Rob Martin is the Digital Marketing Manager at The Lowry, Salford and was part of the small team who opened and launched The Lowry. He is also a professional photographer and has just had his first public exhibition. If you recognise him it might be that you have a) bought a ticket from him in the distant past b) met him at an AMA conference or c) seen him in an embarrassing slot on The One Show where a man tried to reveal his personality via the art on his wall…
In this blog, he shows how The Lowry's experience in using social media in their ticketing operation has reaped benefits for the venue.
Social media and online ticketing
Like most organisations keen to promote their services or offer, The Lowry has long had social media sharing options built into its website, making all events easy to promote online.
We decided recently to take this a step further as Google Analytics revealed the vital role Facebook is currently playing in referring traffic to www.thelowry.com. Now, hit the Events menu item on our Facebook page and you’ll be presented with our programme and the opportunity to book tickets directly from Facebook. Nifty!
How does it work? Live performances and ticket inventory taken from the Box office system into the Web Advertising CMS now allows the website to share that information with Facebook users. The Facebook Events Page is a web application that runs in the context of Facebook. The application retrieves the current event information from the website via an exposed web service. The event information is kept short to keep the loading time down with users encouraged to click a link to the website for more information or to book the event directly, thus helping to drive more ticket sales through The Lowry website.
Of course social media isn’t all about sales. We’ve worked hard to make sure that social media supports The Lowry in all of its functions, not just commercial ones.
We use Twitter and Facebook in different ways to spread information about events, our community programme, insider gossip ('Willem Dafoe is eating soup in the canteen') and, crucially, as a listening platform. Our strategic approach to social media has paid dividends in the past, with groups forming on Facebook under their own volition following engagement with the organisation; a re-tweet via James Cordon went to 675k people, so booking tickets via Facebook seemed the natural next step.
We wouldn’t want Facebook to be only about sales – that would ignore all of our efforts to create a community. But we do want to make sure we service that community with functionality that enables them to interact with us as easily as possible.
On average we sell around 50% of our tickets online, with the percentages rising for music and comedy. We also place Facebook ads which we have found to be effective for some, if not all, of our offer. At a cost of just £500 to integrate the new service, we’ve seen a return on that investment which has made it more than worthwhile. Now we have to concentrate on promoting the service and, of course, getting more people to Like our page.
With social media gaining greater significance for arts organisations and, as more and more functionality becomes available for Facebook’s ever expanding population, it makes sense for those organisations to seek deeper engagement with fans and followers by building on already strong relationships and providing services which don’t take the person away from their beloved time on social media sites. For The Lowry, digital marketing is becoming increasingly essential to every campaign, and we benefit from years of investment in online functionality, making this development a logical extension.
We’ve had no problems at all with the functionality, but Web Advertising are a great development company and have a real understanding of the arts, social media and technology. However, organisations looking to do the same should make sure that they have, like us, spent time developing a relationship within social media that is built on trust, conversation and much more than sales. In other words, does this functionality support your organisation’s social media policy or replace it?
What has been its value?
We recouped the cost of developing the service within a month of launching it, and sales have remained at a steady level since, so there’s no doubt that, for The Lowry, it has been a worthwhile investment. It has also meant that we’ve been featured in local press and, here I am writing about it for the AMA blog, so there have been positive outcomes other than sales.
Which is exactly what our social media policy is all about!
Robert Martin
Digital Marketing Manager
The Lowry
www.thelowry.com
www.facebook.com/TheLowrySalford
Twitter: @The_Lowry
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