PromoTix University

Will Royall (00:00)
If you're looking to sell more tickets to your events and want to get 5 to 14 times higher return on your digital ad spend, this episode of PromoTix University podcast is going to rock your world. We're going to chat with Geoff Shames, founder of Crowd Control Digital, one of the world's best event marketing agencies,

who's run ads for Millennium, 88 Rising, Kid Laroid, Judas Priest, KSI, Travis Scott, and more. We're going to dive in on Found.ee a programmatic ad platform that can boost returns on ad networks like Facebook, Instagram, and other digital channels. We're also going to show you how to leverage a unique viral contest tool to turn one paid visitor into eight to 10 names and emails and phone numbers for ticket sales on the same exact ad spend. You do not want to miss this. Stay tuned.

Will Royall (01:06)
PromoTix University. I'm your host, Will Royall, and this is our first episode of PromoTix University's podcast where we're going to explore all facets of how to run a successful events-based company that relies on selling tickets. Over the next many episodes, we're going to cover everything from proper budgeting to vendor negotiation, cash flow planning, production, raising capital, liability, operations, industry-based software, talent buying, selling sponsors, and my favorite,

marketing because we all want to sell more tickets right? We'll dive in on case studies and host interviews with some of the top event producers and business owners who sell out venues and events and experiences consistently across the globe. If all of that sounds of interest to you, be sure to hit the subscribe button below to be notified when new episodes are released and go ahead and hit that like button.

Will Royall (01:51)
Today on the show, we're blessed to sit down with Geoff Shames, an expert in digital advertising with Crowd Control Digital, specifically in the event space, who's driven more than $100 million in overall ticket sales through his campaigns.

Will Royall (02:05)
Geoff, welcome to the show.

Geoff Shames (02:06)
Absolutely, thanks for having me, man. Looking forward to it.

Will Royall (02:08)
For sure, man. So you've been doing this a long time now. Tell me, like, how have things changed and shifted over the years, you know, in the digital marketing space since you first started doing this, you know, through COVID up to today?

Geoff Shames (02:22)
It's definitely changed is the short answer.

I got started with sort of event marketing and digital marketing in the MySpace days. So used to be as simple as putting up a bulletin and doing some hacky stuff to get everyone there and ads were incredibly

year over year advertising is getting more expensive. There's more saturation everywhere. There's seemingly more events. So just in general, it's a much more competitive landscape, which makes our job a lot harder.

Will Royall (02:54)
And talk to me like about the individual platforms because obviously MySpace is probably not a thing anymore for event creators, but now we've got like Snapchat, TikTok, you know, we've got all these new ones. The old ones are gone. Facebook, Instagram, still players in the market. Tell me like, how are the different platforms actually performing and what do you see that's like working in the event space now to drive ticket sales?

Geoff Shames (03:19)
It's a bit of a mixed bag. think the way we start every campaign is almost taking a step back and thinking about who the actual buyer is. You know, your 13 to 17 year old pop music fan is probably going to be on TikTok or Snapchat. Your middle aged housewife in Kansas that listens to adult contemporary may be better on Facebook or a Google.

They're just searching for their favorite artist. So it's not always one-to-one. Sometimes there is sort of an outsized return on one platform versus another, just depending on who the consumer actually is. And then sometimes we're surprised in the same breath. We'll go into a campaign expecting that, hey, TikTok is going to be our absolute number one channel. And it turns out that it's not.

Reddit raises its hand and turns out to be sort of the arbitrage opportunity for whatever that might be. So it really is a mixed bag. Sometimes we're looking for different things in different places. So it's almost more about being fluid and flexible versus just going in with one plan and sort of sticking with it.

Will Royall (04:36)
Yeah, mean, like any marketing campaign, you really wanna make sure that the target demographic you're chasing is on that platform, right? You mentioned something in that last answer about Reddit, which has not really been top of mind, I think, for me, as well as probably many other event producers out there. Can you talk to me a little bit about advertising on Reddit and kind of what's working there in the event space?

Geoff Shames (05:05)
Yeah, it's honestly a newer one for us over the last couple of years. It's kind of the one place that hasn't been blown out in some cases. So the great thing about Reddit is there are incredibly niche communities. If you are a decently sized artist or even not, even if you have a couple hundred diehard fans, they're in one place. They are only talking about you and you can actually target

to an individual subreddit level. So if there is a niche community, if there is even a topic that's related to that you could go after, it's pretty easy to get in front of an incredibly high affinity group that also probably spend most of their time there. Think it's, have friends that are Reddit users, they're Reddit users. That's where they live, it's where they breathe. So I think in a lot of cases you're reaching effectively a new audience.

that you just wouldn't hit on another platform because they don't go on TikTok. They don't go on Instagram. That's just sort of where they live. So yeah, it doesn't scale as far as some other platforms, but can be incredibly impactful to get sort of your highest affinity fans.

Will Royall (06:22)
Yeah, I know like some of those subreddits and whatnot, obviously it's like a community generated content platform, right? Like the community itself is creating those subreddits a lot of times. And I think for some event creators, there's festivals out there, right? That are doing five to 10,000 people and they don't even realize that there's already a community that's created this subreddit. There's already community there that are talking about this event, that are fans of this event. And I guess with Reddit ads, can

directly then target them and get in front of this group.

Geoff Shames (06:57)
Exactly. We've been surprised before when we pick up a new client and we go on Reddit and they have this massive community that they didn't even know was there. know, sort of an official fan club or a, you know, friends of X. And there's sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of people there that we can reach out to and just sort of have a genuine connection with. You know, ask them to help you something in return for.

give something to the community that actually ends up lifting sales.

Will Royall (07:29)
So just staying on the topic for a minute of platforms, Reddit, obviously something that probably a lot of people are not taking advantage of yet. What else is there that's kind of like the latest, greatest, newest platform that you're experimenting with or that maybe others should start paying attention to?

Geoff Shames (07:45)
We try a little bit of everything is the short answer. We've been doing a lot more banner advertising and programmatic, which a lot of people sort of, I personally, I don't think I've ever clicked on a banner ad in my entire life, but there are a huge number of people who do. Native advertising, those little things that look like news articles at the end of something, those can work as well. We've gone back to...

direct mail in some cases where we work with a digital platform that allows us to quite literally mail something to somebody. In email advertising, you can buy space in an AXS or a Ticketmaster email. They sell some of that banner space and you can run it programmatically. Where better to hit somebody when they're already buying a ticket and looking at their receipt?

So yeah, mean, it's your usual suspects that everyone would expect your socials, your Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, sorry, X. But I think sometimes the real outsize win is thinking outside the box. You know, there's plenty of channels that go overlooked and sometimes even hitting that smaller channel where other people aren't just means you get that much more share of voice.

Will Royall (09:14)
So if you're like a brand new, maybe not a brand new event, but let's say an event that's kind of brand new to getting started into the paid media digital spend side of things, like what advice would you give them as to like where they should start? know, is there a platform that's kind of outperforming returns at first that they should try to max out before they expand to something else? like, how does one get started on the paid side? Because obviously if there's,

you know, 20 opportunities out there, 30 opportunities out there. I mean, there's an unlimited amount, but you know, if you got the major 10, the major 15, and I've got a limited ad budget, where do I start?

Geoff Shames (09:52)
Right

I would still start with Meta. It's kind of your easiest win. In my opinion, it's one of the easier platforms to work with. For most events, you can still spend a sizable amount of money very efficiently. It's sort of where we start most campaigns. That is the lion's share of what we're doing. And then depending on budget, depending on scale, depending on returns, we'll start to add on additional networks.

say again, kind of a order of operations generally is meta first, get that running, get it efficient, then flip of a coin, kind of depending on what you're doing, either a TikTok or a Google. If you're working with a particularly big name that you think has high search volume, maybe it is Google, you can just run branded search. If it's not, maybe start with TikTok. Again, it's kind of your second largest platform right now.

then you get into your Snapchats, your Twitter, Xs, your Reddits, et cetera. But it really is sort of budget contingent. If you have a ton of money, yes, spread it out everywhere, but you also don't want to have so little on any given platform that you're spreading yourself to.

Will Royall (11:11)
Right.

Yeah, mean, when you start any ad campaign, right, you're gonna have a little bit of spend where you're trying to figure out what's working, what's not working. And so I guess talk to me a little bit about your strategy for doing that. Like how do you successfully find the campaigns that you can begin to scale? What's the strategy for finding, creating and scaling those campaigns?

Geoff Shames (11:35)
Two ways to look at it, and it depends on what you're advertising. In the case that I'm a promoter working with you, and I actually have attribution, would want to look at something where we can actually see dollar in, dollar out. We spent $100, we made $500, and kind of look at that at the campaign level. If we can't get attribution, if we are working with a

major, major promoter in a venue that has a lockout and we can't place a pixel. We kind of need to take a step back and just look at a little bit more holistic of an approach where, okay, at the very least, sort of the highest we can get is maybe a cost per click and a click through rate. That would be the highest signal we can look at. This audience is getting the highest click through rate. And within that audience, it's this asset.

Okay, that's kind of the closest thing we can get to a true signal. So that is sort of it. It depending on, if you look at the gradients of how much data, how much feedback loop am I getting, pick sort of the highest impact thing you do have access to and use that as your North Star metric. And then sort of the way we normally structure a campaign is one campaign for top funnel or prospecting new fans, maybe one for remarketing.

within each one of those have a couple of different ad sets so we can test different audiences. Within each ad set have a couple of different assets. So as you sort of run some ads and look through that, you should start to see, hey, asset A is always performing a little bit better regardless of audience. Okay, check, that's our best asset right now. Now at the ad set level,

hey, this audience seems to really be the most reactive, again, whether it's the highest click-through rate or actual sales. With that, you sort of have that signal, this is my asset, this is my audience, let's punch that as hard as we can until the wheels fall off.

Will Royall (13:42)
So

you got diminishing returns, right? And then you're looking at something else. So obviously like the buying patterns for attendees and ticket buyers has changed across the landscape of different types of events really, but post COVID it's very different than it was pre-COVID, right? We used to drive tons of pre-sales very early on, you know, it was easy to get something to scale.

Geoff Shames (13:45)
Exactly.

Will Royall (14:10)
Now the buying patterns have changed obviously. People are buying a lot closer to the event. How does that affect the strategy when it comes to advertising online?

Geoff Shames (14:20)
It adds a lot of stress. We sort of look at it and there's kind of three phases. was pre-COVID, like you said, there was a lot more sort of pre-sale was a little bit easier. We still had some of that last minute buyer, but it varied a bit by genre. And there was, let's call it right post-COVID. We sort of called it the COVID bump where any show, anywhere, any genre you're selling to get, it was going crazy.

Will Royall (14:22)
Hahaha.

Yeah, it did great. Everybody

wanted to get back out, right? Like they were all cooped up and they wanted to get out and have a good time.

Geoff Shames (14:53)
And yeah, any show,

any day of week, any location, it was just a gold rush. Now we're sort of back to a little closer to that pre-COVID experience where there's just sort of no middle class is the way we've been talking about it, where there's Taylor Swift and Oasis and everybody breaking ticketing platforms and people getting mad that they didn't get tickets. And then there's everyone else.

Will Royall (15:17)
All right, sell out immediately.

Geoff Shames (15:22)
where we see hopefully a big surge at on sale, complete death of sales, and then a last minute sort of uptick into those sales. So it does impact what we can do, because we can expect that. We do know that we're going to see a ramp at the last minute, but we also don't want to just save all of our budget for that bump.

because if there's a lack of awareness in general, maybe we don't have enough time or enough budget to get everyone to take that action in that last, let's call it seven to 10 days, seven to 14 days.

Will Royall (16:01)
Yeah, so you still gotta warm them up, in other words, right? You still gotta have that top funnel, kind of wider brand recognition awareness campaign before you're really pushing them for a call to action. I would assume that you're running more of those lower funnel campaigns closer to the event to get them to buy sales, buy tickets.

Geoff Shames (16:15)
Exactly.

Exactly. I mean, it's

your, it's your old, it's your old mad men marketing rule of seven, right? People, people need to see things like a couple of times before they're sort of ready to take an action generally. So, you know, we will try to clearly convert as many sales as humanly possible, right? When something goes on sale, but sort of the second we start to see that fall off a cliff, move into that sustained period, maybe get into an educational cycle. If it's a newer artist or a newer brand, let's tell people what it's all about.

Let's just show them some other performance footage. We're selling an experience at the end of the day. So let's show people the experience that we want them to give us money to see. And sort of trickle that, get it in front of people. Maybe just get them to the website, get them to the ticketing page, knowing that they might not be ready to purchase, and that's fine. But we at least can remarket towards them. We can at least hit them again when we do sort of need to push them off the cliff there.

when it is time to purchase and we're in sort of that core buying period.

Will Royall (17:28)
Talk to me, how do you test out these campaigns? How do you test your ads? I'm sure you're running multiple versions sometimes of creative with certain audiences. How do you structure testing to get highest conversions or highest click-throughs? How are you testing that stuff?

Geoff Shames (17:45)
It really is that core structure. I could print this thing on a poster and it would pretty much apply. It's for almost every platform. You're going be able to use the same sort of structure. it's got fans who aren't in your ecosystem, fans who are in your ecosystem, that new fans, old fans. One campaign trying to reach new people, maybe two depending if you want to run multiple objectives, but your top funnel campaign with a couple of different audiences in it.

You know, we'll generally do something like a broad genre bucket where we're just going after rock and roll, rock music, something that broad. Similar artists where it's, okay, here's 10, 20 artists that are similar to who we're trying to sell tickets to see. And then maybe if we have the data, a lookalike of sort of success, whatever that is, whether that's engagement on your own socials, whether that's a lookalike of your email list.

but something where we can still get a pretty large addressable market based on some sort of first party data. And again, depending on budget, sometimes we can put in a lifestyle audience if there's certain publications or TV shows or something like that that would be really sort of indicative of who we're trying to hit. We can hit that. And then within each one of those, put all of the same assets. So the idea is we kind of want to have consistency across the entire structure.

So when we do take a look back, we don't want one asset to one audience because then it's not, we don't really know if asset A in audience C would have been a better permutation than what we ran just A to A. So sort of setting the platform up to at the end of the day, I am not smarter than Meta's hundred trillion dollar worth of ad spend machine learning or

However much money they've run, they have run significantly more ads across the platform than I will run in 100 lifetimes. So just sort of setting ourselves up for success with that sort of structure where we at least give the platform, same with TikTok, same with Google, give it enough to do its thing. Then it's our job to sort of take a step back, try to look for those patterns.

Will Royall (19:41)
Yep.

want

to play nice with the algorithms. You want to play nice with the data that's already there.

Geoff Shames (20:05)
Yeah, that's really it is. They're good at what they do. For the most part, you gotta check their homework.

Will Royall (20:12)
mean, they're keeping everybody

on their platforms, right? I mean, everybody's addicted to socials these days.

Geoff Shames (20:16)
Yeah,

certainly do that one. But yeah, it really is that, is setting up enough structure that you have some consistency in something that you can sort of test against itself to then sort of have that second look, make a couple changes and then see if basically the hypothesis was true. Hey, we ran, let's just call it phase one for a week or so. Looks like asset A and audience B are sort of our winners. If we flip off everything else and scale those.

Do we see better results, worse results? What do we see? And then sort of.

Will Royall (20:49)
mean, you're effectively

A-B testing different ads and different audiences and comparing against themselves to just keep improving the metrics that you're going after.

Geoff Shames (21:00)
Exactly, with the North Star of, is it actually impacting sales? So it's thing. It's why we love testing and spending a ton of money. If it's not impacting sales, let's also keep that in mind that maybe that is the right asset, but let's trim our budget because it isn't driving the sales we need and we need to make sure we have budget left closer to the event.

Will Royall (21:03)
Right. Right.

to stop and add then? When do you decide like, okay, we've spent X amount on this, because obviously you gotta give it time to produce the results. So how do you know like, hey man, we've spent X and it hasn't driven the return we expected, or when is that gonna start kicking over, or when do you decide to pull the plug?

Geoff Shames (21:45)
Little bit of an art versus science thing You know there certainly are some things. We'll try to keep in mind if our Goal CPA is $10, and we've $200 and we haven't spent anything that's probably not the one it's very clear if it's at $50 you know five times Depending on sort of how everything else is moving. Maybe we give it a little bit more because if all of sudden it does sell

two tickets, now it's a $25 CPA and it's getting closer. So we do try to give things as much leeway as we can, because that will happen. There's attribution is a little funky on all the platforms. Sometimes there's a seven day view through window and it's going to attribute a sale from whatever. And if you are using that platform at its word.

and that is how you were handling attribution, you do want to at least give it that much space. So general rule of thumb, A week. So we are hitting that one week window or kind of that five to 10 X goal CPA number, unless there is a case where we do launch something right out the rip and asset A is converting exactly where we want it to and asset C is not, just turn off asset C, it's fine.

If you want to if a falls apart down the line you think you're getting diminishing returns maybe reintroduce See to see if it was just a timing thing But yes, there's there's a lot of Sort of art to it there isn't particularly cases where we don't have the right attribution. It's We've just done this for too long and sometimes there's a

Will Royall (23:38)
I

want to talk about attribution for a second because now that you bring it up, you know, Apple changed a year or two ago, it wasn't too long ago, when they changed that rule and you weren't able to necessarily get all the attribution that you should, let's say, on these platforms. How is that affecting things in the ad space online?

Geoff Shames (24:02)
It depends on how you are handling attribution is the short answer. They have started, so it affects everyone equally is one way to look at it is there is still some attribution. There are other ways to handle attribution, but depending on what your KPIs are, depending on how you're handling internally, sometimes it doesn't really impact you.

you know, sort of our rule of thumb is, we're probably missing about 30%. I'm sure somebody has measured that more properly, but it's okay. If we think we're missing about 30%, because that is what would be happening. Effectively, what happened is Apple started blocking pixels. So theoretically, what you would have is people who are purchasing, they're just not telling you. So if anything,

Will Royall (24:55)
You're not seeing it come back.

Geoff Shames (24:58)
So yeah, so theoretically it should be an under reporting. So if we are happy with what we are.

Will Royall (25:04)
Are there ways to track

that? Are there ways that an event organizer could track that on their side?

Geoff Shames (25:10)
Yes. it depends on the platform. You can use a UTM code. You could use a unique ticket link. You could use a unique landing page. We have tried every possible permutation of all of the above. You could, if platform supports affiliate links, use an affiliate link for your ad.

So anything that comes from that affiliate link, if that's the only place where it lives, there's your feedback group.

Will Royall (25:43)
So basically

UTM links, affiliate links, some sort of specific tracking link that comes to an outside analytics platform that you control. And then you can see exactly how many ads came from that platform. That's necessary.

Geoff Shames (25:52)
Exactly.

Exactly. It's sort of the closest,

yeah, it's lawn darts, right? It's as close as you can get. So if that's sort of what you have, I think it's almost more important in the way we look at it with a lot of clients and partners is what do you want the source of truth to be? And as long as it's consistent, you can at least benchmark against yourself and to say, okay, it is going to be

Meta is reporting. Great. Every event is the same. Every event is impacted the same. Cool. That's what we're going to do. If it is Google Analytics GA4 with UTM codes, awesome. Do the same thing for every single event, just so you have parity and you can sort of match it. So it's more about, you know, we kind of call it like analytics hygiene. It's just do the thing. You got to brush your teeth every day. You got to do this for every event.

As long as it's consistent, you have that map to look at.

Will Royall (26:58)
I mean, it does sound like you can get fairly accurate than with your own analytics tracking. Let's say if you, inside the ticketing platform, if you use an individual affiliate link, I mean, you could generate an additional affiliate link for every ad that you're running on the platform, right? So then you truly do know, even if you're running 10 different ads on Meta, which ad is actually driving the sales through your own internal reporting.

rather than relying on meta and not being able to get that feedback from Apple that it needs to track the conversion. That's a great suggestion. So.

Geoff Shames (27:35)
Yeah, it's a...

We all had to go backwards. It's what we all had to do before pixels. So... It still works.

Will Royall (27:39)
Exactly, you have a four pixels. That's what we were doing. That's right.

Yeah. So, from a budgetary perspective, you know, maybe obviously there's events that are, you know, have a very small budget and there's events that have, you know, millions of dollars to work with. from an advertising perspective though, about how much should event creators be expecting to spend, to acquire ticket sales and maybe that number is different.

for a newer event than a more established event, what do you typically see as an ad spend budget compared to what they're trying to drive overall in ticket sale revenue?

Geoff Shames (28:18)
Two-part answer Generally when we look at overall marketing budget just period Roughly five to ten percent of your target ticket gross is a pretty good start for overall marketing as it relates to ads We are very digital heavy and and big proponents and it tends to work the best anyways bias or not

So we generally say, you know, roughly 80%, 70, 80 % of that budget on digital. That's one set of math you could use. I'm trying to make $100,000. My marketing budget should be maybe $10,000 if I'm a new event, $7,000 if I'm somewhere in the middle, you know, five if I'm the biggest person in world and I can just do it. And then a big portion of that on digital. The second is

Everybody more or less agrees, you know, if you can get a 4x, 5x return on ad spend, you're doing quite well at scale. So you could also just run the math of, my tickets are $30. I'm trying to make a 5x return. My goal CPA should be six bucks. And to sort of use that as at least a barometer. You know, one thing I always do like to flag is because of said pacing.

Sometimes those numbers will drastically change. So it's maybe not the end of the world if for that ticket you're sitting at a $20 CPA a couple weeks out because all of a sudden you're going to start driving sales for two, three, four dollars in the last seven. So it'll average out to kind of where you do want it to be at the end of the campaign. Again, clearly you don't just want to burn cash.

Will Royall (29:53)
Right.

and the average will hit where it's supposed to be, right?

Geoff Shames (30:10)
But particularly if you have some historical data and you can mostly hope to see that behavior, you can try to work that into your sort of projections.

Will Royall (30:22)
Yeah, so the first year you're doing your event, it might be a lot of data buying that you're doing. You're trying to target something, but as you get an idea of what your ticket scaling is, the next year you can kind of use that ticket scaling to judge where that current ad spend cost per acquisition, let's say, that's currently being shown to you, where it should be based on where you are in the ticket scaling process, right?

Geoff Shames (30:50)
Exactly and same thing. How are you comparing to the previous year? Are you ahead of pace? Are you behind pace? What does that mean? Yeah

Will Royall (30:55)
Are you ahead, behind? Sure.

All right, let's, give me some, like give me a cool story about like the coolest ad campaign you've ever run that you thought was just, you know, awesome. I don't know if that's because you were just, you know, you were driving $100 average order value for a buck or because it was for somebody like super famous that you just enjoyed working with. Just tell me about your favorite campaign.

Geoff Shames (31:23)
I don't know about favorite, there's one that'll just always stick out to me. So we do Twitter advertising, and it was Twitter at the time. Never been our go-to platform. Generally didn't find the best results, and most people I speak to, their colleague kind of feel the same way. But we were working with a pretty large scale K-pop campaign a couple of years ago.

advice from the local partners was K-pop lives on Twitter. You gotta hit Twitter. You gotta do it. Awesome. Great. At the time, it was a little bit newer to us, more than willing to take the suggestion and the advice and the expertise. And yeah, it was about a dollar for $150 ticket to the point where we were scrambling internally, freaking out, thinking that we had messed up all of our pixel placements.

and that there was just no possible way that we were selling tickets this efficiently. Like this is not possible. We have messed up. We're gonna have to figure this out and credit back the client and do something. We're gonna have to, I'm stressing, beards turning gray. It was horrible.

Will Royall (32:22)
that you were driving it.

And really you're just crushing

it this whole time, right?

Geoff Shames (32:42)
And this whole time, was just the greatest ad campaign of all time.

the net result ended up being something like a 67X return. Every dollar was making $67, and we actually ended up needing to go back towards our partners and saying, we need all of the money. Just give us all of the money. Give us all of the money, we'll tell you when to stop.

Will Royall (33:00)
Yeah. Do nothing else, just

this and you're going to sell all your tickets.

Geoff Shames (33:07)
Truly, truly, we're like, hey, does anyone care if we just turn off everything else? We're just gonna dump a huge amount of money into this channel, because we did go as far as putting in a UTM code and doing all, and it was real. So that was one where, again, we love to be wrong.

Will Royall (33:27)
and on a channel

that you guys didn't really utilize that much for events that often. And I guess that goes back to what you said earlier, that the channel really matters in regards to the demographic you're going to

Geoff Shames (33:32)
Gave it. Gave it. No beast.

100%. Yeah, that was a particularly fun one. Particularly because we were wrong. Made it a good result. But yeah, that was, I'll never forget that one. That was crazy. I just remember opening up and sitting with the team, we're going through our daily reporting, we just opened up the report and I just freaked out. I was like, something is horribly wrong.

Will Royall (34:02)
me and all the listeners really, what's one thing that they could start doing today to help their ads convert better?

Geoff Shames (34:13)
Test more. I am still surprised daily that a lot of people sort of look at advertising as they know it's important, they know they need to do it, but it's a box to check. So they have their event flyer and they throw it up and they put the budget on it and they sort of walk away. And it would not be, you know, we get brought into some of those scenarios where somebody's in hot water.

and we spent a huge amount of money and it's just not selling. And we suggest something as simple as, I don't know, have you animated the flyer? Or, yeah, change the Yeah, try something different. Change the copy. You have this two paragraph long caption, turn it into three sentences and see what happens. And literally overnight, they start getting five times better results.

Will Royall (34:54)
try a different ad. You had one ad running, try something different.

So maybe

they can take the same ad they've got and just try five different versions of creative, five different versions of copy, five different audiences, run some A, B, C, D tests, see which one performs best, right? And then drop the mother load on whatever seems to be performing the best, but not until then.

Geoff Shames (35:25)
Yeah.

Great.

I think it's,

yeah, I mean, think at the end of the day, if you are promoting a show, the show is worth tickets. You would not have booked that show. You would not be doing that show if it wasn't worth something. Just because the ads aren't working doesn't mean it's not gonna sell. It might just be sort of a mismatch. You need to find what will sell. Clearly that artist, that band, that whatever has sold tickets before, show a different piece of creative. Change the caption a little bit. Look at your...

Will Royall (35:40)
Yeah.

Geoff Shames (36:03)
Ticket page, do you need to change the copy there, change the banner, do something. But yeah, really just don't discount the power of easy changes, and that does not mean go out and make a new flyer if it's super, change the caption, change the caption, change the color. Put up a photo instead of the flyer and just see what happens, because it could be that simple. It could be a five minute project that just turns the thing around.

Will Royall (36:28)
So test more, that's the rule. If it's not happening for you, test more and it will happen eventually. You just gotta find the right combination of ad, copy and audience. Geoff, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today and bringing your expertise to the table, sharing what's worked for you, sharing these insights. To everyone out there who's watching, if you want to work with Geoff,

Geoff Shames (36:30)
as we're testing.

Pretty much.

Will Royall (36:56)
you can visit crowdcontroldigital.com and reach out to him. He's more than happy to take a look at your ad campaigns and help you

Geoff Shames (37:06)
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks. Well, this was a good time. Like you said, always willing to chat with anybody. anybody listening, feel free to hit the website, shoot us a line, and I or somebody from the team will get back to you as quickly as possible.

Will Royall (37:20)
Awesome. Thanks, Geoff.

Will Royall (37:22)
Next up on the show today, we're gonna dive in and do a quick review of Found.ee, a programmatic advertising platform that allows you to target your audience better and generate much higher returns on your paid media spend. Let's check it out.

William Royall (37:38)
All right, so this is Found.ee It's an advertising platform that allows you to reach a ton of different media channels all within the same platform and get greater performance. And when I say greater performance, I'm serious about this. I mean, you're gonna get 14 times on average more impressions on Facebook than if you went to Facebook directly, 28 times more on Instagram.

32 times more on their other premium publishers and even on Google Ads you'll get two and a half times more impressions. So this platform is is leveraging their media buying amount right like their weight in the industry as well as doing programmatic ad buying to get you this increased performance and that's why it's taking off in popularity. Even the Oprah Winfrey Show has used it at this point. They've got a pretty strong hold on the music space.

They even have the ability, for example, to target ticketing data from Ticketmaster, AXS, Eventbrite, and more. So like if somebody bought certain types of tickets to certain shows or artists, you can target that inside of Found.ee to help sell more tickets for your event. And I mean, they've got over 200,000 users at this point and have run more than 3 ad impressions. So let's take a look real quick at the types of campaigns you can run on Found.ee with Taylor.

William Royall (39:00)
All right, today we're going to talk briefly about the different types of ad campaigns you can set up on Found.ee. Under the left-hand nav bar advertising dropdown, you'll see Setup Ads. As you get in here, you'll see the different types of advertising campaigns and there are other videos that go into these, each individual campaign offering a little bit more detail. So feel free to check that out if you want to learn more about any of these specific ad campaigns. So Web and Mobile ads, these are standard.

probably most popular or most frequently used ad campaigns. These are display banners that get served across the internet, across multiple different types of websites. As you can see here, Rolling Stone, GQ, TechCrunch, Pitchfork. They also get served to many different audiences that might have specific kind of behavioral or characteristics that are more in your demographic. So if somebody falls into a certain type of genre of music, a rock music fan or

somebody that often buys concert tickets online, you can reach those folks across the web. Now video ads, these are actually what we consider premium video advertising. It's connected TV and streaming video. So as you can see here, these get delivered directly on televisions as well as on mobile devices, web and mobile devices that might be seeing pre-roll video on websites. But most of the time these are used for delivering streaming.

essentially video commercials, TV commercials, 15 to 30 second videos on people's living, on people's televisions while they're in their living room watching TV, through streaming devices. These are going to be great for brand awareness. You're not necessarily driving a lot of traffic like you might be doing on the web of mobile ads. You do have a URL that people can click, but it's generally since people are watching these on their TVs or, you know, they're, watching some specific program. It's a great brand awareness piece, but not something you necessarily would

deliver traffic to or drive a lot of website clicks. Remarketing web and mobile. This is going to be just like display banners, but these are going to be campaigns that are marketing to an audience that you've built up using your found the pixel. you generally do want to have a good size audience. We recommend at least, you know, somewhere in the 10 to 15,000, audience, total audience before you start remarketing. you know, the smaller the audience, sizes, generally the higher the cost are. So

know, Found.ee is known for delivering low CPMs, which is cost per 1000 impressions. and generally, you know, with web and mobile or remarketing web and mobile, you need a bigger audience to really effectively reach people at a lower cost. So do a good job of, driving a lot of traffic to your websites and build up those audiences before you start running remarketing campaigns. Newsletter banners. These are going to be also display banners that actually you create and get placed into a third party, newsletter.

So similarly to web and mobile ads, would upload a banner, you add a couple of additional pieces, and then basically these get served inside of newsletters that people are opening. So they're third party newsletters, it's not you sending an email to somebody, it's people that might be subscribed to a Rolling Stone email news list or any of these other examples, or even like a local news organization that serves ads in their newsletters.

Another good, these are kind of again for really more awareness. Generally you're not seeing a ton of clicks, although you could obviously drive traffic with the link in these as well. And here you have Spotify audio ads. These are, you know, user generated audio clips that get served via Spotify audio. You know, it's only serving to people that don't have a paid subscription on Spotify. And, you know, because we don't have a minimum spend on these Spotify audio ads.

seems that we do sometimes get limited inventory. So if you're really trying to have a full strategy that it's focused on Spotify, if you have their minimum budget of $250, I'd recommend going direct. But if you have a more limited budget, you can certainly use our Spotify offering. And definitely check that video out that talks a little bit more about your strategy when using this as well. Indoor digital billboards. These are, this is our most recent addition to the advertising offerings.

These are just like they say digital billboards in a sense. So similarly to the CTV, uh, video ads, OTT video ads, these are going to be a 15 to 32nd video. However, uh, usually where you would see this might be in like a, you know, in a restaurant that has just kind of general content playing on TVs. might be a commercial that shows up there. can be in doctor's offices, bars, other venues. So a lot of times I wouldn't recommend a video that you want to

Use a lot of audio. Think about it as a billboard, essentially. definitely check the video out on that. We go into little bit more detail as well. But these are all of our advertising offerings. If you have any questions, let us know. But definitely dig into the rest of the blog for other video references. And hope you have a day.

Will Royall (44:01)
Another amazing tool event creators have been using to get 8 to 10x return on their ad spend is the viral registration contest tool from PromoTix. It helps your events go viral by getting contest registrations and getting the registrants to invite others to register for the contest as well. The way you get an increased ROI in your ad spend is because the one paid click that drives one visitor turns into 8 to 10 people into your database.

effectively giving you an increased ROI of 8 to 10x. Let's jump in and take a look at this tool.

Will Royall (44:33)
How are you, Sebastian?

Sebastian Schulze (44:35)
Doing good, thanks Will.

Will Royall (44:36)
So Seb, why don't you show us how to launch a

contest on Prometix.

Sebastian Schulze (44:43)
Yeah, super easy. So from your dashboard in PromoTix on the left side of the screen underneath the marketing section, the very first tab is registration contests. And I've actually already built one out here that we can take a look at.

Here we go. So this is the page that you would set up when you're building a registration contest on our platform. And this page is customizable. You can edit the images. You can edit the banner color at the top. And then of course, all of the written text here, you can customize to whatever you want.

So with every contest, need some sort of prize, right? So you can see that I've added here a grand prize to win two backstage passes to the event, which is obviously a good incentive. And then you can add as many additional prizes as you want. I created one secondary prize here for a 10 % discount.

So the way that it works is attendees are going to register on this contest and they're going to compete by earning points. So it's like a game, whoever earns the most points by the time the contest closes, which in this case I've set it to end in just under 12 days.

is going to win those prizes that we've set up here. And all of the people that participate, they're ranked. So for the first place, they're getting the two backstage passes. And then the nine runner-ups after that will receive the secondary prize, the 10 % discount.

Will Royall (46:21)
Yeah, and the success of the contest a lot of times will depend on the quality of these prizes, right? So obviously the stronger the prize, the more people want to win it, the more they're going to register, the more they're going to invite other people.

Sebastian Schulze (46:34)
Absolutely. And on the topic of prizes, I found that it's better not to offer tickets as a prize because what we tend to see happen is potential attendees will register on the contest and then they won't buy tickets because naturally they want to see, wait and see if they've won. So that's why giving some sort of prize like a backstage pass where

You know, it enhances their experience, but they still need to purchase an admission ticket generally is a good idea.

Will Royall (47:09)
that note, show them how easy it is to change that secondary prize to like a merch pack for example.

Sebastian Schulze (47:15)
Yeah, so just click the little pencil icon scattered throughout the screen.

can just go ahead and update this.

Sebastian Schulze (47:25)
All right, so once you've set up all of the prizes the way you want and you've published the page, you will receive a unique link that goes specifically to this page. So you would blast this out on social media push it out to all of your followers, and then once someone comes to this page and they want to participate in the contest, they're going to click on this register here button.

And the very first thing we ask them to fill out is their name, email address, and phone number. So I'll go ahead and put that in here.

And then what we do is we take them through this flow and we give them all of these activities to earn points. And like I mentioned before, it's a game, whoever earns the most points by the time the contest closes is going to win those prizes that we set up. So the very first activity that we ask them to complete is to connect their Spotify account. So you can see they earn five points for doing that.

Will Royall (48:33)
And the Spotify account here really is going to give us data for another feature that's really awesome for talent buying in the music space.

Sebastian Schulze (48:43)
Absolutely, yeah there's a reason why we incentivize connecting Spotify and that's because we pull a lot of really valuable data from everyone that connects their Spotify account.

Alright, so that's the first activity and then if I move on to the second screen, so here they can share the contest on Facebook and Twitter, so they earn five points for each of those platforms that they share to.

And this step right here, this in my opinion is the most valuable activity. So for every single participant, we generate a unique referral link and we give lots of different options for them to share. I minimize the screen here, you can see there's a whole bunch of different options that they can use to send this out. And they're actually going to earn 10 points for each of their friends that they can.

invite to the contest and get to register as well. So this is really the viral component that, in my opinion, adds the most value to this tool.

Will Royall (49:48)
Yeah, so they can copy that link and send it out however they want. It looks like on the mobile version, there's a lot more options to share since most people are on their phones. They can send it via instant messenger, SMS, things like that as well. WhatsApp, got it.

Sebastian Schulze (50:03)
Exactly.

And the last step here, so we tie into all of the event organizers social media accounts. So we pull all of those links here and then participants can earn five points for following and liking the different pages. So this is also a method to grow your social media following as well.

Will Royall (50:24)
So you're getting long-term connections with the contest registrants so that you can market to them over and over again for future shows.

Sebastian Schulze (50:31)
Exactly. Yep. So we're collecting that data upfront and then trying to boost marketing elsewhere however we can

And that's it. So that's the whole process for registering on a contest. Then we show the scorecard screen. So here they can see all of the activities that they've completed. If they got any of their friends to register on the contest as well, they would see their names underneath there. Obviously, we're going to show them how many points they have. And in a realistic example, this would say, hey, you're in the top 5 % or the top 3%.

out of everyone that's registered. And they can always go back in, click this button to complete more of those activities, share their link with more people, and try to win as many points in order to win those prizes.

Will Royall (51:21)
I think the coolest thing about this for an event creator is,

you're getting the names, emails, phone numbers, you're getting social media connections. You're building a marketing database of people who are aware of and interested in your events. So, you know, even if they haven't bought tickets yet, you now have that information to continue marketing to them, create retargeting ads across socials, send out email campaigns, SMS campaigns. This really helps you build the marketing database, get the hype going, get people interested in inviting others to join.

so that you can market and sell more tickets to your event and really crush the on-sale.

Sebastian Schulze (51:59)
That's right. Yeah, and actually we have a feature with this tool. As you're setting up the contest, you have the option to enable an email blast or not.

And when you enable the email blast, you specify when your tickets are going on sale. So obviously this would be when we've announced the event, the tickets are going on sale in a week or two weeks or something like that. So you can run this contest before tickets go on sale. And then as soon as tickets are live, everyone that's registered on the contest and has shown interest in the event will receive an automated email blast with the length to purchase tickets.

Will Royall (52:38)
And I see on this screen too, it says buy tickets right now. So obviously tickets are on sale for this event Which means you got a double whammy, right? So if you're advertising and sending people to this contest page They can buy tickets right away if they want or and or register for the contest for a chance to win the prize. So Hopefully both

Sebastian Schulze (52:57)
Right, hopefully both. Right, hopefully they register

on the contest and then also convert and purchase tickets.

Will Royall (53:04)
Awesome.

Sebastian Schulze (53:05)
so that's the, like I said, that's the whole flow for the contest participant. And then going back to, this is the event organizer side of things. So this screen is only accessible by the event organizer. So this will show the results and how well the contest is performing. So you can see here the number of follows that have been gained on social media.

Every single person that registers is going to be added to this table, the fan leader board down here. And they're automatically going to be ranked by how many points they have. So once the contest is over and you need to fulfill those prizes, this is where you would go to pick those winners.

Will Royall (53:52)
Can

you explain the revenue column there on the fan leaderboard down at the bottom where it says revenue?

Sebastian Schulze (53:59)
Yeah, there's quite a few revenue values actually. So there's a revenue value for the entire contest overall. There are revenue values for each of the individual ticket types that have been created on the event. And then like you pointed out, there's revenue values for every single participant that registers on the contest. So the significance of this is once the contest is over, since this tool is built into the ticketing platform,

our system will recognize if someone registers on a contest and then later on converts and ends up buying tickets to the event. So you can track the exact ROI, let's say if you were giving away a prize that was worth $500, at the end of the day you can look at this page and see, hey, we've actually generated $10,000, $20,000 in ticket sales.

because we did this campaign.

Will Royall (54:59)
It's great. You can actually see the ROI. can drill down to the specific ticket types and the money that was driven for each ticket type. And the revenue on the leaderboard down at the bottom is basically the revenue that's generated from the referrals that each of the registrants have provided. So Sebastian, if you had sent 10 people to register and they all bought tickets, your name would be credited with the revenue there. And so, you know, as an event organizer, you can really tell who your star fans are that are

you helping you to spread the word about the event and actually helping you to drive sales.

Sebastian Schulze (55:34)
Absolutely. Yep, and by clicking these carrots here you can very quickly see who that top fan is or that top spender or the top referrer is and then reach out to them and you know try to try to utilize them even more

Will Royall (55:50)
So that about wraps up this episode of PromoTix University's first ever podcast. If you want more of this type of content, please give it a like and a share. And don't forget to subscribe to the notifications so you can be informed the second we drop the next episode. Also, let me know in the comments, what topics do you want us to cover in detail on future episodes of this podcast? In the next episode, we're going to dive in on three marketing tools you probably didn't know exist that can help you drive more sales right now.

So thanks for joining and until next time, keep selling those tickets. Take care, everyone.