STAGE DOOR

30 Jul 2024
Arts Marketing, Data, Digital, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Social Media Permalink

Enhancing Digital Marketing Performance through Meta’s Conversion API 

July 30, 2024

As Arts organizations craft their marketing strategies, marketing teams are asked to do more with less.  So how do you ensure that every marketing dollar is as impactful as possible?  With ticket and subscription goals growing each year, Arts organizations are looking for the right strategies to drive additional performance and solutions to set them up for long-term success. How you do that is through the right strategies to support your organization’s marketing initiatives.  One such solution is Meta’s Conversions API, a powerful tool that can provide the insights necessary to drive successful campaigns. 

What is the Conversions API? 

Meta’s Conversions API serves as a bridge between your website or app and Meta’s advertising platform. Unlike the Meta Pixel, which records client-side information, the Conversions API operates server-side. This shift means you no longer must rely on the end user’s browser to send conversion data, making tracking and recording far more accurate and reliable. 

How does it work? 

While the Conversions API works behind the scenes, its impact is felt across your entire marketing strategy. When a user performs an action—such as making a ticket purchase, signing up, or completing a form—the Conversions API securely captures and sends that information directly from the client’s server to Meta’s servers. This ensures the data you rely on to make critical marketing decisions is both accurate and comprehensive. 

Why is it so important?  

Industry shifts around consumer privacy are redefining digital marketing and advertising best practices. With key digital leaders like Apple and Google advocating for increased consumer data protection, traditional tracking methods like third-party cookies are becoming less reliable from an attribution perspective.  

While Google had previously announced cookie-tracking deprecation by 2025, just this week, however, Google announced an updated approach that will not remove third-party cookies from Chrome but instead will allow users to make informed choices across their web browsing, which they could adjust at any time. Consumer controls like those already enabled by Apple and Safari impact how digital marketers identify audiences, deliver personalized messaging, and measure performance across various strategies. This challenges marketers to implement new ways to measure impact and deliver seamless consumer experiences. Meta’s Conversion API offers a robust solution to these challenges, enabling accurate measurement and audience segmentation for long-term engagement strategies. 

5 Reasons to Implement the Conversions API 

By implementing the Conversions API on behalf of our arts partners we have seen enhanced benefits and results driving greater engagement and better performance.  

1. Enhanced Data Accuracy and Reliability 

By operating server-side, the Conversions API ensures a higher degree of data accuracy. This means fewer discrepancies caused by browser issues, ad blockers, or cookie settings, giving you a more reliable picture of user behavior. 

2. Complete Tracking and Attribution 

The Conversions API enables comprehensive tracking and attribution, capturing every action users take on your site or app. This holistic view allows you to understand the entire customer journey, from the first click to the final conversion, ensuring you allocate your marketing resources effectively. 

3. Improved Ad Optimization and Audience Targeting 

Accurate data is the backbone of effective ad optimization and audience targeting. With better data quality, Meta’s algorithms can more accurately target audiences likely to convert, thereby maximizing your return on investment (ROI). 

4. Enhanced Privacy and Data Security 

With growing concerns around data privacy, Conversions API provides a secure method for data transmission. Information sent via the API is encrypted, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations and enhancing user trust. 

5. Cross-Device and Offline Conversions 

The Conversions API supports cross-device and offline conversion tracking, offering a unified view of customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. This capability is crucial for arts organizations that engage with patrons through various channels, from online ticket sales to in-person events. 

Real-World Results 

Several arts organizations have successfully implemented the Conversions API, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world scenarios: 

  • Agency Results: Achieved up to a $28 return on ad spend (ROAS), a 67% increase in click-through rate (CTR), and a 50% increase in site traffic. 
  • Performing Arts Center in South Carolina: Experienced a 332% lift in ROAS, a 34% increase in CTR, and a 57% increase in landing page views (LPVs). 
  • Symphony in the Dallas Fort Worth area: Saw a 118% ROAS, a 36% increase in CTR, and a 108% increase in LPVs. 

These case studies underscore the tangible benefits of leveraging the Conversions API for enhanced digital marketing performance. 

Conclusion 

In a cookieless world, the Meta Conversions API stands out as a crucial tool for accurately measuring digital performance, optimizing campaigns, and reaching the right audiences—all while ensuring data security and compliance. For arts organizations looking to stay ahead in the digital marketing landscape, implementing the Conversions API can provide a significant competitive advantage. 

To learn more about setting up the Conversions API for your team, please reach out to your MogoARTS team members or contact us directly. 

31 May 2024
Uncategorized Permalink

Mastering the Art of Annual Media Planning: A Guide for Arts Organizations

May 31, 2024

In the constantly shifting landscape of digital marketing, arts organizations face unique challenges in staying connected with their audiences while navigating their marketing strategies and budget. The foundation of a successful engagement and marketing strategy lies in the meticulous annual planning of media activities. This approach not only streamlines budget management but also ensures a holistic integration of paid and non-paid marketing initiatives, optimizing support for key performance indicators (KPIs), delivering consistent messaging for a cohesive patron experience, and enabling a unified approach to measurement and performance evaluation.  

But why is annual media planning so crucial, and how can it transform your organization’s marketing strategy from good to great? This blog post dives into the benefits of adopting a yearly outlook on your marketing initiatives and sheds light on best practices to maximize your efforts. 

The Compelling Advantages of Annual Media Planning 

1. Increased Efficiency 

One of the advantages of annual marketing planning is the heightened efficiency it brings to media buying and placement. For arts organizations, having an overarching view of the year’s marketing strategy facilitates better negotiations with vendors, ensures a strategic allocation of media investments to drive performance, and minimizes inefficiencies to better manage budgets. This will help with planning, including everything from season announcements, subscription efforts, and single ticket sales over the course of the year. This pre-planning also affords teams the luxury of concentrating on the creation of compelling campaigns across all marketing efforts without the distractions of logistical hurdles, like Paid Search timing or negotiating traditional or broadcast rates. Annual planning enables more consistency with things like budget allocations, performance evaluation, and which optimizations will drive better patron engagement. 

2. Better Budget Allocation 

With an annual lens, organizations can distribute their marketing budgets more judiciously across chosen media channels and during more critical times throughout the season. Every arts organization wants to maximize the momentum around season announcements, subscriptions, and the single ticket sales as each production or exhibit hits the market. With a strategic allocation based on an in-depth understanding of the goals for each show, which channels will offer the most impactful reach to the intended audience, optimizing spending for maximum effectiveness can be supported throughout the season to help reach ticket and revenue goals. Additionally, planning the budget over the year allows for adaptability within the budgeting process, providing the flexibility needed to pivot in response to market trends or organizational needs. 

3. Consistent Messaging 

In the realm of branding and marketing, consistency and patron experience reigns supreme. Annual media planning enables the delivery of a cohesive and coherent message across all marketing and media touchpoints. Establishing a calendar for “messages in market” guarantees that all communications are in lockstep with each production or exhibits visual and messaging identity and ties into the organization’s overarching marketing goals. This ensures that patrons receive unified messaging and have a consistent visual experience across all touchpoints to build and reinforce brand loyalty. This kind of consistency can expand to support each production, subscription, or season announcement effort for enhanced brand awareness and affinity.  

4. Improved Measurement and Evaluation 

One of the most significant advantages of annual media planning is the ability to measure and assess campaign performance comprehensively. This ongoing analysis facilitates a deeper understanding of campaign performance, supporting the ongoing optimization of strategies for better outcomes. By benchmarking success against clearly defined KPIs (revenue, ROI, or ROAS), arts organizations gain the insights necessary to amplify successes and address and correct any shortcomings, thereby enhancing media investment returns.  

Best Practices for an Effective Annual Media and Programming Strategy 

Crafting an annual media plan that drives results requires the right approach. Below are essential practices to guide your strategy: 

  • Define Clear Goals and KPIs: Define and share your marketing objectives by effort or production to help internal or agency teams understand how they are pacing to your goals. Establishing and communicating these benchmarks will help all teams align on the optimizations, recommendations, and overall impact the marketing strategies have in driving those KPIs (ticket sales and revenue, ROI, or ROAS). 
  • Understand Your Audience: For arts organizations, nurturing existing patron audiences will be key in building that brand affinity with the most loyal audiences. From there building strategies to reengage lapsed patrons or engaging new patron profiles, will help to build out both the audience and channel strategies that will help drive engagement and revenue for your organization. 
  • Strategic Media Mix: Depending on your audiences and KPIs, looking for opportunities to diversify your channel strategy will help engage new audiences and reach existing patrons more holistically. These channels may include email, organic, traditional, broadcast, or even emerging digital channels that can help drive audience engagement. The goal here is to continue to layer onto your existing strategies to drive organizational growth while balancing the workloads of your internal team.  
  • Continuous Optimization: The digital landscape is always evolving, and so should your strategy. Regularly review your campaign performance, adjusting strategy, channel, or audience targeting, as needed, to stay aligned with your goals. 

In Conclusion 

For arts organizations, annual media planning can be a cornerstone approach to fortify market position and deepen audience engagement. By emphasizing efficiency, strategic budget use, message consistency, and rigorous performance evaluation, arts organizations can harness the full potential of their marketing efforts. The adoption of these practices, underpinned by a profound understanding of an organizations’ goals, holistic marketing strategy, digital media approach, and measurement metrics for their KPIs, will be instrumental in crafting strategy that resonate, engage, and endure with the patron audiences. 

05 Mar 2024
Arts Marketing, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Subscriptions Permalink

Crafting Effective Digital Subscription Campaigns for Arts Organizations 

March 5, 2024

As arts organizations gear up for subscription season, there’s a growing emphasis on deploying strategic digital campaigns to maximize subscription sales and foster deeper connections with patrons. In a year where record engagement and ticket sales are being seen in all corners of the arts and entertainment space, maximizing season subscriptions offers an opportunity for arts organizations to capitalize on the interest in live entertainment.  Digital and traditional media strategies can help drive this engagement. Learn more of the campaign strategies to consider, the best practices for creating compelling calls-to-action (CTAs), and strategies to personalize messaging and creative tailored to different audience segments.   

Subscription Campaign Strategy 

Subscription campaigns differ from single ticket sales as they target an organization’s existing audience. Subscriptions offer membership growth for arts organizations by offering packages to loyal patrons that include tickets, benefits, and one-of-a-kind opportunities not offered in single-ticket sales. Subscriptions typically include packages that provide exclusive benefits, such as discounted rates, early access to content or events, and other perks not available to non-subscribers. By embracing subscriptions, organizations can cultivate a loyal patron base, enhance event attendance through recurring engagement, and capitalize on predictable revenue streams. Moreover, subscriptions offer invaluable insights into consumer preferences and behavior, empowering organizations to refine their offerings, tailor marketing strategies, and deliver personalized experiences that resonate with their audience. 
 
Benefits of Subscription Campaigns: 
Digital subscription campaigns can amplify and support more traditional advertising methods including several benefits:  

  • Long-Term Sustainability: A strong subscriber base provides a foundation for the organization’s long-term sustainability, ensuring its ability to continue producing and presenting arts and cultural programming.  
  • Loyalty and Retention: By focusing marketing initiatives on retaining existing subscribers and encouraging renewals, organizations can maximize the lifetime value of each subscriber. Subscribers are typically more loyal to the organization, as they have already demonstrated a commitment to supporting its work. 
  • Drive Demand for Seasonal Programming: Subscribers often receive early access or priority booking for seasonal programming. By offering subscribers the first opportunity to purchase tickets or access exclusive events, the organization can create a sense of urgency and anticipation, driving demand for seasonal programming. 
  • Increased Competition for Single Ticket Efforts: Offering early access to popular events and programming to subscribers first creates a competitive advantage, as they have the first opportunity to secure tickets to popular events before they sell out. This can lead to increased competition for subscription packages among those who want access to early ticket sales. 
  • Upselling and Cross-Selling: Subscribers represent a captive audience that can be targeted for upselling or cross-selling opportunities. By promoting premium subscription tiers, add-on services, or complementary products to subscribers, revenue can be maximized per subscriber, increasing the overall profitability of the subscription program. 
     

Subscription Audiences: 
Depending on the stage of your organization’s subscription cycle, it’s essential to craft the right strategies for your subscription efforts. Audience segmentation and management are crucial to message and engage those target audiences for both subscription renewals and acquisition efforts.  

  • Renewals Audience: The renewals audience comprises current subscribers who are due for renewal in the upcoming season. This segment is crucial for driving retention and loyalty. A renewals campaign should exclusively target first-party audiences, such as a CRM list of current subscribers. Additionally, a suppression CRM list can help exclude subscribers who have already renewed, ensuring resources are focused on engaging those who need to renew. 
  • Subscription Acquisition Audience: The acquisition audience represents potential new subscribers and those who didn’t renew before the deadline.  A significant aspect of acquisition campaigns involves upselling existing patrons who have yet to subscribe or have let their subscriptions lapse. This approach is driven by first-party targeting, including a CRM list of lapsed subscribers, multi-ticket buyers from previous seasons, and community members who have engaged with your organization at events. Furthermore, targeting website visitors and social engagers enhances the reach and effectiveness of acquisition campaigns. 

Tailoring Campaign Strategies: 

Given that a subscription entails a commitment of both time and money, it’s crucial to tailor marketing efforts toward converting and upselling your existing database. For organizations aiming to attract younger and new subscribers, a two-step approach can be effective. Initiate engagement with this audience through a single ticket campaign, who are familiar with the organization’s offerings and experiences. Subsequently, highlighting the membership’s benefits and values entices this already engaged audience to become a subscriber.  

By strategically segmenting your target audiences and aligning your campaign strategies with their specific needs and behaviors, you can maximize the effectiveness of your subscription campaigns and drive sustainable growth for your organization. 

Crafting Compelling CTAs and Creative: 

The next step to consider when crafting messaging is how to align the audience with the right message. Here are some recommendations to align your content and creative with the right audience: 

  • Customize Messaging: Tailor messages to different audience segments, focusing on benefits and incentives that resonate with each group. 
  • Highlight Savings and Exclusive Benefits: Clearly communicate the value proposition of subscribing, using messaging or CTAs like “Save Now” or “Subscribe and Save” to emphasize discounts and perks. 
  • Showcase Programming and Membership Priority: Balance visuals and text in creative assets, focusing on either programming highlights or subscriber benefits with simplified and uncluttered creative. 
  • Maintain Consistency: Keep CTAs and logos consistent across different ad formats to reinforce brand identity and improve recognition. 
  • Explore Creative Formats: Experiment with video ads or carousel formats to showcase programming and subscriber benefits effectively. 

Setting Goals and Measurement Metrics: 

Finally, when building your digital and traditional strategy, define clear goals and KPIs based on historical data and audience insights. Defining the success metrics before launch will help the teams running the campaign be able to optimize around sales results (conversion volume or rates, revenue, subscription growth YOY, ROAS, YOY ROAS, CPA, etc.). Defining the KPIs will support the activation teams to have aligned optimization recommendations throughout the campaign and a clear evaluation of the effort’s success and effectiveness.  

However, while live, measuring secondary KPIs like engagement rates (CTR, likes, shares, comments, etc.) will help organizations understand how the target audiences are engaging with the brand and the subscription packages. This may inform strategic internal decisions around messaging, package availability, and channel strategy. Data across all these primary and secondary metrics will help inform any optimizations or strategy opportunities over the course of your subscription effort. 

Digital subscription campaigns offer arts organizations a powerful tool to drive subscription sales, engage with patrons, and build long-lasting relationships. By leveraging targeted messaging, compelling CTAs, and strategic goal-setting, organizations can navigate subscription season with confidence and maximize revenue opportunities in a dynamic digital landscape. 

14 Aug 2023
Arts Marketing, Data, Digital, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Non-profit Marketing, Tips, Trends, Uncategorized Permalink

Evolving Patron Buying Patterns and How Your Marketing Strategies Can Keep Up

August 14, 2023

In August, we had the pleasure of hosting a breakout session at the Tessitura Learning & Community Conference (TLCC) in Orlando, FL. MogoARTS’ Managing Director, Samantha Bryant co-presented with Howard Levine, VP of Marketing & Guest Services at State Theatre New Jersey (STNJ). The two put together a comprehensive session outline on how to use Tessitura to analyze patron buying behaviors by product type, seasonality, genre, etc.; and how to mirror marketing strategies and channels that complement different audience behaviors.  

BACKGROUND 

First, we must set the scene; it is no secret the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way patrons spend their time and money. Even though consumers were spending considerably more of their money online than before the COVID-19 outbreak, that spending has shifted. Research and data suggest that the money being spent online is a redistribution of aspects of traditional offline spending. Other purchases are being deferred or cancelled entirely. Going to movies, concerts or other events fell into the “stopped activity entirely” column, and entertainment outside the home dropped 20-25% from what was being spent pre-COVID.  

Recent survey data from the Patron Perspective Buyer Report tells us more about patron buying frequency. Before the pandemic, 89% of survey respondents said they went to the theatre three or more times per year. We also saw that 73% of respondents to this survey said they purchased tickets one month or more in advance of an event. There are many factors which contribute to the timing of a purchase such as popularity, run time, ticket price, audience loyalty, seasonality, etc. But the takeaway is clear, patrons are not buying months in advance. 

A national survey conducted by TRG Arts analyzes average booking patterns from 10 weeks before the final performance of a run at a venue or the maturity of a single performance. In both 2019 and 2021, 46% of the final revenue had been achieved by 10 weeks out. Patterns remain remarkably similar throughout the following weeks. In 2019, 12% of revenue was achieved in the final week of sales. In 2021 this dropped to 10%. What is interesting for the story of this chart is how much things have bounced back to pre-covid buying patterns altogether on an aggregate view. Take note that this survey is not segmented by market, venue type, genre or time of year and will impact buying patterns when looked at in more specific views.  

Lastly, it is important to understand how your patrons are purchasing: online, at the box office, over the phone, etc. Knowing where sales are correlated can help manage expectations of the results of your marketing strategies. For example, if you have a high volume of purchases over the phone for subscriptions (so patrons can ask questions, etc.) do not expect your digital strategies to correlate those sales – instead look at additional KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as phone traffic, offline sales, visits and/or clicks on the contact us page, etc.   

ANALYZE YOUR AUDIENCE 

The best way to understand your patron’s buying patterns is to look directly at data from your database (such as Tessitura) to segment audience behavior. For example, STNJ is a performing arts venue which hosts various event types – so they started by looking at their largest genres. For the most recent season they saw that Concerts followed by Broadway were their highest selling event types. They also look at sales patterns such as subs vs regular vs. discounts as well as sales channels. Both by season and by production.   

Analysis by production also includes revenue makeup/loss to discounts. Attendee segments such as new to file, second-time attendee, 3+ time attendee, subscriber; as well as running sale totals by date. Additionally, STNJ looks at where buyers come from and income levels and if children are present in their household and at what age. This helps get an idea how to better market this show as well as similar shows in the future.   

When looking specifically at a Broadway Tour buying patterns pre- and post-pandemic STNJ compared similar titles in December 2018 and January 2023. Pre-pandemic, there was a huge spike at the on-sale announcement and a steady sales pattern with a slight increase 3-4 weeks ahead of opening. Compared to 2023, the on-sale spike is still present but nowhere near as high as 2018 and continues to see sales increase in the 2-3 weeks ahead of opening showing the delayed nature of a Broadway buyer.  

Additionally, STNJ looked at similar family/children’s programming pre- and post-pandemic. Again, in 2018 they saw a large sales spike at the on-sale announcement and a relative steady pattern leading to the opening. The biggest change being in 2023 seeing no spike at the on-sale and sales remain steady but low until a large spike 4 weeks out from opening as well as the week of the show starting. Parents aren’t bothering buying or planning far in advance with family programming – likely due to kids being sick more frequently, they don’t want to commit until they know the family can attend.  

Any ticket-sales organization can look at their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) database to analyze buying patterns and create a persona with behavioral assumptions to help inform exactly how and when to market to these patrons. 

IDENTIFY THE BEST MEDIA STRATEGIES 

All forms of media have ideal placements for specific types of engagement. It is best to start by looking at a marketing funnel and identifying different outcomes from different media channels. 

Top of funnel strategies are for marketing to a wide audience to capture as many leads as possible. Since audiences are searching for information at this stage, the primary goals of marketing at the top of the funnel are awareness and lead generation. Some examples of channels used in this stage are CTV/OTT, Streaming Audio, Premium social media (TikTok, Twitter) and Traditional Media such as Billboards, Broadcast, Radio, Print, etc. 

The next stage of the marketing funnel is interest or consideration. In this marketing funnel stage, potential customers are aware of your brand and are starting to learn more about it. They may have watched a video about your season or visited your website. Examples of media to support this nurture phase of the funnel are more first party focused tactics in addition to prospecting to known audiences – native advertising, social media such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, Meta), and paid search engine marketing. 

Finally, the conversion stage is when a user finally makes the choice to convert or purchase. Your goal is to get as many people as possible from the higher stages of your marketing funnel to this purchase point. It is the final push to get your prospective patron to convert. At this point, focusing on more direct response tactics such as programmatic display banners, social media (Meta), and paid search engine marketing is recommended.  

It is also important to consider segmentation – and to prioritize engaged audiences strategically among your first party audiences. Key audiences include CRM Database, Site Visitors, Social Engagers and Cart Abandoners. Did you know, according to Baymard Institute, that almost 70% of shoppers abandon their carts? A MogoARTS recent benchmark report shows an average 8.23% conversion rate on abandoned cart; and $23.91 ROAS (Return on Ad Spend). 

Ultimately, consider the timing of your media activation in relation to your patron’s buying patterns. For a late buying audience, deploy top of funnel strategies earlier out from on-stage dates and increase remarketing and bottom of funnel strategies closer to opening. You may also consider running media a few days or weeks into on stage flight to leverage reviews and patron testimonials. Read up on our recent blog on the benefits of annual media planning for other ideas on how to structure your season approach.

TEST & LEARN 

Structure clear tests to measure which strategies perform, and scale. Rule number one regarding A/B testing is that all tests should be performed in isolation. Choose one thing – a new channel, headline, call to action, landing page, etc. If you are trying multiple new ideas at once it is impossible to know what was the factor that impacted your test. We also recommend dedicating a testing budget or at least equal budget to A/B test subjects for comparative data and determining a true result. Be comfortable and prepared that all tests have a winner and a loser, and you may not achieve your desired result. 

When it comes to measurement, you may be monitoring ticket sales, but it is recommended to log multiple KPIs on a regular basis… you never know what the impact of your test may be! Decide and weigh which KPIs are most important to your organization and continue to check in throughout your test. Depending on what you are planning to measure we recommend looking at historical / organic growth of those KPIs and then setting specific growth goals within scale of past performance. For example, MogoARTS ran a CTV (Connected TV) test with STNJ in Fall 2022 and while the campaign inched closer to the performance opening – ticket sales were not being impacted fast enough. The STNJ team made a decision that branding and awareness coming from CTV was not as important as focusing on ticket sales and decided to pause the video portion of the campaign and reallocate the budget to more direct response strategies. 

No matter the patterns you uncover, there are a multitude of unique ways to approach marketing to your audience. Treat every product or performance as an individual challenge and don’t be afraid to try innovative ideas – you just might discover the right combination of media and timing that strikes your audience right!

28 Jul 2023
Arts Marketing, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Tips, Uncategorized Permalink

Unlocking Success: Harnessing the Potential of Annual Media Planning

July 28, 2023

In the rapidly evolving world of marketing, organizations are constantly seeking ways to reach their target audience effectively. One essential strategy that has proven to be highly advantageous is annual media planning. In this blog, we will delve into the benefits and explore some best practices for creating an effective annual media strategy.

Read more

18 Jan 2023
Arts Marketing, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Display, Non-profit Marketing, Social Media, Subscriptions, Tips Permalink

New Year, New Season: Subscriptions Campaign Best Practices

January 18, 2023

The new year means new season planning and budgeting is around the corner. One of the most important efforts in new season planning is engaging with your subscribers to retain them for another year of support. A well-crafted subscription campaign can help your organization stand out from others and enable your membership benefits to build deeper and long-lasting relationships with your patrons through your digital marketing efforts.  

Why use digital advertising?  

Traditionally, subscription renewals are driven primarily by box office outreach, direct mail pieces, and email campaigns. While these strategies are effective, it is known that it takes multiple touch points with a patron to drive an action. Telemarketing and direct mail can be expensive and/or be locked in at fixed rates, not leaving room for flexibility to pause or ramp up efforts. Folding in a digital marketing campaign to your subscriptions efforts can be a cost-efficient strategy to reach loyal patrons ripe for an upsell to a subscription or retain a longtime subscriber that doesn’t require as many touch points to renew. 

Digital Marketing campaigns allow the ability to customize messages by different audiences or patron types, track and measure correlated ticket and subscription purchases directly to your ad spend, compliment your offline strategies with CRM remarketing, and efficiently optimize strategies that are working and dial back on strategies that are not. 

Identify your Audience 

Depending on where your organization is at in the subscriptions cycle, you’ll want to group your target audiences by Renewals and Acquisition.  

Renewals audiences consist of only subscribers who are up for renewal from one year to the next. More specifically, a renewals campaign will target first-party audiences only, such as a CRM list of current subscribers and/or a suppression CRM list of those that have already renewed.  

Acquisition consists of the open period in which subscriptions are available to new subscribers (and/or those who didn’t renew before the deadline). Something to consider is Acquisition is not only net-new patrons, but rather new subscribers within your organization’s database. A large portion of an acquisition campaign should focus on upselling existing patrons who have not yet subscribed or let their subscription lapse. This is also heavily driven by first-party targeting of a CRM list of lapsed subscribers, multi-ticket buyers from 3-5 seasons back, and/or members of the community who have engaged with your organization at events. In addition to CRM, your campaign should also target website visitors and/or social engagers.  

A subscription is a commitment of time and money, and it is less likely to convert a patron who has never been to your institution ever before. So, it is important to focus your marketing efforts on converting and upselling your existing database. If your goal is to attract younger and new subscribers, focus on getting this audience in the door with a single ticket campaign first and then upsell to a subscription package.  

Customize Messaging 

One of the benefits of digital marketing is the ability to tailor unique messages to diverse audiences to create a customized conversation. We recommend creating different ad sets and messages to speak to renewing subscribers versus lapsed or first-time subscribers.  

Lapsed audiences or first-time subscribers may need a reminder of the savings of subscribing, member benefits such as discounted parking or concessions, meet ‘n greets with talent, early access, and more. Create a carousel or animated ad that rotates through the various benefits of being a subscriber to effectively showcase a patron who may not be aware of these perks. If your value is primarily in programming, promote the show titles or talent included. 

Renewing subscribers who are loyal to your organization and already know the benefits of being a member. Using digital ad campaigns is a way to cost-effectively reach these patrons to remind them renewals are on sale and/or programming has been announced and create a sense of urgency. These audiences don’t need a lot of touchpoints to encourage them to renew and can be pushed through the consideration funnel faster than a new-to-file patron. Try using a message with more urgency around retaining their benefits such as “Renew today to secure your seats!” or “Subscribe before May 1st for 30% savings!” 

Goal Setting & Measurement 

Before heading into the next subscriptions period, look back at years’ past and take note of changes or growth. Have you seen a drop off in a particular package? Do renewals depend heavily on programming? Do subscriptions typically sell more online or from patrons calling the box office? What may have impacted these changes in the past? (Lack of marketing budget or a pandemic, perhaps?) It is important to look at historical growth to set goals for the coming year with context or identify strategies that have worked in the past. 

Even if you’re not dedicating a marketing campaign to subscriptions renewals, one thing that is inevitable is crossover. Subscriptions will likely go on sale while single tickets for the current season are still available. Many subscribers will head to your website to renew their packages and get caught in the remarketing efforts of any single ticket ad campaigns that are currently active, and those renewals can then be attributed to a single ticket campaign and inflate results. A quick fix to prevent this is to provide a CRM list of your current subscribers up for renewal as a suppression list to exclude this audience segment in any remarketing during the renewals period. By doing this you can exclude transactions for renewals that are not related to the single ticket efforts and save your remarketing dollars for those who need it.  

Lastly, set clear goals to measure success both offline and online. Sales results is the ultimate measure of success (volume of sales or revenue), but consider secondary KPIs depending on your strategies in market: 

  • If you’ve introduced a season trailer, look at video engagement. 
  • If there is any in-market advertising, keep an eye on Google Analytics to see traffic trends and/or engagement rates 
  • If you’re advertising in a new channel such as Meta or TikTok, look at follower growth 

Every organization’s subscription cycle and patron buying patterns are different, so measure your success against yourself and not peer organizations. As well as talk with your marketing agency or in-house department about what new ideas you can try in 2023.  

29 Sep 2022
Arts Marketing, Data, Digital, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Google, Social Media, Tips, Trends, Uncategorized Permalink

Preparing for Change: How Arts Marketers Can WIN in a Cookieless World

September 29, 2022

Over the course of the next few years, third-party data will continue to become less reliable as data privacy continues to evolve (currently slated for early 2024). MogoARTS Marketing recently led a session at Tessitura’s Learning & Community Conference in Denver, CO exploring the marketing strategies to best position arts organizations in a world with increased data privacy and limited tracking capabilities. Here are the takeaways from this session:  

What are Cookies?  

Currently, online consumer data is tracked via cookies, which is a piece of code placed on your device that collects and stores data that the website can retrieve at any time. Cookies contain third-party data, such as user identification, behavior, and preferences that have been widely leveraged in digital marketing. 

Why do Cookies exist? 

Cookies make your online experience easier by saving browsing information. With cookies, sites can keep you signed in, remember your site preferences, and give you relevant content. Advertisers use cookies to collect data – such as website visitation – that enables brands and advertisers to use that data for segmenting and targeting consumers based on their engagement.  

Why do Advertisers Use Cookies? 

Using cookies has been foundational for paid digital marketing tactics like retargeting, user tracking, conversion attribution, and reaching new audiences using third-party data. The changes around data privacy including regulation and legislation, are embracing enhanced data privacy policies and setting more boundaries and guidelines around how data is used that both honors users’ privacy and supports transparency. Ultimately, this has limited the use of cookie-based data to protect user privacy. 

Traditionally, users would be forced to opt-in to tracking through their consent of user agreements or terms of service when signing up for things like Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Now, the industry is moving away from these passive consent-models toward empowering users to manage their data more directly. In the new approach, users now have more direct control to choose to opt-in or out, allowing users more discretion on how and when their personal data is collected.  

While users opt-in and allow tracking content through user agreements and terms of service when signing up for and using services like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, the industry is moving away from passive consent models. Instead, the industry is leaning into active consent from users to explicitly opt-in or out of tracking. This gives the user more discretion on how and when their personal data is collected.    

Timeline  

The industry changes started with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Data Privacy Act (CCPA) setting the tone for other states’ legislation. In 2016 CCPA championed ballot initiatives to advocate on behalf of better personal data security. This sparked a call for national and global privacy compliance. At this point, lawmakers in 15 states are poised to vote on more expansive legislation in 2022.  

In response to the regulatory and legislative pressures, Google embraced the shift toward privacy. Having announced in 2021 the deprecation of third-party tracking. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty in the industry. In fact, Google has already shifted their projected cookie deprecation date from 2023 to 2024, just illustrating what an ever-evolving subject this is.   
 

What Changes Are Coming? Why Should I Care? 

The trend toward data security, privacy, and transparency is centered around a consumer-focused decision of how their data is collected and used.  

As part of the changing landscapes, websites are now required to have a consent framework built into their systems. A consent framework enables users to opt-in or out of data collection, typically through an online environment (like a website or an app) with a pop-up asking, “do you accept cookies?” This gives consumers the ability to more directly manage data-consent and specifically what the data could be used for.  

Major tech companies like Google and Apple are implementing additional privacy standards to adhere to GDPR and CCPA. By default, most browsers (Firefox, Safari, Microsoft Edge) already prevent cookie-tracking. These environments assume users want data privacy, but users still have the option to adjust their setting to opt-in to data tracking. Apple also requires app developers to build in the consent framework pop-up to get explicit data sharing opt-ins from its users.  

The most immediate and difficult impact is on the paid media side of things. Specifically, this makes attribution challenging to understand the impact of paid media exposures to an outcome (a purchase, a signup, etc.). If someone has opted-out of data tracking – then you cannot attribute their behavior to an ad exposure. 

Digital marketing will be most directly impacted through targeting and personalization of messaging toward third-party audiences, as consumer profiles will be more protected so audience segmentation will be less transparent.  

Opting In or Out 

So once a consumer opts-in, they will become part of your first-party audience. Brands will have more flexibility with these audiences by virtue of the consumer opt-in. Brands can leverage them in remarketing, track consumer behavior to personalize messaging and outreach, and customize their user experience to build brand loyalty. For this reason, CRM (consumer relationship management) platforms will need to be compliant with consent management platforms to ensure the brand is aligned with privacy regulations. This gives the brands an opportunity to deliver higher ad relevance to their opt-in databases, through customization and personalization as well as more cost-efficiency in their advertising since they are a qualified and engaged audience.  

For third-party audiences (who have either opted-out or have yet to engage with a brand), brands will be limited in their ability to segment and customize the experience for that audience. As a result, targeting non-opt-in audiences will impact correlated conversions, reporting, KPI, and will be more expensive to reach because of the limitations on passing their behavioral data back to media platforms.   

To date, we’ve seen opt-in rates as low as 5% and as high as 25%, so the industry is expecting a major shift in how brands will target, track, and measure digital media efforts.  Even for the high end at a 25% opt-in rate, this is a fraction of what was reported historically. So, marketers will need to adjust their KPIs, benchmarks, and digital goals to account for the loss in visibility. In fact, a recent study from GetApp and HubSpot showed that 44% of marketers predict that advertisers will need to increase their ad spend by 5-25% to see the same results from 2021. 

Strategies for Engaging Third-Party Audiences  

Brands can turn to contextual advertising to reach new prospects and reengage audiences who opted-out. Instead of using third-party data segmentation to align audience and messaging, brands can opt for real-time contextual advertising – e.g., a news article, website, news feed, mobile app screen, or video game a user engages with. For instance, if a newyorktimes.com reader is looking at an article about the newest Superhero movie, they might see a contextual ad placed by Marvel reminding them of the release date.    

Before the cookie goes away, you can target:  

  • Consumer Profile  
  • Household Income  
  • Behavioral Interests  

After the third-party cookie goes away, you can target instead:  

  • Contextual advertising  
  • Broad Topics  
  • Web Browsing Themes 

The truth is, this is a global change that will impact everyone; internet users and consumers like you, digital advertisers like us, and publishers like Google. 

What can you do? 

Build out new measurement models and KPIs: We highly recommend building out measurement and analytic models as a framework for performance evaluation for digital channels.  Partner with your marketing team or agency to craft measurement and analytic models as a framework for performance evaluation for digital channels.  

Tracking is changing. Year over year measurement will no longer be informative in the ways it once was. So, start preparing and tracking new KPIs and designing measurement models to appropriately track your audience and performance before and after these changes take place. Look at performance from April 2021 compared to April 2022 and see how performance and audience data dips. This is a preview of what is to come with cookies.   

Engagement metrics are going to be key going forward. Selecting KPIs like click-through-rates, site visitations/landing page views will become key forms of digital marketing measurement. Supplemental reporting around leads, CRM growth, site engagement metrics will help to tell a story around brand engagement and marketing effectiveness. Consider evolving beyond just conversion-based or direct response benchmarks. The key will be to align on KPIs internally and to actively track and document performance across those metrics. Review these with your internal or external marketing team to assess historical trends and help forecast and identify areas of opportunity.  

Invest in First-Party Audience Development: It’s recommended to prepare your first-party audiences now before it’s too late. Set goals for CRM Database and Social follower growth.  This can be used for Email Marketing, Content, and/or Lead Generation. 

Work with your marketing team or agency to launch strategies designed to increase new audiences. By starting early, your organization will be equipped to keep advertising momentum when these targeting and tracking capabilities shut off.   

Segment first-party audiences for customized ad messaging: Building strategies to increase and engage with opt-in audiences are going to be foundational strategies. Brands need to think through how best to personalize online experiences to engage these audiences.  You can be more action-oriented in your messaging to an opt-in audience. Testing more direct messaging like “Get Tickets / Buy Now!” can work for engaged opt-in audiences while “Learn More” calls to action will be more appropriate for any third-party messaging.  

Categorizing and segmenting your engaged audiences will help you build out a better communication strategy. If you have segmented member or purchaser audiences, you can customize a message based on their buying behavior in a way that can help build patron loyalty. For instance, if you have a known or lapsed subscriber audience, you will want to customize a message to speak to renewing their subscription. Relevancy, personalized messaging, and immediacy of outreach will be important to ensure you are delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time.  

License Enterprise Technology and Partnerships: Engage in partnerships with technology partners and vendors at the forefront of data privacy.  This can include on-boarding a media buying platform, a consent-based analytics platform that plugs into ticketing, website improvements, data warehousing refinements, etc.  Talk to your agency or marketing team about what tools they are using for consent and data privacy compliance.  

While all these changes are going to change the way brands interact with their audiences, it’s important to understand nothing is concrete yet. Solutions are continuously being presented. Brands need to be open to leveraging their partner and vendor’s knowledge to navigate and find the solutions that work for them. Having these conversations now will be pivotal in preparing marketing teams and organizations for the changes that are expected in the next 9-12 months.

09 Nov 2021
Arts Marketing, Data, Digital, Digital Marketing Best Practices, Display, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Social Media, Tech Updates, Technical Tips, Tips, Trends Permalink

Navigating the Cookieless World: What we know & How we can Plan for the Future

November 9, 2021

Over the past year there has been an increase in conversation and expected impact of the upcoming industry changes when it comes to privacy and consumer data. Google and Apple are just a few organizations who have made headlines for their commitment to ensuring consumer privacy.  These changes will have a large impact on the marketing strategies and how brands will engage consumers.

For years, consumers have been advocating for more privacy and control of their data and how organizations are both collecting and using that information. Government policy as well as leading tech organizations are driving industry change to help support consumer privacy and data protection. Organizations like Google have announced that within the next few years they will move away from third-party cookies which track consumer behavior. Brands are then able to use that third-party data as a way to identify and segment specific audiences for advertising. Google’s commitment to eliminating the third-party cookies is another step to protect consumer data and ensure privacy, which will limit advertisers ability to target highly segmented audiences. Along with Google, Apple has announced the launch of their iOS14 updates which gave consumers more control over how their data is being collected and used. The industry is seeing a shift to empowering users to opt-in, or more often the case, opt-out of data sharing.  This gives the power to the consumers to decide when and how their data is collected and shared. These changes and movement toward consumer empowered data protecting is forcing the rest of the industry to accelerate their own privacy and data protection strategies. 

The good news is that these changes and challenges are not entirely new.  However, the questions remain: How can your organization prepare for the changes to come and what strategies can you implement to help support your marketing efforts? MogoSME’s latest Webinar discusses industry changes and strategies to help your organization prepare as we head into a “Cookieless World.” To support that discussion, the blog format will help support the webinar based conversation.

What big shifts are going on in the digital space?

Currently, consumer data is being collected by Cookies, which are a bit of code that enables brands and advertisers to target and track consumer behavior.  Brands have used that information to personalize online experiences, tailoring offerings and messaging to online users based on their preferences. Cookies now seem invasive as consumers become more aware of how much information is publicly available and that their data is often resold for purposes they are not always aware of.  In response, lawmakers are implementing data privacy laws and regulations to prevent advertisers from viewing and using data without consumer consent. As mentioned tech companies like Google and Apple are implementing additional privacy standards to adhere to regulations like GDRP and CCPA.  This is just the beginning as there are additional plans to include more privacy features by 2023.

Already most search browsers, to a varying degree, prevent cookie-tracking by default. Users would have to actively opt-in to tracking by changing the settings on their browsers. These browsers assume that most online users would prefer to not share their data. The industry is to move away from unclear data collection and sharing practices in favor of more consumer consent models of data sharing.     

When are we expecting to see these changes take place?

As mentioned before, some of these changes have already taken place. Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge were early adopters and limited third-party tracking on their browsers. In fact, by the end of the year all current browsers will have tracking disabled by default.  Apple now requires app developers to build in pop-up prompts in order to get explicit data sharing opt-ins from users. Google, by 2023, will remove all third-party tracking from their Chrome browsers. This will have a big impact on data collection as Chrome accounts for around 70% of all browser use (Statista, 2021). With opt-in rates as low as 5% and as high as 25% (Bloomberg, 2021), the industry is anticipating a real shift in how brands and advertisers target, track, and measure digital media initiatives. 

To support these changes, Google is currently testing out multiple, often competing, solutions in order to find the best approach to enable privacy and support advertising initiatives. Their goal is to standardize consent across all platforms, browsers, and apps, using a shared IF across these environments to enable tracking, targeting, and measurement. This would still ensure a consumer has the right to opt-in or out at any time. The two biggest solution options are UID2.0 and Liveramp ATS. Both are in the testing phase, but what we do know is that each is proposing email addresses become the identifiers for consumers and their opted in or out status. This means that email addresses will help identify consumer data privacy preferences and either enable or disable data tracking and sharing. 

There is still a lot of testing to identify the right solution. However, we know that privacy and security is nothing new for these technology companies who have already taken steps to prepare themselves and brand using their services for the changes to come.  Google is still helping to define a unified approach with the goal to support a cookieless environment starting early 2023. 

What will happen once these changes take place?

Once these changes go into effect, consumers will have more control of their digital footprint and what data they will and won’t share. This will put more responsibility on consumers to manage their opt-in or opt-out status, but will ultimately provide consumers more control over their data and give them a personalized approach to data sharing.

For advertisers, on the other hand, they will need to embrace a consent-based strategy to reach their audiences. Organizations will have to find the right privacy management solution to support consumers ability to opt-in (or out) of data sharing. Advertisers will also have to be more transparent on how they are using their consumer data, so looking for and exploring ways to speak to consumers about data utilization transparently and respectfully.

Along with finding the right privacy consent solution, advertisers will rely more heavily on their first-party audiences, where there is already a relationship between consumer and organization. Managing and supporting these audiences with personalization and quality content will become a big part of a brand’s strategy. 

There is still a lot of work to do to find the best solution, which creates an opportunity for creativity and testing once these changes take effect. Brands and advertisers can test our new strategies to message to their audience or new targeting approaches based on the industry-wide solution that Google will embrace, which means there will be some disruption as the industry challenges and vets new best practices.     

What impact will we see with paid digital marketing campaigns?

In terms of digital marketing impact, brands will have to shift their approach to targeting, optimizations, and measurement. The removal of third-party tracking, along with expected drops in first-party opt-ins, will result in a loss of conversion attribution. Conversion attribution accuracy will decrease as we will lose our ability to measure the impact of an ad against a direct outcome like formfill, ticket purchase, or product purchase. Overall, we will see lower conversions, higher CPAs, and will have to establish new benchmarks to help evaluate performance. 

Another impact will be on targeting. As the definition of a targetable audience will shift to only represent first-party and opt-in audiences, we do expect to see a decrease in retargeting audiences and a limit on how to target non-opted-in audience segments (that we can do today, but won’t in the future). This is one of the things Google is testing now.  One approach they have is that Google will create groups or cohorts of users that are large enough to make it impossible to identify individual characteristics, behaviors, or patterns.  These cohorts AKA Google’s FLOC (Federated List of Cohorts) will be available to advertisers to expand their targeting outside of their first-party audiences. This will provide consumer protection, decrease an advertisers ability to personalize ads toward a smaller audience segment, but still allow advertisers the ability to engage with prospecting audience segments. How this will work is still being defined by Google and their web standard partners like W3c (World Wide Web Consortium), which are working to define cohort audience segments. 

Along with audience size and target availability, optimizations and measurement will be impacted. As third-party cookies are removed, the industry is bracing for a loss in conversion data. This is due to the inability to track targeted audience across multiple environments like websites, apps, and platforms. The limitation in tracking will be reflected in measurement and performance metrics that advertisers report on. Brands will have to be more reliant on conversion modeling to help contextualize performance. Platform algorithms will no longer have the 1:1 correlation between ad and action the target audience takes. There will be a shift back toward more traditional correlated performance indicators used by methods like Media Mix Modeling to help understand advertising impact. Organizations will have to lean into their agency partners to build out new measurement solutions, benchmarks, and standard to correlate performance to their digital media efforts. 

Due to these impacts, current KPIs will no longer be valid. Cost per Acquisition will increase as attribution decreases. Due to these limitations we know we will not have full visibility into performance, which will increase all cost-based metrics, decrease in attributed conversions, and will require a new perspective to evaluate digital media impact.

How are agencies or advertisers minimizing the effects from the loss of third-party cookies?

It will be critical for organizations to lean into first-party audiences. Building strategies to increase and engage with opt-in audiences are going to be foundational strategies going forwards. Brands need to think through how best to personalize online experiences to engage these audiences.

Agencies will need to be an integrated partner to best support their clients. This will include partnering to build out measurement and analytic models as a framework for performance evaluation for their digital channels. An example of measurement model might look like taking media channel allocations and looking at ticket sales for the given campaign period vs. a period when the campaign was not active. Since we know attribution is limited, we would evaluate if there is a lift in ticket sales during the active campaign period to help look at correlated impact of the digital investment. This will require more collaboration between agency and brand to build a measurement framework to evaluate performance, make data-driven recommendations, and optimizations.  

On social channels, despite the limitation on third-party tracking on performance, there is still an opportunity to measure impact on your owned channels. Looking at campaigns to drive engagement or follower growth can help brands better evaluate the power of the social channel and support additional investment in those channels.

Another consideration is that social platforms are building out their own solutions to better support measurement for their advertisers. Facebook has introduced their Conversion API connecting an advertiser’s CRM, website, ecommerce platform, call center, mobile app, etc directly to Facebook bypassing the need for cookie-based audiences. Pending privacy policies, this will enable advertisers to customize and personalize their marketing messaging with consumer engagement with the online brand. The API enables organizations to share data directly from servers without cookie-based tracking.  

While we know measurement, data sharing, and organic engagement are all strategies that are being explored, the key area of focus for most brands will be on how to build and sustain their first-party audiences. Brands will have an opportunity to look for more innovation in how to drive value, measure performance, and understand the impact of their digital efforts.

Advice for organizations and industry leaders

There are a few opportunities organizations can take to get ahead of the impending changes. The first and foremost is for advertisers to spend time vetting and evaluating the right content management solution. Brands can spend time thinking about the right solution to help manage consumer privacy, communicate data transparency, and to deliver and engage the right content to their first-party audiences.  

Secondly, advertisers must remain flexible when it comes to measurement, audience targeting, and performance evaluation. Investing in your first-party data and especially your content strategy across paid, owned, and earned media channels. Finding ways to engage first-party audiences will be the foundation of their digital media strategies.  

Finally, advertisers can turn to their agencies and digital partners to take on a more strategic role. We know there is still a lot of uncertainty, but one thing we know is that agencies can support in redefining KPIs, evaluate current measurement strategies, and define new ways to look at and measure success for digital efforts. Look toward your agency partners as an extension of your marketing team to help navigate the impending changes.

To listen to this conversation, you can watch our recording here.