Sell More Tickets In A Single Month: Your Week 2 Plan

In this second of a four part series on how to sell more tickets to your event, we kick things up a notch while still keeping the time commitment to a minimum, looking at how to build a social ad timeline, make personal appeals, and more.

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Guest post by Sophia Vaccaro for Eventbrite

You don’t need to stare at a screen for hours a day to sell more tickets to your event. To help you reach your goals, we’ve put together a series of posts with the tips and tricks you need to upgrade your marketing — in just 15 minutes a day. This is post two of four. Check out the first post here. 

You made it through week one. That wasn’t too bad, eh? And even if you aren’t seeing massive returns yet, now’s the time to ratchet up your efforts — while keeping the time commitment minimal. 

Read on for your week two plan. 

Facebook’s powerful targeting capabilities can give the perception of being hard to use. That’s a false perception.

Introduce these terms to your lexicon to quickly study up on Facebook advertising:

1. Individual Facebook ads are a subset of ad sets, where you define targeting and select your audience. Overarching campaigns let you set greater ad objectives.
2. Relevance scores rate how interesting your ad is to your audience. Ads with higher scores appear more often in user feeds, and they’re less expensive for you to run.
3. The default audience for your Facebook ad will be a Saved Audience built using native targeting criteria like interests, behaviors, demographics, and location.
4. Custom Audiences, on the other hand, allow you to retarget those who’ve visited your site already.

15-minute task: Get familiar with these terms, then go through most of the steps of creating a Facebook ad to get a feel for how easy it is.

Day 2: Build your social ad timeline

Now, get strategic about how you assign your valuable ad dollars. Ali Shakeri, CRO & co-founder at ToneDen, warns, “One of the biggest mistakes we see event promoters make is to announce an event way in advance and spend a lot of money on the initial ad stage, but then neglect to harness the interest of initial viewers.”

To avoid this mistake, Shakeri suggests partitioning your money between four specific stages of the event lifecycle:

1. Event announcement
2. Ticket onsale
3. Maintenance period
4. Close out

15-minute task: Build an ad timeline around these four phases, with messaging appropriate for each phase.

Day 3: Analyze your social performance so far

With your social ad timeline and Facebook basics in place, you can pretty quickly test your theories. Every social network offers insight into engagement with your posts. Views, likes, and shares are standard across many platforms. Some platforms may also offer you insight into link clicks or profile clicks.

15-minute task: Use a social media management platform like Buffer to find aggregated engagement analytics across your social networks. Using this capability, assess how your paid media investments are performing.

Day 4: Get creative with your email marketing

You did the work to grow your lists last week. But email marketing is only effective if your emails stand out. This is your chance to let your event’s personality shine through. Attention-getting subject lines, witty body copy, and eye-grabbing imagery are all key.

15-minute task: Use these seven event email templates as a starting point to draft your event’s email marketing copy. 

Day 5: Make a personal appeal

“To get your events off the ground, always start with who you know,” says Darrah Brustein, Founder of Network Under 40. “Leverage the trust and relationships you already have, and ask them to help spread the word.”

Chances are, you probably know some influential people. Pick a few to reach out to:

• Friends in high places — think members of your peer group, your university alumni, even your LinkedIn network
• Major organizations aligned with your mission
• Local businesses who could benefit from your event and might be willing to help you promote it

15-minute task: Craft an email you can cut, paste, and personalize for each individual. You can use these templates as a starting point. 

Don’t stop now — you’re halfway there 

Two more weeks left! You can do it. If you’re already ready to start weeks three and four, check out the full ebook. 

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.