Facebook is an event owner’s saviour when it comes to event marketing. The platform boats more than 550 million users engaging with Facebook Events each month, which showcases a huge opportunity to reach potential attendees and increase your ticket sales. By putting money behind your Facebook promotion, you’ll increase your odds of getting in front of local event-goers. Here’s what you need to know before you get started.
When setting up an ad campaign for Facebook Events, consider your goals. Do you want to raise awareness of your event? Encourage current fans to buy tickets? Or showcase a previous event to build traction?
The 2 types of Facebook Event Ads
It all depends on your goal of the specific ad. You can use:
1. Ads to collect event responses. This ad allows users to respond to your event, using the options ‘interested’ or ‘I’m going’. This helps to give the event owner a ball play figure as to the number of guests which may be beneficial if your event requires catering of the sort.
2. Ads to drive ticket sales: These ads also provide all of the event details, but provide a link for users to “Buy Tickets.” This gives them a direct route to purchase and works well if you are building urgency through your event ads.3
3 TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL EVENT AD CAMPAIGN
1. Have a ‘Launch moment’
Create a “launch moment”. For example, if you are holding a music festival, launch the ad in correlation to when your line-up is announced or tickets go on sale etc. This will help build up hype for the event.
2. Use relevant images & videos
Highlight any premium experiences of real-life images to spark that desire and conversation between friends. For example, if you run a comedy club, you could post images of audience laughter and high profile acts on stage to increase engagement levels and build a sense of positivity around your event . I mean let’s face it, ‘A comedy club wouldn’t have many laughs as a result of not many people showing up’.
It’s a known fact that video content performs much better on social media as it’s more engaging and captivating. You could use this technique to promote your previous successful events to set the bar and showcase to your followers what to expect at your next event. This will install a ‘fear of missing out’ and will more than likely increase your ticket sales.
3. Retargeting your event ads
Have you ever seen the same ad more than once? Retargeting is a technique that showcases your ads to people who have previously engaged with your event, but may not have bought a ticket just yet. This allows you to stay in your potential customers mind and create a sense of urgency with last minute deals.
So, you’ve set up your ad. But now you need to choose your desired audience. For both types of event ads, you can use event-specific audience targeting (available in the Ads Create Tool), including:
- Targeting people who responded to your event to convert interest into ticket sales. (This is retargeting which I mentioned earlier)
- Targeting friends of people who responded to your event to reach other interested audiences. For example, if a user has already purchased a ticket to your football event, Facebook can show the same ad to his friends, whom will more than likely have a similar interest in football.
- Excluding people who already responded to your event to avoid advertising to people who have already purchased tickets.
- Targeting people who viewed or responded to any of your previous events to reach people who have already attended one of your events.
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