Driving ticket sales by expanding direct fan relationships

Challenge

There’s a large and growing appetite for live entertainment experiences across the US, with sports providing some of the very best unique days out for a spectrum of audiences. However, understanding which audiences to target, and the right channels to target them through, to fully maximize game day revenue presents a commercial challenge as event organizers compete for leisure dollars against other sports and non-sports experiences.

Insight

Since 2002, the annual MexTour has seen the Mexican national soccer team play just under 100 friendly games across the United States. However, with the markets and venues chosen to host games changing every year, Soccer United Marketing (SUM), the tour’s commercial agent, is challenged with selling tickets to a largely different audience every tour.

Solution

Capturing fan data, and building direct fan relationships with Mexican soccer fans in North America, would enable SUM to more effectively and efficiently allocate their marketing spend for ticket sales for US MexTour games, and build an engaged fanbase of Mexican soccer fans in the US for future MexTours.

Action

In a trial in 2019, Two Circles conducted SUM’s first ever programmatic paid media campaign using first-party data, creating audience segments out of first-party data and achieving an ROI four times higher than a control audience segment of third-party data.

For the 2020 MexTour, Two Circles built on this work by supporting SUM in acquiring first-party audience data to create direct fan relationships with Mexican soccer fans, and designing a data-driven paid media campaign to acquire new ticket-purchasers.

To acquire first-party data, Two Circles used data around SUM’s existing audience to inform a mix of video and display marketing assets that used targeted copy, messaging and creative. This was delivered to a targeted audience through paid social to acquire new fans and deliver direct ticket sales.

Promotional competitions – sweepstakes and giveaways – were also specifically targeted to audiences through paid social to drive data acquisition, as well as growing the property’s English language social channels.

As a result of these efforts, new user site traffic increased by 865%, growing data for future retargeting.

Subsequent ticket marketing campaigns utilized this new first-party data as part of the overall campaign mix and yielded strong results, with 20% of ticket purchasers for the two US MexTour games in Charlotte (North Carolina) and Arlington (Texas) coming from newly-acquired users.

“The work with Two Circles has been critical in establishing the framework to significantly grow our consumer database, while at the same time helping us reveal insights to inform our marketing and commercial efforts across all our properties.”

Gloria Molina, Event Marketing, SUM