Managing ticket sales is the most important step in running a successful event. Even if you have secured the best talent and venue for the event, selling tickets is the only way to make it profitable and successful.
Creating a proper event ticketing plan is important to ensure you can sell as many tickets as possible while providing customers with a smooth customer experience. Remember – the ticket-buying journey is your first touch point with the audience: it sets the tone for their entire event experience.
Your event ticketing plan should include features like your online event ticketing partner, promotional platforms, marketing plan, and budget to push ticket sales as much as possible.
We have compiled a one-stop guide to help you find the best ways to sell your event tickets online and effectively.
Running an event soon? Check out Platinumlist’s event ticketing solutions to help you through the journey!
How To Sell Event Tickets Online
Choose The Right Artists For Your Event
The most important factor in running a successful event is the artist or set of artists that will be playing at the event. At the end of the day, the audience wants to participate in the event because of the artist. If the performer doesn’t fit well with your target audience, then there isn’t much you can do to sell the events.
It’s important to conduct a thorough analysis beforehand to select the right artists to attract your target audience. This can be done by examining the artist’s history and past performances. If they have performed in your region before, find out how well the event turned out. If they have never performed around your city, look at their past performances and the kind of audience they attracted.
You can also analyze their worldwide popularity by looking at their Spotify streams, billboard records, music awards, and more.
It’s also a good idea to analyze the kind of artists that have been part of successful events in your city and the ones that people in your target market widely attended to understand the kind of events your audience likes to attend.
This in-depth analysis will help you decide about the performer you pick for the event and increase your chances of success.
Determine Ticket Pricing
Your ticket pricing strategy can make or break your event and must be determined with various factors in mind. Here are a few things to consider when determining your event’s ticket pricing.
- Your event goals – How much profit do you plan to make from this event? Is the event supposed to be all-access or limited to a certain audience? What do you want to gain from this event? These important questions must be answered before deciding your ticket price.
- Your expenses – For any event to be successful, the revenue you earn must be higher than the expenses. To ensure that you are charging enough to break even at least and (ideally) make a profit with your ticket sales, you have to determine your profit and loss and price them accordingly.
- Your audience – Probably the most important factor to consider before pricing your events. Who is your event targeted towards? Is it youngsters, couples, or maybe families with young kids? If the tickets are too expensive for your target audience, you might not be able to sell enough tickets to break even, leading to an unsuccessful event.
The key is finding the right balance between all these factors and determining the correct event price to ensure maximum sales and revenue.
Using the “Early Bird” pricing strategy is also proven to increase ticket sales for events, where customers are offered an exclusive discounted ticket price in the early launch period of the event. Planning such pricing waves encourages people to purchase tickets earlier as they receive a lower price for the same ticket, persuading them to make their buying decisions quicker.
Choose Your Ticketing Partner
Another pivotal point in your ticketing journey is choosing the ticketing partner. The right ticketing partner can make your life smooth and easy, while the wrong one can completely ruin your entire event organization process.
Think about it, your ticket partner plays many roles in your event. They are always your first touch point with your audience and set the tone for their entire event experience. If their purchase experience is not smooth, you end up with a disappointed audience even before stepping foot into the event.
Selling a large number of tickets is not an easy job. You want to partner with someone trustworthy, reliable, and experienced enough to handle a big crowd. The last thing you want is a server crash when your target audience is trying to purchase events.
If you are looking for a reliable ticketing partner in the region, Platinumlist is here to help you with all your ticketing needs. Apart from selling your event’s tickets, Platinumlist also provides various event management solutions, including licensing, event permits, digital marketing for the event, an on-site ticketing team, post-event feedback surveys, and more. Our one-stop event management solution is here, no matter what you need help with.
Interested in learning more about Platinumlist’s ticketing solutions? Get in touch with us now.
Create a Holistic Marketing Plan
The best (and only way) to make sure that you’re able to sell as many tickets as possible and reach your revenue goals for the event is to create an unbeatable marketing plan that takes into account every system, every platform, every demographic in your audience, and every step of your event’s lifecycle.
One of the biggest event marketing mistakes we often see is organizers dedicating their entire marketing focus and budget towards the event launch. This approach can help you create a significant buzz for the event initially. However, you may have no plan or budget to promote the event through the remaining lifecycle.
Creating a significant interest and sharing important information about the event, like the date, venue, and the performers at the very beginning, is crucial but should not be the only focus of your marketing plan.
Keep in mind that there are different types of buyers in the market. For instance, some people take a little time to decide, while some wait till the very end to buy the ticket. Your marketing plan should comprise a strategy for each type of buyer and span the entire ticket-selling lifecycle, not just the beginning.
Want to learn more about creating a marketing plan for your event? Check out our in-depth article to find out more.
Partner With Your Vendors To Market Tickets
Another great way to market your event to a large database is to partner with your vendors, such as your venue, artists, and ticketing partner. These parties are a significant part of your event, and your success will also be their success. By marketing your event to their database, they can help you reach an audience beyond your customer database and increase the event’s exposure.
It’s simple, the more people know about your event, the more people are likely to purchase tickets, eventually leading to a successful event that will benefit you and them.
As an event ticketing partner, Platinumlist provides maximum marketing support to event organizers through our large online reach and customer database. With our world-class digital marketing, we make sure that our events reach as many people as possible through our social media pages, newsletters, push notifications, and other marketing platforms, providing event organizers with 360-degree digital marketing support without the fuss of doing it themselves.
Find out more about Platinumlist’s digital marketing solutions and get started now.
Use Social Media To Promote Event Tickets
By now, we all know that social media is one of the most successful marketing platforms. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, each platform has a massive reach that’s unmatched by any other platform. But marketing on social media is no longer about posting pretty photos; it’s a lot more complex. So how do you ensure you’re making the most out of social media marketing to sell tickets for your event? Here are a few suggestions.
- Create a social media strategy. Your strategy should be based on various factors, but most importantly, your audience. Understanding which social platform your audience used the most will help you determine your focus area. For instance, if your event targets millennials, using Facebook or Instagram might give you better results. In contrast, an event targeted towards Gen Z will likely perform better on platforms like TikTok that are more popular within that particular demographic.
- Dedicate a promotional budget. While reaching people organically is ideal, putting some money behind your social media marketing can take it over the edge. With a good paid marketing strategy in place, you can reach the right audience, improve conversions, and sell more tickets for your event.
- Use videos. Gone are the days of photos; every social media platform primarily promotes video content. To ensure that you reach people through these platforms, you must integrate videos into your social strategy.
- Gather content from event performers. Your event’s artists are the biggest attraction for the potential audience. They are coming to see the artists perform, so having original content like videos from previous performances or an exclusive video invite for your event can be very persuasive content on your social media channels.
- Add a call to action to your social media pages. There is no point in marketing the event through social media without providing your audience with an easy way to purchase tickets through the platform. Always add a link to the event in your bio and mention it in your promotional content to show them a clear path for purchasing the tickets.
Create Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
A strong email database is a secret weapon to success. Unfortunately, many event organizers fail to see the potential of email marketing and do not use this treasure trove. An email marketing campaign gives you an opportunity to connect directly with your audience. As this audience is part of your database, they are likely existing or interested customers, which increases their likelihood of conversion.
The key to a good email marketing strategy is creating emails that catch your audience’s attention without getting lost in the sea of other emails they receive daily. Here are a few tips to make your marketing emails stand out.
- Pay attention to the subject line. Write something that immediately catches their eye and creates interest in what you are talking about.
- Keep it short and simple. Nobody has the time to read through a long email, so make sure you express your message as simply as possible. Using visual text and imagery can be helpful in communicating your message in an interesting manner.
- Add a call to action. Again, you want to give your audience a way to book the tickets as easily as possible if they are interested. Adding a clear call to action button that leads them to the purchasing process is crucial to ensure your email marketing converts your audience.
Not an expert in email marketing or don’t have a relevant database to send emails to? Let us help you out. Platinumlist’s target email marketing campaigns are crafted to reach as many customers as possible, with an average 35% open rate. With our email marketing solution, you can market your event to our large, comprehensive database made up of a high-quality audience with a high conversion rate.
Learn more about our email marketing solutions now.
Partner with Influencers and Affiliates
Influencer and affiliate marketing are some of the growing marketing strategies in the world at this time. Partnering with influencers and affiliates allows businesses to reach a large audience and access a completely new database of potential customers at a reasonable price.
Influencers and affiliates are internet personalities with a large, trustworthy following on social media platforms that can promote your event to their database in exchange for a fee and/or a commission.
They also tend to have a more engaged community and more relatability with their audience, which increases the likelihood of audience conversion compared to your own social media strategy.
Track Your Marketing Platforms
Each marketing platform you choose to include in your event marketing plan requires time, effort, and money. Keeping a strict track of the performance of these platforms will show you what’s working and what’s not and will help you understand which of them are worth the effort and money.
For instance, you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars running Facebook ads if they are not reaching the right audience and getting you conversions (ticket sales). The main goal of your marketing plan is to sell as many tickets as possible, so if a platform cannot do that, it’s either time to optimize it or divert your efforts toward a different strategy.
Tracking your marketing performance will help you better understand the market and your audience. After the event, you can create an in-depth marketing report that will define patterns in your audience’s buying journey and behavior, preferred platforms, and other important factors that will assist you in making a more informed marketing strategy for your next event.
You can track all your marketing efforts under one system with Platinumlist’s advanced sales reporting dashboard, which can be easily integrated with all the primary marketing platforms without any coding, including Facebook, Google Analytics, and MailChimp. You can also create custom URL parameters with our in-built Campaign URL Builder to track your marketing efforts on the sales dashboard that displays real-time revenue, occupancy, demographics, and other important information.
Interested in learning more about Platinumlist’s sales dashboard? Get in touch with us now!
Sell Tickets For Your Next Event With Platinumlist
If you are looking for a one-stop solution for your event management and ticketing needs, check out Platinumlist’s all-in-one event management system. The region’s leading ticketing platform, Platinumlist, provides many features to help you run your event smoothly and efficiently.
Here are a few solutions that Platinumlist can help you with for your next event.
- Sell tickets easily and efficiently – Platinumlist’s powerful end-to-end ticketing platform is built to sell tickets for every kind of event, including business, sports, entertainment, and online events. The system can handle up to 250,000 participants per day and is among the most reliable and trusted in the region.
- Easy on-site ticketing – Platinumlist’s free access control app allows organizers to easily scan customers upon entry using a QR code on the ticket. The app is built to shield against ticket duplication strongly, can be used without an internet connection, and scans up to 600 customers per hour. Platinumlist also provides onsite staff support to manage your event ticketing needs.
- All-in-one solution – Platinumlist’s powerful system automates and simplifies the complex booking journey, including payments, customer support, marketing, on-site booking, and more for your event.
- Ticket customization – With our easy-to-use built-in editor, event organizers can customize the event page, ticket, and transactional emails as per their own brand. They can also set up reminders or follow-up emails to be sent out to the customers.
- Interactive seat mapping – Our advanced seat mapping technology develops interactive seating plans optimized for mobile, allowing users to select their seats easily and improving the overall customer experience.
- Keep track of your event sales – Platinumlist can also be easily integrated with important tracking tools, including Google Analytics, Facebook Pixels, and Mail Chimp, without any coding to help you track your marketing efforts. You can also create custom tracking links with UTM parameters from the built-in Campaign URL Builder and track conversions from the sales reporting dashboard that provides real-time revenue, traffic, demographics, and other important statistics.
- Digital marketing solutions – Platinumlist’s world-class marketing team can help you reach more people and sell more tickets with our full stack of digital marketing efforts. Reach your audience with advanced email marketing campaigns, paid promotion strategies, social media promotions, and other marketing tools with our digital marketing solutions.
Get started with Platinumlist for your next event now.
