Ticketbud Tips and Tools*
March 28, 2014  •  by Jane Carter

4 Key Marketing Stats To Drive Registration: When to Post, What to Post & How to Improve

1. Keep it fresh Providing powerful and compelling marketing comes down to producing quality content. However, even the most impressive marketing can grow stale after enough time. Keeping your marketing and messaging fresh is one of the most effective steps you can take to keep engagement high and a great example to refer to is the content kings of the internet, Google. Google’s job as a search engine is to continually provide the freshest and most relevant content to it’s users and, to do so, it instituted a “freshness” algorithm. While I don’t suggest trying to replicate this mathematical equation, basing your marketing off the key stats and points of the algorithm are a great way to determine whether or not you should make changes. Some takeaways from the algorithm to keep in mind for your marketing:

  • – “Changes to important content matters more”

    • Takeaway: Determine what your “main attractions” are rotate them in your messaging. Don’t give away your best stuff all at once!
  • – “How often you change your content impacts ‘freshness'”

    • Takeaway: In our experience, changing up your content every week is a good start. Rotate different images and text to see what sticks.
  • – “User behavior indicates freshness”

    • Takeaway: See what your attendees are talking about most and base your changes off of that. If everyone is talking about about the petting zoo at your carnival, it’s time put up some more animal images and zoo details.

2. Avoid weekends and evenings

While fresh and creative content is crucial to a successful marketing campaign, it will be all for naught if no one reads or even opens the content you send. The day of the week and the time of day are both important factors in the success of your open and click through rates so before you start scheduling when your messaging will go out, here are few important metrics to abide by:
  • clock– The most content is sent out on Tuesdays (17. 93%), which also has the highest open rate (19.9%) – (source: SmartInsights)
  • 40% of all marketing content goes out between 8am & 12pm but the most frequent responses times to that content was between 8pm & 12am – (source: AdWeek)
  • 23.8% of all email opens occur during the 1st hour after delivery. After 24 hours, an emails chance of being opened drops below 1% – (source: SmartInsights)

3. Help your volunteers, Early Bird attendees and loyal followers help you

Take a look at this stat from LinkedIn: “Employees are 70% more likely to take action on your update and spread your message to their networks by liking, sharing, or commenting on your posts.” The idea here is that those closely connected to something are more likely to share and promote it. If we extend this idea to your event, we can make the assumption that volunteers, early ticket buyers and, otherwise, loyal followers (like the employees from the LinkedIn report) are more likely to be your best resource for building engagement and spreading buzz. Take advantage of this by including these followers in your marketing plans and making it simple for them to share and engage with your content. Send notifications and links every time you release or share new marketing material or when particularly important updates to your events go live. As Buffer nicely puts it, “Asking for engagement is sometimes all it takes to get your colleagues involved.”

4. Optimize and thrive

As we discussed in one of our earlier posts, if you pay attention to what’s working and what isn’t on your event page and make informed refinements based on that, you will end up with an highly effective and high-converting page. This process, which many refer to as optimization, applies to your marketing efforts as well as is a great way to decide what to market and to who. Rather than guess as to what your audience might like, start with something basic (an email newsletter or social media page) and let the engagement and data from that tell you what to optimize next.
If a majority of people are clicking on the photos in your newsletter and not the text, you may want to consider adding a link to photo gallery or even include a video in your next newsletter.
Optimization is so powerful because it allows your audience to tell you what to do next. And who better to take direction from then the very people you want to come to your event?!]]]]> ]]>