Since my last post business prospects for the company I currently work for as Director of Marketing continue to improve.

• The January event increased gate sales by 16% over the previous year. Interestingly, during that year the spend was some $25,000 more than I budgeted for this event.  The entertainment package offered went from Nationally known recording artist to simply a local DJ.
• After the January event, we scheduled an additional event last minute – one that would take place only 3 weeks later (and one I might add that eliminated well over 1/2 of our target demographic).  I was able in only 3 weeks time to market this event so successfully that we managed to match internal estimates, and beat external estimates 4 fold.
• Our most recent event, taking place in February, had even more shocking positive results – a 5% increase over total gate from the previous year, despite every conceivable reason and conventional wisdom why it shouldn’t – most especially, the competition out spending us on entertainment and marketing 50:1, the other events taking place on the same weekend with the potential to split out demographic, and yet another event (world known) taking place right down the road. In addition, the government and local press were clearly in the corner of our competitor.  My marketing literally decimated the competition by turning their strengths into weaknesses (not in a harsh or out of bounds way, but in a way that ‘turned the tables’ in the minds of our shared demographic) and were it not for the deep pockets which back up that business, I’m confident they could not carry on.  It was a classic case study on the difference between a professional marketer (myself) and an amateur (their team).  That 5% gain should have, and could have, easily been a 25-40% loss.

Some interesting Social Media/Advertising/Email/Website statistics follows:

• In November the business counted 28,000 Facebook fans among it’s ranks – it now has over 36,000.
• The performance of the Facebook ads came in over .2 average. I created 10 ads over the life of the campaign, continuing to test and tweak.  One ad had a steady .453, and another actually posted a .913 (something no one I’ve spoken with has ever seen before – we’re all shocked at a .5, .6, or .7).  In understanding how important these statistics are it’s important to note – you do well on that platform to achieve a .2.
• Over the last 4 seasons (since opening) our website has always been on a shared server.  The growth of the site under my direction has caused us to move to a VPS.  In fact, for several weeks we were running so much traffic the provider was continually checking to see if we had a DDOS attack of some type happening.  The server load became so un-balanced that it tripped and completely shut our site down, forcing the move. In a two hour period we actually had over 36,000 hits to our site and kept bumping up to the threshold limit.  The determination was that it all came from legitimate traffic and the only recourse was to move us from shared to VPS.
• Email Marketing has really shined and is something I’ve not spoken about.  We use Constant Contact which is a good service and has very reliable stats.  Our highest email Open Rate for the last event achieved 31.5% — the lowest 18.2% (on the third and final email of the campaign).  The average open rate in our market segment is 19%, so I was able to easily beat that statistic when coupled with the first email which had an Open Rate of 27.3%.
• My marketing achievements concerning Email doesn’t end there.  In addition to an Open Rate well above the average, we also blew out the average Click Thru Rate (which averages around 16% in our market segment) with a high of 29.8% (once again this high came from email #2). Email #1 had a CTR of 11.8% and Email #3 had a 20.6%.  So both in terms of Open Rate and CTR it was a tremendous win.

One lesson from this latest email campaign is this – Video is King!  Placing a video in the email helped those high CTR’s, and in the 2 emails where video was a choice, 69% chose it in one email, and over 50% chose it in another.  If you’re reading this and hoping to learn some tips (and I don’t give away information often) the tip is this – make sure to provide directional links on the video page if you’re hoping to get people to buy.  Don’t simply rely on placing them within the email itself as people will not return to the email.

We now have enough reliable information to show that pre-sales account for an average 10% of total gate sales.

Though continuing to work with this company, I am open for consultations.

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