The success of your event depends on how well you market it. Now more than ever, it’s essential to find new ways to cut through the noise and reach your audience before a competing event does.
One way to get ahead of the competition is to automate as many manual tasks as possible, so you’re more efficient, can be more creative and provide an overall better fan experience.
We spoke with Bri Willis, our Customer Success Manager at Audience Republic, who’s worked with event organizers for festivals, venues and tours for over five years. We asked her some questions to find out how she helps Audience Republic’s customers automate their event marketing functions and what advice she gives to them.
“The main benefits are mostly around saving time and automating your tasks. Anything that you're doing repetitively or on a regular basis, there's probably an automation that we can create for you.”
“And the idea is that based on certain groups, certain triggers, or parameters that you determine, you can automate actions or your workflow.”
“One of the big ones would be around triggering an email or an SMS based on a ticket sale. Because we have integrations with a lot of the major ticketing players, we have those ticket sales automatically pulling into the platform.”
“So you can use that as a trigger to automatically send out an email or an SMS, and try and upsell them, for example, maybe they bought a GA ticket, but you want to upgrade or upsell them to a VIP, or offer them some glamping package for a camping festival.”
“Another example would be around list organisation and tag management. So other triggers that you can use might be around people signing up to a campaign or using a signup form. Based on them using a particular signup form or signing up to a presale registration campaign, you can add them to a list or add a tag to that person. This removes some extra steps for yourself at the end of that campaign period or at the end of that signup flow.”
“Another clever use I saw recently was using the links inside of emails to tag your audience. So say if you're sending out an EDM, with loads of different gigs and acts of different genres, and they click on the ‘buy’ link for a particular genre, like a techno event, automatically a techno tag will append to that person.”
“So now you've got their genre preferences automatically tagging, based on what links they've clicked inside of an email.”
“It's just about taking those little additional steps that you may never do manually because you can’t be bothered. But, if you've got an automation to do it, this is a clever way that you can segment your audience without having to do any additional work.”
“Event organizers need to think about what tasks they are doing quite regularly on a weekly or daily basis that are time-consuming.”
“I think a lot of that is around list management and tagging. They should look at the triggers, or at the action people take and there's probably an automation that you can do to just remove that task from your daily or weekly routine.”
“Definitely have a look at our automations page in the platform (pictured below), we've got a list of triggers and also a list of actions. So just having a look at those items and seeing if they can be used to solve your particular problem.”
“I feel like the use cases for automation are practically endless. If you spend enough time looking at your problem and also looking at the different triggers and actions that are available to you, there's probably an automation you can use to solve and remove that manual effort that you're going through.”
You’ll be spending less time in the weeds and manually completing tasks as everything should be automated for you, so you should get back to the important thing and your main focus, which is just trying to sell out the gig and producing an amazing event.
Once in place, marketing automations can save event organizers countless hours and numerous headaches when it comes to the admin side of producing an event. It’s important that the focus is always on producing the best event possible in order to keep fans coming back year on year and let’s face it, it’s way more fun focusing efforts on the creative side of things rather than admin.
If you’d like to learn more about how to automate your event marketing so you can sell more tickets and refocus your time on producing the best event, book a demo with our team to see our platform and automations in action.
