Mining your event marketing mountain & "digital dust"
When starting with a new client, I conduct a thorough marketing audit. The sophisticated process involves taking a very detailed look at an event's financial health and marketing assets.
In every audit to date, not a single client has been fully leveraging some of their most valuable data.
Several well-established events have a mountain of marketing data. The problem with a mountain of data is that most events don't even know what to look at or where to look. To be fair, it's a daunting task. It's a mountain for Pete's sake ... there's lots of it, and it's unruly! Much like data.
Years ago, I discovered that a new client that had over 90,000 previous customers hiding in plain sight. Unfortunately, those customers were never marketed to, and the customer database collected "digital dust." What does that mean?
Over time, data accumulates "digital dust." The data goes out of date or certain aspects fundamentally change. Here's a simple example. A customer's email address might have changed in the five years since they've purchased a ticket to your event. In most cases, and without a good process in place, that customer data is lost forever. The client mentioned above lost almost 20,000 customer email addresses due to digital dust.
Much like mining, and what little I know about it (a little more than zero), you don't try to mine the entire mountain if there are only a few veins of gold.
You start with a little research to find the best places to mine for gold. Then you put your limited resources into action. In the case of every event, a potential gold mine of data is your previous customer file.
Do you know where to find your previous customer information? Is there a process in place to prevent it from collecting digital dust?
So before trying to create some fancy new ad or Facebook campaign (both fraught with danger), go mine that "gold mine" of previous customers!
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