One of the more fascinating niche markets that has embraced our Digital Onboarding and Targeting platform has been professional sports.
Professional sports teams in basketball, football, baseball, and soccer need to fill their stadiums in order to make money. To fill the arena on a consistent basis, teams need to know who their ticket buyers are and who the consumer look-alikes are in the local market. This audience can be upsold to season tickets, special events, and team merchandise. Teams also target engaged fans at the last minute via digital media as qualified prospects for special offers, such as unsold tickets leading up to a specific game.
Teams we work with often mention that roughly one-third of the crowd is completely unknown to the club at any given home game. In addition, even though Google Analytics estimates visits, the identities of visitors to the team website remain largely unknown and are an unused asset.
At Semcasting, our job is to fill in the blanks:
1.Turn season ticket holders into digital assets
The key here is scale. Through Smart Zones, our IP Targeting match rate is typically greater than 85% and connects an address to multiple online delivery points: the home, the office, and mobile devices. Onboarding at scale significantly improves the ability to generate qualified leads.
2.Identify the 33% of the crowd that is unknown to the team (even though they may attend multiple home games)
Using Mobile Footprints, we turn in-stadium mobile activity into a true asset that teams can follow up on. Mobile DeviceIDs are enhanced with data to profile family composition, affluence, and distance to the arena to determine ideal candidates for pitches.
3.Identify and validate the website traffic
Using Semcasting’s UDX Leads, site visitors are compared to season ticket holders, the now-identified 33%, and the prospect lists being used in direct mail. Online-to-offline conversion allows for robust measurement on variables of interest such as travel time, age, income, home values, and use of sponsored products.
4.Target the identified audience with online advertising
Using stadium visit history, ticket holders, and their look-alikes, we run digital video campaigns (especially on mobile devices) to drive engagement to ticket outlets and team apps designed to generate sales. Because we serve the campaign and have access to website and purchase app traffic, we can quickly attribute points of sale to investments in advertising. Cost of upsell and cross-sale tickets routinely average between $4.00 and $15.00 per ticket sold with an 8-10X ROI.
A key metric for sports teams is that they have longer-term marketing campaigns in order to attract season ticket holders. However, they also have short-cycle campaigns to drive important one-off sales and garner interest. Short cycle campaigns require that prospects be identified and qualified quickly in the channels they are most likely to transact. Smart Zones IP Targeting is a uniquely positioned linking technology that can be used to identify anonymous activity both offline and online that can be linked to short- and long-term prospects on which a team can capitalize.
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Semcasting has been an industry leader in audience building, onboarding, and qualification since 2009. We built our own robust database of consumers and businesses, supported by a patented predictive modeling technology. Our IP onboarding and qualification technology — Smart Zones — is backed by an initial patent granted in 2014 and a continuation patent granted in 2016 for device analytics and attribution in support of the Internet of Things. Smart Zones is unique in that it allows for far more granular onboarding and targeting when compared to other IP-Geo services — being several thousand times more accurate than a zip-code on average. Our mobile targeting technology, Mobile Footprints, covers 125+ million mobile devices with the ability to map every identified device back to any other location visited over the last 7 to 90 days.