Often, we can already feel how the market is evolving. One of the latest trends we've noticed is the overall need to offer a DIY solution, either as a core part of the offering or as an additional add-on to the current platform or technology. Organisers expect the ability to manage their ticket business from scratch to 'on sale'.
Want to develop your new self service marketing strategy? Read our 5 tips to make your DIY offering work.
While the core of being successful is often related to a 100% focus on a specific strategy, a self-service offering can trigger additional, non-interfering business/revenue across multiple market verticals. To be honest, being stuck in old-fashioned business narrows down the opportunities for innovation and is, as a result, limiting the increase in revenue. Well, if there’s one thing salespeople really don’t like and want to avoid at any time, it's getting bored because of missing out on potential business cases and deals.
"Oh, lets quickly add this feature to the offering and the deal is done”, is something I often hear. Out of experience, we know it's not as simple as that. Let us give you an insight into what your self-service proposition should be compliant with in order to be successful.
Rule engines and dynamic flows: The DIY type of market is subjected to dozens of influences, where each of them has their own specific well-defined demands. Taking all of these into account and bundling them into one single product almost feels like merging the beauty and the beast into one person. You can’t tackle all of the European markets and their specific use cases by unboxing the exact same technology every time over and over again. Rule engines and dynamic flows that can be configured on demand in relation to the specific local requirements are one of the most suitable and effective solutions.
Adapted UX/UI: Your flows need to be dummy proof and self-explanatory. It's your clients themselves who have to set it all up, they need to be able to understand the tool without external guidance. At this point, the concept of ‘human perception’ plays his role. Take the usage of the colour 'green', for example. From a ticket buyer perspective, the visualisation of "50 tickets" in ‘green’ means there is still a capacity of 50 tickets available. 'Green' stands for positive, here meaning "available". You'll want to use green to indicate the vacant tickets in the purchase flow. But at the same time, for a promotor, "50 tickets" in green will be perceived as the amount of sold tickets. This means, in your self-service back office flow, the sold tickets (instead of the available) tickets should be visualised in green, indicating how well the sales are going.
Personalisable: Your partners, venues, promoters, etc. will definitely want to deeply embed and configure their copywriting, look & feel, mail templates, customized purchase flows, etc. This will give them the feeling of 'owning' the ticketing solution and makes it possible to incorporate the tickets as a part of their identity. On "Koningsday" for example in the Netherlands, all ticket designs and email templates should be in orange while on the other hand in Germany, they want to pick their own seat and has BAS algorithms.
It's obvious that a DIY offering is not something you can add along the line. It's part of the DNA, the real core of the core.
Now that’s exactly the reason why offering a modular white label DIY technology makes sense. We enable our partners to still run their ongoing business and seamlessly start or accelerate the innovative DIY offering, without disturbing the current business focus and overwhelming the development squad with all kinds of “exotic” demands which are out of their comfort zone.
So, challenge your salespeople and let them tackle additional verticals on top of the successful business you’re already running..
Want to know more about starting your own self-service offering? Watch the on-demand webinar full of tips and tricks on how to expand your current business with a DIY ticketing offering.
This blogpost is written by our Business Development Director, Yannick Van de Voorde.
Photo: unsplash
