The Ultimate Event Advertising Plan for Busy Event Creators

To sell out your event, use the ToneDen experts' complete event advertising plan including timeline, copy, and campaign types.

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When the average Facebook user clicks on only eight ads a month, creating ads that draw people to your event isn’t easy. And for those event creators who manage multiple events a year, designing effective ad campaigns can become a mind-boggling feat.

The experts at ToneDen have seen it all and then some. To sell out your event, use their experts’ complete event advertising plan including timeline, copy, and campaign types.

In the ebook, you will discover:

The best ad creative and campaign types to use to drive ticket sales on Facebook and Instagram
The most common mistakes event promoters make with their social ads — and how to avoid them
What the event ticketing lifecycle looks like for different types of events and how to adjust your ad strategy to match

Preview

Stage 1: Event announcement – Drive awareness to target later

In the beginning, your goal is simply to let people know about your event. It’s all about spreading the word that your event is happening and getting people hyped to save the date.

Ad strategy for this stage

While spreading awareness of your event is a noble cause, ultimately, you don’t just want people to know about it. You want them to buy tickets to it. People may see your ad now and think “That looks fun!” but forget to circle back when tickets go on sale. During the awareness stage of your ad arc, your goal is to link interested viewers to eventual ticket sales.

There are several ways to do this:

Direct your early ads to a page with a Facebook pixel embedded so you’re set up to retarget initial viewers with follow-up ads when tickets go on sale. You can then cultivate their interest to the point of conversion. See how here.
Load your event to Facebook through Eventbrite’s Add to Facebook integration then run an Event RSVP campaign. The bonus here is that any time a fan RSVPs “yes” to your Facebook Event, that RSVP is shared with their friends, widening your reach.
Invite ad viewers to opt in to receive announcements when tickets go on sale. While you can do this by collecting email addresses for your newsletter, a more effective way to do this is via Facebook Messenger. Shakeri says this is “a potent way to advertise to interested fans. While the standard open rate for regular email is a low 20%, with Facebook Messenger, it’s more like 80%. And more people click through from Messenger than from email, too.” Lightning in a Bottle recently used this strategy to sell out their festival.

Content ideas for this stage

The strategies above only work if your ads grab attention in the first place. At this early stage, before you have a lot of details to offer, your ads will be pretty general. But be transparent about the information you do have: the name and date of the event, when tickets will go on sale, and how much they’ll cost. Use these 4 Must-Have Video Templates to Promote Your Next Event to get started.

Now is the time to test out different creative ideas as you go. Use A/B testing to run two different versions of an ad to see which performs better. Adopt this practice early on to hone your ads quickly, or even automate the process using ToneDen. By the time tickets go on sale, you’ll have a good idea which variations inspire the most views and clicks.

Get the full event advertising plan by filling out the form on the right.