May 04, 2021

The scalability of digital marketing.  Outbox believes digital marketing is more important than ever. With the return of live events, we’ve identified marketing techniques that reach out and sell out events in ways we have never seen before. Digital marketing tools like Google, Facebook, Instagram and other social media are taking a bigger part of event goers’ lives. Today, more and more event promoters are using them to keep scaling their marketing campaigns. Read below to learn how we’ve implemented tools like Google Tag Manager and the success stories that followed.


Social Media – creating demand via interests, lookalikes, and other audience tools. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Reddit; there’s no denying that there is a social media channel for almost everyone, providing powerful marketing tools. During a recent presale for a show, the promoter’s marketing department used our public-facing ticketing interface EventShopper™ along with Facebook’s Pixel. Conversion events were set up to track views, abandoned carts, purchases and the conversion values associated with each event. By using different posts, sponsoring them via Facebook Ads Network, the event was able to track the campaign’s performance in real time and focus on the one with the best return on ad spend (ROAS). Posts about the event, containing, pictures, descriptions, and buying links, were retargeted (shown several times) on the newsfeeds of people who were likely to purchase but hadn’t done so yet. All this was made possible because of the integration of the Facebook Pixel with the Outbox application EventShopper™, and the marketing tools of social media networks.




Search engines – capturing demand. While we see social media as a way to create demand for a product or event through videos, pictures, and emotional marketing “Fear of missing out” (FOMO), we recognize search engine networks like google.com as capturers of demand. Compared to social media which will in some cases show users content for something they had no idea existed or wanted; most users of search engines will already have an idea of what they want. By using Google Tag manager which learns the behavior of its users and integrating the tag into our EventShopper™ ticket sales interface, promoters are able to display their website to search terms related to their event. They can then track usage of these words and optimize their marketing for it. With these tools, a marketing campaign for a venue was able to outbid a ticket reseller’s Google Ads, and bring those ticket buyers where they belong: On the primary market, on the venue’s ticketing system.


Promo code creation – track & … Promo codes existed long before digital marketing and were used in many ways: to research price sensitivity of specific groups, as way to incentivize and attract value centric customers, and to aide marketers to track a campaign’s success. Today, marketers are using this tool that is part of Outbox to easily create limitless number of promo codes and promo links. By having specific web links with embedded promo codes, promoters can have unique campaigns and unique discounts for every channel. From giving a specific website its tracking URL, to giving promo codes on Coca-Cola cans, these promos can easily be tracked within Outbox’s reporting tools.


Influencers – powerful enhancers. Social media has led to the rise of influencers; powerful people and brands which have accounts with millions of people following their every move through posts and stories. With this, early adopting marketers have had explosive growth simply by having their products and experiences show up in the daily lives of these influencers. One recent influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers, attended a event and exposed it through several Instagram stories. In one story, the “Swipe Up” button was used along with a promo code. The swipe up function allowed video story viewers to click on the button and be directed to a webpage – the Outbox ticketing interface for the event. The promo code allowed an incentivized price as well as additional and backup tracking (for example, when privacy settings of a device prevented tracking).  By using influencers, the event experience was able to reach out, stand out, and sell out! Over the coming weeks, even if the story had expired, marketers using Facebook Ad networks, were able to retarget anyone who had seen or interacted with the story, by sponsoring posts and stories about the event, converting interested users into sales! Shown below, one of Instagram's most famous personality, Kylie Jenner, with hundreds of millions of account following her social activity.



The challenges of tracking – Privacy & cross device. As user privacy and data usage becomes more and more important, tracking user behavior will become a bigger challenge. A recent update in Apple’s iOS (14.5) has made tracking behavior more obvious to users by prompting their approval to do so. However, these marketing channels also have more tools than ever to track users. A.I., location data, predictive behavior, cross device tracking, and many other available data sets,  have allowed Google & Facebook to be more sophisticated at assembling all this data  and understanding that there was in fact a conversion. As the number of marketing channels and tools increases, it will become more important than ever for marketers to correctly attribute sales and conversion events to the right channel. For example, one person may see an Instagram post of a Cirque du Soleil show in their city, head into Google and search for it, end up on purchasing tickets. In this situation, it’s important for marketers to understand that there were 2 channels which should be attributed to this purchase: Instagram (through the post) and Google for the search terms. Marketers can then divide the attribution of the sale through all of the involved channels, even if Google may attribute itself 100% of the sale.

Over the last years, we’ve seen digital marketing allow our clients to scale up their marketing efforts. As channels and features are expanded, we’ll continue to support & stay up to date with them. We can’t wait to see what new tools are developed to allow small- and large-scale producers and promoters to use Outbox to; reach out, stand out, and sell out.