Marketing your event is absolutely vital if you want it to be a success – no matter how great the content is, if no one knows about it you’re not going to sell any tickets.
However, marketing budgets – especially for fledgling events – are often small, so it’s important what you do have is working for you. In order to avoid wasting money and deploy your budget as strategically as possible, the first step is to identify exactly where your target audience can be found.
To help you do just that, here are the best ways to find out where your potential attendees are hanging out online so you can reach them with your limited marketing budget.
Search for them
The chances are your audience is already engaged online with people and sites that cover their areas of interest. For example, if you’re targeting people to attend a folk music festival, it makes sense to identify the most popular blogs, websites and social media profiles followed by fans of the genre.
You can use a tool like Mention to monitor keywords or phrases on blogs, news sites, RSS feeds, forums and social media. If relevant conversations are found, you will be alerted in real time, which allows you to do a number of things.
You can simply join in the conversation, you can identify the best sites for paid advertising or you can seek to engage the authors as potential ambassadors. Mention’s ‘Influencers Dashboard’ helps you find the most influential people talking about your subject matter.
Another free service that can help you find potentially useful conversations online is Google Alerts. You can set up alerts for your industry, your competitors and for yourself – this lets you know who’s already listening to, and sharing, your information so you can develop those relationships further.
You can also run highly specific manual searches in order to find where people are active around topics related to your event. For example, if you want to search specific forums or question and answer sites such as Mumsnet or Quora you can use an ‘advanced search operator’ in Google.
Advanced search operators are words that can be added to searches to narrow down results. To get results from certain sites or domains, for example, you add ‘site:’ in front of the domain name. So, a search for conversations about baby shows on Mumsnet might look like this: “baby show” site:mumsnet.com
Related: 5 tips for finding your event’s biggest fans on social media
Analyse your existing traffic
Make sure you have Google Analytics plugged into your event website so you can learn from your existing traffic. You will be able to see where visitors are coming from, be it search engines, social networks, advertising campaigns or other referral sources.
This enables you to understand where interested visitors are hanging out, i.e does 30% of your traffic come from Facebook? Then you know to focus much of your marketing efforts on that platform.
Is that banner advert you placed on an industry website failing to drive traffic? Scrap it and look for your audience elsewhere. Did someone write a blog about your event that caused a spike in visitors? Great – engage with that influencer!
Working backwards in this way – finding the sources of existing visitors and mining them for new ones – can be a great way to grow your visitor numbers.
Related: Hone your AdWords campaign for event success
Ask them
If you have run an event previously or have an existing mailing list then you have a valuable data source at your disposal. How did these people come to find you and what are their online habits? Gleaning this information can be hugely useful in helping you decide where to concentrate your efforts this time round.
If you have telephone numbers, pick up the phone and call your past attendees – it’s old school, but it works! Explain to them that it’s purely a research call and won’t take more than a few minutes of their time. Ask them about their favourite social media platforms, which newspapers or trade magazines they read and which industry websites they use. By speaking to them in person you can get a real feel for your audience’s preferences and the best ways to reach them.
You can also carry out your questionnaire digitally, using survey software like SurveyMonkey. People’s inboxes are busy places, so you might need to incentivise them to take part by offering a prize or giveaway (this could even be free tickets to your next event, which will help to promote it at the same time).
Another good time to collect this information is at the point of registration for your events. Using Eventbrite’s ‘customer questions‘ you can ask everyone signing up for your event how they heard about it. Given it’s likely to be fresh in their minds, it’s a great time to ask and get accurate information.
Related: How to create custom questions for attendees
Monitor them
Once your ticket sales have commenced, you can further use Eventbrite’s tools to gather more useful intel.
To localise your marketing, use the geo filter to see what location attendees come from. If your event is in Crawley, for example, but you see a large percentage of sign-ups from Brighton, it might be worth running a promotion with a local newspaper there. Or you could choose to launch a targeted Facebook ad campaign for people in the BN postcode.
Eventbrite also offers you the possibility to create tracking codes to see which sites or partners help you sell most tickets, which works really well in conjunction with Google Analytics to help you drill down on the marketing partners and channels that are really working. This in turn tells you where your audience is most active and lets you plan your future activity more strategically.
Conclusion
Don’t waste time and money with a scattergun approach to your marketing. Use these simple techniques to track down your audience and effectively target them online.
Share your tips on how you find your audience in the comments or tweet us @EventbriteIE
