152 - Why More Reach Didn’t Mean More Ticket Sales (And What Actually Fixes It)

One team grew social reach from 7 million to 12+ million impressions.
 Engagement exploded. Video views were up.

ROAS? 7–8x.

And yet… single-game ticket sales stayed flat.

In this episode, Jeremy breaks down why awareness alone doesn’t create growth, the difference between monetizing demand vs. multiplying it, and how to structure your funnel so reach actually turns into repeat buyers.

Key Topics

• Why a strong ROAS can still hide a growth ceiling
• Monetizing demand vs. multiplying demand
• The 3 Ad Buckets every sports team must use
• Why frequency problems get mistaken for awareness problems
• The overlooked “Game 2 Strategy”
• Database growth as a revenue multiplier
• Why timing sales ads to 24–48 hour buying windows matters

The Core Lesson

This team didn’t hit a wall.
 They hit a ceiling.

Their ads worked.
 Demand exists.

But their funnel wasn’t engineered to move fans from awareness → intent → repeat behavior.

The 3 Ad Buckets Framework

Every ad must live in one of three buckets:

1. Audience Building - Build familiarity and retargeting pools.
2. Buyer Warming - Reduce friction and drive traffic.
3. Buyer Ready - Sell tickets.

If every ad says “Buy Now,” none of them function like true sales ads.

Platforms optimize for engagement — not wallet behavior.

They’ll find people who:

• Watch
• Like
• Comment
• Share

They are not automatically optimizing for:

• Selecting a date
• Bringing a family
• Buying multiple games

That behavior must be engineered.

This team likely:

• Re-activated past buyers
• Sold to an existing pool
• Improved efficiency

But didn’t expand the buyer base.

That’s a frequency problem — not an awareness problem.

5 Layers That Unlock Growth

1. Capture Before Conversion – Own the relationship early.
2. Retargeting Discipline – Structured audience building.
3. Separate Content Tracks – Entertain and sell.
4. Game 2 Strategy – Opening Day is marketing. The rest is sales.
5. Group Data Capture – 50 tickets sold ≠ 1 contact captured.

Database growth = revenue growth.

The Timing Insight Most Teams Miss

Most single-game tickets are purchased within 24–48 hours of the game.

If your conversion ads aren’t strongest during that window, you’re fighting buying behavior.

Align your ads with when fans are ready to act.

Timestamps

00:00 – Massive reach, flat sales
 01:16 – The 7–8x ROAS breakdown
 03:30 – Monetize vs. multiply demand
 05:14 – The 3 Ad Buckets
 08:16 – Engagement vs. buyer behavior
 12:57 – 5 growth unlocks
 19:43 – Ceiling vs. wall
 20:20 – Timing matters
 21:52 – Self-audit questions

Episodes mentioned:

Episode 125 - “I Saw Your Ad—But Didn’t Buy”: Fixing the Fan Follow-Up Funnel

Episode 111 - Building Your Marketing Budget Like a Funnel: Awareness to Action

Episode 132 - The 35,000 Visitor Problem: Why More Traffic Can Tank Your Profits

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Transcript

Jeremy Neisser (00:00.244)
Welcome to episode 152 of the Sports Marketing Machine podcast powered by Revilocity Sports. Today, I am going to dig into something that happens more often than you realize. One team that I was talking with shared with me that they increased their social reach from about 7 million impressions to over 12 million. An absolute amazing jump. Engagement was up.

Views on their videos were up, content was clearly working and yet single game tickets declined or they stayed flat. Now before we go any further, this is not a, they messed up, here's where they went wrong episode. No, no, no, no, no. In fact, what they did was actually really, really good, but they hit a ceiling. Today I'm going to unpack why it happened and how to fix it.

and what things that you should be looking out for if this is you. All right, here we go.

Jeremy Neisser (01:16.27)
Before we dig into exactly what happened, let's set the ground level here. This team spends between $40,000 and $45,000 in single game advertising, and they generated $320,000 in tracked single game revenue. That's about a 7 to 8 return on an ad spend. Anyone in America, any company in America would absolute kill for that.

Seven to eight I give you a dollar you turn around and give me seven or I give you a dollar you turn around and give me eight Anyone in America would love to do that in fact some companies that are in the s &p 500 would love to do that as well so a 78 7 to 8 return on ad spend is very strong that is absolutely not bad marketing and is not a wasted spend so that isn't a like meta doesn't work episode

This is actually a structured episode where the key thing that I'm going to be talking about is they monetized demand, but they didn't multiply it. Huge difference here. So they monetized their demand. So they got more eyeballs on things, but they didn't multiply it. All right. I'm not saying impressions are useless. When you get 13 million people to watch your content, engage with your content, right?

absolutely not useless, it's just insufficient. Impressions aren't losing strategic value, but one thing I do want to come out and say is likes and impressions don't always pay the bills, outcomes do. We need people to buy tickets, right? That's what we need. So I agree impressions are not useless, they're just simply insufficient. That's probably the safest word I could use here.

Awareness used to be in the scoreboard. So like you're showing off, the awareness side of things that that's just the tip of the iceberg here. Reach tells you who noticed it and then outcomes tell you who acted. So remember impressions or how many times we've got it out there. Reach tells you how many people it reached. But at the end of the day, we're in the business of selling tickets. And this is where this team ran into a ceiling. They succeeded at awareness.

Jeremy Neisser (03:33.262)
They got a lot of eyeballs on their content, but awareness is really that top of the funnel. That is just the beginning of all of this, right? That's part of the sales strategy. That's not the whole shebang. That's part of it. So remember I've talked about the sales funnel in a few different episodes before episode 125, episode 111, and even a team that had a dramatic increase of website traffic, but they didn't sell more tickets. So I've talked about this episode

in a few different ways, but really when you get that many impressions, that is amazing at the top of the funnel, but we need to be pushing people closer to the middle. The real question that I think that they weren't asking, I don't think they failed to ask people to buy. In fact, that's what I asked them. Like, hey, did these ads, these things that you have, organic content, even paid media, did they ask people to buy tickets? And they said,

Absolutely. If that was the problem, like, number one, like I'd be a genius, but that's not the case. Like that's the simplistic thing. Most teams are doing that. The real question is, did you define which ads were designed to sell you tickets and which ads were supposed to get people excited and fired up about what's happening at your arena or your ballpark? Because not

every ad should have the same job, especially now with the changes with Andromeda and all the things happening on Meta and even some of the changes that we're seeing with Google and some of the ad display networks out there. episode 111, I broke down where the marketing funnel is, and this is exactly the framework that played out in real life for this team. Every ad must live in one of three buckets. Number one,

audience building. I'm trying to build an audience. So the purpose is familiarity and the metric really for that audience building ads are really engagement and retargeting pools. Think about it. If you've got a bunch of people that have consumed 75 % of a bunch of videos or 95 % of a bunch of videos, that's an audience that you have built some know, like and trust. If they're going to stick around for a 15 second video or a 30 second video, they're

Jeremy Neisser (05:56.918)
Essentially watching a commercial of you multiple times, right? That is such a great way to build an audience. But the metrics are engagement and to build retargeting pulls. Another ad, it must live in one of these three buckets. The other bucket here, number two, is buyer warming ads. The really, simple way to think about this is I'm trying to reduce friction.

I'm trying to get clicks and website traffic. That's really what I'm looking for. That's really it for these buyer warming ads. And the third type of, or the third ad in those buckets where every ad must live is really buyer ready ads. The purpose, I'm trying to sell some tickets. Simple as that. I just want to sell more tickets. So that means the metric that I am keeping an eye on is purchases.

have people converted and have they bought tickets. When every ad that you place on social media to push out and promote your season, if it's every single one says buy now, or is every single one's all about awareness, you've got to be able to put them into buckets. Otherwise, you're essentially spraying and praying and hoping something sticks here. So if every ad is treated like a sales ad, none of them work like a sales ad. It's really

Trap right so all three of these buckets let me go through them again audience building ads the metric here is engagement or retargeting we want to build an audience of people who consumed content really like 50 % or engage with our content we really want to be able to build out any a Retargeting pool so we can come back around and really try to reduce friction on Numbered bucket number two, which is buyer warming ads. We're reducing friction

We're trying to get clicks and website visits. That's really the big thing here. If people buy, great. Thumbs up, high five. That's awesome. But bucket number three is really those buyer ready ads. They are designed to sell some tickets. All right. So let's unpack this a little bit more. So why reach went up, but the attendance didn't? You see social platforms are very good at finding people who watch, like, comment, share.

Jeremy Neisser (08:16.462)
I mean, if you think about it, their job, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, wherever it is, YouTube, even for that matter, they want to keep people on their platform. So they say, Hey, we're going to keep people on this platform because it looks like you are asking me to build awareness with this. So I'm to get people to watch your content. I'm going to get people to like it, comment or share it. Right. They're not automatically good at finding people who want to commit on a date, bring a family, come.

twice in a season. Like that's behavior. That's off of their platform. They understand what you're trying to accomplish. mean, you're a sports team. You're trying to get people to your games, but really depending on how you structure your ads, you could be getting people who are just trying to watch your content and that's it. But at the end of the day, like you're trying to get a behavior. You're trying to get people to take out their wallet, put it into their ticketing software and buy a ticket from you.

That behavior must be engineered. And really in episode 125, I'll put a link in the show notes to all these. You don't have to go back and listen to all of them. But I think this is the point that I'm calling out here. I talked about optimizing that sales funnel, not just the ad. And this is exactly the situation. The ad worked. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. It got engagement. It got eyeballs. It built awareness around the team, but the system underneath of it didn't compound.

reach without the progression to push them down the funnel is really just building more and more people at the top of the funnel without pushing people out the bottom of it, right? So if you took a funnel from your kitchen and you put it in your hand and you push your hand at the bottom of it where the hole is and you filled up the top of it, it's just this gonna sit there, it's not gonna come out, right? And that's essentially what we're seeing here. But in their case, instead of sticking their hand at the bottom of the funnel, they stuck it in the middle.

I mean, sure, they asked people to buy things, but essentially that's what they did. They stuck it right in the middle, kind of a third away from the top, and they just sat there a little bit, right? They hit their ceiling. What they were suspecting would happen, which would hope every team in America does this, right? Hey, I'm running ads. I want to drive sales. And really for them, a seven to eight ROI, that is phenomenal. The ads probably did drive some sales. They just drove sales from the same pool.

Jeremy Neisser (10:41.946)
of existing buyers or a very smaller audience, whereas their larger audience of 12 million engagements, like they didn't even tap into that, right? That's why the ROI stayed strong, attendance dipped. They were really going after the same existing pool of buyers or the existing audience that was already engaged. That's how they got those folks to buy tickets. So in my mind, I'm thinking,

If I'm Joe fan and I've came out to a game or two in the past for you and I've watched a video multiple times and I came back out this year and I didn't come out last year, but I came out this year. Well, like your ads got me to buy to come out this year. Whereas other people who came out in 2024 didn't come out in 2025. So you won the game of getting people to come back out or this audience, this pool of people that were exciting.

but you didn't get the new people which is what a lot of the marketing dollars that teams are allocating for is to go get new people to come out to your games. So I understand like, like if you think about this, it's the same fans, some bought tickets this year, some bought in the past, some are just like fans in general of your team, regardless if they're coming or not, but just, they just came to fewer games.

They didn't buy as much as they used to or what have you. bet if we took their data and unpacked it, we would really uncover that they had a higher than average return of past ticket buyers and less brand new buyers, right? So when I was talking to them on the call, they said something super smart. They wondered if it was the same group of people just coming less often. That's a frequency problem, not an awareness problem. Game one.

is all about marketing. It's opening day. Like that's all about marketing, getting people excited about it. Just like you're going to start seeing over the next month and a half from ESPN, you're going to see the Yankees and the Dodgers on ESPN. Like all of that is marketing and it's building anticipation towards opening day, right? So we're getting people excited about opening day. Game two and the rest of the season is all about sales.

Jeremy Neisser (12:57.602)
Like we're trying to drive more tickets. We're trying to get the momentum from opening day to sell more tickets. If you don't intentionally design or engineer game two and the rest of the year, design towards ticket sales and moving people through the funnel, your attendance will absolutely stall. So what was missing? Missing here for them.

The layer that kind of unlocks the growth. So if I'm sitting with them and we're going through all of this and we're going to spend some time to really unpack and really strategize how to put this together, we are going to do five things. Number one, capture before the conversion. So if someone engages, do you own that relationship? What does it look like? Are we trying to build an email list? Are we building retarding list? What does that look like? Number two,

pixel and retargeting discipline, right? This is a piece here that if you haven't touched your pixel on your website, sure there are some limitations because of privacy, but it still works because you are tracking a percentage of people that go to your website and you are retargeting people by building audiences in the back.

of meta, right? Meta can still see people that engage with your content, regardless if in drama to changes, they still know who's watching videos, they still know who's liking and commenting and sharing, right? So you still can build retargeting audiences in the back here, right? I think the other piece number three here of what will unlock growth here is separate content tracks.

You're going to build fun content because that's what we do. Sports teams were always showing off content of our players, what they're doing during the games. We're doing silly videos. We're doing videos with influencers about getting ready with me. We're doing fun videos to get people excited, right? We need just as many pieces of that, maybe three fourths of many. So if you do 10 of those fun pieces of content, can I get seven?

Jeremy Neisser (15:06.882)
where I'm just trying to sell more tickets. You actually need both. You can't just have one and know that that's going to spur ticket sales. Because we're really good at getting players to answer questions as they walk off the court or the ice or heading into the clubhouse. We're really good about getting silly questions. We're really good about creating highlight clips. We're really good at that. But we need to get a better at creating content that sells more tickets.

The fourth layer that kind of unlocks this growth is the game two strategy. How do we get people to come back out, bounce back offers, post game follow ups, an intentional progression, an intentional process to get people to buy more tickets and you're focused on it. And number five, I really like groups as when you're selling groups, blocks of tickets, picnics, parties, sweets, those types of folks, they're feeders, right?

all of your revenue is just groups, are you capturing those buyers individually? And this is a piece where I think a lot of teams will trip up. The moral of the story is the more people you have in the database, the easier it is for you to sell more tickets. So if you're selling group tickets, you sell a block of 50 tickets to a church that's coming out on a Friday or Saturday night, are you capturing?

the names of the people and the emails of person 1 through 49. Are you doing that? I know you're getting the group leader, but are you getting everyone else? The more names and information that you get, that first party data, the better chances you have to get them to come back because number one, email marketing still has the highest ROI of all the marketing that you do. Number one,

But number two, you already know that they came to a game. So you can use that as a retargeting audience in Meta. You can use it on a lot of different places to be able to get them to come back out, send them special offers on text message. You could do a lot of things. So focusing on building up your database. And one area that I see as a black hole, a blind spot for a lot of teams is they're not capturing group leader, you're capturing group leader information, but not

Jeremy Neisser (17:21.922)
the folks who are coming to the games with the groups. When you do that, either you're using Spinzo or Feevo or maybe you've got your ticketing software that can do the cool things that I'm talking about now. The easier that you can do that, the faster your database grows. And when your database grows, it is so much easier for you to be able to sell more tickets and create momentum when you are building your database. episode 132, I talked about tracking

beyond vanity metrics and this is exactly why. If you don't know which layer of the funnel drives the sale, you can't really scale it. And this part of it too is your marketing budget. You gotta figure out, how much am I allocating to just get eyeballs on my content, to create momentum? How much am I allocating to asking people to buy stuff? Because not every ad is designed the same. Not every ad is exactly the same.

How many of my ads are designed to try to get moms and the kids to come out this weekend to come out to a game? How many of my ads are designed to entertain people, to get people excited, to create momentum, to get them to consume it so that they are in my retargeting list, right? So you're thinking about this a little bit differently and I hope this really is clearing up some fog here for you.

because this is actually all good news. This is the part I want you to hear clearly. The team did not hit a wall, they hit a ceiling. Their ROI proved that demand exists. They got a seven to eight ROI. Like, pat yourselves on the back, that is fantastic. There's so many teams in America that the marketing director would absolutely be thrilled for a seven to eight ROI. Their reach that they did

also proved that they have a lot of interest in their team. 13 million engagements and reach and impressions, like that's phenomenal. that is like amazing. Their structure is absolutely fixable, right? If they can generate a seven to eight ROI without a clean funnel, without having everything kind of cleaned up,

Jeremy Neisser (19:43.854)
Imagine what happens when they unlock this. Like I could totally see that them skyrocket to a 10, 12 ROI. Like that would be amazing. They put a dollar in, they get 12 back. Like that would be unbelievable. But they really have to map out the funnel to figure out how each piece of the puzzle fits. Cause they've done a really good job to prove

There are people out there that are excited about your product that are willing to engage in your product. We just need to clean up how we're structuring the ads and this in layout when and how we're hitting them. Timing also matters here because I bet if we looked at their timing of when their fans bought tickets, it's typically 24 to 48 hours or within the day of or within 48 hours.

So if they're pushing out their buy now ads to their retargeting audience within 48 hours of when their game is, bet there would like, we're going to see a spike in tickets because you are pushing an ad out the same exact time when people are ready to buy, not the week before or what have you. Now conventional wisdom would say, Hey, I want to run an ad.

For next Friday's game, want to start running it this week, but that's not when people buy tickets. They start buying tickets 48 hours before. That's when the majority of it is. So structuring your paid ad that is designed to sell tickets around the time when people are buying tickets, like you're going to move the needle faster because you are lining up your ad, your conversion ad, the ad that you're asking people to buy when people are actually buying.

tickets. woo wee! Lots of good stuff here, lots of stuff to unpack, but really if this is your situation too, I think this episode should be helpful for you, but if you've always got questions, I am just an email away, reach on out, love to sit down, have a conversation with you about what you're working through, how you're trying to figure this all out, like I mean it, completely free of charge, just

Jeremy Neisser (21:52.046)
30 minutes we're going to sit there and chat for a little bit about what problems you're running into and how we can continue to unlock opportunities here. So if you're listening and thinking, hey man, this is really familiar Jeremy, ask yourself these three questions. Do I know which ads are designed to sell tickets or warm an audience? Number two, do I have a clear path from reach

to capturing and sending people to my website to buy tickets. Do I have a clear plan to get fans to come to game 2, 3, 4, 36, 41, 72, whatever, however many games you got, right? Because here's the bottom line, likes and impressions don't pay the bills, but attention is still valuable. The teams that win are the ones who can turn attention into intent and intent into repeat behavior.

Reach will absolutely get you noticed, but systems and processes and have you have this all organized will absolutely get you paid. All right, if you found value in this episode, head on over to Apple or Spotify and leave a rating or review. It would mean the world to me, but more importantly, it would get this podcast in front of people who are just like you trying to sell more tickets and grow your fan base. Until next time.