How to Market Your Event with PPC & Online Advertising
Let me give you a basic, yet powerful, pay per click (PPC) advertising strategy to drive advance sale tickets for your event. The following advice is applicable to PPC services on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Facebook. It can also be used for other forms of online advertising such as banner ads.
Don't Direct Paid Traffic to Your Home Page!
One of the biggest mistake I see event organizers and promoters make with their online advertising is directing paid traffic to their event home page. You might be asking, "why is driving traffic to my home page a mistake?" Because people have too many options when they land on your web site. If you give a web site visitor too many options, they probably won't take the action you desire. Focus on driving traffic to complete one simple task, e.g. join your mailing list, buy a ticket, fill out a survey.
The Landing Page Strategy
Here's the strategy . . . Direct your online PPC traffic to a specific landing page. That landing page should contain an strong opt-in offer for the visitor. Don't give the visitor too many options on the landing page, focus on one goal. The person clicking on your ad has already shown an interest in your event, don't lose the lead because you don't have an opt-in (email capture). Consider the following event web site statistics . . . 70% of the people coming to your site only visit ONCE and 40%-50% of those visotors have an attention span lasting LESS THAN 10 seconds. I encourage you to take a look at your visitor loyalty numbers in Google Analytics, you'll see very similar numbers. By using a landing page you have the highest probably capturing online leads. Those captured leads can then be converted into ticket sales.
Within a Week of Your Event
If you're within a week or so of your event, you might want to consider transitioning from an email capture page to a long copy ticket sales page.
A well thought out landing page strategy will CRUSH sending paid traffic to your home page. Those captured leads represent the greatest potential drivers for advance ticket sales. Without an opt-in, most of your paid traffic will come to your site and never return again.
Click on the link below for helpful PPC starter tips on setting up a PPC campaign for your event.
Here are some examples of hybrid landing pages from multi-million dollar online companies.
- Catch Him and Keep Him (Offsite Link)
- Double Your Dating (Offsite Link)
You'll notice that the above links are actually hybird home pages (contrary to my suggestion above).
The difference is that the above examples are specifically designed around getting an email opt-in.
They are NOT traditional home pages.
Want more info on online advertising for your event?
Check out the articles below:
- Hold Your Event Marketing Accountable!
- Measuring Advertising Effectiveness
- Simple Event Advertising Tracking with Google Analytics
- Tracking The Effectiveness of Traditional Marketing with The Internet
- Radio versus Pay Per Click: Snapshot
- A "Must Follow" Event Advertising Strategy . . .
- Event Marketing: Start Building Your List Early
- Automatically Generate Leads for Your Event Year Round
- The Event Promotion System
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