Ticketek: Modern marketing strategy is about treating people as people

Marketing leader and commercial officer at Ticketek's parent company, Nine Live, explains how his team is working to achieve a single customer view

Modern marketing for Ticketek is about becoming contextually relevant and treating consumers as people, not a channel.

That, at least, is the long-term goal for Cameron Hoy, chief marketing and commercial officer at Ticketek’s parent company, Nine Live. CMO caught up with Hoy during the recent Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact event to discuss the need all marketing teams have to unify customer experiences regardless of channel or platform if they want to be effective.

Ticketek recently made the decision to re-invest in Responsys’ marketing campaign management technology as a stepping stone towards improving and personalising customer engagement. The deal was struck in November, and implementation is just being completed.

“We have always engaged on a channel basis and from a marketing perspective using transaction data,” Hoy explained. “The challenge is to start to recognise people as people, and to communicate outside of that transaction environment.”

Historically, Ticketek has sent out untargeted or genre-based emails to registered customers with a range of content from its partners. Like many brands, the company hasn’t had a unified view of customer interactions across multiple channels.

Hoy said he is building a centralised data asset engine to piece together a single profile of the customer, which can be tapped into to personalise communication regardless of touch point or where that person is in the buying process.

“The challenge for us is to recognise you before you transact and personalise content,” he said.

With 14 million customer transaction records covering online and offline activity, Ticketek has a wealth of data available on each customer’s interests and preferences. By combining this with online browsing data and interactions through other channels including social, the company will have a huge opportunity to highly personalise the consumer’s experience of the brand, Hoy said.

But it’s the stuff that sounds the simplest that is the most challenging, he admitted.

“The marketing organisation is very siloed, so it’s no wonder we have that [type of] view of the customer,” Hoy said. “But we want to unwind that. Today, you still need people functionally responsible for getting stuff out, but we need to re-engineer the marketing team from a customer -centric view.”

Other ambitions include clear conversion to sales metrics from email, which can then be combined with social and other digital channels.

Hoy said a catalyst for Ticketek’s marketing turnaround and technology investment is the changing and challenging nature of operating a ticketing business.

“The deals we’re doing with event inventory are so tight today, every extra ticket we sell through being more contextually relevant is important,” he commented. “We are at a point where this investment needs to happen.

“In our world, a lot of events are struggling – for example, different codes of sport. We have to be more sophisticated marketers.”

While getting the right functionality was 70 per cent of the decision to invest in Responsys, Hoy said it was important to have a partner who could help provide advice on the strategic and operational process changes necessary to unify his company’s customer approach. A big part of learning was also tapping into what other customers are doing.

“What we hope is that Responsys can help us unlock the value of these platforms by being more of a partner,” he said.

Longer-term, Hoy said looking at customers as people will unlock other marketing investments, and highlighted mobile as a core area of opportunity.

“We want to communicate this way through mobile as well, bringing that customer view all together,” he added.

More from Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014

- Nadia Cameron travelled to Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014 as a guest of Oracle.

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