Athletes and marketers have a lot in common. They both work hard to understand and assess the competitive landscape to develop strategies for scoring against their opponents. They both use teamwork and aggressive defense to protect their assets, whether it is the end zone, the basketball hoop, or their proprietary technologies and Intellectual Property. Both hustle for that one big play and opportunity to intercept the ball, charge down the field and change the game forever in their favor.
In the sports industry, marketers play an integral role in helping promote teams so that fans can purchase merchandise, follow their favorite players online and score season tickets to upcoming games. The sports industry is big business indeed. According to Plunkett Research, the estimated size of the sports industry within the U.S. is around 435 Billion for 2012 with annual company ad spend right around 18.6 Billion. Since this is a huge investment for advertisers with huge opportunity, marketers definitely need a way to optimize how they are spending their dollars.
A step in the right direction, CoreMotives, a marketing automation company owned by Silverpop just announced that it has integrated with Ticketmaster to provide marketers with new revenue-tracking capabilities to connect ticket sales to specific digital marketing efforts. The company works with numerous professional sports teams to aid their digital marketing efforts, including the New Jersey Devils and the Seattle Seahawks. These marketers, like most, are challenged with developing highly targeted, multichannel campaigns that educate and engage while also driving more revenue.
“Professional sports teams in particular choose CoreMotives as a marketing automation provider because of the platform’s ability to leverage their fans’ preferences to send relevant and targeted messages that build loyalty while also driving ticket sales,” said CoreMotives co-founder Rhett Thompson. “With the new Ticketmaster tracking capabilities, these marketers can now get even more strategic in their approach and determine which campaigns are getting the best results.”
Before this integration, marketers had a hard time culling through the mounds of campaign data to analyze which advertising initiatives drove the most ticket sales. With its new Ticketmaster revenue-tracking capabilities, marketers can transform Ticketmaster’s aggregate monthly sales summaries reports into more detailed reports that carefully track how individual email campaigns are performing. This information, in turn, helps marketers fuel and optimize future campaigns based on what the learned the first time around.
Thompson added, “Any marketer that has the ultimate goal of selling tickets through email benefits from [our Ticketmaster] integration, including those in the music industry. Before this integration, there was a disconnect between marketing efforts and ticket sales. With the integration in place, revenue can be attributed all the way down to the email level, even specifically identifying the individual who made a purchase from a specific mailing. Marketers now have even more behavioral data on their contacts within their CRM systems, allowing them to target specific campaigns to those who have, or even haven’t, purchased tickets in the past.”
Silverpop is a digital marketing technology provider that unifies marketing automation, email, mobile and social, similar to competing technologies offered by Marketo, Eloqua, and Optify. In March, Silverpop acquired CoreMotives, a marketing automation platform that operates within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
Marketing automation through a centralized platform arms brands with the tools they need to plan, execute and track campaign performance. According to Doug Wheeler, CMO of Optify, “As more companies, not just the big brands, realize the power and efficacy of content-based and inbound marketing, these companies will drive marketing software providers to deliver solutions that provide integration, execution and reporting of both their inbound and outbound efforts. It’s not enough to have email and lead nurturing combined with a myriad of point solutions to deliver more and better leads. Delivering a holistic demand generation approach that enables professional marketers to truly understand the value of all their digital marketing programs and make fast, informed tradeoffs will win in 2013.”