It’s that time year again-- basketball has come to an end and spring sports are in full force, which means one thing, 2018-19 budgets are due!
This was always my favorite time of year when I worked in college athletics, the fun guessing game of will my football team start the season 0-5 or 5-0? Will my basketball team be ranked in the top 10 or have the worst start in five seasons? How will I need to spend my budget based on these unknown scenarios? Well, here’s where I drop some of that, ‘if I only knew then what I know now’ knowledge-- regardless, of the scenario, people are always searching for tickets (need proof, check out google.com/trends). In a time where revenue generation and access to data is so important to athletic departments, why wouldn’t we as marketers, not fully fund this opportunity?
Do me a favor, Google “[enter school name] football tickets”, what do you see? I am willing to guess at least one secondary ticketing platform is showing an ad for your ticket terms. You know why? Because they know people are always searching for tickets, which means revenue and access to data is available for the taking and those two things are worth spending money on, regardless of the winning/losing streak, time of year and/or whether your donors think you should fire your football coach.
Moral of the story- how important is it to your department that you are making money and adding invaluable data to your database? I am going to guess most of you are thinking, “pretty important, Katie”-- well, if that is indeed the case, then I challenge you to look at Search as revenue channel rather than a marketing expense.
[For some street cred, I spent seven years working college athletics marketing with stops at Eastern Michigan, University of Maryland and as the Assistant AD of Marketing at the University of Tulsa before I moved onto Google, where I work on the Sports & Live Events team.]