Skip to site content
The Group Travel Leader Going on Faith Select Traveler

Spectra Sharpens Digital Marketing Skills

Spectra by Comcast Spectacor has learned a lot about digital marketing by using social media and varied digital tools to promote the facilities it manages. About a year ago, Spectra decided to share its knowledge by offering digital marketing packages and services to meeting and event clients.

Viki Arias, marketing manager at the Spectra managed Iowa Events Center in Des Moines, Iowa, leads digital strategy for all Spectra-managed facilities. “One thing that sets our company apart is the digital resources we can offer,” she said.

Spectra’s digital marketing skills can help make events more successful, boosting attendance and many other aspects of events. Digital strategies can be used to increase ticket sales for a concert or for a public event that is part of an association’s convention. Digital marketing can also help move attendees toward a desired hotel room block or target a specific audience based on geography, profession, interests or other personal attributes.

For organizations that don’t have marketing staff, the assistance a Spectra facility can provide in digital marketing is invaluable. “A lot of our clients don’t have marketing people, so we can meet with them and ask how much they want to spend, who they want to target and what their objective is,” said Arias. “After we collect information about the campaign, we get the campaign running, monitor the results and talk to them about analytics.”

Spectra’s digital marketing packages can be tailored to a meeting planner’s budget and purpose. Planners with limited budgets might want to try a small campaign that would include “one email, one Facebook post and one Facebook event mention,” Arias said. “All of the packages can be tweaked and customized.”

Because digital marketing assistance is available at all Spectra properties, meeting planners also benefit from the idea sharing that naturally occurs among marketing managers at different venues. “If someone at one facility has worked on something that turned out great, a marketing person at another Spectra facility can call them and get a recap,” Arias said.

Here are a few ways digital marketing can be used for a meeting or event:

  • Through retargeting, a digital marketing campaign can be designed so ads and web links for the host hotel pop up after attendees visit the conference website. Those pop-up ads help drive attendees toward a room block.
  • If a conference or convention includes public events, digital marketing can promote those events to a target audience. For example, Arias can use geotargeting to market a free engineering conference to some 80,000 engineers through online ads.
  • Digital marketing works well for consumer events, including home and garden shows, trade shows, sports events and children’s entertainment. “We can drive attendance through databases that we have for the areas that they want to target locally,” said Arias.

 

Another big advantage of digital marketing is the data it can provide both on audience and effectiveness. “Google Analytics gives us robust analytics so we can look at a campaign to see where customers come from, which cities they are in,” Arias said. “Our clients also like that they can look at the ROI and see how much business was gained from digital marketing.”