4 Ways To Use Influencer Marketing For Your Event

You’ve reached out to event blogs to create listings for your event, you’ve done our checklist and even done some Google AdWords and retargeting and you’ve totally got the social media marketing thing down. What do you do? Well, you need to reach more people. It’s a law of averages: the more people who know about your event, the more tickets you’re likely to sell. While skywriting may be an interesting way to capture attention, and potentially some viral-ity, just blanket targeting anyone isn’t the best way.

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How to Preserve Customers While Growing Event Business

Meet Customer Expectations with a great team: Your event organisation must have a team that is aware of how to build these customer relationships, and skilled in many disciplines. They must have good critical thinking skills and be able to adapt to changing technologies, understand customer expectations, and be able navigate the business culture and have the knowledge to be able to exploit all event marketing tools. Listening To Your Customers: Clients will tell you volumes, if you’ll only listen. Train your employees to be interrogators (in the best possible sense, of course!). Ask your existing customers what they loved about events they’ve been to or their favorite part of the last event you organized for them. Simply engaging them in conversation about them will net you all the information you need to better your events and services customer treatment. As important as listening is, make sure you “hear” what clients say. Make changes and alterations where you feel it is warranted. A customer that sees their suggestions implemented is one with a stake in your business. Concentrate and capitalise on these human emotions. Reward Your Best Customers: Not all customers are created equal. Some will try to get you to give them the sky for free, while others are more than happy to pay good money to be treated well. Value cannot be overrated. When you find customers that are loyal and return over and over to your business, find ways to reward their loyalty. A little hidden secret about this tip is that happy, loyal, well-cared-for “insider” customers can be one of the best new client acquisition tools. These folks tell their friends. Be Professional Yet Have Fun: Obviously this tip will vary depending upon the type of Event organisation you operate, however, the principle is still relatively universal. While being professional and helpful to your clients, the simple act of putting a smile on your face can lighten the mood and make an otherwise unmemorable interaction one that not only gets remembered but gets spread around to others likely to get in contact for event management. Lending back to your team, Event Managers must always be personable and able to talk and gel with anyone; relationship building skills are imperative and priceless! Keep Current (With What Matters to Your Customers): Technology continues to accelerate and it’s important to keep up with what’s new and popular with customers. New smart event devices; such as apps and all round delegate management systems, new hot off the press venues, new event trends they are inspired by, new ways to be heard, and new social channels. Sometimes it seems improbable that you could keep up, but if you try to relate to your customers and see what is interesting to them, you’ll have a better way to decide what to concentrate on. A good example recently is Pinterest. It blew onto the scene suddenly, has grown exponentially, morphed from its original uses into a broader tool for businesses, and is beloved for its visual emphasis. Don’t let these kinds of opportunities elude you just because the value isn’t immediately apparent. Keep reading. Keep watching. Keep listening. Consider Complaints a Gift: This is easy to say but, of course, hard to do. Remember, whether the customer is right or wrong, and even on days when you deal with complaints that are unreasonable, the way you handle them can demonstrate to customers that you are committed to delivering the best event management service. Complaints are an opportunity to improve your skills and up your game. Author Bio: Sarah Hill is a professional blogger and creative content writer. She works as a Marketing Manager Group Se7en Events. Group Se7en Events is a leading event planning & event management agency in London, delivering global meeting and free venue finding service. ]]]]> ]]>

7 Habits of Highly Successful Event Planners

1.Never Stops Learning Did you know that most people only read one book a year, and that this number is declining? Talk with most people, and they’ll tell you that after they graduated from college or they received their event planning certification that they’re done with learning. To be successful, you need to keep advancing your knowledge. And this isn’t just about reading books, it’s also about getting experience and practical tips to know how to run a successful event. So whether it’s reading blogs of other event planners, buying books on event marketing, or helping out your friend with her bridal shower, you need to keep honing your skill set. If you don’t, you can and will fall behind. 2.Works Well With Others You might be the only event planner for the event, but that doesn’t grant you omnipotence. For most events you’re also going to have to work with caterers, speakers, ticketing, vendors, and a lot more. Even the most basic events will require you to coordinate with others. A valuable tip, and also the Golden Rule: “people treat you how you treat them”. 3.Uses Technology (When Appropriate) There’s a whole slew of event technology nowadays, so much it seems overdone. There’s iBeacon, RFID, conference apps, event management software, and so much more. To make matters worse, some blogs seem to say that if there aren’t drones flying overhead snapping photos for your instagram and pinterest blogs then you might as well just pack it in. Here’s the only litmus test I have for event technology is this: does it make something more fluid? Asked in another way: does it remove some sort of friction from the event and make it more enjoyable for attendees? For example, I find registration software to be helpful because it removes the chore of excel spreadsheets. Check-in apps and RFID are much cleaner than just checking names off a list and can notify you of VIPs. Conference apps, too, can help measure engagement. They can also help attendees schedule their days more efficiently. I say appropriate use of technology because you can’t be using technology just for the sake of using it. I’ve seen Tweet Walls used to great effect and I’ve also seen them gone unused because they’re in an inappropriate setting. 4.Asks for and Implements Critique Athletes have coaches, employees have managers, students have teachers. But when you’re an event planner, you’re normally in a situation where there is no critique or feedback towards what you are doing. To be successful at what you’re doing, you need to have someone – like a mentor – to help you improve. People have different personalities and different viewpoints that can make you even better at being an event planner and/or designer. After you receive critique or feedback, you should consider what you have learned. If it’s just negative and provides no learning experience, it’s best to ignore it. But if it’s something that critiques your event in such a way like “you need more ways for attendees to interact with the speaker” then it warrants further thought. 5. They Don’t “Go With the Flow” “I find out what will be trending and available to the public around the time of my event—and then I avoid it.” —Billy Butchkavitz One thing I’ve consistently noticed that most of the top event planners is that they are not beholden to the trends that are currently going on. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use a popular trend if it works well for an event. It means that you do your best to make your event stand out from all the other events out there. The best way to make people care about what you’re doing is to have a unique proposition for your event. As the saying goes, the purple puppy is the one that stands out. 6.Wide Range of Knowledge (marketing) The best event planners are also bloggers and marketers. They are a “Renaissance man” or woman of the event space. Mindy Weiss, for example, knows how to market herself with a blog that talks about events she plans for (and has already designed and done). 7. They let their personality shine Building off of #5, one of the easiest ways to be successful is to let your personality and creativity shine through in every project you work on. In my experience, most people are too timid and afraid of opinions to achieve peak creativity. Even worse, people can be scared that their designs will put people off. Now here’s the thing: your style could put people off, but that’s okay. Are you curious to know why? It’s because some other people might find your design style to be whimsical or cutting edge or something else positive. I see articles about companies that love using certain designers because of the aesthetic they bring to the table. Some of these designers are now hailed as the best in the business. To conclude, I think that a lot of these habits are basic habits that happen to be tuned to an event planning mindset. The best thing about a lot of these habits is that while some of them may be tough to achieve, having them puts you a step above all your competition.]]]]> ]]>

5 Ways to Use Social Media to Sell Event Tickets

If this is the first time your company is hosting an event, then you have some serious work ahead of you if you hope to sell most or all your tickets. Since your business isn’t well known at this point, it’s going to be challenging to convince guests to attend. Nevertheless, the goal is completely doable especially if you promote your event heavily through social media.

1. Implement Social Listening

Use social listening services to monitor social media activity. This helps you identify soft leads that may potentially become hot leads. The latter is the demographic that you want to nurture as they have a greater likelihood of converting to customers. There is plenty you can do with social listening, such as:

Determine keywords or hashtags your demographic is using
Find out which social media channels they spend more time using
Identify positive and negative posts about your brand and respond accordingly
Determine your biggest brand advocates and reward them (more on this later)
Determine what followers are saying about your competitors, both the good and the bad

You can visit this site for a list of free social listening services, though you’ll eventually want to upgrade to a paid service for the very best features to really identify key social media patterns among your demographic.

2. Provide “Soft” Reminders

You want to begin ticket sales early. A lot of potential attendees, though, may opt to purchase closer to the event date since they’re still on the fences about attending and would rather not make a decision when the event is still kind of far out. This tends to be the case even if you provide early bird sale specials. These people are your hot leads that you want to nurture so that they don’t forget or decide not to attend.

On your event page, you can provide a signup box that pops up when the visitor clicks away. The signup box can urge the visitor to sign up to receive regular reminders via tweet or Facebook post as event day approaches. This is known as a “soft conversion” tactic that keeps potential attendees in the loop so they don’t let the event slip past their mind.

3. Reward Your Biggest Brand Advocates

Brand advocates are the people who not only buy a ticket but also recommend others, “like” your social media channels, and share your posts. These advocates are your biggest assets and most loyal customers that you definitely want to keep around for the long-term.

To keep them as brand advocates, you have to reward them and acknowledge the favor they’re doing for you. Engage with these people and get to know them more on a one-on-one basis. Identify who they are and reach out to them on a more personal level.

This can be done via social media through a private post that addresses the recipient by name. Include some type of gift, such as a ticket discount if they haven’t already bought their ticket, or a coupon code as a thank you for advocating for your brand on the company’s behalf. To make it even more personal, send a hand-written physical letter or postcard with coupon code or gift card.

4. Create a Memorable Event Hashtag

Most people think they know how to create a cool hashtag when they really don’t. The trick is to make the hashtag discernible while keeping it as short as possible. Take a look at the hashtag #October2016MuscleCarShowOrangeCounty. It’s easily discernible just by taking a look at it, but it’s a tad long.

You can definitely curtail it to the following: #Oct2016MCShowOC. This is a lot shorter, but it’s a bit vague. Anyone not familiar with the event will have a hard time identifying what it means. How about this one: #OctMuscleCarShowOC? This provides the perfect balance between length and discernibility. Notice that it also leaves out the year. Omitting nonessential information helps keep the hashtag sweet and short.

5. Post-Event Talk

The event has passed, so ticket selling is over at this point. However, your job is far from over. It reasons that you plan on hosting more events in the future, so why not get a head start for the next event by promoting it right after the first one ends?

Continue to use social media to generate conversations about the event. Content to share include:
Video event highlights
A “thank you for attending” message from a company higher-up
Sending post-event surveys
A thank you gift (in the form of a discount code) for those who attended
A message or preview of the next event
A link to the event page for the next event if it’s already up
Ticket reservation for the next event, exclusive to those who attended the first one

Creating post-event buzz keeps people excited and may increase their likelihood of attending the next event. This is an early form of consumer nurturing that pays off come time for event #2.

Social Media Provides More than Enough Resources

Using social media to sell more tickets is a lot more than just sending posts here and there. You have to use the tools and trending social media practices to form a rapport with your consumers. Nurturing your customers in this manner takes time, but the rewards are more than worth it.

About the Author: Dan McCarthy is an Event Manager at Ultimate Experience, an event management company based in the UK. Dan has 5 years of event project management under his belt. He has worked on many successful events, and currently he shares his knowledge by writing on the company blog. Follow him on Twitter @DanCarthy2.

Choose a payment system. Mobile POS systems and cash are both good options. If you’re planning a ticketed event, select a platform to sell and scan tickets.]]]]> ]]>

Content Marketing for Events – Blogs

As you’ll recall in my last post, content marketing is essential for positioning yourself as a leader within your industry. It is also a fantastic way to get people more interested in going to your event or using your event planning business. With that being said, I wanted to talk a little bit about how to use blog posts to accomplish that. Guest Posts Guest posts can go one of two ways: either you have somebody post on your blog, or you make a post on somebody else’s blog. Somebody posting on your blog: If you’re going this route, the best thing to do is get somebody who is well respected in your industry or niche to post about a topic that relates to your event. This means that if you’re doing a trade show, having a representative from a company writea bout what to look for in a certain product is great. If it’s a comic convention, having a special guest write about something is sure to be a winner. If it’s a social event, even having somebody who regularly frequents it write about a great experience they had will be relatable. Posting on somebody else’s blog: Your first step is to identify blogs in your industry or nicheThe second is to identify if any of them allow guest posting. Stop right here – remember that you’re posting on somebody else’s blog. This means that you can’t just advertise your event your your service. You need to provide something of value before you can talk about yourself or you’re not going to be allowed to guest post. Or, worse, you’ll look self-serving and it will rub people the wrong way. Once you have a list of potential guest posting opportunities, email them all! Or if you know them in person, just ask. Be sure to make your email stand out. Pitch an idea or interesting perspective for a piece within the email. This is far more likely to be accepted than a vague “can I write a thing for you?”. Also, don’t forget to go big! Some blogs may seem intimidating because they’re huge within their field and have thousands of followers, but include them in your email pitch. If your idea is good, they’ll be interested! For Event Planning Businesses If you’re running an event planning business, you should have regular blog posts. Blog posts come in all shapes and sizes: you can write about things you’ve learned, tips and tricks for other event planners, embarrassing/funny stories about planning, and much more. The blog posts you write are only limited by your own imagination. There’s a story behind every event you’ve planned and the experiences you’ve gained from it. Some of the most popular event planning sites out there, like eventplanningblueprint.com , have an extremely robust content section. For Events If you’re making blog posts to market an event, you should post regularly but the content shouldn’t be about tips and tricks. It should be anticipatory in nature – perhaps post “leaked” pictures of what the event will look like. Guest posts from speakers and stars are great here. If you’re running a conference or trade show, talk about vendors or speakers that are going to be there. Just like with conventions, see if a speaker or a certain vendor is willing to write a short post about their experiences or anything else that relates to your convention. Other Tips – Have a schedule set up. People enjoy regular content and will make it part of that day’s routine. Communications studies have shown that many people would read a newspaper every day just because it was a habit. So whatever day you’re going to make a post, stick with it! – Keep paragraphs short. Imagine if I had no line breaks and everything I’d written so far was in one huge paragraph. It’d be an eyesore and mentally taxing to read. – Headers should be in bold. Did you notice that all my headers were in bold? Due to the effect of social media and Gawkeresque sites, people tend to skim articles and this can point them in the right direction. There are a lot of arguments on long posts vs. short posts and what works best. According to Medium, the optimum post length takes about an average of 7 minutes to read (post here). You also have Buffer saying an optimum post has about 1,600 words (post here).This allows for the post to contain enough information for the reader to find relevant without also taking up too much time or overwhelming them. That’s not to say short posts aren’t good or useful, as I think this one fits both criteria! I think a blend of both is the best way to go but, testing with your own audience and what they respond to is the best way. Conclusion I hope this gave you some inspiration to get started on a blog for your event or for your event planning business. If you’re interested in more posts about blogs, check out my post on how to use blogs to sell tickets online. ]]]]> ]]>

4 Reasons You Need Content Marketing

We’ve talked about all kinds of marketing for events on this blog, but one has been missing – until today.

Content Marketing is one of the most influential types of marketing out there and it comes in many shapes in sizes. From blog posts to how-to articles to videos to white papers, there isn’t a single event out there that couldn’t benefit from content marketing.

Today I’m going to talk about how events can use content marketing to help get new attendees to their events. Some of the most important types of content for events will be video, photo, news, and blog posts.

For this introductory part to the series, I want to talk about why content marketing is so powerful.

1. Content Marketing Will Make You Look Like Leader In Your Industry.

Let’s take two comic book conventions, A-Con and B-Con. A-Con (not to be confused with the rapper) has weekly emails detailing various happenings. B-Con also has weekly emails, but they also have blog posts detailing special guests like Harrison Ford and that one guy in the back of the cantina. Not just that, but B-Con also posts interviews from cosplayers and even has surveys asking attendees what they might like for next year.

So, which convention sounds like they’re at the top of their game? Which convention sounds like the one you’re going to want to go to? It’s not a trick question. It’s clear that that the convention putting out more content for their attendees is going to be the convention people flock to. Make no mistake, something as simple as a video can result in increased sales.

2. Content Marketing Will Make People Remember You More

Have you ever heard of Michelin Stars? A restaurant can be awarded from 1 to 3 stars, with 3 being coveted and tough to get. Most restaurants aren’t awarded Stars at all, so even being given a single Star can be a huge deal. If the name Michelin sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the Tire Company with the funny-looking mascot. While this might seem random, people now know the name Michelin across different industries. Your event’s name will stick in more people’s heads. Anecdotally, when first writing this article I was trying to think of examples and this is the first one I thought of simply because it was so interesting. And I just recently got a flat tire on my car and the first thought that popped into my head was to see about getting a set of Michelin tires.

3. People Come For the Content, Stay For The Brand

Watching a funny commercial or reading an in-depth white paper is something that most people are interested in. Hence, people will actually go out of their way to learn about a new topic or to watch the best Superbowl Commercials. But what happens when someone watches 10 wacky videos of a blender destroying iPhones, crayons, and Thanksgiving dinner? You start to consider purchasing that blender, even though you might have just started watching the videos for fun. Check out the two comments below:

[caption id="attachment_23038" align="alignnone" width="450"]

You’ll notice, of course, that they bought it on eBay. However, its competitor lost a customer due to the Will It Blend? campaign.[/caption]

In 2007, spending precious time watching ads for products would be laughed at, but now it’s the norm. You can see just by those two photos that these videos which many (including myself) watched for fun ended up creating a huge profit for the company. And it has almost 900,000 subscribers on youtube – if even 1% of them purchased a blender for $400, that would be 9000 people buying a blender which is $3,600,000 in revenue.

4. Content Marketing Helps Identify What’s Important

When Jack, Megan or I start creating articles for the Ticketbud blog, we look over what we’ve done before and what’s been successful. We also take note of what might not have been as popular. Over time, we get better at what we’re doing and the blog posts we write now are, in my opinion, much better than blog posts we wrote even a year ago. Writing a lot of posts has helped us identify what readers coming to this blog like, and we now write better and more targeted posts because of that!

The other benefit is that as you write more, you become better at writing. As you record more videos or do more how-to’s, you become more competent at those tasks. Overall, creating content is not just good for getting more attendees, it’s good for your event as well.

Next week I’m going to start detailing the different ways to use Content Marketing for your event.

Next Week: I talk about Blogs

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Slideshare: Email Marketing for Events

In this slideshare, we discuss:

List building strategies to take your subscribers from 0 to 100
Types of emails to send based on different factors within your list
Must-do touchpoints for your email campaigns
Design tips that leave your potential attendees salivating
Creating a killer email invitation

Email Marketing for Events from Ticketbud

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Social Media for Events Timeline Infographic

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Virality; The Yawning Effect

The Power of Referral More and more, you see people tuning out ads on Facebook and search engines. Or, they run an adblocker so even the a really well designed advertisement don’t show up for them. This is stuff that virtually all marketers run into everyday. So, how do we circumvent this? We incentivize. 1. Social Shares A. The Contest. This is a super easy one to do and you might have already thought of it since a lot of events have used it to great effect to sell tickets online! Put on a contest for attendees and potential attendees to share the event on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or even LinkedIn depending on the crowd you’re going for. Then you put everyone who shared it into a raffle and then winner(s) then receive prizes such as backstage passes, free passes, or other event-appropriate items. This one works super well simply because people are going to want the free stuff and so will their friends. Give extra “raffle tickets” to people who’ve liked your page. B. The Discount. After attendees have purchased a ticket, encourage them to share their purchase on appropriate social networks for your event. Once they share the site, have them send proof and then give them something like a drink ticket or a small discount off their ticket. This one could be a bit difficult to do and keep track of, but this one may be a bit more enticing to your attendees. 2. Attendee Affiliates This one will also be a bit more tricky but has further potential: offer to compensate attendees who refer other attendees to your event to purchase tickets in the form of either discounts, drink tickets, or again any other event-appropriate items/regalia. While difficult on its own, you could certainly use a software platform such as https://gleam.io/ which is perfect for running contests and getting users to complete actions to gain benefits. [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="474"] Source: Gleam.io[/caption] Source: Gleam.io 3. Gamify What’s a better way to draw interest for your event than to make it supremely interactive and exciting for your attendees? After doing some research for helping events keep audience interest, I came across this: http://www.gamifyapp.com/ With the ability to get points for completing tasks, you’re going to have a much more engaged audience. Heck, even getting points for referrals is something that you could easily do and prizes are always appreciated. Source: Quickmobile In conclusion, there’s a lot of ways to really engage a contagious, “viral” effect to draw more attention to your event with very little marketing effort for yourself. Instead, your attendees are the ones who end up pulling the weight, getting their friends, family, and coworkers interested instead. The bigger plus for this is that you’ll have more people and your attendees will be much more excited to check out your event and will be more engaged before, during, and after. ]]]]> ]]>

Slideshare: 8 Social Media Tactics to Ignite Ticket Sales

In this slideshare, we discuss:

How you can repurpose event content for long lasting effects
Incentivizing social sharing through promo codes
Running a successful ticket giveaway contest
Secrets to leveraging Twitter’s advertising platform
Leveraging your speaker’s audience
Instagram photo mentioning
Retargeting for your event
Gaining exposure through Reddit

Event Marketing Strategies – 8 Social Media Tactics to Ignite Ticket Sales from Ticketbud

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Basic Google AdWords for Event Planners

You’ll notice, of course, right off the bat, that the first two results past the pictures are ads, and then there after all this are the “organic” (this means unpaid) results. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Ads are extremely powerful in this scenario, as people are statistically much more likely to click on the first 1-3 results and then much more sparingly after that. So now that you know this, let’s look into utilizing Google Adwords for your event!

Also, before we go any further, I should note that Adwords is not right for everyone, especially depending on your ticket price and your location. I only recommend you use Adwords if you are located in an urban center or area with a large population, and if your ticket prices are at least $10-15.

For New Users
In this section, I’m going to walk you through the account creation and first ad creation. It’s quite simple, however there are always things to watch out for! The first thing you’ll need to do before anything is create an Adwords account if you haven’t already. Simply go to https://www.google.com/adwords/ and click the blue “Start Now” button. If you already have an Adwords account/have used Adwords before, you can skip this portion and head down to “Optimizing Your Ads”.

First, you’ll need to create a Google account if you haven’t already. If you have, you can sign into it and you’ll use that account for you Adwords
Setting your location: Ignore the default location settings and click on the little pencil icon to the right. Then, go to “Let me choose…” and enter in the city you’re in. For my example, I’m trying to market “concerts in Austin” so I’d obviously want to add in Austin, TX. I’d also add in cities that are nearby Austin because I’m sure people will want to go them during the weekends! Use your judgment here.
Search Networks: Next, you’ll see the area that says Networks. Click on the Pencil to edit, and uncheck “Display”. Display ads aren’t very popular and I’ve never seen good results with them. Now onto the meat!
Keywords: Keywords are things that people search for in search engines. They can range from “where to buy coffee” to “what is that one song that goes i’m blue da ba dee da ba die”. This part can be difficult to determine- you’ll need to think about what people could be searching for that would make them want to go to your event. If you’re doing an event for home decorators, you could choose keywords like “home decorator tips” or “home decoration”. The nice thing about adwords is it will tell you how popular those search terms are, as well as giving you other ideas.
Bids: Bids are a little tricky, and this is one portion where I recommend setting your own bid to start off with. Doing $1.00 is good enough to start with, but you’ll need to think about ticket prices. Don’t go bidding $1.00 if your tickets are only $3.00! Go into the bidding process thinking that you’ll need at least 2-3 clicks before someone buys. You can always edit your bid later. After you’ve decided on your bid, now you can go back to your budget and set it. Don’t worry if your clicks or impressions are lower.
Writing a Text Ad: If you’ve never done a Google Ad before, here’s a few things to keep in mind. First off all, you have Character limits. Your headline has a limit of 25 characters, and then you have two lines of ad text, each of which are 35 characters each. My most basic recommendation is this: Have a clear connection between your keyword choices and the headline for maximum interest. Then, in your first line of ad text, have a benefit. Why do they want to come to your concert? The second line of ad text should have a call to action, such as “buy your tickets now!” or “5 early bird tickets left, save $5!”. These are always the most effective ads.

After all that, you’re all set! Be sure your landing page is the actual website for people to see your event, and set that green URL as your website as well. Click “Save”, then go to Billing and Review. You’re finished!
Note: We are not affiliated with empireatx, but they are pretty cool so I wanted to use them as my example.

Optimizing Your Ads
Here’s a few tips for optimizing your ads for not only the highest CTR (click through rate, which is calculated as Clicks/Impressions) but also for saving your money.

SPLIT TEST!!!: Although it’s incredibly basic, you’d be surprised at how many people fail to do it. Split testing involves creating two (not 3, not 4, not 1) ads for each group of keywords, and then seeing which one has a higher CTR. The higher the CTR, the better! After a couple weeks or at your discretion, look at your campaign manager and see which of your two ads has a better CTR. Delete the loser, and create a new ad based off your “winner” and see if you can boost it even higher. Over time, your CTR will increase even higher. The higher the CTR, the lower your costs are going to be since Google wants people to click on your ads. I recommend rotating out the loser every 1000 impressions.
+Modified +Broad +Match +Rules: Remember when you picked keywords? Choose an ad group, such as “concerts in Austin”, and then take all keywords that you want to look similar. For example, you’d want to add a + in front of Austin and also +concerts. This means that your ad will only ever show up if someone types both “concerts” and “Austin” into the search bar. This will help increase your CTR dramatically. It’s really the best of all types of keyword matching.
dn’t misspell wrds: Character limits suck, but you can’t get around them. Acronyms are one thing (like ATX), but you need to be using the full word. Google judges the quality of your ad, and that affects where it’s placed.
Bid Slightly Higher: Very rarely will you pay exactly what you bid. This means that you should try to bid a little bit higher than what you’d want to pay, as this will get you higher spots. Higher spots means more people click, which means higher CTR, which means that your costs can go down…seems counterintuitive but that’s the way the bidding software works.
Use -Negative Keywords: Are you doing a Baroque concert in Austin but it seems that everyone is searching for “neopsychelectro funk concerts in Austin”? Help raise your CTR by using negative keywords. In your campaign manager, you can choose to put in negative keywords. This means that if someone searches for “neopsychelectro funk”, your ad won’t show up for that keyword.

Conclusion
There you have it- you now have all the basic knowledge to run a successful Google Ad campaign! As always, be willing to learn new information and you’ll also want to stay up to date on new happenings in the ad space to make the most out of your budget. You’ll find that this takes very little of your time but can have drastic results. I’ll be writing more about Search Engine Marketing for Event Marketers and Planners, so stay tuned and thanks again for reading!

How to Retarget for Your Event

Take a look at your Facebook right now. Begin scrolling through your News Feed. Nestled between baby pictures and political arguments, you’ll see the occasional sponsored post. A sponsored post is a native Facebook ad. Keep scrolling. Start taking note of all the ads from sites you have visited recently. There’s probably a lot. If you browse the Internet, you’ll find that these sites seem to follow you everywhere. Congratulations, you’re being retargeted.

What is retargeting?

Retargeting is when you serve ads to people who have previously been on your website. The logical assumption is if someone visits your website, they’re expressing some interest in whatever your’e selling. Retargeting allows you to stay top of mind and boost awareness to these visitors. The ultimate goal is to herd these visitors towards becoming customers. For events in particular, this means pushing visitors to completing their ticket purchase. retargeting_step_by_step

The magic behind retargeting works like this. When someone visits your website, a cookie is added to that person’s browser. This stores the site visit so when they leave, you’ll be able to serve them ads on other sites that they browse.

…more than 90% of visitors visit and leave without converting or buying. – Noah Kagan

This post will show you how to setup retargeting for your event. We’ll go over what retargeting tools to use, types of ads, and smart tactics that’ll help you sell more tickets. Read on to learn how to successfully retarget potential attendees.

Retargeting Tools

We’ll focus on 3 big players in the retargeting space. These companies don’t require massive budgets to get started. We’ll briefly go over each tool and then move into the types of ads you can make.

1. Perfect Audience

“Retarget lost visitors everywhere from one simple dashboard.” Perfect Audience is a good choice for jumping in and getting started in minutes. They boast a number of retargeting options including Facebook, Twitter, and various websites. A giant network of ad exchanges is at your fingertips so you’ll have many opportunities to retarget lost attendees. Cost: Charge on a CPM basis. They charge per one thousand views.

2. ReTargeter

“ReTargeter optimizes your ad spend with highly targeted, real time digital advertising solutions and the best account management in the industry.” This tool touts itself as a full-service platform that offers a suite of solutions for your retargeting needs. They also allow you to retarget on the same channels as Perfect Audience. It feels a bit more geared towards the seasoned marketing professional. Cost: Sliding scale based on monthly unique visitors. $500 for every 10,000 visitors.

3. Adroll

“The global leader in retargeting.” Adroll was one of the first remarketing tools out there and it shows. They’ve built a robust platform that is in parody with the other 2 on this short list. Their customer base is impressive with many of companies across many verticals. Cost: Pay as you go CPM Pricing. You get a 2 week trial to start.

Types of Retargeting Ads for Events

Let’s get the creative juices flowing. Here’s 2 ad types we suggest: 1. Direct Ticket Purchase: Clicking goes right back to your ticketing page. Most popular choice here. 2. Demand Generation: Clicking the ad can go to a promo video, your speaker lineup, or just any piece of content that will help convince your attendees to buy tickets. We recommend testing out campaigns for these 3 ad options below: 1. Facebook News Feed Screen Shot 2015-03-25 at 3.54.36 PM

2. Web Image Ad standard-web-ad-160x600

3. Twitter Feed Screen Shot 2015-02-02 at 1.57.26 PM

There’s some other options available but from our experience, these are the 3 we’ve seen success with.

Setting up Your 1st Campaign

Before setup, take a moment to think about the ROI you’d like to achieve from retargeting. For selling tickets in particular, start with your ticket prices and work from there. A good benchmark is to try doubling your spend. Let’s say you’re selling general admission tickets for $50 a pop. Ideally, you’d want to shoot for spending $25 for every ticket sold through retargeting. The economics differ for each event so go through this exercise to force yourself to think about your goals. For this example campaign, we’ll be using Adroll to create a Facebook News Feed Ad.

Step 1: Placing the Smart Pixel on your website

After creating an Adroll account, place the Smart Pixel tag across all pages on your site. By doing this, Adroll will track all your page views and you can segment your retargeting campaigns. This is super important!

Step 2: Create New Campaign

Step 3: Choose where you want to retarget

Here, you’ll see all the options Adroll has to offer. We’re choosing the Desktop News Feed.

Step 4: Campaign Settings

We recommend starting with about $100-200 a week. You can adjust this amount at anytime. Be smart about your campaign names, here’s a great post on how to do this.

Step 5: Target Visitors

This is where you tell Adroll what visitor segments you want to target. You can target specific pages and set the amount of time the visitor is targeted for. For your first campaign, start broad. Create a segment that targets all visitors by adding a * for the URL rule. This ensures that all your site visitors are retargeted. conversion1

Additionally, create another segment specifically for your ticket confirmation page. Insert the URL for this segment and click ‘Count this as a conversion’. After creating this segment, toggle the segment to be excluded. Now Adroll will track your conversions and not show ads to visitors who have already purchased tickets. Campaign optimization for the win!

Step 6: Add Ads

At this point, you’ll want to consult with your design team to build out some image assets. Your ad images could highlight a speaker, your festival lineup, or action shots from past events. It all depends on your event. upload_new_ads

After uploading an image, Adroll will prompt you to write your ad copy. Create a clear call to action and a gripping headline. Your only goal is to get your visitors to click. Also take in consideration that this ad is appearing in your target audience’s Facebook feed. Envision how it’ll look in the News Feed. The more native it is to Facebook, the better. gorgon_city_ad1

We highly recommend creating multiple ads so you can test the engagement.

Step 7: Launch & Test!

Adroll takes up to 48 hours to approve your campaign. After approval, your retargeting ads will begin serving. Your work is far from done though. After launching, you’ll want to keep tabs on your dashboard to watch engagement. Adroll gives you all the charts and data you need. See what ads work the best and make adjustments when needed. graph

Thanks for sticking around to read through the post. Retargeting has a bit of a learning curve but can pay dividends if you put the time into it. You’re now ready to test out this marketing channel for your event! We know that there’s a lot of details when it comes to creating a retargeting campaign. Leave a comment below if any questions come up. We’re happy to help out. Additional Resources:

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