While taking care of the operational side of running an event is important, it won’t be useful if you cannot attract your target audience. Simply put, it will not matter if you run the most well-organized event if there is no one in the crowd to witness it.
This is where marketing comes into play. A well-established marketing plan is the only way to ensure that the news of your event reaches as many people from your target audience as possible so that you can fill up the seats and run a successful event that fulfills your revenue goals.
Many event organizers often make the mistake of not marketing their event until the last minute, making it harder to sell tickets as a huge part of the audience is unavailable on the event dates. Quite often, organizers shy away from creating a marketing plan as they deem it as difficult. However, good marketing does not have to be challenging. You can create a successful marketing strategy for your event by following just a few simple steps.
To help you with this process, we have created an in-depth guide about ways to market an event to the right audience.
Don’t want to go through the hassle of creating a marketing plan for your event? Let us help you with our in-house marketing team of certified experts who have successfully managed hundreds of marketing campaigns for events.
Things To Do Before Kickstarting Your Event’s Marketing
Before you start marketing your event on various platforms, here are a few things you can do to make the process smoother and more successful.
- Determine your marketing goals: The first thing to determine before making any strategies or decisions are your marketing goals. Determine what you want to achieve through your marketing efforts and who you want to target so that you can create a marketing plan accordingly. Different marketing goals lead to different strategies, so establishing them as early as possible is important.
- Establish your target audience: To understand the best ways to reach your potential customers, it’s important to determine your target audience. Every customer segment has to be marketed differently. For instance, the platforms and channels through which you could reach Jack, a 35-year-old man who loves Arabic and Egyptian music, will be very different from the ones you can use to reach Jill, a 21-year-old young woman who is a huge K-POP fan and loves going to concerts. Determining your target audience and understanding which channels they use most will help you decide which marketing platforms will be the most effective for converting your potential customers based on relevant data, whether it’s social media channels like Youtube, Twitter, or TikTok, or other platforms like offline advertising, PR channels, and more.
- “Pack” your event. Create artwork and descriptions that would tell your user why they should visit your event, why it’s not just another festival or concert but something unique that they shouldn’t miss out on. You will also require high-quality images, videos, and artwork to market your event on multiple platforms throughout the marketing process. By creating this content beforehand, you can ensure that there is consistency in all your marketing collaterals, which will help you establish a strong brand image.
- Create an in-depth marketing plan: Once your marketing goals and audience have been determined, set up a detailed marketing plan for your event, which includes all the information, including marketing strategies, platforms, audience, tracking, and KPIs. This plan will act as a blueprint for your entire marketing strategy and help guide you through the process efficiently. You can also create a step-by-step marketing timeline that outlines how the process will unfold. For instance, week 1 – announce the launch of the event and artist line-up, week 2 – start selling early bird tickets, and so on.
- Set a marketing budget: Your marketing efforts will require some budget for tasks like creating content and artwork, hiring a team, and running paid ads. When creating a marketing plan, determine how much money you are ready to dedicate to marketing so you can plan and budget the amount accordingly. Usually, a good marketing budget ranges from about 10%-30% of potential revenue, but it depends on many factors.
- Establish your marketing team: When you already know your audience and relevant marketing channels, you will require a highly qualified team that can take responsibility for the tasks. Whether the team is made up of existing or new members, it’s important to determine the roles and responsibilities of each person beforehand so that each person is aware and accountable for the tasks they are required to take care of. Examples of possible team members are a PR Specialist, a Paid Marketing Specialist, and a Social Media Marketing Specialist.
However, hiring an entire specialized marketing team can get expensive. Instead, let our specialized in-house marketing team help plan a successful marketing plan for your event. Learn more about our event marketing solutions now.
How To Market An Event Successfully
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is one of the most effective organic ways to reach a large audience. With an estimated 4.76 Billion unique users, social media is one of the world’s most commonly used marketing platforms. Adding a social media marketing strategy to your overall marketing plan is essential and can significantly contribute to your marketing goals.
Through its wide reach, social media marketing can help you increase awareness for your event. If you aim to improve conversions through social media channels, don’t forget to add a call-to-action and a link to guide your audience toward the right destination to purchase the tickets, or you may lose out on potential customers.
There are multiple social media platforms to choose from, like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. The best one for you would depend on your event type and target audience, as each platform has its own goals and audience types. Make sure to thoroughly research each platform before choosing the social media channels to market your event on.
To improve success, you can include strategies like influencer marketing, giveaways, and user-generated content (UGC) in your social media marketing plan.
Email Marketing
With an average ROI of $36 per $1 of spend (as per Hubspot’s research), email marketing provides one of the highest returns compared to other marketing channels. Given its high success rates, setting up an email marketing strategy can greatly increase conversions for your event.
If you have an established email database of existing and potential customers, a good email marketing campaign can help capture them and result in a high conversion rate, as the audience is already familiar with your brand.
However, even if you lack an existing customer database, you can reach a targeted audience by partnering with Platinumlist. With the help of our world-class marketing team, we help market events to our high-quality, events-focused audience through specialized email marketing campaigns that result in high open and conversion rates.
Interested in learning more about our email marketing solutions for events? Get in touch with us now.
Build an SEO-friendly webpage for your event
Setting up a dedicated web landing page for your event is the best way to provide all the required information in one place. But you want to ensure that your webpage can reach as many people as possible and does not get lost amongst the millions of other event pages on the web, which can be achieved by creating an SEO-focused webpage.
An SEO (search engine optimization) focused webpage is one that follows relevant SEO practices like writing unique copy, using high-quality images, targeting specific keywords, etc., which results in the webpage ranking on top of Google search results. The better your landing page is optimized, the more likely it will appear for relevant Google search results like ‘events happening near me.
However, setting up a high-quality, SEO-focused webpage can be difficult. Instead of doing it yourself, you can choose to list your event on Platinumlist’s event and ticketing website, where our team will create a dedicated, SEO-focused landing page for your event. With our website’s strong authority and history, we can help your event’s landing page rank for specific event-related keywords, increasing reach among the right target audience.
Platinumlist is also the region’s go-to event ticketing platform, with thousands of visitors every day looking for trending events. With the large footfall on our website, your event’s page is more likely to be viewed by potential customers. Get in touch with us to get started now.
Paid Marketing Campaigns
While organic marketing should make up most of your marketing efforts, paid marketing campaigns can help give your marketing efforts the push they need to reach the right audience. These event advertising campaigns can be run on various digital platforms, including Google (search and display ads), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
These campaigns can be highly targeted, improving the performance and conversion of your marketing efforts as the targeting ensures that you reach the right people with relevant interests.
If you’re new to the game and not experienced in running paid campaigns, our paid-marketing experts with years of experience in the field can help advertise your event to the right people most effectively and efficiently.
Find out more about our paid advertising and marketing solutions.
Find PR opportunities with local media channels
Partnering with local media channels is a great way to reach a wider audience within your target area. However, taking the paid route, in this case, can get very expensive. With the right approach and marketing, you might be able to find organic PR opportunities with media platforms by providing them with an interesting story to advertise to their audience.
Think about the ‘newsworthy’ aspects of your event. It might be your famous performers, venue, or even a cause your event supports. If the information is interesting enough, you will likely be able to intrigue their interest and secure an organic PR piece for your event.
One of the most effective ways to make this happen is by cultivating meaningful relationships with local media platforms. This can be done by providing them with the latest information about your events and free tickets. This will benefit you in the long term by harboring a relationship based on goodwill, leading to more organic PR opportunities in the future.
Affiliate marketing
In recent years, affiliate marketing has become one of the fastest-growing channels to reach new customers. With 20% of brand marketers choosing it as their top customer acquisition channel, it has started coming head-to-head with other important marketing channels, including paid search and display ads.
In a nutshell, affiliate marketing is the process of building ambassadors or affiliates that advertise your product or service to their audience to help increase sales and receive a percentage commission in return.
Affiliate marketing is considered one of the most efficient customer acquisition channels as it helps you reach a completely new and niche audience (belonging to the affiliate) for an inexpensive commission cost, leading to a high ROI on your spending.
By building an affiliate database for your event, you can spread the word about your event to a large, targeted audience through the ambassadors, increasing conversions and revenue.
At Platinumlist, we run our very own affiliate marketing program with thousands of affiliate partners who can help you reach a wider audience by promoting your event on their marketing platforms.
Interested in becoming a Platinumlist affiliate? Join the program now.
Partner with your vendors
Your vendors are your partners, and your success is their success. Whether it’s your venue or your ticketing partners, the success of your event is directly beneficial for them, too. Due to this, they will likely be happy to market your event to their database.
Given that these companies are working in the event niche, their audience will be highly targeted, which will help you reach the right people for your event.
As your ticketing partner, Platinumlist helps you market your event to our high-quality customer database through various platforms, including social media, push notifications, email marketing, paid ad campaigns, and more.
Partner with your performers
This one is obvious but worth a mention. Your event’s artists will likely have the biggest and most effective channels. Celebrities always have the hottest audience of the most loyal fans, meaning any promotion for your event through their channels will likely reach a much wider audience and have a high conversion rate. And at the end of the day, your event’s success is your performer’s success; they go hand-in-hand.
When setting up your contract with the artists, make sure to add a few marketing clauses that include marketing and promotion for your event through their platforms to be able to access their targeted audience.
Our event and marketing solutions are curated specially for each event; get in touch to learn more.
