Sell More Tickets In A Single Month: Your Week 1 Plan

Sometimes life doesn't allow for the constant aggressive marketing you'd planned on, but fortunately building a strong marketing foundation can be done in just fifteen minutes a day. Here we look a five day breakdown of how to execute a formidable ticket selling ticket selling strategy.

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Guest post by Sophia Vaccaro for Eventbrite

Vendor negotiations. Last-minute cancellations. Meetings that cut through lunch. Sometimes your schedule just doesn’t allow for the aggressive marketing plan of your dreams. 

Even so, you don’t need to blow major budget dollars or stare at a screen for hours a day to sell more tickets to your event. In just fifteen minutes a day, you can establish a strong marketing foundation to build on for the long-term.

For your first week’s plan, keep reading. Soon enough you’ll be mastering the art of marketing before you’ve finished your morning coffee.

Word of mouth has always been the dream of event creators. In fact, 63% of event creators named it as their top sales driver in Eventbrite’s 2019 Pulse Report. 

Darrah Brustein, Founder of Network Under 40, has this advice for event creators hoping to inspire word-of-mouth fervor: “Hand-select a group of ‘hosts’ or ‘ambassadors’ who get free entry to your event — along with two free tickets to give away to their friends.”

15-minute task: Like Brustein advises, spend 15 minutes finding and reaching out to influencers on social media. You can speed this process up even more with a word-of-mouth sales program on Verve.

Day 2: Choose the right social media platforms

You can get really lost down the rabbit hole of social media marketing. Streamline your efforts and make the biggest impact by focusing on the platforms most relevant to your events. For example, your book club audience is probably more active on Instagram (#bookstagram, anyone?) than LinkedIn.

“To get the most impact in the least amount of time, use the platform of your choice to its fullest potential,” advises Nicole Giordano, founded StartUp FASHION. Her team uses the platform to share posts, stories, and live video to 12.5k followers.

15-minute task: Use this quiz (and your own common sense) to determine the best social media platform for your events. Forget the rest for now.

• Extra credit: For most events, Facebook Events is a powerful driver of ticket sales. Create your Facebook Event in minutes and enable sales directly in the Facebook app by publishing it directly from your Eventbrite account.

Day 3: Put tracking links in place so you can measure campaign effectiveness later

One of the best ways to measure and compare the effectiveness of multiple marketing campaigns is to set up tracking links — unique URLs for each promotion.

For instance, if you’re planning to run multiple social media ads at the same time, set up a tracking link for each that helps you identify which ones see the highest traffic and convert the most ticket sales.

15-minute task: If you’re an Eventbrite customer, you can set up tracking links for your posts using this guide.

Day 4: Start to grow your email lists 

An Eventbrite survey of 1,000 event creators confirmed email as the most used and effective event marketing channel. Small listserv? Don’t despair. There are plenty of quick ways to invite more people to opt in and receive event announcements:

• Add a form to your website
• Set up a text-to-join option and add the number to all your printed promos
• Add a sign-up link to your standard email template
• Collect sign-ups through Facebook, using a Facebook Lead Ad

Take a few minutes to put these four actions in motion to automatically collect email addresses from now on.

15-minute task: Read this post for explicit directions on how to accomplish the four tasks above.

Day 5: Infuse your website with smart SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) increases the odds your event will show up when your target audience searches for events like yours. The better your SEO, the higher your ranking on search engines like Google.

To strengthen your search rank, use the right keywords on your event website. Here’s a few tips to get you there:

• Use a straightforward name that describes your event clearly. A beer festival should contain the words “beer” and “festival.” (By the way, the keyword “beer festival” is searched 3,000 times a month on Google.)
• Include your event’s location and date in every description.
• If possible, choose a domain name that includes your target keywords (likely your event name).

15-minute task: Take a moment to read this post on “How to Rank on Google” to pick your target keywords and add them to a few spots on your website.

Keep your momentum going 

Whew! That wasn’t so bad, was it? Nothing like feeling that sense of accomplishment as the week trundles to the end. Ready for weeks 2 – 4? Check out the full ebook, Your One-Month Plan: Sell More Tickets in Just 15 Minutes a Day.

Sophia Vaccaro: Bay Area native, snake enthusiast, and live music lover Sophia writes fantasy books for young adults and blogs for Eventbrite. So far there has not been much crossover, but only time will tell.