This week, ticketing professionals and those who support them have gathered in New Orleans for the 38th Annual International Ticketing Association Conference. 

With four days of sessions geared toward all thing ticketing, a common theme seems to be rising out of the cacophony of conversation. Mobile ticketing and customer relationships are taking place on mobile devices more than ever . Consider these facts:

• Americans are spending an average of 5.6 hours a day connected to a screen
• 50% of all screen time is on a mobile device
• 55% of  all email is read on a mobile device
• 50 minutes per day is being spent on Facebook, Messenger or Instragram.
• 50% of all Facebook users are exclusively mobile
• 41% of Facebook users engage with Facebook Events

These trends will continue to build as mobile technology continues to evolve in complexity, features, and ease of use. If you are an organization ignoring mobile as part of a marketing and ticketing strategy, your days are numbered. Even the argument that older audience members don’t use mobile technology doesn’t hold water anymore as recent Pew Internet “Older Adults and Technology Use,” study is reporting that while 86% of all adults have adopted mobile, 59% of seniors over the ages of 65 have adopted the technology as well. 

Yet, having this information and knowing what to do with it are two different things.
Going mobile in your organization means developing a separate mobile strategy. Besides a lack of functionality, you can’t just take your current website and think that it is good enough to view on a mobile phone. In thinking about your technology you need to become platform agnostic. Instead of thinking about how content is delivered on your website versus a tablet or phone think about unifying that content so that it works across all devices. Step into your customer’s shoes and pair your content down to what is actually useful to them. Bloated websites are billboards. Mobile sites are dynamic and present the most relevant information to the customer.

Are you using Facebook to target your customers? Face book advertising is inexpensive. It also allows you to target your audience by segmenting them to match audience demographics that you determine. Did you know that you can import the e-mail addresses of your current patrons into Facebook? By doing so Facebook will identify which of those email addresses are connected to Facebook accounts which allows you to have access to their pages for promoting your events. You can even build look-a-like audiences and refine it further using keywords. Using Facebook for events promotion has been shown to deliver an ROI of $18/$1. Try creating a Facebook event and link it directly to your ticketing page. Remember 41% of Facebook users engage with Facebook Events. Instragram can return an ROI of up to $23/$1. 

Another area that every nonprofit organization should be using is Google Ad Grants. Nonprofits can apply to receive up to $10,000 per month in funds to be used for Google ad campaigns. What marketing department would turndown up to $120,000 dollars per year in digital marketing support?

While all of these are great ideas it takes a disciplined approached to see real results. If you don’t have someone in your organization that is at least focusing part of their job on mobile marketing and social media, consider making this a priority. It will pay big dividends. There are also cloud-based social media suites that will assist you in unifying your approach to mobile. A good example if Hootsuite, but there are others as well.

While there is certainly room for a wide range of channels for marketing and connecting with audiences, mobile is a strong contender for much of your marketing budget. Having a strategy in place that clearly defines your goals is a key step in increasing revenue to your organization for years to come.