Etienne Looije can trace his love for events, and desire to work in the sector, to a few pivotal festivals he attended in the Netherlands as a teen. The first was Into The Woods (“It’s not very big but it’s very cool”), the other was the longstanding electronic dance music festival Mysteryland.
“When you walked in it was like, wow!” he recalls. “So I think it was a trigger to start in this sector.”
These days, as the Operational Director at Benelux event advertising agency Boest, Looije loves seeing audiences arrive at the events he works across. “It's like, wow, maybe you came through our ads. It's funny to think of people going to the festival maybe because of the work we are doing.”
Here, Looije talks about the most impactful social channels for event marketing, segmentation techniques, optimizing your marketing through the lifecycle of a campaign, and much more…
What's the key to getting the most out of your social media channels when you're marketing an event?
One of the most important things is that you really know your audience. It's maybe a little basic, but if you have an event for people between 18 and 24 years old, and you're only doing your marketing with Facebook, you won't reach your audience.
Because this audience is on TikTok, on Snapchat. It’s really important to think through your audience and know where they are and which channels they’re scrolling all day.
Are you seeing TikTok as an effective channel for event marketing?
We've seen it very effectively. So one of the things with TikTok is the content has to feel really natural. It doesn't have to be high resolution, it really has to blend in with the organic feed.
You really want to give a good impression of your event and bring over the vibe and the feel.
When we're talking about advertising, we don't use the Instagram Story content, the fancy content. We're mostly focusing on promoting the organic content and pushing to reach the audiences and interact with them.
So when you take a look at Instagram and TikTok, for example – on Instagram, you'll want to link all the time to the website, to the ticket shop. Where on TikTok they want to stay within the platform, so you really want to engage within the platform. And when they engage multiple times, it's a chance to show something else and to push a bit more on selling your tickets.
You want to create a community first before you show them, “buy my tickets”.
Are you finding any other platforms outside of Meta really useful?
I think one of the channels we're always using is Google Ads. And within Google Ads, you also have YouTube advertising.
So YouTube advertising is also a very effective way to reach your audience. Because you can target on search terms, specific subjects, specific videos, specific music genres, specific channels. It's very interesting how you can use that targeting to reach an audience you want.
Google search is also still interesting.
For example, if people in foreign countries are searching for festivals in the Netherlands, you want to be first. So they're very actively orientating. It's an interesting way to reach your potential audience.
Snapchat is a bit more for the teenagers. [In] the Netherlands it went a bit dark, but it's back growing again in the last two years. So the funny thing is, I don't know if it's also in other countries, but I heard that teenagers around 14 and 16 years old are not even using WhatsApp anymore, but they just communicate with each other through Snapchat.
So it's a channel you have to remember because it's coming back from the dead.
"YouTube advertising is also a very effective way to reach your audience."
How do you run campaigns on Snapchat?
The interesting thing is, Snapchat can be like a combination of the content of Instagram, but also TikTok. So you can use a bit more user generated content, but you can also use high quality video or flat visuals, for example.
The only thing we sometimes mention with using Snapchat campaigns is that the quality of the traffic can be a bit low. So I would say it's mostly interesting for reaching people, creating awareness and generating some traffic to your website to let them orientate further for some info or lineup.
But for directly selling tickets, it's a bit harder. So it can be effective, but the quality of the people who are using it is maybe a bit lower than other channels.
I've spoken to people who run campaigns on Pinterest with influencers, and the content will be an influencer putting together their outfit for a particular festival. How do you use Pinterest?
Our core focus is on festivals and clubs, but we also do food festivals. So we had Healthy Fest, and it's like an activation to do yoga, healthy food things. So the target audience was really focused on women within a specific age who are very active on Pinterest.
You can also target there with search terms. So people were looking for healthy food inspiration, for example, and we use those campaigns to reach that audience.
Pinterest is maybe similar to Snapchat, in that it's a bit hard to generate conversions from it. But it's a very interesting way to reach your audience, to generate engagement with your pin boards, and to lead them to the website for some more information.
Is there still a place for email marketing amongst all these social channels?
Yeah, definitely. Email can still be very effective.
But [a mistake] events are doing sometimes is that they don't do any kind of personalization. So they send an email to everyone: “buy my tickets”.
And one of the strong ways to use it is to be more focused on personalization and optimization. So for example, if someone went to your festival three times, you want to show them a different kind of message than someone who had just signed up to your newsletter.
"[A mistake] events are doing sometimes is that they don't do any kind of personalization."
This brings segmenting into the equation. How important is it to segment your audience data?
Really important. When we're talking about advertising, you can imagine someone who watched your video for two seconds is less interested in an event than someone who will watch the video for 30 seconds, for example. So you really want to change the message of your ads there, because they're more likely to buy a ticket than someone who watched two seconds and scrolled away.
Or, for example, you can also try to do some personalization through your ads by creating very specific videos. For example, with a techno festival, if someone watched a hard techno video, you want to follow them up with a hard techno lineup.
And if someone watched a melodic techno video, you want to follow them up with a melodic techno lineup. So you can use that kind of segmentation within your advertising.
Typically, how far in advance of a festival would you start really honing in on the advertising?
It really depends. You [generally] start to activate your campaigns during and [immediately] after the festival, because you're in the momentum of the festival, everybody is hyped.
So you already want to make a link to a pre-registration, for example. With Mysteryland, the festival’s in September so we're already running campaigns throughout September. We start the new campaigns within the same year, so we're almost running 11 months.
So in November we start with a pre-registration, and then we're more focusing on early access, priority access. So creating the urgency within the moment of pre-registration – get the earliest tickets, or the cheapest tickets.
December is a low-key moment because people are very busy with Christmas, so it's just creating awareness, being visible but with smaller budgets. I would say the same thing around January, and in February we’re starting with the early access priority and trying to create momentum with ticket phases.
By creating ticket phases, you can really push different kinds of moments to create some urgency in limited tickets, and to create a moment. And one of the things we always try to do with our media budgets is work with when people get their salary.
You want to increase your visibility, because now they have money and they can buy tickets.
If you were to outline three must-dos for every event organizer when it comes to selling tickets through content marketing or content advertising, what would they be?
1. Know your target group and use personalization in your ads based on that knowledge. For example, if you have different music genres within your event, you want to create different kinds of content. So if I'm interested in hard techno, I get a hard techno video.
2. Invest in your content. I think this is one of the things that sometimes events forget. We’re talking [a lot] about the big festivals, but you’ve also got smaller club nights. And they think, okay, when you put your advertising on, you put budget on it, it will sell tickets, but that's not how it works.
You really have to invest in your content, combining the high quality with the low key TikTok content. It’s fine to make a video with your phone behind the DJ deck and show the vibe of your event for use on TikTok, but you also want to create a good after movie.
3. Use the three-step marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion.
In the conversion phase, you can scream, “Get your tickets now!” In the consideration phase you want to generate a bit more interaction and get some more information, so show them the lineup or behind the scenes or have them interact with your ads. And in the awareness phase, you really want to show your videos, create a good impression of your event.
"You really have to invest in your content, combining the high quality with the low key TikTok content."
One thing you touched on earlier was the dead zone in an on-sale campaign. How can you generate interest in those quiet moments?
You still want to be visible. In those moments, you are focusing on the two first phases of the funnel. It’s very valuable to generate interest in this moment, because a lot of other advertisers also don't advertise or focus in this moment. So sometimes it's even cheaper to be visible in this period.
So you really want to focus more on being visible, growing your community. Focus a bit more on the two phases of the funnel, build up your retargeting audiences, and use those audiences when you start to sell your first phase tickets.
When you think about some of the techniques you’ve seen to sell tickets recently, has anything stood out as being innovative?
[There is a group] called The Opposites in the Netherlands.
They did a comeback tour. And they did a pre-registration on Instagram, and you had to leave your number. And when you left your number, you got a call the next day from The Opposites. So it's like, ‘Hi, this is The Opposites, get your tickets now’. It was an automatically generated message, and it was a very interesting way to generate awareness.
And I think they sold out within five minutes.
Visit Boest here. Follow Etienne on LinkedIn here.
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