1. Conversion tracking

As of just a few months ago you can place Facebook conversion code on the thank you page of your site. This allows you to see the number of sales from Facebook users who have viewed or clicked on your sponsored content.

Insights:

-We are seeing a positive ROI on all campaigns so far. Proof that social media can be tracked and make money.

-The ads that convert the best (i.e. drive the most sales) are delivered to friends of fans. I initially thought that ads served to friends would drive the highest ROI but I was wrong. This just proves what makes Facebook so powerful and that is the power of the social endorsement. When users see something their friends like, they are far more likely to click on it and purchase.

2. Audiences

Late last year, Facebook released “Audiences” which allows advertisers to import email addresses into the ad tool. Facebook will then match Facebook accounts to the list of emails and advertisers can serve Facebook ads to the email addresses that have associated Facebook accounts. This is a great tool for arts marketers. You can import all the ticket buyers from relevant past shows and deliver ads for current shows. And with conversion tracking (outlined above), measure your success and optimize.

3. Lookalike Audiences

Even better than Audiences is the brand new “Lookalike Audiences.” One past challenge with Facebook advertising was when you narrowed into a target audience using interests, your target group was very small. If you want to target college educated female dance lovers over 30 in Atlanta you can do so with interests. Trouble is you may only get 10,000 users, so it’s not scalable. With Lookalike Audiences, advertisers can import an email list of customers and Facebook will run a magic algorithm to find lookalikes. So with a list of 10,000 email addresses of your current customers, Facebook will find 50,000 users that are similar, for example.

Insights:

-This feature launched last week so we have only tested this with one client, but the click through rate for the ad with the imported email list was 8%. The lookalike, 7%! Not bad.

Quick note. You need to use Power Editor for Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

The post Three New Features in Facebook Advertising to Deliver and Track ROI appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

Typically, it takes multiple touch points along the funnel for a prospect to become a customer.  Smart marketers know they need touch points all along the funnel in order to turn prospects into customers. But with limited budgets, marketers must prioritize where along the funnel to focus budgets and efforts.

All top-of-the-funnel efforts should be about driving down-funnel activity.  So eventually most of your efforts are at the middle of the funnel and below.

Marketing at the top of the funnel is less efficient and more expensive.  It allows you to reach a larger universe, most of whom will not be interested in what you are selling. However if you have a large marketing budget you have the luxury of more of this type of marketing. Examples include buying banner ads to on a newspaper’s web site or purchasing an email blast from a magazine.

Marketing at the middle and bottom of the funnel is about turning people who already care about you into customers.  This includes email and social media marketing.  This tends to drive much higher ROIs but requires a pool of interested prospects.

If you do allocate resources to the top of the funnel, it should incorporate a major element of driving down-funnel activity. For example, any banner ad placed on a publisher’s site (i.e. NYTimes.com) should drive users to a website that has a primary or secondary purpose of collecting a lead.  This lead can be in the form of an email address, social follow, or even a tracking pixel so you can later serve the prospect a remarketing ad.  If you don’t do this, you are going to need to pay the newspaper publisher the next time you wish to reach this prospect…and the next time…. And so on, continuing this vicious cycle of dumping your budget at the top of the funnel.

In an ideal world, if you focused all your past top of the funnel efforts on lead gen, you would be able to fill your theaters with just a few emails, social posts and remarketing ads. After all, you have a giant list of prospects who care about you.

This is not to say you should not be engaging in new audience development efforts, which mostly occur at the top of the funnel. But I’d argue it is much easier to capture an email address or a social follow than to sell a ticket. So all your audience development efforts should include lead collection as a primary goal.

Need help collecting leads on your website? Check out Leadacity.

The post Focus Further Down the Digital Funnel appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

Result 1: Ability to participate in more competitive auctions and grow non-brand keywords
With the increased CPC, grant accounts are able to participate in more competitive keyword auctions, ones we could not utilize under the $1 max. And most importantly these auctions are for non-brand keywords, the keywords that have the best potential for new business. In the past, terms like “Arts Events Bay Area” were above the $1 max, so Grant accounts ads even with very high quality scores rarely appeared. Now grant accounts are getting shown more often in these auctions.

Result 2: Still room to grow
Since most arts organizations serve regional audiences, it was very hard to use the entire $10,000 monthly budget at the previous $1 CPC max. There simply was not enough search demand on keywords, even when you got very creative. So, by increasing bids from $1 to $2, arts orgs can engage in more competitive auctions and still not hit the $10,000 monthly ceiling.   If you were serving a national audience it would be much easier to burn through the full $10,000 each month. So organizations that have a more national footprint will not be able to drive as many clicks.

However, rarely is a $2 bid billed at $2.  The amount charged is driven by the competitiveness of the auction.  So sometimes a $2 bid will only be charged $1.02 when clicked,  for example.  But now your grant account can compete in this auction for just an additional $.02, where in the past you couldn’t even compete.

Result 3: Average position improving
I was initially concerned that average ad position would decrease with Google Grant accounts now appearing below paid account results. However, we have seen higher positions which result in more clicks. This may seem strange, but I think grant accounts were so limited by the $1 ceiling, even with great quality scores, they could not appear in some auctions they belonged in. This is going to get technical, so bear with me.

Google determines ad position with this formula:

Ad position = max CPC x Quality Score

(Quality score is determined by many factors including landing page relevance, how well your keywords match your ad, account organization, etc.)

So even if you had a quality score of 8 with a max CPC of $1, your best possible rating for that keyword would be 8 (8 x 1). If non-grant advertisers were bidding a $3 max CPC and had a quality score of 6, they would get an ad position of 18 and your 8 would be too low for your ads to appear, even though your ad is super relevant. This is how ticket brokers can appear in search results but your grant ads would not.

Now that well organized grant accounts have a $2 max CPC, ad positions are getting boosted. Grant accounts still may not appear in some auctions or may appear below non-grant advertisers, but overall position is improving   Plus ads driven by brand terms are still appearing in the first position bringing up the average.

Client Case Study
We saw the following results in the first week after the change for a regional theater client:

- Impressions tripled
- Clicks doubled
- Cost tripled
- Average position improved
- CPC almost doubled
- Conversions stayed flat (with the caveat that a production was winding down)

What does this mean? The higher CPC allows this account to participate in more non-branded term auctions and appear in a higher position, which results in more clicks. Conversions typically come from auctions using branded terms, which usually follow non-branded searches (first a user searches “Theaters in San Francisco,” the next search, once the user knows the theater name and production, is a brand term search and this is the session where they purchase).  However, on the branded terms, the client did not see an advantage of having a higher CPC.  So conversions are not seeing the same increases at this point, but eventually will.  In the long run, improving engagement on the general terms should help raise conversions or assist with conversions both online and offline.

Bottom Line
These changes are good news for arts organizations and increase the importance of having a Google Grant and using AdWords.

The post Google Grant Changes: Early Learnings appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

There is nothing more important than growing a list of leads of people who care about you. In the digital realm this is comprised of email addresses and social media followers. With each new lead you collect, you need to pay less money to the 3rd party media middleman (i.e. newspaper and radio) when it comes time to sell tickets. That way, you will fill your theater much more quickly and cost-effectively.

Think about it. When it comes time to sell that new production which organization is going to do better:

- Organization A has over 50,000 email addresses they’ve collected from past ticket buyers and visitors to their website. They’ve focused on social fan acquisition and have 45,000 Facebook Likes.

- Organization B has the same annual budget size as A, but has not been focused on lead acquisition. They have just 20,000 addresses on their email list and just a few thousand Facebook followers.

Clearly A is in a far better position. With the large lead pool, A will need to spend far less on paid media. A few emails and social posts and the house will begin to fill. Organization B is going to have to work much harder to get press attention and pay much more money to the media to fill their house. They are in a vicious cycle of “renting” rather than “buying” their leads.  This makes it harder to sell their current production and causes the vicious cycle to continue.

But buying your list takes time and effort; time many arts marketers do not have when faced with immediate sales goals.   This is why we created Leadacity.

Leadacity is a website plug-in that helps you generate email addresses and Facebook “Likes” from your website visitors, the most fertile ground for people who care about your organization.

Organizations like Alvin Ailey, New York City Center, and Lincoln Center Theater have already captured thousands of new leads with Leadacity. We’ve seen Leadacity collect leads from as many as 4% of visitors on the pages it is placed on.

We built Leadacity especially for arts marketers knowing you have limited development budgets and want full integration with your email platform. Learn more about how it can work for you here.

The post Want to Sell More Tickets? Collect More Email Addresses and Facebook Likes. appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

I have not yet used this tool (this was rolled out in beta to just a small universe of users) but knowing what I do know about Facebook and Search Engine Optimization, I am going to make some suggestions as to how I think arts orgs should prepare for this new feature.

1. Make sure your “About” section is up to date, complete, and keyword-rich.

First, double check that your contact information is correct. You want to make sure that Facebook search can place you on a map.

Second, check your categories. If you are a theater, make sure that is reflected in your primary category. You may want to add a second or third category like “Performing Arts Education” if you offer these services. Often these categories were selected by the intern that set up your account years ago, before we knew how powerful Facebook would be. Check to see what categories similar organizations are using.

Third, review the description of your organization in the “About” section. Make sure important keywords are included. A ballet company would want the words “dance,” “dancers,” and “ballet” at the very minimum. Think through all of the ways you could be found in search. Check your top organic keywords in Google Analytics and make sure they are in your description. You need to be comfortable amending your stock “About” language here if necessary.

2. Focus on getting more “Likes”

The more users who “Like” you, the better your chances of showing up in search results. Here are some ways to earn more “Likes”:

Send a dedicated email to your list asking them to “Like” you on Facebook. Make sure to outline the benefits such as seeing your breaking company news, discount offers, sweepstakes opportunities, and content.

Run a paid Page “Like” campaign. Target friends of current fans or relevant interests or other organizations that align with yours. You can also import all the email addresses from your email list into Facebook and target these users to “Like” you since they are likely converts.

Pardon the plug, but we recently launched a software plug-in called Leadacity to help you garner more Facebook “Likes” from your web site visitors. Your website is a fertile ground for Facebook “Like” prospects.

3. Encourage users to post about your organization on Facebook

It’s one thing for you to post about your organization, but it’s even better if Facebook users are posting links on your behalf.  Google’s search rank is heavily influenced by links to a site from other sites.  This shows Google that a site is credible and popular so they boost the site’s search rankings. I believe that Facebook will do the same.

In order to get users to post about you, provide content that is very sharable and even ask for a share when you post.

Add “Like” or “Recommend” buttons  to sharable content throughout your website.

Build post-purchase sharing into your e-commerce path so users can post about the tickets they purchased immediately after completing a transaction. Finally, ask users to post about their experience on Facebook in your pre and post-event emails, when excitement about a performance is at its peak.

These steps should prepare you for the larger release. We will know more once this feature is available to everyone, including the advertising and sponsorship features that Facebook will offer with social search. Super exciting stuff if Facebook gets this right.

The post Preparing Your Organization for Facebook Search appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

Go for an emotional connection
Emotions drive giving. Why do animal charities show dogs behind bars or children’s charities show emaciated kids? Because these images elicit powerful emotions that drive giving. How can your appeal bring out emotions? Most people who go to performances do so because they have an emotional connection to what is on the stage. How can you elicit those feelings? Videos or well-written appeals that can take a person back to a particular show or moment in a show can have a powerful emotional pull. Or paint a picture visually or with words of what could happen if you don’t have the budgets you need to do your work.

What is the benefit?
The Obama campaign raised lots of money using benefits like winning dinner with the President and Beyonce. While you probably can’t offer that kind of star power, we’ve seen clients do well offering CDs or DVDs of performances. What can you offer to donors? Benefits increase your response rates and can be used to drive larger gifts.

It’s about the donor, not you
This seems counterintuitive, but try to make the written materials about the donor, not you. Write about their experience in the theater or what their gift will do. How many times can you include “you” or “your” in your appeals?

Gotta Get A Gimmick
A plain letter from your artistic director pasted into an email no longer cuts it. You need something that will break through the clutter and get people engaged. A beautiful video, an infographic, a major give-away. Think bigger than last year.

Resend to non-openers
Here is a tactical email trick. Two days after you send your first appeal, resend the exact same appeal to everyone who didn’t open the first time. You can increase your overall opens by 30%. Read all about that here.

The post Gimme More, Gimme Gimme More appeared first on Capacity Interactive.

Facebook posts are now seen by 30-50% fewer users.  If you have 10,000 fans, in the past, a good post with lots of engagement could reach 2,000 users.  Now, a similar post is lucky to reach half that number.

Over the past year Facebook has been aggressively promoting Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories.  These advertising units allow page admins to boost the number of fans that see their posts.  With some money behind the post, it can go from 10-15% of fans seeing a post to more than 50%.

With Facebook now a public company, they are under pressure to bring in more advertising dollars.  Now it is evident that charging brands and organizations to reach their fans and prospects is one of the ways they are going to do it.  Frustrating?  Yes.  A reality?  You bet.

Eyeballs have moved from the pages of newspapers to the pages of Facebook.  Facebook is the #2 most visited site on the web and users spend, on average, 405 minutes per month on the site, according to comScore.

Facebook is a natural fit for arts organizations.  Facebook is a visual medium.  People visit Facebook for leisure and to escape.  Luckily arts orgs also provide leisure and escape.  (It is not like we are selling paper clips or insurance).   Our patrons enjoy seeing us on Facebook and we can easily reach them and connect with them there.

So is Facebook becoming like a newspaper?  For a brand or organization to guarantee presence, do you have to pay to play?  I am afraid that is the new normal.  Facebook has spent eight years building the assets to become an essential part of any digitally-savvy organization’s marketing mix.  And we fell right into Facebook’s web when it was essentially free.  Now with so many organizations deeply invested, they have changed the rules.

So from here, two things can happen.  Brands and organizations can realize the value of Facebook and pony up the cash.  Or they revolt against Facebook and begin to move their efforts to other social tools like Google+ and Pinterest that are less commercial.  If that happens, my guess is that eventually these networks will eventually work to monetize organizations that use their platform to market.  And then the process will continue.

For now, we recommend that arts orgs spend the effort and money to hire staff or agencies that can help them take advantage of Facebook’s marketing tools.  And invest the money to boost efforts on Facebook.  Facebook has built an incredibly powerful marketing interface.

To learn more, check out this article I wrote for Musical America called Best Practices: Facebook Marketing for Arts Organizations.

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