Part 1 of 2

You have an event, maybe you decided to sell tickets to your recital, maybe you booked a gig with a new group at a venue that gives you sales from the cover at the door. In both scenarios you want people to come and maybe even (wait for it…) “pay” for tickets, now what?

You created the event on Facebook, invited people, even hung up some posters in your local university or church. Cool, now you can sit back and watch the ten people come to your event.

Sure, that might be good enough for you, you just want the performing experience anyways. The next gig will be different, right?

But maybe, just maybe there is a way to actually get paying customers to show up. Let’s talk about how to get that done in this 2-part series - Ed’s Event Marketing Bootcamp. In this series, I delve into a combination of my own anecdotal experiences over the years, which combined are just enough to start to make some logical conclusions, paired with a dab of industry best-practices.

Part 1 - Facebook is not enough

Facebook events are great, sort of. Facebook events are free to create (hence one reason they are great), and if you want to pay to boost them to let some more people know…its really not that expensive. But don’t put all of your chickens in the basket of Zuckerberg. If there is one thing I have noticed about Facebook Events is that there is not a strong correlation between people marked “attending” and people that are actually buying tickets. Actual ticket buyers, unless they have a personal connection with you, probably don’t want to jump on the “attending” wagon. I personally prefer not to tell complete strangers my plans for Friday night. Also, people are flakey and change their mind at the last minute. Unless they have their purchased ticket in hand before the night of the concert there is probably a 20-30% chance of them actually showing up. Therefore, high amounts of people marked as attending can lull you into false sense of security.

How do I know this? I’ve been there, I’ve been burned by that sultry “boost event” button a number of times. I’ve had that awkward conversation with the friend who had marked attending but then had to babysit their cat who was going through an emotional crises that night instead. But, boosting events is not useless. Let’s just go ahead and put a number on it:

$50 (max).

There, that’s it.

Create your event and boost it for $50 to people that like your page and their friends (spend even less if your page doesn’t have that many followers yet). Done. If you really want the social media giant to have more of your money save it for a promoted post with a direct link to buy tickets. There you can come up with fancy custom audiences and the like. But don’t spend too much on this because again (and say it with me this time) “Facebook is not enough.”

So where do we spend the money instead? Let’s do some quick math first.

How much money do you want to earn off of the performance / how many seats are in the audience = average per cap ticket price (including comps and discounted seats).

So if your venue seats 100, and you want to earn $2000 in revenue, your ticket price will have to average out to be $20. Meaning you will likely need to charge about $25 in order to make up for the 20 comps you give out. Also, expect to spend at least 30% of that in advertising if you want to get even close to earning your revenue target.

Therefore, $600 would be an adequate advertising spend IF (and this is a big caveat here) you have an established audience and following and you can allow your email distribution list to do a lot of the heavy lifting for you (you have one of those right?…right?). If not you might need to consider doubling your budget to have any hope of filling those seats. The good news? After a few concerts you likely won’t need to spend quite as much.

Ok, so where do I spend that magical money if not on Facebook?

Stay tuned next week for the answer in Part 2 - how to create touchpoints when budget is a touchy subject (I promise to come up with a snappier title before then).

Hey, want to come up with a game plan for your next ticketed event?
Whether its a recital, poetry slam, or
community theater production of Seussical,
I offer free one-hour consultations where we can cover just that!

Head over to the services page to learn more.

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