This post was written by Sally Pigott who leads the consumer events team at Eventbrite UK and is an ex-event director with 8 years experience in the industry. With her wealth of experience and constant engagement with event organisers, she’s an expert at helping festival organisers produce more successful events. Sally takes a look at 5 of the most common problems facing festival organisers and some solutions on how to solve them.

How can I make more people aware of my event?

With an unending number of events and experiences consumers can take part in, it’s not enough to just have a great event – as an event director you have to make sure as many people as possible know about your event, so it stands above the crowd and drives the ticket sales you need to make your event a success.

The key to this is trying as many promotional avenues as possible – social, print, outdoor, PR – to understand which channels or combination of channels drives the best results for your event. I increasingly hear event directors say that social media advertising, Facebook in particular, by far drives the best engagement. The organisers getting the best results from this insight are the ones that then focus their marketing budget on Facebook to allow them to stand out where it matters, rather than spreading themselves thinly across channels that are driving little to no results. Download Eventbrite’s guide to Facebook Advertising here.

How can I turn my online community into ticket buyers?

Everything looks great on paper – people are talking about your event, you’ve got tons of followers on Facebook and the press has picked it up – but not enough of these people are actually buying tickets.

There are lots of clever and creative ways to activate your audience – like spot discounts, PR stunts, and competitions – but sometimes the simplest concepts are the most effective.

On average each extra step in a purchase process leads to a 10% drop off in sales. One of the simplest ways to increase your ticket sales is to ensure sure your ticket buying experience is quick, simple and intuitive in order to minimise drop off in your ticket purchase process.

If your ticketing system has a forced login, more than a few page loads or the purchase button isn’t easy to find, it’s worth thinking about the impact your ticketing system choice could be having on your bottom line.

How do I turn my Facebook followers into attendees?

It’s common for event directors to see Facebook as one of their most important promotional channels – but unless you can turn your followers into ticket buyers, you’re going to end up questioning how valuable your time and budget spent here is.

Brand new technology like Eventbrite’s Buy on Facebook tool allows you to turn more of your Facebook followers into ticket buyers by making it quick and easy for them to purchase tickets in 2 clicks without ever leaving Facebook. They can then also access their tickets directly from the Facebook app!

By putting tickets right in front of your audience rather than asking them to navigate away to another site, you’re making it much easier for them to buy and will result in more of those ‘Likes’ turning into actual ticket sales.

How do I make sure I’m getting the best results possible from my marketing spend?

Regardless of how big or small your marketing budget is, it’s always going to be finite – it’s therefore crucial to know that your spend is delivering the best results possible.

The better you can understand your attendees, the easier it will be to target them and make sure that you’re spending your marketing budget on the channels and in the places that will give you the highest return.

Alongside processing ticket sales, your ticketing system’s job is to give you easy access to attendee data and insights so that you can build a picture of who they are.

One of my favourite tools is Eventbrite’s attendee chart – a heat map of the UK (or the world, if you have an international audience) showing where your ticket buyers have come from. This is a great way to instantly identify specific areas where you have high engagement, without having to so much as download a spreadsheet. You can then use these insights to inform who and where to target with your marketing budget.

How do I get last year’s attendees to come back again this year?

It goes without saying that remarketing this year’s event to last year’s attendees is a good sales tactic – but how and when do you do this to get the best results?

Firstly, make sure your ticketing system gives you 24/7 access to last year’s attendee data so that you not only have the details to reach these people again in the first place but also so that you can do this when it suits you.

Once you’ve got the data, try to build a picture of when last year’s attendees bought – do you see a spike in sales around payday? Are they weekday or weekend buyers? In which week or month did you see most ticket sales coming through?

Digging a bit deeper to find insights like this will allow you to understand your attendee’s engagement and buying habits so that when you do contact them again, you can do it at a time and in a way that they’re going to be most responsive.

If you’d like to find out more about how Eventbrite can help your event, contact us now and speak with one of our experts.