Market your events smarter

1. Smarter Marketing for your Events
Marino Fresch
Marketing Director - Eventbrite
@mfresch

2. Events are changing

3. €4 Billion
Tickets processed each year
#1
First in the world by
number of events
180+
Countries
3
The event industry runs on Eventbrite
50+ Million
Active ticket buyers

4. 4
Music Festivals + Consumer Events Sports Conferences + Universities

5. The 4 Ps of marketing
PRODUCT PRICE
PLACE PROMOTION

6. The marketing trifecta: earned, owned and paid media

7. It takes 3-5 touches for people
to do, think, feel, what you
want
- Herbert E. Krugman

8. 8
01
Promotion
1. Facebook advertising
1. Advanced targeting methods
2. Building an effective funnel

9. Why Facebook advertising?
- 2 billion active users. Your audience is here
- Only pay to reach the people you want
- Organic reach is becoming saturated

10. Why targeting matters
2 important reasons
- Facebook’s targeting makes it the most powerful ad
platform available. Proper targeting drives real revenue
- Facebook uses Relevance Score to determine how much
to charge you for the ads. More relevant ads = higher
score = lower cost.
Therefore the better your targeting the cheaper your
ads will be.

11. Get your Ad Manager in shape
● The Facebook Pixel
○ The pixel allows you to:
■ Create audiences from people that visit your website(s).
■ Set up conversion events to measure the success of your ads by
recording what actions people take on your site after clicking through
from an ad (e.g. buying a ticket).
○ Without the pixel, you cannot run effective Facebook ads.
● You can use Eventbrite’s integration with the Facebook pixel to measure the
performance of the ads you use to drive ticket sales on Eventbrite.

13. Saved audiences
● Use FB’s in-built targeting functions e.g.
location, age, gender, demographics,
interests, etc.
● Pros:
○ Pretty granular.
○ Good for large target markets
● Cons:
○ Needs a detailed knowledge of what
your target audience looks like.
○ Weak for niche markets.

14. Custom audiences & retargeting
What causes high traffic / low conversion
campaigns?
People don’t buy on the first interaction, they
need nurturing.
If you’re not retargeting your website visitors,
you’re WASTING money.
Custom Audiences are what give you the ability
to target people who have visited your site.
Website visitors are
more likely to convert
through a retargeting
campaign
CPCs are on average
lower for retargeting
campaigns
80%
43%

15. Example: “All Visitors to mysite.com in the last
30 days”
More targeted: “only target people who visited
certain pages” (such as your speaker or
programme page)
Even more advanced: excluding anyone who
reached your “registration-complete” page.
Combining this with the above would mean you
target all visitors who are interested in your
event, but haven’t already bought a ticket!
How to define your custom audience

16. Recap: custom audiences and retargeting
With Custom Audiences & retargeting, you’re
targeting people who are already interested in
your event.
So they’re more likely to click on your ad (which
makes your ads cheaper!) and they are a
massive
70%
more likely to register for you event.
Remember, people don’t buy on the first
interaction - they need nurturing and
reminding to make sure they come back and
convert, and that’s what retargeting is about.

17. Lookalike audiences
A large audience of “fresh” people with
similar interests, demographics and
behaviours to your existing customers.
Which is an ideal audience to market your
event to.
More reliable than saved audiences,
because they don’t rely on you guessing
what your target audience looks like -
Facebook does it for you.
You can then layer over standard targeting
criteria (e.g. age, gender, location, interests
etc.) to get even more targeted.

18. Lookalikes - a recap
Facebook generates audiences that are
similar to your custom audiences.
Therefore, they let you target people who are
very similar to your existing customers
...But without you having to know what they
look like (unlike Saved Audiences)
Therefore, when we
can’t target our custom
audiences, Lookalikes
give us “fresh”
audiences to target.
=

19. People don’t use Facebook to search for festivals and other events to attend. They
use it to socialise
Facebook advertising needs more touch points than Google Adwords.
You have to create that initial interest in your event before coming back to close
and convert them.
The marketing funnel on Facebook

20. ● Use Lookalike audience targeting to run ads with
light, awareness type content (e.g. Videos, blog
posts such as “9 reasons to attend ‘Event x’”)
○ This will generate a good volume of
inexpensive, yet targeted traffic to your
site/content.
● Use your Facebook pixel to capture these website
visitors in a Custom Audience, and then target
this audience with ads that communicate why
they need to register right now.
Create Awareness
and Interest
Convert
Targeting with Lookalikes
Retargeting
with Custom
Audiences
The basic funnel
Funnel - basic principles

21. 1. Use the Facebook pixel.
2. Always be as targeted as possible.
3. Funnel it, don’t force it.
4. Build, measure, learn, repeat.
Remember

22. 22
02
Place
1. Conversion rate optimisation
2. Mobile
3. Ticket buying behaviour
4. Distributed commerce

23. [Placeholder
graphic]
What if instead of focusing on
driving more views of your ticketing
page…
.... you focused on turning more page
viewers into attendees?
We all focus here
(get more traffic)
Opportunity is here.
Can your visitor buy a
ticket quickly and
easily?
Small increase in conversion = Larger increase in ticket sales.

24. 7%
Source: Aberdeen Group
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2012/12/04/fast-sites/#676b441853cf
24
Every second delay in page load time
= 7% decrease in conversion

25. Eventbrite
25
Competitor €€ €€€ €€€ €€€ €€€ €€€ €€€ €€€
The effects of a difficult buying experience
1 in 10
interested buyers drop off for
every additional step beyond 3 in the
purchase flow
1 in 4
interested buys drop off
if an account login is required

26. 26
61%
Source: Comscore
http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing-analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/
Percent mobile share
of total digital
minutes

27. 27
Eventbrite traffic - desktop vs mobile
Mobile pageviews per hour
Desktop pageviews per hour

28. Practical example:

29. When do people buy tickets?
● 45% of people at a free event buy tickets on the
day vs 18% at a paid event.
● Paid events should have sold at least 80% of
tickets before the day.
● The more expensive the event, the earlier
people buy. For festivals:
○ 7% buy on the door (unless sold out)
○ 26% buy 1 month out
○ 44% buy > 3 months out
The earlier you sell the better!

30. Who’s buying?
● Women are slightly more likely than men to buy in
advance.
● If you audience is >45, the key period is 3+ months.
● For 16-24 year olds it’s 1-12 weeks.
● For 25-44 year olds it’s under a month, with many
booking on the day or day before.
● People with children are more likely to buy on the
door.
● People in relationships are 30% more likely than
singles to buy tix 3+ months in advance.

31. 31
Sell where your
customers are
Distributed
commerce

32. 32
Seamless
purchase
experience

33. 33
Source: www.MOZ.com
Company Domain Authority
Eventbrite 95/100
BBC 100/100
Amazon 94/100
RTE 88/100
Google IE 83/100
Search rankings matter

34. Simple ways to increase conversion and sell more tickets
1. Understand your audience and plan marketing accordingly.
○ Who are they? When do they buy?
2. Be where they are.
3. Use images and rich content to paint a picture of your event.
4. Design your event website with the most important information clearly visible.
○ Reflect your brand & use negative space
○ Date, time and price clearly visible
5. Ensure it’s easy to buy tickets on mobile (test it).
6. Make sure your checkout flow is smooth and short.
7. Make sure your ticketing page is fast and reliable.
8. Test it as a customer. If you struggle, so will they!

35. 35
03
Price
1. Pricing models
2. Tips and advice

36. 36

37. 37
Cost based pricing vs value based pricing

38. 38
Don’t let cost determine the price, let value guide the price
1. Research your competitors; understand your audience’s willingness to pay and price accordingly.
2. Offer multiple ticket types with different prices and benefits.
○ Early bird
○ Special access
○ Bundled add-ons - merchandise, food, autographs, etc
○ Group discounts
○ Etc
3. Focus on tickets that either:
○ Create a lot of value with little added cost (e.g. special access)
○ Reach customers with lower perceived value, without harming margin (e.g. no gift bag ticket)
Learn more:

39. 39
04
Data & insight
1. Where to look
2. What to look for

40. Toolkit: Google Analytics
Acquisition - determine your reach (traffic)
1. Acquisition
2. Audience
3. Behaviour
4. Conversion

41. Audience - who’s discovering and buying your tickets?
Toolkit: Eventbrite dashboard

42. Behaviour - what are they talking about & engaging with?
Toolkit: social media dashboard

43. Conversion - understand what drives revenue
Toolkit: CRM system

45. Next, look for pages with high
traffic & low conversion.
Use conversation rate
optimisation to improve your
ticket sales.

46. Then go for the inverse -
pages with low traffic &high
conversion
Focus on driving more traffic
to them.

47. Last, look at conversion across different devices, operating systems and traffic sources.
These all provide valuable information on where to focus resources, where there might be
leaks, or opportunities to increase ticket sales.

48. Remember
● To improve your marketing, you need to track everything correctly.
○ Use UTMs, Google goals, Facebook pixel and Eventbrite pixel
○ Track offline activities with promo codes
● Find out what is working and do more of it!
● Only then start digging around for leaks and missed opportunities
● And remember data ≠ insight. It’s only as smart as your interpretation of it, so
look at it critically and think through what story it’s really telling you

49. 49
05
Tools

50. Top tools for event marketing (that we use)
● Google Analytics
● Asana
● Hootsuite
● Buzz Sumo
● Social Jukebox
● Hemingway
● Grammarly
● Lumen5
● Canva
● SurveyMonkey
● Mailchimp
● Eventbrite!

51. More resources

52. 52
Thank you
Marino Fresch
Marketing Director - Eventbrite
@mfresch