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We never stop innovating to help our clients sell more tickets. That’s kind of become our motto here lately. We’ve been quietly building the Facebook integration for a few weeks and beta testing it to the hilt, and I am happy to say our super genius dev team has done it yet again.
Now, when you set up an account in TicketBiscuit, you can automatically publish your event to your Facebook page. If you update the event, it will be updated on Facebook as well. There is simply no easier, quicker, or cooler way to connect with your fans and keep them in the loop.
I know what many of you are thinking: “I don’t have time for some kid’s toy!” But think again. Rapidly approaching 100 million registered users worldwide, the Facebook community is expanding into all demographic categories. Those 25- 40 year olds with deep pockets? Over 11 MILLION are registered on Facebook in the United States alone. That will probably be 12 million by the end of the month. The takeaway is that this ain’t just a kids toy. It is a serious marketing tool and can reap mucho benefits. (UPDATE: read this blog post if you’re still not convinced)
Check this page out to learn more about Facebook Pages. Here’s another overview page about the other business products you can get.
If you’ve already set up a Facebook account and want to get this feature hooked up pronto, give us a call.
(Full Press Release: TicketBiscuit Ticketing System adds Automatic Facebook and Eventful.com Integration)
Yesterday we continued our absolutely frenetic pace of innovation and released what I feel is probably the coolest TicketBiscuit enhancement since print at home tickets. It represents a HUGE step forward in ticketing, and will definitely help our clients sell more tickets.
You can now publish your events AUTOMATICALLY to Eventful.com
You may have remembered our tip on how to sell more tickets from a couple of weeks ago- when we introduced a lot of you to Eventful.com. For those of you who missed the post, Eventful.com is an event aggregator site- they maintain a comprehensive listing of local events in cities nationwide. It is a very cool service and as of last count had upwards of 7 million users.
Well, thanks to our team of super genius developers at TicketBiscuit, we’ve now made the process of adding your event to Eventful.com as easy as clicking a button.When you set up your event, it will be automatically populated to Eventful and kept up to date as you update it in TicketBiscuit.
Seven MILLION more sets of eyes. Zero additional effort.
We’ve got more innovations like this in the pipe coming your way soon, all geared toward helping you have more successful events and helping you sell more tickets. If you have ideas or enhancements that you feel would be useful to your business, we’d love to hear them. Just drop us a line and let us know.
People, in general, hate convenience fees. Being in the ticketing business, that’s something we hear on a daily basis. Ticketmaster may not have introduced the concept of a convenience fee but they certainly are the preeminent harbinger of hated fees in most peoples’ minds. So if so many people hate the fees, why not get rid of them? Well, Ticketmaster is now a publicly traded company. Getting rid of fees would destroy their entire business model, and executives would probably spend some time in prison. Not good. Even with the ascendance of Live Nation as a formidable competitor to Ticketmaster, fees will be a part of the equation – we are stuck with them.
The problem with fees arises with the perception that the Internet is free, therefore all strictly internet based transactions should be free. If I can order tickets with MY computer over MY internet connection and print them out with MY ink, what am I paying you fees for?
Okay, so fees are hated. But, can ticket sellers do anything about convenience fees? YES. Savvy ticket sellers will make them transparent. Solutions like ours allow venues, promoters, and artists to roll the fees into the ticket price and appear invisible to the customer. Will customers complain of higher ticket prices? Temporarily, but right now folks are used to paying more for everything – you needn’t look far to find another doom and gloom story about the economy. The risk is that a price bump will impact sales, but you can likely look at past sales data to mitigate that risk. The “no convenience fees” approach can even be an effective marketing tool, since it is so rare. Your web sales will DEFINITELY increase, sales through your more expensive channels (phone, walk up) will decrease, and in the end, you will make more money.
Interested in trying it? Give us a shout and we’ll show you how.
If you haven’t yet heard of or used Eventful, you are missing out on a world of free promotion for your venue or event. Eventful is (according to their website) “the leading events website which enables its community of users to discover, promote, share and create events.”
Okay, anyone could say that. But the stats back up their story:
- 4 MILLION events posted online
- 600,000 monthly visitors (according to compete.com)
That’s a LOT of eyeballs, so merely posting your events to Eventful.com will increase ticket sales. BUT, Eventful has an even cooler feature that all promoters should know about. It’s called “Demand.” Again, from their site:
“Eventful’s unique Demand service empowers users to influence where their favorite performers, candidates and other celebrities appear by creating viral grass-roots campaigns to “Demand” them in their town. Tens of thousands of musicians, comedians and political candidates use Eventful Demand to engage with millions of their fans and supporters to find out where they are in Demand.”
How do you use it as a promoter?
1. Visit www. eventful.com
2. Use the button under the eventful logo on the top left to select your location
3. Click the “Demands” Button in the navigation bar at the top.
4. Select “Near You” under the “By Location” section on the left hand side.
A quick search of my hometown (Birmingham, AL) shows that Plies, Dane Cook, and Pretty Ricky are the hot acts. You can search by performer type (Business, Comedy, Music, etc) to hone down the results. Find the hot acts, schedule the hot acts. Post your event to Eventful so all of the demanding fans can see it, and sell mucho tickets. Make sure you have Promotozoa hooked up to yourTicketBiscuit account so all of the demanding fans can invite their friends as well.
But even if you don’t use the Demands feature, you should use event aggregators to promote your events. Eventful is just one type of these event aggregator services. It is definitely the largest and most techno-advanced, with myspace and youtube integration and even an iPhone application. Other similar services include upcoming.org (powered by Yahoo) and Going.com.
The bottom line: more eyeballs equals more tickets sold.
How much money do you make per customer? If you can’t answer this question, stop what you’re doing and go figure it out. You can’t run your business without this key metric.
There’s a lot of talk these days about the secondary market (ticket reselling). The only reason the secondary market exists is because tickets aren’t price correctly in the primary market. Our industry seems to be the last to adopt modern economic principles surrounding revenue and yield management (I like the term profit management as it doesn’t matter how much money you bring in if you’re not making a profit). The airlines were the first to leverage revenue management back in the early 80’s. They learned to manage perishable inventory (e.g. the revenue from an empty seat can’t be recovered in the future).
So why hasn’t the ticketing industry caught on to this concept? This question has baffled me for many years. The only conclusion I’ve come to is that the supply chain remains disjointed and is filled with mistrust. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency over the years has allowed everyone in the supply chain to take advantage of each other: ticketing vendors charge fans exorbitant fees and lock ticket sellers into long-term contracts; promoters earn additional profit with hidden fees using cost plus contracts; artists require price caps on tickets and then resell their own tickets in the secondary market; venues allow fans without tickets into the venue to earn profit on food and beverages; ticket brokers grab the best seats before real fans have a chance to buy tickets, the stories go on and on…
This is all going to change soon as dynamic pricing becomes commonplace, the primary and secondary markets merge, and tools from companies like TicketBiscuit provide transparency in the marketplace.
What should you do? Understanding your profit per customer metric is the first step. I’m not just talking about ticketing. How much profit (not revenue) do you make on ticketing, food and beverages, merchandise, etc. per customer. With this information, you can then determine how to price tickets, how much to pay for talent, how much marketing you need to do, etc. Don’t let the history of this industry dictate how we approach the future. Just because it’s always been done this way doesn’t mean it will continue to be done the same way in the future. The Times They Are A-Changin’…
This weekend I had the pleasure of seeing Seinfeld live (my apologies for the lousy picture as it was the best I could snap without being caught). How did I get front row center seats at face value? Piece of cake - as long as the ticketing vendor uses ticket outlets. Simply show up at the outlet 10 minutes before tickets go on sale (it takes 10 minutes to get someone at the store to come over to the ticket register, dust off the keyboard, remember how to place an order, etc.) - don’t worry, nobody else will be in line as no one else buys tickets at outlets. Two minutes after the tickets go on sale you’ll walk out with the best seats in the house.
Perhaps this post will reunite the pre-Internet ticket outlet fervor of the ’80s and ’90s, but I doubt it. Why?
The use of ticket outlets is bad economics for EVERYONE!
- Ticket buyers pay the same fees at outlets as they pay for buying tickets over the phone and web. Here’s what I paid: $75 per tix plus a $10.80 per tix convenience charge - that’s 14.4% in convenience fees for buying at the outlet!
- Establishing and maintaining ticket outlets cost ticket sellers a lot of money, time, and resources.
- The outlet (i.e. grocery store chains, etc.) sell so few tickets that it can’t be worth the time and energy to train their staff on how to place orders.
- When was the last time you were in the check out line with your box of Ho Ho’s and said “let me walk over to the unmanned ticket counter, wait 10 minutes for someone to show up, and grab some tix to an event?” How inconvenient! Why not call and buy the tix using your cell phone on the way home?
- Has anyone seen any hard data that shows that ticket outlets increase profitability for anyone? Your doctored sales report from your ticketing vendor doesn’t count.
- Cross sale? I think not. Does anyone ever go to a store to buy their groceries because they can also buy tickets to an event?
Why do old school ticketing companies still use/promote brick-and-mortar ticket outlets?
- Sunk costs - they’ve invested heavily in ticket outlets and try to justify their past investment decisions.
- It seems logical that the more places tix are on sale, the more tix you’ll sell. WRONG! It’s about overall profit, not top line revenue. It’s about getting the message to the people that’ll most likely purchase tickets and buy a bunch of stuff while at the event. Why not send a targeted email to likely buyers FOR FREE with a couple of clicks of the mouse or use viral event promotion tools like Promotozoa - one of our newest product offerings (check out some of our beta clients: Comedy Club Stardome, Exit/In, The BottleTree)?
- But I’ll lose the customers that’ll only pay with cash? You think you actually make any money off the tightwad that only uses cash? The 0.0001% of the population that only uses cash is not your ideal customer - trust me.
At TicketBiscuit, we’d rather invest in building better tools that are proven to sell more tickets and increase everyone’s bottom line. Call us old fashion, but we like having a profitable business model that is flexibile, low cost, and high value to all parties in the supply chain.
Ticket Selling Tip: Increase the VALUE of Admission
December 16, 2008 in Commentary, ticket selling tips | Tags: concerts, lefsetz, liveworks, season pass, ticket selling tips, ticketing, venue, venues | by ehoush | No comments
I recently started subscribing to the Lefsetz Letter. Bob Lefsetz (the author) has been publishing his thoughts for 25 years. He addresses the issues that are at the core of the music business: downloading, copy protection, pricing and the music itself. To say he is an expert is a bit of an understatement.
Anyhoo, Bob’s latest post is one that I think all owners of venues should read. In it, he talks about the perceived value of admission and tries to get you thinking about what it is, exactly, that keeps folks coming out to see shows at your place. Here’s an excerpt:
Bob has some interesting thoughts on how to increase perceived value and pack the house without giving away tickets. Check out the full post here, and if you are in the music industry, you should mos def subscribe.