In Part 2 we outline how to use Paid Social to help you sell more tickets to your event. (3 min read)
• Know your audience inside and out
• Choose the right objective
• Good creative draws attention
• Compelling copy drives clicks
• Monitor and tweak the campaign if necessary
1. Know your audience
Who do you want to buy your tickets?
You’re probably thinking “anyone and everyone, it doesn’t matter”.
But it DOES matter.
Advertising to consumers who have no interest in your events is a waste of time and money. That’s why it pays to research your target audience prior to launching paid ads.
Initially you’ll want to know their basic demographic info such as age range and location. But more advanced audience information is what will sell tickets. What are they interested in, which events do they attend, who are their favourite artists?
This wealth of audience data can be found in Facebook Business Manager under ‘Audience Insights’.
A safe option is to target consumers who already connected to your page. They’ve already displayed interest and are therefore more likely to purchase a ticket.
If your event has just launched, you may want to consider creating a ‘lookalike audience’. This is where Facebook creates a new audience for you to target, based on your previous customers (in this case, event attendees).
As you learn more about your potential audience, you’ll want to create several ‘sub-audiences’ that hone in on particular interests, for maximum effectiveness.For example, you can funnel down your “electronic music” audience to “fans of [headline act A]” and “fans of [headline act B]”.
2. Decide your campaign objective
Once you’ve set up your audiences, the next step is establish your marketing objective for each ad campaign. Facebook Ads Manager gives you several options. As expected, the most important one for driving ticket sales is Conversions.
(Another popular option is ‘Brand Awareness’ which is useful for growing your social following, but not for selling tickets).These options aren’t just namesakes – Facebook’s algorithm targets specific segments of your audience depending on your choice.
No doubt you’re thinking: why wouldn’t I always choose Conversions if the goal is to sell tickets?
Because Conversions campaigns are costly, and only effective once Facebook’s algorithm has been given time to learn about your audience. In other words, they have to proceed through the ‘Awareness’ and ‘Consideration’ stages first.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which option you pick if you don’t have an eye-catching creative.
3. Prepare your creative
The ‘creative’ is marketing-speak for the image/video that accompanies the text (or copy).The creative and the copy are, without a doubt, the two most important elements of an ad.
It can be easy to spend too much time on targeting. Even if your ad is displayed to the right audience, without good creative and copy they aren’t going to pay attention.
It’s down to personal preference whether you work on the copy or the creative (the image or video) first but in our experience, the creative is far more important.After all, visual content increases the desire to read text by up to 80%.
Most consumers only skim through posts on social media – an eye-catching creative makes them stop scrolling and pay attention to your message.
For Clovelly, we use a combination of professional photography and user-generated contents for our ads (and organic social posts).
Have specific outcomes in mind when carrying out these exercises – if you plan to run ads showcasing your new drinks menu in the future, take these photos well in advance.
Videos typically out-perform images (by at least 20%). Videos are more eye-catching and auto-play by default on Facebook and Instagram.
Combining this with an in-app ticket link is a recipe for success.
You always want to make the customer journey as streamlined as possible.If you run events regularly you should already have a bank of content taken from previous events. Of course, in the age of COVID, this isn’t as simple. It’s up to you whether you show pre-pandemic event photos. If you do, make sure it’s communicated clearly.
If you’re low on content, you can use the creative from your organic posts, in your ads. This works best if you’re targeting an audience that doesn’t already follow your page.
4. Craft your copy
You’ve grabbed your audience’s attention with the creative, now the copy needs to convince them to purchase a ticket.
First and foremost: keep it short. Edit and re-edit your copy, until it’s as concise as possible without losing the key message.
Here’s an ad we were running for Karma Kitchen:
Short, enticing copy, followed by a bright photo and ‘Book Now’ CTA that leads straight to the booking system, rather than the website. It’s often best not to mention price in the copy (unless you’re running a special promotion). If you convince consumers that the occasion is ‘unmissable’, they’ll be less influenced by the price.
5. Monitor the campaign’s progress
Once you’ve done all the hard work and your ads are running, you need to keep an eye on their progress.We’re not suggesting you have to look at it every hour, but at least once a day you should check on their performance. If you find they aren’t producing the results you hoped, consider tweaking the creative or copy.
Paid Social is all about trial and error, over time you (and Facebook’s algorithm) will learn more about your audience, which form of creative resonates most and which copy drives ticket sales.
You may want to look into A/B testing: this is where you have two similar ads running simultaneously. You might discover that your audience responds well to the ‘hard sell’.
On the other hand, if you find your ads are already driving strong sales, consider increasing your budget, or running the same ad with a separate ‘lookalike’ audience.
Follow these tips and you’ll be selling more tickets to your events in no time.
