Being stuck in a "we're so cool" industry mindset
In December, I attended a paid industry seminar on using Social Media to drive event ticket sales. Two of the presenters were clients, so I was there in a support capacity. It was great to see that the overall presentation focused on tracking advertising and marketing efforts to ticket sales.
During a case study presentation by a young lady from the United Kingdom, something hilarious occurred. The presenter's case study featured a marketing campaign with over 500 tracked online advertisements. Her campaign is one of the most sophisticated event promotion campaigns I've ever seen. Bravo!
Here's the funny part. The presenter mentioned that more ticket sales were generated from "today is the last day to buy" Facebook posts than from performer feature posts. Put in other words, the Facebook posts that were straight forward sales messages outperformed all others.
Immediately after that information was shared with the room ... one of the revered award-winning industry-leading experts, replied out loud with, "really?!?!" Then came the very measured British reply of, "really." And she simply moved on with her presentation.
The industry mindset is "everything we do is cool. We just need to tell more people about it and they'll think it's cool too." That isn't the case and the tracked data shows otherwise.
Here's today's takeaway. Sometimes the best way to sell tickets to your event is to give people a reason to buy right now. Most event organizers are afraid to ask, because they think it's "too salesy."
Be different and you will profit.
Here are some additional articles on planning a successful event:
- The Importance of Market Research in Planning Your Event
- An Extremely Dangerous Event Planning Mistake
- Your Event Promotion and Marketing Strategy - Start Point
- Event Planning: The Customer Avatar and Your Event
- Two Amazingly Powerful Event Survey Questions
- A Killer Social Media Promotion Strategy for Your Event