Calgary Sports Teams are Winning by Tripling Ticket Sales and Driving 4.5X Return on Ad Spend

Speaker 1: 0:01

You're in the marketing world and you're looking for inspiration, or you're a business leader who wants to understand what good marketing looks like. You're busy. You don't have time to sit around listening to a rambling 3 hour podcast. We get it. This is the Remarkable Marketing Podcast, where we celebrate the marketing rock stars that deliver truly remarkable marketing, when you'll hear short interviews with marketing execs who share stories about the best marketing they've ever done, how it delivered a huge impact and how they overcame all the challenges to make it happen. If you aspire to be remarkable, you'll walk away with ideas on how to do truly epic marketing. Getting right to the content of what you need for busy professionals, this is the Remarkable. Marketing Podcast. Now your host, Eric Eden.

Speaker 2: 0:56

Welcome to the Remarkable Marketing Podcast. Today. Our guest is Dave Taylor. Dave is a digital marketing expert with over 15 years experience and he is the co-founder of an agency called In Front Marketing in Calgary. He has been building this firm there for almost a decade. He's worked with hundreds of clients on digital marketing and advertising, seo and websites. He's had the fortune of working with all the major sports teams in Calgary. I think we're going to talk a little bit about that today and some of the things he's done there. Welcome to the show, dave. Thanks, eric. I appreciate you having me Tell us a little bit about your firm and what you've been doing with the sports teams there in Calgary. Sure.

Speaker 3: 1:49

In Front Marketing was born in 2015. We had the joy of building an agency right through the mix of COVID. We actually moved into our first dedicated office space. We were working in a co-working space and we had moved right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, had an open house, 120 people here and three weeks later the whole world shut down, building an agency through some of the most challenging times, starting in a recession, starting through COVID. We're really fortunate to be hitting that 10-year mark coming up next year and have seen seven-figure growth over the years with a small dedicated team.

Speaker 2: 2:30

That's great. You have the privilege of getting to do marketing for some of the big sports teams there in Calgary, including the Flames.

Speaker 3: 2:39

Tell us a little bit about that, that's right, yeah, For about six years now we've worked with the Calgary Flames, the Roughnecks, the Hitman, the Sam Peters, as well as helped them launch the Wranglers. Now we work with a few other sports properties here in Calgary, but we would be considered not only their agency of record. We also manage all of their data assets and have now also onboarded another professional sports league for managing all of the data. That's cool.

Speaker 2: 3:09

What kind of great things have you done in that sports marketing area in terms of the digital marketing and websites and SEO?

Speaker 3: 3:18

Yeah, I think for us it's all been centered around owning the data and then leveraging that to ensure you have clarity for not only your return on investment but for the audience that are interacting with each of the properties. The thing about professional sports here in Calgary is that you have to have a lot of they're all kind of under one umbrella for the most part. We have a basketball team here that's under its own ownership, but all of the football, the cross, junior hockey and professional hockey is all under one property and there's a lot of crossover within their data of the audiences, how they interact with the brands and then purchasing. So prior to working with us, there was actually really little clarity for them on what audiences were interacting, how they were buying tickets. They were really just using Ticketmaster, who some people will know is just promote. Here's a game. They leverage their audiences, they own the data and the teams don't necessarily get to own any of that data and they don't really get the clarity as well, as they can't really change the assets that are in market to promote specific things that are out the game. So our sell was ownership of the data, really bringing everything in-house, forcing all of the assets to track through a landing page, ensuring we have clarity on the devices that people are using, building data sets on who those audiences are, allowing us to remarket specific games or specific messages, and then also tracking to a point of revenue. So within our first year we were able to show a four and a half return on ad spend, just specifically on the campaigns that we were running, and then over the years, we began managing data from all aspects. They'll have 10 to 15 different vendors running ad campaigns at any time and they leverage the data that we have to not only strengthen those campaigns but to give clarity for how those vendors are performing, as well as the return on ad spend that they're seeing.

Speaker 2: 5:11

So driving that really great return on ad spend was enabled because you had the data and you could do all of those tactics that you mentioned. That was the key thing that made it successful, right.

Speaker 3: 5:25

The key is owning the data. So with the death of cookies, I think marketers have a difficulty in leveraging data. Many businesses don't understand that you can spin up a data server and you can own a lot of the data coming from the devices that are interacting with your brand without breaking any privacy laws. Then you can action that first party data into your ad campaigns and get clarity again on your audiences and on the impact your ads are having. Data servers are really inexpensive. For a large organization like Calgary Sports and Entertainment it's in the tens of dollars a month, not even in the hundreds of dollars a month. So it's a very small investment to own data. But then you need to find ways to leverage it and actually use that data. So for businesses who come up against discrimination policies on meta or have difficulty remarketing within platforms, the ownership of that data is really great for being able to action campaigns. But then again it's the ability to track, to point a sale and understand impact. That's cool.

Speaker 2: 6:29

Is there a particular campaign program that you're proud of? That you ran for Calgary Sports.

Speaker 3: 6:37

I think we're really fortunate to have a great relationship with them directly. They have a dedicated marketing team and they share assets and they share vision. But for us they come and they leverage our expertise in terms of getting that message out Coming through COVID. It was obviously a hard pause no tickets to sell, no people to put in the seats, so it was kind of a what are we going to do and how are we going to do this? And that's where we really began to expand our audience into helping them understand the things that were actually happening at the game, outside of just hockey or outside of just football whether it be Paw Patrol coming to the game or concerts or new food items, food delivery to your seat just talking about things that are happening in the venue. And for us, what we found to be most impactful was that people coming through COVID weren't necessarily looking to go back to the same experiences that they had. They were looking for new experiences and they were looking to keep their family close. You see less and less people going out and doing things alone, with their group of friends or whatever. You see them doing things as families. We see this a lot in tourism. In Alberta we work with a couple of tourism properties. But the family events showing families at games, showing families at events it's really impactful just to place people in a setting so they can they can understand the experience that they're going to have, and leveraging our marketing tactics to do that, that really just pulls back the curtains and helps people understand what they're going to experience. So coming through something like that pandemic really gave us an opportunity to look at how we were going to get people engaged again in a way that wasn't the same as 2019. We used to just be able to say, hey, flames are playing, this is who they're playing, and then try to leverage the messaging to sell other tickets and encourage people to come back. But now the messaging has all changed to what's happening within the game and trying to pull back the curtains. You see this even from the NHL level the way that they're creating content. They're going really heavy, even when you see it with the All-Star game that just happened, going down to the celebrities and getting people engaged at ice level to really help people understand there's more happening than just hockey and this has really helped us get people back into the seats right away and maintain that dedicated fan coming to the game.

Speaker 2: 8:55

That's great. So would you say that things are recovered from COVID? Are they above pre-COVID levels in terms of attendance of the games and ticket sales?

Speaker 3: 9:07

Now it ebbs and flows by the team performance. So there's certainly that aspect of the team still has to perform to still have sellouts. But across the board, we certainly see people coming to games that they wouldn't have come to before. They're less concerned about the opponent. That's less of a draw. When we do have a big opponent like Toronto or Montreal, it's a sellout just because people still want to see those teams. But you do have a lot more engagement across the board, just simply because people have different experiences. Alberta Tourism had its most impactful year this, last year for 2023, of people visiting and moving around the province and going to small communities and looking for different experiences. We eclipsed the numbers for 2019 for people visiting Alberta and visiting communities, so things have recovered for sure. I think that, with interest rates the way they are, there's some businesses and business segments that are struggling, such as the restaurant industry, as one of them, grocery prices have impacted people going out for dinner, but people still want experiences, so they're still going to events, they're still going to sports, they're still going and touring and traveling. They're just doing a lot more research and I think the purchase cycle is a lot longer, which is again really important to leverage the data to understand what type of a purchase cycle you're in. Is it a single day somebody sees an ad and they purchase, or is it a seven day, 30 day, three month, one year cycle? We have the ability to action data that encourages people who haven't engaged in three months to begin engaging again. So again, it becomes really important to use that data. But, without a doubt, we've seen a lot of recovery and you see it in homebuyers, you see it in automotive, you see it in a lot of retail. There's a lot of segments you see it in and there's some things that can be done with the other segments that are still seeing a challenge to see a recovery. But I think we're going to play that game for the next couple of years. You're going to have certain segments of business that recover nicely from COVID and are seeing a boom, and you're going to see others that are still feeling a pinch from. You know, people just tightening their wallets a little bit and standing a bit differently.

Speaker 2: 11:31

Makes sense. So you mentioned that you're also working with some of the new sports teams and you're in the middle of building them up. Can you talk a little bit about that? That's pretty interesting.

Speaker 3: 11:42

Yeah, we're really fortunate to work with a team called the Calgary Surge. The Surge are Calgary's basketball team. We have a league here called the Canadian Elite Basketball League CEBL. It is a professional sports league similar in ways to the NBA. These guys are playing in Europe. They're playing in the G League. They're looking for opportunities to showcase their talent and the quality of the games is really high. It's really very competitive, fast-paced. These guys know how to shoot the ball. It's been really amazing seeing them build a foundation. We've become their agency partner in the last year. Right out of the gate. We managed to work with them through their first season and now we're targeting kind of launching in a different way. They average 3,000 or so fans a game through their first year. We're launching with 11,000 seats available for the home opener in a much larger venue. We're seeing really good engagement from the fan perspective right now for that game. But we're having conversations about the messaging. The messaging needs to be all-encompassing. It needs to have lots of different layers for different audiences People who want to bring their kids to a unique event. People who love basketball. People who have no idea basketball exists in the city. People from different quadrants who have different engagement with basketball from the things that they do in their daily life, what's accessible to them. In Calgary there's a couple of youth basketball leagues, but they're really kind of spread out. You find these quadrants in the city where people interact well with basketball and some who don't. Then, of course, the corporate messaging and getting people just to support the team. We believe that that 11,000 fan attendance will set the benchmark not only for us for the season but for the league as a whole. As a league, that's the number that would set the bar for highest attended game in the league. Somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 is going to be where we try to hang our hat this year. As I said right out of the gate, that game happens in May. We've been marketing it since before Christmas. We've talked a lot about the Taylor Swift mentality just tiny drips, little information coming, getting priority accessibility to games and then just releasing content to get people excited. There's a ton of stuff you can learn from somebody who's just a giant in the industry from that, and even somebody who's new, coming to a city for the first time, having a successful year, growing larger fan engagement and trying to get a much larger bump in ticket sales.

Speaker 2: 14:27

You've got to look at people who are doing it right and take some notes, Going from selling 3,000 tickets to selling a major increase to selling 11,000 plus tickets. You think messaging is the key there. Does data also play a part in it?

Speaker 3: 14:46

Yeah, for sure. At the end of the day, that's going to be where we can separate the messaging. So we have to have those layers of the data on audiences, not only to understand how to give them the right message, but how to keep them in our funnel when they haven't purchased. So if they've come and they've engaged in the game and we've been able to gain data from their device, we can effectively decide what type of messaging they get from the team and that'll help us encourage them to come back. So it all works hand in hand. It's difficult to create unique messaging for specific audiences if you're not tracking a unique data, If all you're tracking is all audiences based on a specific landing page and then you're remarketing all messaging, or let's say, you're doing a meta campaign where they optimize the creative for you they don't necessarily leverage your data in the same way, where we can pick and choose a little bit more of how we action some of that messaging. So yeah, it's part and parcel. They work together. For sure that sounds right.

Speaker 2: 15:52

So what is the most interesting or unexpected thing you've learned over the years in doing the digital marketing for the sports teams?

Speaker 3: 16:02

Unexpected. Yeah, I think there's always things that are unexpected. I think, obviously, we didn't expect the season to get canceled, but we didn't expect to have to try to reengage people to a point where they just didn't want to come out anymore. That was, without it out, the most unexpected. However, I think if you talk to somebody in 2024, they're always going to talk about COVID and the impact it has had. It still hurts a bit, especially in marketing, all the things that you had to go through with, not just sports, but with all customers. I think for us, the adoption of AI is not unexpected, but from a business perspective, the openness of people to talk about it and not shy away from it People want to talk about chat, gtp, they want to talk about AI for marketing. They aren't afraid of it. I think that to me, that's unexpected because they're afraid of it in their daily life. They're afraid of how it's tracking them or they're afraid of what's going to happen in the future with the growth of AI. But when it comes to business, they want to know, they want to know how to leverage it and they want to understand the impact that they can have. They look at writing and content being a huge proponent of growth for SEO. People are afraid of using AI to create their narrative or to create their content, but once they understand how it takes information and compiles it into words is very impactful for them. They just need to understand that, just like anything else, it takes some massaging. You need to massage that content into something that's a little bit more easy to read and digest, as well as something that's more unique for your business. But it's funny because right away there was a little trepidation and hesitation of do we even talk about using AI and what is that going to look like in the marketplace, and the adoption from most businesses has been pretty remarkable. They're into it.

Speaker 2: 18:12

Interesting, with owning the data being key. I can see a tie-in for AI in terms of getting insights from the data and also around messaging getting ideas for messaging ideation. Ai is great for that. I can see the tie-in for the key things that you mentioned.

Speaker 3: 18:34

Yeah, once you get into and understand the audience, you can plug it in and say this is the audience I'm looking for, shoot me a message, and it can help identify creative messaging. For sure. We have tons of experience in the office here. I've been designing ads for over 20 years and I would say most people here have a strong lens for creative messaging and what gets people engaged. Ai is a tool. It's not where we build the foundation, but it is fast becoming a bigger part of everything, for sure.

Speaker 2: 19:08

Yeah, it's definitely helpful. Great Well, thank you for sharing these insights. Truly remarkable being able to get that 4.5 return on ad spend from owning the data driving growth of 3,000 tickets to 11,000 tickets by getting the right message. That's really exciting. I appreciate you sharing these insights with your agency. I believe you guys do strategic consultations with people if they're interested and learning more about these things.

Speaker 3: 19:38

Yeah, that's right. We always say it's free to talk. We want to help people and provide some guidance. Consultations are always free. We don't charge for strategic planning. We get in. We want to help people understand how to leverage data for their business, what platforms are accessible to them, and where the gaps are and where they have opportunity to gain market share. Then we move to a point of managing and implementing campaigns in partnership with them. You can always get a hold of me straight through the website in frontmarketingca, or you can just search Dave Taylor in front marketing on LinkedIn and easy to connect with.

Speaker 2: 20:17

All right, thanks so much, dave. I always like to say, when it comes to marketing, it'll never be easy, but it should always be fun.

Speaker 1: 20:29

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