Facebook In Hyperdrive

Marketing can get wonky, and this article certainly drifts into some techno-babble, but for promoters trying to fully implement a marketing strategy for their events, it’s imperative to know the complete toolkit Facebook has to offer.

The social media network shared with Pollstar one of its newest offers, Custom Audiences, and AEG explained how it was used for the recent, two-day August outdoor event featuring Phoenix and The Strokes.

The important figure here is 2 percent. That’s the amount of the marketing budget AEG spent on its Facebook campaign, and yet that investment generated 15 percent of ticket sales. According to Facebook, the Custom Audiences strategy has an irresistible risk/reward ratio: for every dollar invested in FYF’s ad spend, there was up to a $1,066 return in revenue, depending on which avenues were used.

The end result is that a potential ticket buyer – be it a fan of Phoenix, someone who visited the FYF Fest’s website or a person who went to the previous event – will have a Facebook news feed that will include a sponsored post about the festival. Meanwhile, customized ads will appear on the ad space on the right of the screen.

Like Phoenix? Maybe you’d like to see them at this event. Custom Audiences creates this in several ways, including through Facebook’s “pixel” tags. By placing a pixel on the FYF website, Facebook can tell AEG which accounts have visited.

There are also people who “like” any of the acts on the FYF lineup. And for the email accounts provided to the marketing team, Facebook can match them to social media accounts.

“There are about 60,000 people who follow the FYF Facebook page,” Alex Ayvazian, who handles digital marketing for AEG, told Pollstar. “But in order to increase our reach, and to reach people not connected to that page, we put together a campaign where we reach the fans of that specific page, fans of the certain artists on the lineup, and past ticket buyers. Facebook will upload those emails and match those emails to FB users who have their own profile.”

Lindsay Lyons, digital marketing director for Goldenvoice, commended Custom Audience for its adaptability. If one part of it wasn’t working, the ad spend could be rearranged and put emphasis on another aspect.

“We were literally making changes in real time,” Lyons said. “We are our own ad managers. We can change our budget and it will go live basically immediately. In theory it’s more important to rein in a spend as it is to spend.”

Custom Audiences is also tremendously scalable, she added. It can be a $50 marketing campaign for a small club show, or a $50,000 campaign for a Concerts West / AEG arena show. Yes, AEG is still investing in street teams, billboards and flyers, hoping to catch the eye of a potential concertgoer, but Facebook hits the target audience immediately.

“As we see successes of this scale it will encourage us to partition more of our marketing budget to appropriate spend on the platform,” she said.

“At the same time, Facebook is testing out new products,” Ayvazian added. “They just released a mobile ad network where you can target Facebook ads in other apps outside the Facebook app. There is also Atlas, where you can track campaigns of Facebook ads outside the Facebook site. As it continues, we’re investing.”

Facebook stresses that the customer list is kept secure, with all the information hashed – meaning no one can read it or un-encrypt it, including Facebook.”

Interested parties can go to the “Facebook for Business” site for more information, resources and contact info.