Organising an event is hard work. It requires months of planning and preparation. Each piece has to fit perfectly together so that everyone is pleased and the event is a success. Take one piece out, and everything will crumble before your eyes.
But, between the logistics of the event, managing guests and attendees, and making sure that everything is par excellence, who’s got the time to worry about promoting it? Event marketing doesn’t have to be a hassle, though. In this day and age, when the vast majority of your audience is on social media, you can (and should) promote your upcoming event on Facebook.
Here’s a quick breakdown of the numbers just to give you a taste of the extent of using Facebook advertising to promote your event:
- Over 35 million people view a Facebook event every day;
- Around 700 million people use Facebook event every month to promote an upcoming event;
- Facebook enables marketers to sell tickets directly through the social network.
In this article, we’ll talk about how Facebook advertising can help you promote your event and how to do it.
How Facebook Advertising Can Help You Promote Your Event
Here are three goals that a Facebook ad for your upcoming event can help you achieve. Based on these goals, you can then the type of advertising that best fits your event and which audience to target.
- Drive Awareness for Your Event: An ad campaign can help you create a buzz around your event. You could create ads for different key moments, such as when you announce the lineup or when tickets go on sale.
- Use Facebook Ads to Drive Consideration: Another great advantage that Facebook advertising has is that it allows you to highlight the best experiences of past attendees and get them excited about your current event. That’s how you drive buzz and consideration of your upcoming event.
- You Can Use Retargeting to Attract Undecided Guests: Not all users that show interest in your event end up converting. And, that’s ok. But, if you want to boost ticket sales, then you should consider retargeting. It’s an advertising technique that shows ads about your event to users that have engaged with it but without buying a ticket.
First Things First: the Setup
It doesn’t matter if you plan on promoting your event using traditional marketing methods too or by relying on digital advertising alone. A Facebook ad campaign is a must. Think about it for a second: most people would rather hit “Join” or “Interested” on an event on Facebook rather than writing down the details and trying to remember the date. So, you need to create a Facebook event page.
Here’s how to do it:
- Create the Event: Click the event button on your Facebook business page to get started.
- Add Media: Add a picture or video to your Facebook events page. Make sure that the image is 1200×628 pixels and that the video is no longer than five minutes.
- Select a Name for Your Event: Be very concise as there is a limit of 64 characters. A long event name will mean that mobile users won’t be able to see the entire name from their devices.
- Provide Accurate Details: Write the location, day, hours, and any other detail that might be relevant to your audience.
Facebook Event Ads: Types of Ads and Targeting Options
If you’ve been using Facebook advertising before, then you are probably familiar with the different types of ad formats, such as photo, video, carousel, and so on. What you may not know is that Facebook has advertising options specifically designed for promoting events and getting the right audience to your landing page.
- Ads for Collecting Event Responses: If all you are interested in is generating some buzz around your event, then Facebook allows you to use the “Interested” or “Going” button to get an idea of how many people are interested. While the users that hit these buttons won’t necessarily convert into attendees, they can provide a solid indication regarding overall interest. You can later retarget prospects and persuade them to buy tickets or attend the event.
- Ads for Generating Event Registration: This type of targeted ad enables you to drive prospects to an event registration page. You can set the page up on Facebook and have potential attendees buy tickets directly through the social network or you could redirect them to a landing page. These ads are similar to the ones meant to collect event responses, the only difference being that instead of “Interested,” the CTA button will read “Buy Tickets.”
You know what you want to achieve and the type of Facebook ad that will help you reach your goals. Now, it’s time to consider another crucial element in your advertising efforts: audience targeting.
Facebook’s Ads Manager and Power Editor allow you to create a custom audience based on various factors. You could:
- Target people who showed an interest in an event, but didn’t convert. You could use retargeting to spike their curiosity and get them to take action and buy tickets or register to your event.
- Target friends of people that showed an interest in your event to extend your audience reach.
- Target people who showed interest or attended past event since they may have established a connection with your brand and could be easy to convert.
- Exclude those that already bought tickets or registered. Most probably you don’t want to spam them with ads as well as not waste advertising dollars on an audience that converted already.
If you want to take your advertising efforts to the next level, then you should install the Facebook pixel too. It’s a piece of code that you add to your website and that allows you to track your audience and customise your ads. You can use it to create lookalike audiences (users that are sharing the same interests with those that have already bought tickets or registered for your event) and personalise your ads. The pixel also allows you to collect data and will generate a free report that you can use to review your strategy and see what tweaks you need to make to improve your efforts and drive more event responses or registration.
Over to You
Are you using Facebook advertising to promote your event? No, let us rephrase that: are you using Facebook advertising strategically to generate buzz about your upcoming event and increase ticket sales?
Hopefully, the tips in this article will help you get started. If you don’t feel confident enough to tackle this task on your own, we are one phone call away. Get in touch right now and let’s start discussing your next steps.
Oh, and if you are wondering what’s happening in the social media realm and what you could expect in the future, we recommend you to read this free report from the Social Media Examiner.
