With the Facebook Algorithm Change in early 2018 increasing the cost of Facebook Ads & the newsfeed dying a slow death, event marketing is becoming increasingly difficult.
Owning your audience is one of the most important ways you can overcome this, to sell more tickets today and future proof your event for years to come. As an event promoter, you have a huge amount of data available to you, you might just not know it, or be using it to its full potential.
In this article, we’re going to show you how you can sell more tickets, by unlocking the value in the data you already have.
You probably have your data in various different platforms, as well as various csv files sitting on your desktop. First it’s important to get all your data into one place.
There is the ticket sales data from the different ticketing platforms you use (e.g. Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, etc), your email subscribers (e.g. Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor), as well as the data you’ve captured using Audience Republic Campaigns.
Using Audience Manager, a data management platform, you can import all your data into one place (either csv files, or with our direct integrations).
Once you’ve got your data imported, you can start to run some really powerful filters to target your audience, to help drive ticket sales.
Create a filter showing people who purchased tickets to your previous events, but have not yet purchased tickets to this year's event.
This works really well if your audience is similar across all your events, but you might have to segment further if not, for example running this filter for specific event brands, locations or genres.
Once you’ve created this filter, send a targeted message (of course only if they’ve opted in!) through email, SMS or Facebook Messenger.
You can also create a Facebook Custom Audience to run ads to this segment. With our direct integration with Facebook, you can automatically sync segments to custom audiences every hour.
You could also look at doing a special offer to these previous attendees, for example 2-for-1 tickets as a thank you for continuing to support the event.
Just because a fan has signed up for presale access but not yet purchased, doesn’t mean they’re not going to purchase tickets.
There are a number of factors that show they've expressed interest; by signing up for presale access, but not purchasing right away. For example they may be waiting to see if their friends are going, what other alternatives events there are or line up (if you have not announced yet).
Create a filter of everyone who signed up for presale access to the event, but have not purchased tickets, and target with email, SMS, Facebook Messenger, or create a Facebook Custom Audience to target with ads.
This an extremely high value segment, because they have already expressed intent to buy tickets.
Also, by excluding existing ticket buyers, you’re ensuring that you don’t waste money advertising to people who have already purchased tickets, but equally importantly, not annoying your existing ticket buyers with ads or irrelevant messages/emails.
Your top spending customers are your biggest promoters. Identify who has spent above a certain amount on tickets across all the events you’ve done previously.
There are 3 key things you can do with this segment.
Reward to encourage loyalty – reward those top spending customers for being a loyal supporter. Money can’t buy experiences like side of stage viewing experiences, artist meet & greets and other exclusive rewards are highly effective here. While this is not going to help you sell more tickets in the immediate term, over the long term you’ll be creating life long advocates.
Insights – use our Insights capabilities to gain an understanding of what these types of high value customers look like, so you can find more of them. These are exactly the type of customers you want buying tickets, because they keep coming back.
Incentivise – send a special offer to these top spenders to pass on to their friends, for example vouchers for food/beverage onsite for anyone who purchases using a special link (with the top spender also getting a voucher of course).
When you run campaigns on the Audience Republic platform, you can identify top referrers. A referrer is when the fan shares and earns points for those who have signed up using their unique link.
This is a great way to identify potential ambassadors for your digital street team, using a platform like Verve. Many events are still (very successfully) running street teams with good old fashioned hard copy tickets as well.
Get these passionate fans selling tickets for you, and incentivise them for doing so with commissions or rewards. The great thing about using the presale registration process is you’re able to identify potential ambassadors right from the very first announce!
Want to start selling more tickets to your event? Contact Audience Republic today!
