We love interviews! This time, we decided to invite Michael Jericho, Online Marketing Manager at Ticketmaster, for a virtual cup of tea to talk about his work with the world leader at ticket sales.
What brought you to Ticketmaster?
Basically, my love for live music and entertainment. I always played in bands and even gathered my first working experience in the music business. I worked in a small booking agency for two years, after which I started working at Universal Music as an Intern. Now, seven years later – after working most of my career in online marketing for various companies as a Content Manager / SEO-Manager – it was a logical connection to bring music and marketing together. The position at Ticketmaster was perfect for that.
You’re currently responsible for the content, as well as webshop management at Ticketmaster. What’s the difference between these two roles?
I started as a Content / Webshop Manager but my tasks became more diverse over time and it all evolved into a more campaign-based workflow. My position now is Online Marketing Manager. I’m keeping track of all the different processes and take care that everything comes together and makes for a great campaign: text, graphics and affiliate campaigns. We just launched our Ticketmaster Presale campaign, which was quite a piece of work.
What does your typical day at Ticketmaster look like?
As I am working in the live industry, there is no such thing as a typical day. Often tours and events are announced last minute and we as the ticketing company are the last to know about it. That requires a lot of flexibility and often late hours on Fridays when I actually should be out of the office – but I love it. But we do have daily stand-ups, weekly meetings and so forth where we get to know what everyone is working on at the moment.
You’ve been working with content marketing for many years now. Has it changed much over the years?
I’m working now with content marketing since 2011, and it has changed so much over the years. It moved from keyword stuffing to a more careful placing of keywords (WDF/IDF). Nowadays, Google is very smart when it comes down to content, so you have to create more rich content and think harder about what your targeting group really wants to know. After all these algorithm changes, core, panda and penguin updates, a lot has changed and is still changing. It’s very exciting.
What are, in your opinion, the biggest challenges for content managers nowadays?
The biggest challenge is to stay competitive and think outside of the box. Create great campaigns, interesting stories and really try to figure out what people want to know. You cannot just write a long text stuffed with all the keywords a tool told you to use anymore, you really have to be more analytical and organic.
How do you keep finding inspiration for new content?
I’m on social media networks and music blogs all the time to get the latest news about bands and events. That helps a lot with new ideas for campaigns and stories. Besides that, we get of course a lot of insider information into our mailbox. After scanning search requests and results I get an idea about hot topics. But in the end it’s a daily marketing business and we want to sell as many tickets as possible.
