How to Boost Your Event Ticket Sales with Marketing.

It’s a competitive world out there particularly in the events business. Whether you are running a music festival, comedy show, arts show or business conference the same basic marketing principles apply. Get on top of your event marketing to maximise ticket sales and attendance.

If you are running regular events then no doubt you will have built up a lot of historical data from these previous events. Assuming that at as a minimum you have collected this data either on a simple spreadsheet or complex CRM system, this data is key to marketing a new event. Interrogate you data and check that you have recorded all personal details including tickets purchased by type, amount, quantity, date and source of sale. Note that if you are collecting personal data ensure you are complying with the appropriate data protection regulations too.

Analysing your data provides you with a profile of ticket buyers, when they buy and through which channel. You may find for example that 60% of your ticket purchases happen within 2 weeks of the event date and that most sales are made as a result of posts on Facebook but that sales peaked the day after a press release was made. Put this learning into practice by using it to forecast your ticket sales by date and channel and make sure you allocate a higher budget to activities that previously showed the best return on your marketing spend. 

In your armoury of marketing tools are a vast array of activities to consider. Probably the key activity is using your own customer data to send out targeted email campaigns using your own CRM system or an easy to use tool like mailchimp. Email campaigns are easy to execute and you can track results in real time. You probably have a website that you should be keeping up to date on a regular basis and making ticket sales easy for visitors. Also ensure that all your social media channels are linked to your online presence.

With social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube etc.) make sure that news and other articles of interest are updated regularly and that posts match across channels, it is sometimes possible to link posts across platforms but this can be a bit hit and miss. Most social media platforms allow you to run advertising campaigns where you can get reasonably sophisticated with campaigns or they can be really simple depending on how sophisticated you want to get. Also consider other online campaigns using tools like Google Ads too.

In your creative ensure that you make an ‘offer’ to add interest, using early bird or two for one deals with a time limit can boost sales over a specific time. Most advertising channels also allow you to do A/B split tests so you can try different creative and offers to help refine your campaign effectiveness.

In the offline world there are a lot of activities to consider too. Do you have good contacts at key target media so that press releases get coverage? Are you working with sponsors and other partners to participate in joint promotional activities? However you schedule your event marketing plans remember that all channels and activities should work together, there will never be a single activity that drives all ticket sales.

This is just a very brief overview of what you should consider for your event marketing. A large music festival will have a multi-million pound marketing budget with a whole team of people and a sophisticated marketing plan. If you are running a small event the marketing principles remain the same, you are just doing it on a smaller scale.

Using a software solution like FestivalPro can help manage some aspects of your ticket sales and marketing for your event. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and are performance artists themselves. Using a system like this can help with email campaigns and analysing ticket sales.

Photo by Burst from StockSnap

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