price at the start. Raising prices is hard. Dropping prices has its own challenge.
The Promotion: You have to sell your price. Promotion is just as important in making your price stick as any other aspect of your marketing.
The average score on innovation was 6.13.
Digging into the data, two things stood out to me:
Smaller organizations, even in tickets, felt more able to innovate.
Philharmonics, operas, and theatre were less likely to innovate than sports.
The 6.13 number is also a bit of a warning sign when using the “average” in any case.
In this regard, there were a lot of 3, 4, 5 answers that were propped up by a disproportionate number of 9s that came from smaller organizations.
The interesting question is, why is this happening?
Smaller teams have more direct communication with their teams. They also seem to have a closer connection to their customers.
The larger teams that scored lower on innovation were more likely to be the teams that complained about silos earlier in the survey.
The organizations and teams that you might think are stuck in neutral were typically the ones that were struggling to innovate.
When it comes to using technology, two themes stood out to me:
Many people feel like the IT decisions are being made to appease the demands of the IT department and not to meet the needs of the marketing/ticketing/sales teams.
Despite advances, people feel that too much of their technology is too complicated.
The solution people are looking for was pretty common:
A combo of analytics and market research all in one place.
The disjointed nature of my IT stacks was a common complaint.
Some Secondary Market Insights:
29.1% of people see the secondary market as an opportunity.
Something that stood out to me is that 39.3% of respondents see the secondary market as a nuisance or irrelevant.
I was curious about that last number so I went back and chatted with some of you.
What did I learn?
The irrelevant crowd largely feels like they have an event that might not be a prime target for ticket resale. (I’m not sure that is true.)
The nuisance crowd felt like the secondary market was largely extractive and didn’t add a lot of value to their organizations.
Sports were more likely to have a favorable view of the secondary market. The arts were most likely to be curious. Concerts were most skeptical.
What long-standing practice do you want to see eliminated?
I’ll have to come back to this on its own.
Interesting things here, but a few that stood out as showing up a few times:
Pricing too high at the on-sale and letting the secondary mask for these mistakes.
Bro Culture
Contractual exclusivity in the United States.
Season ticket packages are still too static.
A lot to dig through in part 1.
More in part 2.
Join us in the Talking Tickets Slack Channel.
The podcast: all the episodes!