We’ve summed all our marketing wisdom for around the office to compile this quick marketing checklist for your next event.

Free Event Marketing Checklist Ebook

Click Here To Download Your Free Checklist.

Marketing an event is never easy, and it can quickly become overwhelming and difficult to see the trees from the forest. This guide will help you to determine what steps you will need to take to ensure that your promoting your event to its full potential.

The techniques discussed in this ebook are going to help drive your ticket sales to sell out your events, often event promoters limit themselves to one or two marketing channels when there is a whole plethora of options available.

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If you have any questions regarding event marketing or this ebook please contact our event ticketing team for more information or subscribe to our blog.

In a follow up to our last blog post, we’re exposing 7 ways that you can adapt your Facebook social media strategy to take advantage of it’s updated news feed layout and features.

1. Publish More Visual Content

As mentioned in our previous post “Facebook News Feed – What’s Changed” the refreshed news feed is going to have a far bigger focus on visual elements and in doing so is going to require you to have posts with extremely vivid photos to get noticed. On average visual content (photos and videos) received more than a 65% increase in engagement when the new facebook Timeline was released for brands. We are expecting this to be even higher for the News Feed, so prepare for the rollout by stockpiling visually compelling content.

2. Plan Photo-Focused Advertising

Advertisers who post photo orientated posts are going to be the ones who benefit most from Facebook’s refurbished newsfeed. With the focus on photographs, advertisers are going to have to choose appealing and interesting photos to attract attention to their posts and their copy. With the refreshed news feed visual content is going to be far more common and therefore its going to be necessary to ensure that your photos standout from the rest of your audiences feed.

3. Keep Your Copy Short

With the focus now on photos, Facebook has adjusted the way it displays captions and titles to photos. No longer will the captions be displayed underneath the photos but instead be overlaid in the top right hand corner. This means that photos are now going to be the primary source of engagement with your post. Make sure to keep your captions short and to the point anywhere from 5-20 words is about the limit of how long you want your fans reading your text.

4. Focus More on Your Big Fans

With Facebook’s updated News Feed, users will be able to look at only content posted by their friends as default. This means that even if someone likes and follows your business page, they may never see your brand’s posts because they have filtered them out by viewing content posted by friends.

The solution to this is not to give up on Facebook but instead to be a little crafty and focus your attention on your fans and customers. You want to especially focus on people who commonly like your statuses and engage frequently with your brand. To do this successfully take a look at people engaging with your wall and craft posts that focus on their interest and share content that directly targets them.

5. Create More Compelling Content

Facebook will also be surfacing top articles similar to the linked-in today method for top content. This means it’s in your best interest to use Facebook for promoting your public-facing content such as an event writeup or a new announcement to help get your content a more viral reach. The secret to create viral content is to make it compelling and in doing so have people discussing your post – this increases your posts reach and therefore

6. Integrate your Facebook and Instagram Strategy

Content share through third-party apps is going to have a higher visibility in the News Feed. This includes apps like Pinterest and Instagram,by posting photo related content via these apps to Facebook your going to be leveraging multiple platforms for incoming traffic and helping to diversify your Edgerank.

7. Encourage Check-ins for your event or venue

Location is gaining a massive foothold in both the Facebook and Google+ networks and since Facebook has launched graph search location based search has had a significant affect on traffic to facebook pages. For example the new graph search will return coffee shops near you when you type “Coffee” into the new search. The updated News Feed is going to further this location based information by making checkins far more prominent on the News Feed (as you can see below). You can encourage checkins by rewarding customers that checkin in the most and in doing so parade your event/venue to their friends.

If you take these tips onboard your guaranteed to have a head start over your competition when the updated News Feed is released Facebook wide. With Facebook going public changes like this are going to be more and more common as they find ways to leverage their advertising network over the existing platform.

On March 7th Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced one of the biggest changes to the News Feed in its 7 year history. He shared how almost 50% of all News Feed content is photos and visual content. Knowing this information Facebook decided that it was time for a change and optimised the News Feed to take advantage of this fact by placing a far higher emphasis on visual related posts.

So naturally we decided that we would take an in-depth look at the new News Feed and how your brand can benefit from these changes to place your content in front of your new and existing customers. Facebook’s new News Feed makeover comes in three major parts:

1. Rich, visually engaging stories
2. Choice of different feeds
3. Mobile consistency and experience

We’re going to take a look at all three of these parts in close detail and how they differ to the current Facebook News Feed.

Rich, Visually Engaging Stories.

Visuals on facebook are now more enticing. With the large increase in visual content this comes as no surprise. Facebook has capitalised on the fact that the brain can process visuals far quicker than text and so has optimised the news feed to be far more visually orientated.

The first thing you’ll notice is the focus on the visual content being displayed. When you upload a photo through your page it comes up much bigger than before. The reasoning behind this move is to put the focus on one user or page at a time. Keep reading on to see how we’re going to leverage this to help increase your followers and ticket sales.

In addition to photos that are uploaded and posted as status updates there has been a major visual overhaul of how user’s interactions with your page are displayed on the new News Feed. Normally when someone liked your page your brand’s logo or profile would be displayed, Facebook is now taking elements from the timeline layout and incorporating them into the News Feed. In the new News Feed your brand’s cover photo along with profile picture are displayed (as shown in the photo below) making it more important than ever to ensure your cover photo aligns with your event/brand’s image and mentality.

Choice of Different Feeds.

The second big announcement from Facebook is the “Choice of Feeds” which gives users the ability to toggle between different feeds of information by topic. With over 30% of content in the current News Feed being from Facebook pages and not users, this will allow users to filter results based on their personal preferences.

You can see the news feed options your fans will have access to below:

• All Friends. Here’s where your fans will see everything their friends are sharing. Status updates, check-ins, music listening, and more all appear here. They won’t see brands or celebs here — this is a feed dedicated to the people they’re actually friends with.
• Photos. No links, no statuses — this feed displays only photos from friends and pages you follow. On the right, they’ll see a sidebar with stories about new profile pictures and cover photos, and below that, Facebook will nag them to add more information about albums and photos they’ve uploaded.
• Music. Through apps like Spotify and pages they’ve liked, Facebook seems to have a pretty good idea about what kind of music you’re into. This feed shows posts exclusively related to music their friends are listening to, and artists they’ll like. And the sidebar on the right — it’s filled with useful information like upcoming concerts, top songs from their network, and new album releases.
• Following. Watch out, Twitter, Facebook’s got its own follow culture now. In the Following feed, they won’t see updates from friends — this feed is filled with posts from people and brands they follow.

Mobile Consistency and Experience

Another important change to Facebook’s News Feed is the consistent between mobile devices and the web browser version – the updated version is going to be a far more uniform experience between devices, not only is this going to make the platform easier to navigate for users it will also mean your marketing strategies are going to be uniform across your users devices.

High quality content is more important than ever with these new Facebook changes. Optimizing for the
new News Feed goes beyond just the Facebook Page. This change actually affects your entire content
strategy as a whole, from images and status updates to blog posts and media coverage. Tomorrow’s post will show you how to optimise your marketing strategy to work hand in hand with these new changes.

You can sign up to receive an early preview of Facebook’s News Feed here: https://www.facebook.com/about/newsfeed It will be rolling out to users in the next few weeks and like any change to Facebook is likely to receive a fair amount of criticism, however it will be one of the most important updates for marketers since they released their advertising platform.

Your email marketing campaigns should be part of a comprehensive approach to educate your contacts.

Brands often list email as one of their most powerful marketing channels. To this day, the size of your email list is a clear demonstration of your reach and market knowledge. However, your email marketing campaigns should be part of a more encompassing approach to educate and connect with your fan base. Your marketing emails need to work hand in hand with other efforts, such as SEO, Facebook & Twitter branding and participation to ensure the message is getting across.

4 Email Marketing Challenges & Solutions

1. Integrating email data with other systems
When it comes to email marketing there are three names that standout from the rest, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor & Awebber (whilst not being the cheapest solutions) they offer (in my opinion) the best platform to not only manage contacts but design email campaigns easily and effectively monitor their progress. These platforms will also allow you to easily segment your lists (e.g. send happy birthday emails or target a specific age group), most of all they will make sending email campaigns an enjoyable experience.

2. Improving Deliverability
Delivery rate is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients versus the total number sent, it lets you know how many emails bounced back and what were the underlying reasons for the bounce. Low deliverability can seriously impact the effectiveness of your email campaigns, to avoid low deliverability always make sure:

1. Your email lists are cleaned of people who are no longer responding to your emails (clicks, opens etc.) the aforementioned platforms will help you do this.
2. You have a strict opt-in process. People will generally be annoyed if they didn’t subscribe to your emails (although many campaigns have achieved this by providing good content that people were happy to receive).
3. Allow people to easily update their email address if they wish to continue receiving emails at another address.

3. Growing and Retaining Subscribers
A lot of marketers become frustrated when their lists aren’t growing as well as they would like, some ways to help grow and maintain your lists include:

1. Give a clear value proposition to your subscribers. The easiest way is to reward their loyalty (your long-winded email isn’t a reward). Provide them with a discount off drinks or an invite to a special one-off event (e.g. setup a pre-sale code to a ticketbooth event and email your loyal supporters a link to receive discounted tickets).
2. Segment your lists to match your priorities. If you have a VIP club for your venue or event, segment their list so that you can target them directly, they will definitely appreciate you sending them a different email with special offers.
3. Optimise and test your emails, it’s extremely easy to A/B test with a proper email marketing package and you’ll be able to easily determine which emails your database responds to the best (test for open rates first, then test for click rates to determine the best email).

4. Measure Your Success Effectively.
It’s not always easy to know how your marketing campaigns are performing, so it’s important that you establish not only a goal but also know how to measure this goal, it’s best to describe this with an example:

Jim’s events has a database of nearly 3000 people who frequent his events and purchased tickets in the last 12 months – he’s running a new nightclub event and is hoping to increase awareness by emailing his database about his new club night, but with around 3000 people looking at his email he wants to make sure that he’s squeezing every last bit of advertising juice out of his email. So what’s he do?

Split test! So he’s finished writing his email and he’s got a couple of different spiels and offers as well as different subject lines. So he goes into the Ticketbooth CRM and exports his latest data – his marketing client then imports the new entries and now he’s up-to-date. So he writes his campaign and changes the subject lines and body topics and he presses send. His email marketing client automatically choose a small percentage to test the different versions on, it then calculates which subject line has the best open rate and if he has links in his email which version was clicked on the most it then combines these to make one super email and delivers it to all his contacts. This not only ensures that Jim’s emails are as effective as possible but saves him hours of guessing which is more effective.

That sums it up for part 1 of our Introduction to Email Marketing Guide check our blog next week for part 2 were we look at the different types of emails you can send and how they change the way people perceive your brand and respond to your offers. For more information about event marketing contact our marketing team at Ticketbooth for expert advice on how to increase your ticket sales and social awareness.

We seperate the truth from the fiction and look at 10 social media myths you should avoid.

There’s a lot of so-called social media experts out there. Unfortunately a lot of the advice/myths can be quite misleading not only causing you to waste your time but  also could be hindering your social media efforts.

1. You need to be on every single network

Rubbish! There’s no need to be on every single social media network (especially if your strapped for time and cash). Choose 1 or 2 networks and stick with them, (we use twitter and facebook). Do some research and determine which networks are suited towards your target audience and use them specifically.

2. Focus On Facebook

Yes you’ll want to make sure your targeting the right audience but make sure they are avid users of facebook, (if your event is targeting an older demographic you might be better of looking at linked-in or blogs as many older people stray from facebook due to a lack of understanding of the privacy rules.

3. Don’t use email!

Lies! Email is still one of the most powerful advertising angles you can use, one of the first things you need one you create a social media account is an email and that’s because its survived every IT trend to date. People are far more likely to take an email seriously especially if its something they’re interested in (they can also check their emails at work, unlike their facebook accounts at many offices).

4. You can update all of your posts and updates

*Slap* We know keeping up a good social media account is sometimes difficult and time consuming, but people will generally know if a post is automated – especially if its 12:03 every afternoon. It makes your posts seems impersonal and no-one wants to listen to a robot trying to convince them to buy tickets to a gig there not interested in. You don’t call your friend and put them onto your answering machine so don’t do it with your facebook fans or twitter followers.

5. Send an auto Direct Message (Twitter) to all your new followers

It’s a pet hate of mine and many other twitter users that as soon as you follow someone you get a robotic message thanking you for following. It looks tacky and can really hurt your creditability making it look like your twitter account is run by robots. Instead of auto DMing everyone that followers make a shout out to all your new followers once a day or week depending on how much your loved. Not only will it look natural your followers will appreciate the extra attention!

6. Include popular hashtags to get more exposure

On twitter especially the hashtag is being used less and less as an organisational tool and more of a one word summary of the tweet itself. Examples include #1stworldproblems #listeningto #selfie It allows users to quickly skip over boring tweets in their feed – so make sure your not hashtag hijacking someone else.

7. Use a tool that auto publishes to all your sites at once

Dumb move, auto publishing not only looks tacky but it also is very ineffective due to the nature and lingo of the various networks your posting to. Twitter and facebook have very different conventions and writing styles so your auto posts are going to stick out like a sore thumb.

8. Don’t get personal.

This is one of the most common myths we hear about and is probably one of the most damaging to your social media endeavours. A prime example of why you should be personal is AJ Maddah (@iamnotshouting) the main man at Soundwave Festival – he’s vocal with his tweets and doesn’t hold back, but his fans respect him for it – with almost 25,000 followers (that’s close to a third of the festival following his personal account), he can reach thousands of fans in mere seconds. So next time your wondering whether to post that next tweet or status update do it. Worse case it will be ignored or laughed at but it won’t be the first bad post your fans will have seen and it definitely won’t be the last.

9. Disable comments to avoid negative feedback

Big Mistake! Not only does it look like you’re hiding something but your restricting yourself from constructive feedback and the chance to drive a lot of traffic to your post. Nothing looks better that when a brand looks after someone who’s had a bad experience (think free tix to your next gig, and a free promotion chance). It doesn’t take long to spin a bad experience round to a good PR moment.

10. You should post X updates a day

Yes there is a sweet spot for the amount of tweet you should do a day but it changes depending on your audience, demographic and location so there is no special number. So make sure to test the timing to determine the optimum publish rate to ensure your not over-reaching or underachieving.

These are just a few of the plethora of mistakes being made by event organisers and social media publishers all over the world. Make sure to follow our blog for more social media hints and tricks to help you sell more tickets online!

As the year 2013 dawned upon us we couldn’t help but think: it’s pretty hard to imagine a life without technology. Every day most people log onto an email account, check social media, connect and work through computers, iOS devices and with mobile phones. In a way, technology makes the world tick.

Ticketbooth wants selling tickets online to not only change the way that people buy tickets, but the way that they attend events. And over the past few years we’ve seen some pretty big changes. No longer are paper tickets needed with iOS scanners, and the world of promotion and marketing has exploded with new social media and blogging.

Our latest development of mobile ticketing brings your attendees away from the maze of technology that they crawl through every day, and makes attending events easier than ever before. When you sell tickets online through Tickebooth, our new mobile ticketing feature sends out an automatic link via SMS so that it can be accessed instantly and directly. The only other thing that they have to worry about is attending.

Less is more. It’s that simple.

Find out more about our services here. Contact us via email clients(at)ticketbooth.com.au or give us a quick call on 1300 762 344

Social media marketing is revolutionizing the world of online ticketing. Want to know one of the most effective methods and a personal favorite of ours? Facebook ads.

Advertising on Facebook is one of the most direct ways reach out to specific audiences who will want to buy your tickets. By customizing features such as age, marital status, location and more- it’s a bulls eye for selling out your events. People can even ‘like’ your page straight from the ad, without having to travel to your page. Pretty neat huh?

Still not convinced? Check out these statistics taken from a new survey “99 New Social Media Stats for 2012”:

By using Facebook ads to promote your online ticketing service, you can always feel confident that your marketing strategies are being maximized and channeled into selling out your event- first time, every time.

Find out more about our services here. Contact us via email clients(at)ticketbooth.com.au or give us a quick call on 1300 762 344 or Request Pricing Via Email.

We all like to be rewarded. Whether it’s buying consistently at a local supermarket, or accumulating frequent flyer points from an exhausted credit card- the rewards makes it all seem worth it.

Ticketbooth is bringing you good news about online ticketing. Our social rewards program offers the very best prize of all- the promise of selling out. By offering incentives for sharing, tweeting and liking your events on social networks, your event is guaranteed to reach bigger audiences that ever before.

So how exactly does it work?

On your end, all you need to do is set a standard rate for every sharing action. This can be from as little as 50c (or even hitting the gold coin mark) and will provide incentives for sharing on social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter. As a reward, this amount is taken off the buyer’s own booking fee. And the best part- buyers can be rewarded multiple times by sharing, liking and tweeting to receive three times the rewards. And as a result, three times the attendees.

Here’s a little bit of advice from Deirdre Breakenridge, the CEO of Pure Performance Communications.

“You need to be 10 steps ahead to counsel senior executives about the changing media landscape, and on the same page with savvy, wired consumers to understand their preferences and to better serve their needs.”

Here at Ticketbooth we believe in being aware of what works, and making it as easy as possible for event managers to stay informed. Reward your customers today, and feel the reward of selling out your events tomorrow. A few single clicks have never been so powerful.

Contact us on clients (at) ticketbooth.com.au or simply call us on 1300 762 344 to find out more and get started today!!!