As an event creator, two of your biggest constraints are time and money. You don’t have enough of either of them to pursue every promotional idea.
You have to be strategic. What will pay the highest return for the least amount of effort and budget? And what will help you scale your event so you can truly grow?
On opposite coasts, the marketing owners of two very different events asked themselves these questions. And the answer, for both, was the same: Facebook Events. Here’s how they used Facebook to drastically increase their ticket sales.
Facebook Event Ads Example #1: Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden
Springtime brings peonies and azaleas; in the summer, Virginia gets green. In fact, year round, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden in Richmond shares botanic abundance and a full calendar of community events.
Jonah Holland, the PR and marketing coordinator responsible for promoting these events at the history-filled garden, had a mission: grow the community. For an upcoming Garden Soiree, Holland partnered with Facebook and Eventbrite to meet this challenge.
She wanted to target this particular event to people who had already expressed interest in al fresco, after-hours social events. And she knew that social media was the place to reach new audiences. But the non-profit organization doesn’t have an enormous ad budget, so Holland had to strategize her spend.
Here are the three steps Holland took to drive more sales:
- Created her event listing in Eventbrite and published it to Facebook. Lewis Ginter already has more than 50,000 followers who could see the event — a great start.
- Set up a highly targeted ad campaign using Facebook’s easy advertising tools, which make it possible to boost an event to a strategic target audience in just a few steps.
- Let event-goers buy tickets right from the Facebook app without having to follow a link to a ticketing page
Holland spent only $50 to do all this, with a highly impressive return on investment:
- The ad reached 15,000 additional people
- The ad had a 19.58% conversion rate on Facebook
- She saw a 61x return on her ad spend
- Tickets sold out in ⅔ of the time of a typical Lewis Ginter event
“We weren’t at all surprised the event sold out — that’s what we were going for — but we were surprised at how quickly it sold out,” Holland says. “By selling out early, it allowed me to direct my time to promote other Garden events.”
Facebook Event Ads Example #2: Secret Movie Club
Across the country in Los Angeles, a very different type of event was underway. Craig Hammill launched Secret Movie Club as a grassroots event, promoted by paper flyers and word of mouth. As the recurring event caught on, fans in the know would email him to save a spot and use Venmo to pay the night of the screening.
But these homegrown techniques were hindering Hammill’s ability to scale and grow the event. Some people were hesitant to purchase tickets through Venmo, and Hammill was spending odious time on administration instead of doing what he loved — choosing and screening movies.
“I knew I had to innovate,” he says. “And Eventbrite helped me do that.” Here’s what he did to get there:
- Started setting up events on Eventbrite, and spending less time driving around town hanging flyers in coffee shops.
- Published his events to Facebook to reach his fanbase where they spend their time
- Sold tickets to shows directly through those Facebook Events pages, which fans loved
Almost overnight, Secret Movie Club reached a new level of success:
- Attendance doubled and 4x as many shows sold out
- The event started selling 90% of movie tickets right on Facebook
- Facebook followers grew by 20%, and likes and engagement flourished
- Hammill saved 12 hours of PR and marketing time a week
“I was able to build trust and be seen as more of a legitimate business,” Hammill says.
Learn more about the benefits of connecting your Eventbrite event to Facebook here.
Want to see similar success with your efforts on Facebook? Check out 4 Facebook Events Updates Event Creators Need to Know in 2018.
