New tools from Google Maps and Foursquare are designed to spur impulse buying - including tickets to your event. Here's a look at how these latest ticket trends work.
New Foursquare Ads & Your Venue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8JqUlQj43M
Foursquare has been a staple of event awareness for sometime now, but just this week the popular location based service has opened up its unique advertising to all businesses of any size. Previously exclusive to big national retail chains like Starbucks, the ad service has genuine potential to spur ticket sales when used correctly. As described in the Foursquare blog post announcement:
Here is a problem that all local business owners know: they want to get more customers, but tons of people walk by their storefront without coming in. We created Foursquare ads to solve this problem. We can connect great local businesses with the people nearby that are most likely to become customers...Today, we’re opening Foursquare ads to all small businesses around the world.
The critical takeaway for venue owners is how the new Foursquare ads serve the impulsive needs of would be ticket buyers.
The ad service uses geo-fencing, that is it only displays ads that are relative to the Foursquare user’s physical location, usually an area of just a few city blocks. The benefit to an event using Foursquare ads is the very high rate of return on the money spent. Fickle consumers have a habit of hearing a radio ad for an event in the middle of the week (“That sounds fun, we should go to that on Saturday..”), then forget about it when they are out and about on the night of the event. Foursquare location based ads solve the problem of ephemeral event awareness.
Traditional advertising will always have a place in event awareness, but new ticket trends like Foursquare ads offer a level of very fine grained control. For example, on a busy Saturday night, hundreds of people are just finishing dinner at local restaurants and want something fun to do that is close by, preferably within walking distance. Foursquare will display your event to those diners and, if you choose to allow it, offer up a form of coupon or special discount.
Foursquare isn't the only platform offering new tools to venue owners…
Your Venue In The New Google Maps
Responding to impulsive consumer needs is also the goal of the recently updated Google Maps for mobile phones. Up until just recently, the Google Maps platform was all over the map (pun intended) as it was spread across more than five different services leading to a lot of confused business owners. But now Google has conflated nearly all of its location based advertising into two pillars for small business owners.
For restaurant owners, Google's recent acquisition of the Zagat review service makes it almost a turnkey effort to have their business be brought to the attention of would be diners. If a restaurant is already listed by Zagat, it will be displayed to consumers searching in the immediate area using their mobile phones. It is important to note that Google Maps is the number one app for iPhone and Android, with millions of people using it to get directions every day.
Beyond restaurants, it is easy to have any type of venue appear on Google Maps. Since Google Maps mobile ad service is technically an extension of Google Adwords, there isn't much of a learning curve:
Over one billion people use Google Maps services every month. On the Google Maps app, these users are often searching for local businesses - from restaurants, to car dealerships, to dentists, and more. Recently, we launched a new version of the Google Maps app for Android, iPhone, and iPad where we introduced several new features. Today we’re introducing an updated ad experience we think is more attractive for users and more effective for advertisers.
Both Foursquare and Google Maps can be configured to offer up an incentive to consumers that is redeemable on a hyper-short term basis. While coupons are not new, geo-fenced coupons that expire within hours are new. Event awareness is a good fit for mobile ad services like Foursquare and Google Maps, but there is one caveat - one must be using the right ticketing software first!
ThunderTix Ticket Coupons
The ThunderTix coupon feature can be your command station for offering coupons and incentives with or without the addition of Foursquare and Google Maps advertising. Our coupon technology is specific to event ticket sales and has the same fined grained control for redemption as Google and Foursquare. But unlike Google and Foursquare, ThunderTix coupons do not charge you any fees or extract a percentage from the sale - in fact we never charge you per-ticket fees!
ThunderTix coupons provide your patrons with the flexibility of not having to choose all of their event dates ahead of time by subscribing to a steady stream of coupons. Every time one of your patrons purchases tickets to an event, they will be emailed a unique coupon code that they can use for all the productions that you included with a ticket package. As each performance becomes available for purchase, your buyers go to your website, choose their desired date, time, and their preferred seats. Then on the checkout page, they’ll enter the unique coupon code for each ticket in their basket.
If you are interested in adding ThunderTix coupons to your repertoire of ticket sales tools, please contact us.