Sell more event tickets!
A solid marketing plan for an event is crucial. However, it can be tricky to think of creative ways to deliver a unique brand message that ensures your buyers resonate with your event or festival.
Here are a few helpful tips and what we do here at Event Generals.
1. Run a pre-event campaign (i.e. Save the date)
The best events are amazing at this. Take Splendour in the Grass for example. More often than not there’s 2 or 3 ‘pre-sale’ dates announced and with them comes the announcement of a new headline act. Tying these announcements together does wonders for their loyal following and by the time final release tickets are announced, they are gone within days or even hours!
Obviously not everyone has the luxury of an audience in the millions or a similar budget to lure superstar performers, but the foundations and the blue print is there to follow for all.
If you believe you have something that people want, then tell people ahead of time and let them know when tickets go on sale. This is also a great way to gauge your interest and we advise creating an expressions of interest landing page on your website or social media, so when tickets are released, these people know about it first.
This advice is all about getting people excited for your event or festival. Talking about it with their friends, saving the date in their calendars and planning necessary outfits, accommodation, flights and so on.
Distribution of this information is also key. The obvious channels are social media and email databases, but again, if your audience is new or non-existant you have to think outside the square. Ask your sponsors to engage their audience, work with a local advertising or PR firm, hang up posters and other signage are just some examples of ways to announce your event.
2. Affiliate yourself with other organisations, groups or programs to help spread your event far and wide.
As we touched on briefly above. This piece of advice works. Sponsors are a great channel for you to use. The sponsor can announce their involvement in the event whilst providing you with significant reach across their customers and followers. You may choose to offer your sponsor an opportunity for their followers to receive a discount on tickets by applying a unique code at check out OR the first 100 tickets purchased receive a free gift pack at the door. The options are endless.
Aligning yourself with a large ticketing/registrations platform like LiveNation, Moshtix, Humanitix and other industry platforms is a great way to get your event out there. You will need to pay a commission on your tickets sold through these platforms so be prepared and make sure your pricing reflects this commission. You may also need to read over the fine print in your contract. In many cases it is illegal for you to sell tickets cheaper than these platforms and vice versa.
Track ticket sales through your website or ticketing platform. This can be useful down the track and help you understand where you should invest your advertising spend in the future. It is also a great way to measure when ticket sales occurred, i.e. in line with a sale or a fresh email newsletter. Lastly, its important to track, so you can measure your ROI…specifically around your advertising spend. Understanding where your sales are coming from and how much you paid for the privilege is extremely important.
3. Launch Sales
We only advise you do this at two points:
1) Your ticket sales aren’t were they should be.
2) You only have a handful of tickets left and need to get rid of them.
But, there is always a very important rule to remember…discounted tickets = devaluing your product. ‘Deals’ should be a last resort and be careful not to annoy your ticket holders who have purchased your ticket at a premium.
The smartest way to go about a discounted tickets is to do it in line with your pre-event launches and to tier your pricing. For example;
12 months from event = 30% off tickets
9 months from event = 20% off tickets
3 months from event = 10% off tickets
1 month from event = Close tickets before you sell out *go to point 4 below
4. Close ticket sales even before you sell out.
Why?
Create a sense of urgency! People are naturally last minute creatures and the bulk of people who are like this usually leave it right until the week before to buy tickets. If you cap your ticket sales and ultimately take them off the table, this communicates to several people that the event is filling faster than expected, they get FOMO (fear of missing out) and their friends guilt them on missing out….let’s call it reverse pshycology.
From here, re-launch your tickets with a “due to popular demand” we have released more tickets available for the next 48 hours to a week.
5. Add value
As we mentioned above. Discounts are a last resort. The better thing to do it add-value. Adding value can be done many ways. Here are a few ideas:
Engage a sponsor to give something away to the first 100 ticket sales.
Announce a bonus performer
Give existing ticket holders incentive to refer a friend
Encourage existing tickets holder to upgrade to a more expensive package. i.e. from general admission to AAA.
We hope this article is of use and that you sell more tickets to your events in the future.
For any event marketing assistance, Event Generals specialise in event marketing with a team of skilled and experienced event marketers.